Elvis Costello 14: Spike

During his self-imposed sabbatical from recording, Elvis signed a worldwide deal with Warner Bros. and said goodbye to the Attractions, confident that his career was on its way to new heights. And for a while, it sure seemed that way.

Having enjoyed their collaboration on King Of America, he reteamed with T-Bone Burnett to “cast” an album based on the specific needs of each of his new, eclectic songs. But rather than the Americana celebrated previously, Spike boasts arrangements flavored by Roger McGuinn, new pal Paul McCartney, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band of New Orleans, and a handful of traditional Irish session pros—sometimes all on the same track. A fascination with recent Tom Waits records inspired the utilization of odd percussion and similarly unorthodox instruments, adding to the overall clatter.

Despite its atonal, noisy opening, “…This Town…” sports a catchy chorus, impenetrable lyrics, and Rickenbackers played by McGuinn, McCartney, and MacManus. “Let Him Dangle” is almost the opposite, with journalistic verses detailing true crime and punishment, and a chorus that sounds unfinished every time. A hint of the future arrives in “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror”, with the piano contributed by Allen Toussaint in place of the estranged Steve Nieve. As much as the album sounds different from what had come before, it was just as jarring when the straightforward pop-rocker “Veronica”, a McCartney collaboration about Alzheimer’s, actually hit the Top 20. “God’s Comic” is a wry fable sung from the point of view of a failed entertainer who meets God in the afterlife, then the wacky “Chewing Gum” takes the Tom Waits instrumental sound to New Orleans for a wordy tale about a mail-order bride. The tuba provides the bass for a few hilarious transitions, and the song wouldn’t sound anything like this otherwise. It’s a bold transition to the Celtic lament of “Tramp The Dirt Down”, his angriest indictment of Margaret Thatcher yet.

“Stalin Malone” is an intricately arranged instrumental featuring the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, with “lyrics” printed on the cover (or in the liner notes on CD and cassette). After an uncertain fade, the almost pastoral sound of “Satellite” wafts in, but turns into a tragic scene, an eerie prediction of the Internet porn industry, with Chrissie Hynde’s harmony an excellent counterpoint. Perhaps to provide relief, “Pads, Paws And Claws” is a twisted rockabilly tribute to his wife Cait O’Riordan, written with McCartney, while the woman herself wrote the words and melody for “Baby Plays Around”, one of the more enduring songs here. Ireland and New Orleans collide on the portrait of the alleged neighborhood witch “Miss Macbeth”, but “Any King’s Shilling”, which tells a wartime short story from his own family history, is flavored solely by Irish instruments. “Coal-Train Robberies” was only on the cassette and CD of this already long album; Elvis himself thought the arrangement sounded the most like the “classic” Attractions sound than anything else on the album, even if the lyrics make little sense. “Last Boat Leaving” was written, along with some other instrumental pieces, for the soundtrack of The Courier, a British crime film that happened to co-star Ms. O’Riordan. Here it provides a melancholy ending, again with a feeling of wartime strife.

Spike was an unlikely hit, and sent new fans back to the catalog. But its overall oddness and forced feeling haven’t kept it in rotation over the years. Still, it was proudly included in the first wave of Rhino reissues, each fortified with a bonus disc. This one begins with twelve demos for the album, showing how much of the decoration he had already imagined. (“Satellite” is performed in four instead of a waltz, and the demo of “Coal-Train Robberies”, while close musically, has a nearly different set of lyrics). Four contemporary B-sides, all covers (of which Nick Lowe’s “The Ugly Things” is the best), are nicely collected for context, and a “vocal” version of “Stalin Malone” merely has the words recited over the track.

It should also be noted that McCartney included several demos and outtakes of the songs they wrote together on an eventual expansion of his own Flowers In The Dirt. While we’re at it, somebody noticed a strange synchronicity in that the first song on Elton John’s 1985 album Ice On Fire is called “This Town”, and the second song on side two of the same album is called “Satellite”. This has to mean something.

Elvis Costello Spike (1989)—3
2001 Rhino: same as 1989, plus 17 extra tracks