He hadn’t released an album since the late ’70s, back when Costello was first trying his luck with “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself.” That’s an eternity in pop music - just long enough for a new generation to discover his catalog. For Costello it was the culmination of a lifelong obsession with Bacharach for Bacharach, it was more like coming out of hiding, like Livingston emerging from the jungle. Even 20 years later, it’s more than a mere curio in either man’s catalog, more than lark or a bit of hero worship.
What is truly startling, however, is how sturdy that record turned out to be, how well the two complemented each other.
#Painted memory full
“It’s different every time we sing it, that one,” he tells the crowd, and you believe him.Īll of which is to stay that it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone that Costello would get around to making a full record with Bacharach, who had already emerged as a musical hero for the man born Declan MacManus.
He savors the melancholy of the lyrics, the drama of that pleading melody, and he emerges as a technically stronger and much more confident vocalist, sustaining the notes and filling more of the song with his voice. You can hear all the years that have passed between the two versions, all the lessons that Costello has learned during what was even then a long and respectable career. In 1996 Costello resurrected “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” for Costello & Nieve, a live companion to the same year’s All This Useless Beauty. He released three studio albums in the 1990s, but they were overshadowed by one-offs like 1993’s The Juliet Letters (a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet) and 1995’s Kojak Variety (a covers album as collaboration series). But even that was just a springboard for subsequent forays into the arch C&W of 1981’s Almost Blue, the polished West Coast pop of 1986’s King Of America, and the everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink of the ’80s-closing Spike. For another, while many fans still consider punk to be his default setting, he was only ever punk by association, combining the volatility of that movement with the ragged straightforwardness and innate Britishness of pub rock. For one thing, he wasn’t young anymore in 1998 he turned 44. In the meantime he had tossed those spectacles in the gutter, along with his image as England’s angry young man. Nearly 20 years later, Costello covered the song again. There’s confusion and some anger in his voice, but no irony or condescension regarding what must have been at the time deeply unhip source material. And Costello shows he has the interpretive chops to deliver the song in a meaningful way, to make the cover sound like something more than just a stunt.
A clever performance, it’s the kind of thing you’d expect from the group circa This Year’s Model: a burst of fidgety sexual energy that nevertheless proved that the angry young agitnerd in the thick-framed specs harbored a love for the pop music of the previous decade - in particular, the succinct songcraft of Bacharach and his writing partner Hal David. More than 40 years, in fact.īack in the late 1970s, “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” was a staple of Costello’s antsy live shows with the Attractions and even popped up on the 1978 comp Live Stiffs, featuring artists from Stiff Records’ roster. They go back further than 1998’s Painted From Memory. Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach go way back.
0 kommentar(er)
