Elvis Costello regarded acclaim and women with equal suspicion. A year after the release of Imperial Bedroom, he insisted on quashing a reporter’s memories of what had been, in 1982, a critical triumph. “In each song there’s some fake psychedelia or a ’40s-style riff or things written with a strict format after the fashion of a standard ballad. I wanted to see what effect I could achieve,” he explained while promoting his follow-up record, Punch the Clock. Fair enough. But then he went further: “It just reached a point where I was getting so carried away trying to reflect the lyrics, the whole thing would end up sounding unbalanced.” So unlike other artists, he can judge the quality of his own material.
While not a punk himself, Costello exploited punk’s energy into onslaughts against political and romantic hypocrisy. He did well in the UK and America from the start with the release of his 1977 solo debut, My Aim Is True, and the following year with This Year’s Model, where he was joined by his backing band the Attractions. For a while, they could do anything, at home with tub-thumpers like “Pump It Up” and midtempo flourishes like “Accidents Will Happen.” Steve Nieve’s keyboards absorbed Booker T. & the M.G.’s and ABBA; the rhythm section of bassist Bruce Thomas and drummer Pete Thomas lent enough sinew to their leader’s metaphorical contortions to make them sound natural.
Costello’s fluency with the burgeoning pop-rock canon made him the Boomer generation’s favorite quasi-punk. Linda Ronstadt covered “Alison.” Lindsay Buckingham regarded him as an influence when he pushed Fleetwood Mac into the experiments of Tusk. In a tacit admission of his debts, Costello & the Attractions released the beautiful Motown and Stax homage Get Happy!! in 1980; meanwhile, three years of an eye-popping booze and drug diet and his use of disgusting racial slurs got Costello into an unflattering fight with Stephen Stills’ band in a Columbus, Ohio hotel bar.
“History repeats the old conceits.” The first line from Imperial Bedroom’s first track—sung in the higher register Costello preferred—sums up the adventures of a garrulous singer-songwriter whose stylistic range huffed alongside the jingle-jangle of his wordplay. Reluctant to dwell in what “Beyond Belief” calls “a very fashionable hovel,” he bade farewell to longtime producer Nick Lowe and hired Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, who, with the assistance of Jon Jacobs, gives Imperial Bedroom a buttery sheen. This was the best Costello had sounded to date.
That’s the trouble. To grant artists the right to experiment with their craft and the indulgence to press against their limitations often conflicts with what we understand are the strengths of that craft and our knowledge of those limitations. Costello works best under constraints. While the songwriting on first side of Imperial Bedroom complements Emerick’s production and often strengthens it, the second side settles for mannerism, the tried-and-true. “Kid About It” and “Little Savage” could have fit on Trust (1981) or among the quieter bits on Armed Forces (1979). There’s a sense in which Costello didn’t write enough baroque-pop material to fill an album.
Nevertheless, Imperial Bedroom’s release was fortuitous. 1982 was a good time for industry vets to release career summas, and certainly for a punk-associated rocker to name-drop Rodgers & Hart and Debussy. Imperial Bedroom sat atop the Village Voice Pazz & Jop list of the year’s most acclaimed albums with regal poise, accompanied by Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights, Lou Reed’s The Blue Mask, George Clinton’s Computer Games, Roxy Music’s Avalon, and Marvin Gaye’s Midnight Love, every one a landmark in its creator’s career. The Gershwin-indebted Night and Day, not often mentioned in the same sentence as Imperial Bedroom, hit the Top 20, and Joe Jackson scored a No. 6 hit with his crisp cosmopolitan pop song “Steppin’ Out.” Costello couldn’t even touch the Hot 100.
Not that a songwriter as steeped in pop history as Costello has needed American hits. Another way of approaching Imperial Bedroom: Costello hired a pro like Emerick to tame his fussiness. Trust, produced by Lowe and released the previous year, had almost topped the P&J poll despite not garnering reviews better than “ho-hum, another Elvis Costello album.” Yet Trust inspired a cultish attachment: Not a casual fan’s first purchase, but an album appreciated after submitting to the pell-mell rush of his 1977-1980 run; its reappraisal seems to have surprised Costello himself. The sympathy with which the Attractions, awash in drugs and booze, played those songs clarified the encroaching opacity. Trust is the rare Elvis Costello album whose corners retain their cobwebs.
Out just months after Trust and, in a reminder of his productivity, seven months before Imperial Bedroom, Almost Blue was Costello’s first try at demolishing a half-decade of sturdy broadsides. The weirdness is the point. A country covers album, by Elvis Costello, produced by Country Music Hall of Famer Billy Sherrill. Costello deserves credit for introducing George Jones and Hank Williams to incredulous rock fans, even if his takes on Merle Haggard and Gram Parsons are the only tracks worth revisiting; on the former, he finds a casual humility that pairs well with the self-effacement on which he relied on his earlier material when he needed an escape hatch.
