Smoke Like Mercury

Elvis Costello + The Attractions :  Accidents Will Happen

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At the time, it seemed as if we were making an impossibly sophisticated leap from the sound of “This Year’s Model” but listening now there are very few production devices that sit between the listener and the songs. -Elvis Costello on Twitter

On January 5, 1979 Elvis Costello and the Attractions released Armed Forces, perhaps my favorite of all of Costello's records. Teaming up with Nick Lowe once again, the band had six weeks at London's Eden Studios to record. The whole thing is a marvel. My version was an American cassette with the Barney Bubbles paint splatter cover and "(What's So Funny 'bout) Peace Love and Understanding", which had appeared in November of '78 as the B side of Nick Lowe's "American Squirm"single. It's interesting to read that some critics thought Costello was going soft. Essential!

Costello writes in Unfaithful Music + Disappearing Ink:

Late at night after the sessions, I listened repeatedly to the newly released All Mod Cons by The Jam. What I felt about it was nothing like rivalry, more just admiration. Paul Weller and I were writing completely different songs, but The Jam’s record was such a big and different step up from their previous release that I was moved to put aside a good song like “Tiny Steps” simply because it owed too much to the music and lyrics of This Year’s Model.

From Janet Maslin writing for Rolling Stone :

Consider "Oliver's Army," the piéce de résistance on Elvis Costello's Armed Forces, an album that's killer in several senses of the word. The tune sounds bright and bouncy, with a jangly keyboard riff along the lines of "Here Comes Santa Claus," and it's enough to make you want to rock around the room. But sit down, Fred, and get a load of the lyrics you're dancing to: 

There was a Checkpoint Charlie 
He didn't crack a smile 
But it's no laughing party 
When you've been on the murder mile 
Only takes one itchy trigger 
One more widow, one less white nigger 
Oliver's Army is here to stay 
Oliver's Army are on their way 
And I would rather be anywhere else than here today. 

In fact, this is an angry song about imperialism and the military, reportedly written just after Costello visited Northern Ireland. In spirit and on its very congenial surface, "Oliver's Army" is a hit single. You can hear it one way, or the other way, or both. Elvis Costello doesn't seem to give a damn what you do, and that's no small part of his charm.

Costello writes songs that are elusive at times, bursting with bright phrases you can't always catch. (As someone who still thinks the Rolling Stones are singing "Heartbreaker... with your bowling ball," I'm all in favor of half-audible lyrics that encourage a valuable do-it-yourselfism in the listener.) He sings about violence with a vibrant romanticism, and about love with murder in his heart. He writes short, blunt compositions that don't pretend to be artful, though they are, and don't demand to be taken seriously, even though they're more stunning and substantial than anything rock has produced in a good long while. He doubles back on himself at every turn, and you're forced to take it or leave it. 

 There's only one way to listen to Elvis Costello's music: his way. The songs are so brief they barrel right by, leaving an impression of jubilant and spiteful energies at war with each other. Every now and then, words like "quisling" or "concertina" leap out of nowhere and add to the confusion. Images are etched hard and fast, then replaced by new ones even stronger. There's an overload of cleverness on the LP -- more smartly turned phrases than twelve songs ordinarily could bear. But the rapid pacing alleviates any hint of self-congratulation.

Costello's songs are dense the way Bob Dylan's used to be, driven by the singer's faith that if this line doesn't get you, the next one will, and compressed so tightly that they lend themselves to endless rediscovery. He has something like the younger Dylan's rashness, too, being hotheaded enough to oversimplify anything for the sake of a good line, and being a good enough writer to get away with it. His puns are so outrageous they're irresistible. In "Senior Service" (the name of an English cigarette): "It's the breath you took too late/It's the death that's worse than fate." In "Oliver's Army": "Have you got yourself an Occupation?" In "Chemistry Class": "Are you ready for the final solution?" The first line on the record, "Oh, I just don't know where to begin."

 Beneath all this gamesmanship lurks something like a grand passion, however unexpected it may be from a fellow who favors photographs that make him look like a praying mantis. The EP that accompanies some copies of Armed Forces (Columbia wants you to buy the album in a hurry, so they'll stop including Live at Hollywood High after the first several hundred thousand records) contains a live version of "Alison" that's so steeped in tortured love it makes the concert audience squeal. And the LP's final cut, "(What's So Funny 'bout) Peace, Love and Understanding," is delivered with a sincerity bordering on desperation. The wise guy who can work Hitler into a song about competitive friendship ("Two little Hitlers will fight it out until/One little Hitler does the other one's will") is also prey to authentic romantic agonies so exquisitely maddening they go hand in hand with danger.

