Elvis Costello 8: Imperial Bedroom

Magazine ads for this album suggested it would be considered a masterpiece. While most wouldn’t fall for such hubris, one thing that permeates throughout Imperial Bedroom is elegance, from the pompous title to the production assistance from onetime Beatle engineer Geoff Emerick. Steve Nieve steps up with unique brass and string arrangements throughout, along with his own quirky keyboards.

“Beyond Belief” kicks us off with a tension that a drunk Pete Thomas spends the track trying to kick through, in an amazing performance. Starting with this unstoppable locomotive there is an amazing breadth of material here. “Tears Before Bedtime” is a Nashville leftover here given a more jokey arrangement, while “Shabby Doll” is another song accusing someone of something horrible. He used to snarl; now he seethes. “The Long Honeymoon” is one of many portraits of a damaged marriage, and its unsettling delivery and Parisian slash cocktail touches in the arrangement are kicked aside by the cacophony that opens “Man Out Of Time”, which smooths out into a tour de force of a performance before closing on the same cacophony. “Almost Blue” was written after completing the album of the same name, with the style of Chet Baker in mind, who would one day record it without EC’s knowledge until after he’d died. It’s an absolutely gorgeous heartbreaker, and one of his best vocals. It’s deflated by the mocking soap opera of “…And In Every Home”, the most “baroque” song here, thanks to its Masterpiece Theater-style brass arrangement (though its plot is more reminiscent of Crossroads or Coronation Street).

The second side is dominated by more straight rock, but still retains that elegance we mentioned. “The Loved Ones” and “Human Hands” remain great singalongs to this day, despite their murky subject matter. In both cases Bruce Thomas applies deft bass playing, particularly the chordal touches on the third verse of the latter. “Kid About It” slows things down nicely with a ballad, and the crashing approach of “Little Savage” swings the seesaw back up. “Boy With A Problem” was co-written with Chris Difford on Squeeze, and is something of an interlude before the one-two-three punch of the closing tracks. “Pidgin English” once again laments the degradation of language in modern times, while “You Little Fool” shakes its head at teenage romance through backwards harpsichords. (We really like the wordless harmonies over the fade.) The grand finale is “Town Cryer”, which benefits from the album’s most sympathetic arrangement, complete with strings that carry the album into the sunset for the virtual closing credits.

Over the years Imperial Bedroom has gotten the occasional slag as pompous or overindulgent, but such opinions ignore the excellence and elegance (there’s that word again) of the songs. The album was designed to be experienced as a whole; it even included lyrics for the first time on an Elvis album, printed telegram-style with no punctuation or breaks of any kind. Bizarrely, some of the more challenging tracks were chosen as singles, which didn’t fare well on the pop charts.

Being such a strong, unified album, it was inevitable that the bonus tracks on the Rykodisc reissue would detract from the listening experience. What’s more, some of the better B-sides from the period were not included, but the disc was admittedly filled to capacity, notably with tracks and outtakes from a one-off single. This dearth would be rectified somewhat with the Rhino version, which included most (but not all) of the Ryko bonuses on a second disc that gives a nice peek into the works in progress.

Some of the alternates are fascinating; it’s nice to hear the complete loud take of “Man Out Of Time”, and the so-called “Barry White” version of “Town Cryer” is a scream. “Human Hands” first had a lyric that referred to the drugs wearing off, and “Little Savage” once had a slower, more soulful approach. Others show that he was right to redo them, such as the earlier take of “Beyond Belief” before Elvis modified both lyrics and vocal, which appears here as “The Land Of Give And Take”. The handful of demos demonstrates how much he already had in place before bringing the band in. Rhino also gets points for including the earlier demo of “Seconds Of Pleasure” (which had been on Ryko’s Trust expansion) in favor of the later one now moved to a different bonus disc, as well as a full band stab at “The Town Where Time Stood Still”, but we can probably blame Elvis himself for skipping the noisy take of “Little Goody Two Shoes” for the “Inch By Inch” template included instead.

Elvis Costello & The Attractions Imperial Bedroom (1982)—5
1994 Rykodisc: same as 1982, plus 9 extra tracks
2002 Rhino: same as 1982, plus 23 extra tracks