The first side of Imperial Bedroom promised a definitive break from the holding pattern. As Costello whisper-croons doomy pronouncements like, “This battle with the bottle is nothing so novel,” and, in a nod to Lowe’s only American hit, “Do you have to be so cruel to be callous,” Bruce’s bass throbs like an excited artery and Pete’s cymbals hiss their contempt. “Tears Before Bedtime,” the least impressive song here, plays around with Nieve’s kitschy organ runs and a double-tracked Costello, whose character projects the exhaustion of a man caught in embarrassing scenarios before and ready to endure them again.
The ambling gait of “Shabby Doll” signals the change in intention and direction. On the page the lyrics look like he’s taking aim at another target unworthy of scorn, like a sequel to “This Year’s Girl” or “Possession,” but Costello, in conversation with Nieve’s piano line, spits out each line like poisoned candy; on other occasions, he sings like Emerick is moving cue cards out of sight. An uncomfortable performance; is he deconstructing an affect? The answer comes with “The Long Honeymoon.” Sung with a warmth Costello had never before approximated, this elegant chanson examines a woman trapped in a loveless marriage; Nieve’s accordion deepens the pathos of Costello’s chorus melody, embedding “The Long Honeymoon” in a chansonniere tradition without diminishing the sorrow.
Beatlelolatry suffuses a pair of tracks that are not so much songs as compositions. Bookended by his shrieking, harshly strummed guitar, “Man Out of Time” is pieced together like Paul McCartney’s Abbey Road sequence (McCartney and producer George Martin were next door recording what turned into Tug of War, also released in ’82). It changes chords and time signatures for the sake of menaced ardor: a stiletto hidden in a pillow. What the hell Costello’s on about is anyone’s guess; the Attractions, in swirl mode, put a dour Costello on the defensive. “...And in Every Home,” anchored to a 40-piece orchestra in full “Penny Lane” mode conducted by Nieve, gives a big kiss to rococo-pop, which, given how the lyric is yet another sneer at a woman who’s “35 going on 17,” makes for tangy ear candy, an expert attempt at distraction, or both.
The second side, as noted, is professionalism incarnate–‒–how very Boomer of him. Why Columbia went with the rote meanness of “You Little Fool” as the first single instead of “Man Out of Time” during the peak of UK new pop artists like the Human League and Orange Juice boggles the mind. But Costello, remember, was a pro now. A final proof of how empathetically Costello and his structural ambitions meshed, “Town Cryer” features what Costello called a Philly-style violin section as it goads him into an admission of playacting worthy of idol Smokey Robinson’s “The Tears of a Clown”: “Maybe you don’t believe my heart is in the right place/Why don’t you take a good look at my face?” His instinct for closing albums with recapitulations hadn’t left him.
Peaking at No. 6 in the UK and No. 30 in the U.S., Imperial Bedroom’s lackluster sales justified Costello’s fear about Columbia’s marketing strategy. Its promotions department ran a full-page ad in the trades with the slogan “MASTERPIECE?” “The question mark was surely asking for trouble,” Costello writes in the liner notes.
Costello might’ve titled both of Imperial Bedroom’s immediate follow-ups Punch the Clock. The first, a deranged piece of work, treats horn sections like bass drums, words like gnats, and vocals like the cries of trapped farm animals. And Goodbye Cruel World, often dismissed as his nadir, isn’t heinous at all‒–maybe you had to be there because it sounds no more cluttered than its predecessors. The 1981 Nashville album augured an eventual roots-rock/Americana move in 1986 with King of America, a venomous, ruminative album with a couple of Elvis Presley’s former hot-rodders. By the time Costello released Spike in 1989, he had joined the Boomer meritocracy, earning a gold album the same year MTV put into rotation videos by the Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, and Jefferson Airplane. Costello finally belonged among them, thanks in part to‒–at last‒–his first genuine Top 40 hit.
More than 30 years after that he’s still going. Elvis Costello, his appetites inexorably and wonderfully omnivorous, is the streaming service in human form: Genre constrictions mattered less than the hopes of rewriting them. With interests this varied, Elvis Costello can claim his influence is everywhere and nowhere; perhaps the capaciousness of those appetites is his legacy. For 50 minutes in 1982, Imperial Bedroom coaxed listeners into appreciating another era’s idea of popcraft. “It sounds like music rather than a confession,” he wrote later. Why not both?
