Mad Capulet Markets

 Christmas, innit? So, yeah, happy Christmas, or whatever.

ELVIS COSTELLO & THE BRODSKY QUARET – THE JULIET LETTERS (Warner Bros) 

I used to buy cassettes from Boots. That seems like an absurd false memory now, as if I’d bought spanners from Holland & Barrett or Anusol from Timpson’s, but Chelmsford Boots had a decent little music section, and when my parents were buying grown-up stuff like shampoo and aspirin (I'm pretty sure not Anusol, and I'm not going to check), I’d browse through the records. They often seemed to have some very good tapes on special offer at the counter, and I recall every one of these that I bought was a cracker: Lou Reed’s Transformer, Coldcut’s What’s What Noise? (my introduction to Mark E Smith, believe it or not), Baby Ford’s Fordtrax, and this one. I was 17 for most of 1993, so I suspect I might have been in Boots on my own by this time, but I don’t recall; I’m certain it’s the last thing I bought from there, though weirdly I remember buying marked-down copy of the triple-tape Secret Broadcasts set by Glenn Miller from Oxford’s Boots when I came up to study a couple of years later, and I find it pretty amazing they were still doing music in 1995, it can’t have lasted much longer. 

The album is a series of epistolary songs for solo voice and string quartet, apparently inspired by people who wrote to Juliet Capulet – presumably C/O That Big Crypt, Verona - with their troubles. Only one of the 20 tracks addresses this theme specifically though, the others zipping over all sorts of ground, which has allowed Costello to give reign to some highly inventive lyric-writing. Some of the words are very funny, and this small chamber set-up means every one is easily audible, which I think Elvis relished – listen to the swift judgment of Damnation’s Cellar (which looks like an Entombed song title, but is about bringing people back with a time machine), and the Gershwin-level tricksiness of ‘This Offer Is Unrepeatable’, a satire on hard-sell Christianity in the form of junk mail: “Girls will be swooning because you’re exciting them/ Not only fall at your feet but be biting them...The wine that they offer will go to your head/ You’ll start seeing double in fishes and bread”. There are also some heart-wrenchingly emotional songs on display, which teeter on mawkishness but manage to survive, and ‘The Birds Will Still Be Singing’ can still bring a lump to the throat. 

The whole endeavour, of course, is pure South Bank show shit, the sort of Arts Council bait perfect for a middle-aged artist with an eye on a Sunday supplement spread, but what’s noteworthy about this album is how often it rises above middle-brow novelty. The music is strong with a broad sonic palette, from drawing-room elegance to arthouse intricacy, with plenty of aggressive percussive playing and excellent use of sudden dissonance to balance some incredibly catchy tunes. Costello is in fine voice too, his scuffed intense vibrato sounding oddly like Horace Andy at times, and his pitching and sense of drama are immaculate - but if you were worried that he’d gone opera and lost his punky rots, check the mad-eyed screech of ‘Swine’’s final word, “penknife” (this “letter” appears to have been carved into flesh). Amongst all this there’s space for a very straightforward soulful pop song, ‘Jacksons, Monk And Rowe’, a slightly inscrutable tale of a large close-knit family which doesn’t seem to be a letter at all, and this Pop Private Eye has concluded that it was written before the Brodksy project began and swiftly adapted. 

Many people at the time were disappointed at how far this was from Elvis’s new-wave roots, though that’s odd because we’d already had the country-beard vibes of King Of America and the lush, McCartney-bothering Spike and Mighty Like A Rose. Still, those who missed the full-throttle brain-pop of the late 70s only had to wait one more year for a return, with what might be the best Costello album, Brutal Youth...but that’s a tale for another day (or next issue, who knows).