Listen to "Watching the Detectives," rerecorded in an almost playful version on the EP, with these show-stopping lines: "Nearly took a miracle to get you to stay/It only took my little fingers to blow you away." Or "Party Girl" (as in "You'll never be the guilty party, girl"), with its alternating waves of passionate declaration and angry denial. No Elvis Costello love song is without its ax to grind or its hatchet to bury, but at least the emotion, however strangled, comes through. Costello never sounds exactly willing to give himself over to sentiment, yet he works hard to make himself more than marginally accessible: a gangster with heart. Without that bit of humanizing, he'd be a specialty item. With it, he can be a star.

 It hardly hurts that Costello's songs are never less than snappy, even when their drum parts are reminiscent of machine guns, or that Nick Lowe had produced him this time with a large and general audience in mind. Notwithstanding his Buddy Holly glasses and his Buddy Holly white socks, Elvis Costello refers most readily to the Sixties. And Lowe makes the most of this, filling Armed Forces with recycled lounge music ("Moods for Moderns"), Beatles-like codas and the trashiest organ lines this side of "96 Tears." Like the lyrics, these echoes run together in a quick, exciting jumble, so dense that the end of one number, "Busy Bodies," can mix the phrasing of John Lennon and Paul McCartney's "Nowhere Man" with the guitar lines of Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" and the whoo-oos of the Beach Boys' "Surfer Girl." Costello draws so heavily on the recent rock past that his reliance upon it amounts to a kind of cheapening, a repudiation. But that's only one more in a long line of quicksilver contradictions.

Right now, Elvis Costello serves as a feisty and furiously talented middleman, halfway between rock's smoothest sellouts and the angriest fringes of its New Wave. He wants to be daring, but he also wants to dance. He'd like to seethe and sell records at the same time. He's mindful of -- indeed, insistent upon -- the form and its limitations: it's only rock + roll, after all. But he takes it to the limit just the same.

Bebe Buell was seeing Costello in this time period. In Please Kill Me-- the Uncensored Oral History of Punk she tells the story of meeting  Costello at The Whiskey.

 I turned and immediately knocked his glasses off by mistake. I apol­ogized. He had a great sense of humor about it, he told me he didn't need his face anyway-and we were sweating and shaking and totally scared to death of each other. It was so cute-you don't feel that kind of purity too often in your life. I mean, we were in love. It was just, forget it, that was that.

We went to see somebody record and Elvis didn't like them, so we crawled out of the recording session on our hands and knees and we ran right into the president of Columbia, which was Elvis's label at the time. I'm sure they thought I was a horrible influence on him, because at that point there was only one person badder than me and that was Anita Pallenberg. I think they really saw trouble when they saw Elvis and me together. They thought, Oh god, how are we gonna explain this one? Immediately it was sort of like the Punk and the Model-Beauty and the Beast. And the press pulverized us.

Was she the inspiration for "Party Girl"? Bebe responded to my question on twitter:

Bebe

NO- I didn't even know him yet when he wrote it. I met EC June 1978~he was creating + then making "Armed Forces" when I was first living w/ him in the Fall of 1978 in London.Think he just had a very active imagination which is great when you're a songwriter!x

Of course- there are so many rumors out there- including some started by EC himself. I NEVER thought or claimed that any of the songs on This Year's Model or Armed Forces held me as the subject. Anything after that? All bets are off! EC is famous for denying! 

 40 Year Itch: Oh! I’m going to listen to Get Happy right now!!! 

BeBe Now you're on the right path!

Tom Moon called Armed Forces one of the 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, writing:

Armed Forces was written when Costello was twenty-four, after he and the Attractions had finished a long tour of the U.S. by van. It is the bridge between Costello the "punk singer-songwriter" and Costello the unabashed romantic of rock's New Wave. In the liner notes of the expanded edition, Costello recalls that while on the road, the band listened to cassettes of Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn, Cheap Trick and ABBA. And it's possible to hear the influence of those polished productions in Armed Forces's specific details (the whomping piano-studded refrain of "Accidents Will Happen" and the nattily harmonized "Moods for Moderns"). This is the record where Costello realizes that the doors are wide open, and he can make any kind of snarly (or idealistic) noise he wants. So he makes all kinds of noise -- songs that thrum with Springsteen-like idealism ("Peace, Love and Understanding") or express disdain ("Goon Squad") or go to great lengths to draw parallels between cultural and personal upheavals ("Two Little Hitlers"), an idea underscored by Costello's original working title for the album, Emotional Facism.

From Robert Christgau who gave the album an A- grade:

Like his predecessor, Bob Dylan, this ambitious tunesmith offers more as a phrasemaker than as an analyst or a poet, more as a public image than as a thinking, feeling person. He needs words because they add color and detail to his music. I like the more explicitly sociopolitical tenor here. But I don't find as many memorable bits of language as I did on This Year's Model. And though I approve of the more intricate pop constructions of the music, I found TYM's relentless nastiness of instrumental and (especially) vocal attack more compelling. A good record, to be sure, but not a great one.