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Review: Elvis Costello / My Aim is True super deluxe

SDE on the 5CD edition

By Jamie Atkins

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REVIEW: Elvis Costello / My Aim is True 5CD super deluxe

Declan McManus knew he was good. But who was he going to be?

This 5CD, 49th anniversary edition – clever stuff, getting in there before the inevitable deluge of punk 50th sets next year – of his debut album, My Aim Is True, allows us to listen in as he figures it out. Of the 104 tracks here, 52 are previously unreleased, including bedroom demos, studio outtakes and live performances.

“I’ve thought about issuing these unreleased songs on a few occasions,” Costello writes in the sleevenotes, “only to conclude that I still needed to cover my tracks. That was 20, 30, 40 years ago, when I still had something to hide or anything to lose. Now time is a-wasting.”

He needn’t have worried. The unreleased songs here – chiefly on discs two and three – are a long way from the juvenilia that might be expected from such an exhaustive archive trawl. They’re fully-formed and expertly crafted, performed with passion and precision. While previous editions of My Aim Is True have hinted at the paths – or parallel careers – this preternaturally talented songwriter could’ve taken, had he not become Elvis Costello, this new set truly opens them up.

He’d already given DP Costello a crack of the whip. This was the name by which he hit the London folk clubs for solo shows from the mid-70s. This son-of-a-gun opened setlists with three, count-’em, Hank Williams songs, before hitting the Jimmie Rodgers, George Jones and Gram Parsons hard. Meanwhile, formative inspirations – The Band, Little Feat, Randy Newman – were making their presence felt. Unsurprisingly then, many of the songwriting demos collected here on discs two (The Blue Print) and three (Stranger In The House) suggest that Costello could easily have straightened his bolo tie and arrived on the scene as an early adopter of what we’d now call Americana.

When he returned to ‘I Turn Around’ during the Imperial Bedroom sessions, it became a “peppy toe-tapper” (his words). The version that opens The Blue Print – recorded, like the majority of the disc, in the upstairs function room of The Hope & Anchor, Islington – lopes forward as if it was recorded in the basement of Big Pink while Costello sings of a distinctly Robbie Robertson-ish world of tallymen who offer jobs “selling hooked meat by the pound”, sweethearts chasing the late express and a “counterfeit lover” who’s “a barstool refugee”. Later in the set, ‘Don’t Put A Levy On My Love’ fishes in similar waters (Cripple Creek, presumably). But The Band’s influence isn’t limited to Costello’s writing. In his 2015 autobiography Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, Costello claims that Rick Danko’s voice “was the one that made me think maybe I could make a noise like that” – a claim borne out by a version of ‘Blame It On Cain’ recorded in his bedroom (previously available on the 2001 Edsel 2CD set) in which Costello manages to sound uncannily like both Danko – on the chorus’ opening line – and Richard Manuel, on the pay-off, “But we need somebody to burn”.

The Blue Print continues with another unreleased song, ‘Losing You’, this time positioning Costello as a word-spewing troubadour along the lines of a young Springsteen, his delivery flecked with vocal ticks – uhms and ahs, as if he’s impatient to get the lyrics out. But just when you think you’ve got the measure of the hyperactive wordplay, the chorus packs a sucker punch. “Losing you is just a memory, memories don’t mean that much to me,” he sneers; classic angry young man stuff – but then, a pause, before he tenderly drawls, “Now you’re here,” turning everything on its head. ‘Citizen Junction’ is cut from the same cloth, though less successful – still, Costello didn’t let its striking first verse go to waste, recycling it on Get Happy’s ‘King Horse’. Elsewhere, ‘Play It Safe’ and ‘I Can’t Turn It Off’ are further examples of Costello’s – wholly understandable – crush on the young boss of Asbury Park (check out the way he sings, “I see those clowns running all over town,” on the latter, straight outta ‘Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)’).

But if there’s a song here that Springsteen would’ve given his knitted beanie for, it’s ‘Radio Soul’. Costello bristles with energy as he hymns the the “late night stations playing music that would turn you to sin”. It gives a sense of rock ’n’ roll as a transformative force, as a way of escaping the grey troubles of life and unlocking something vital hidden deep in your soul. He sings of a girl, dressed up prim and proper for a dance, but when the radio plays “them sad old song, she really, really hurts”. There’s a point, towards the end of the third verse (“But for myself I don’t work too much, least not since I was told…”) that calls to mind the “Right now, I can’t read too good, don’t send me no letters no” denouement of Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’. As ever with Costello, it doesn’t feel like an accident – just as ‘Desolation Row’ can be seen as a sanctuary for those who have rejected the bleak realities of society, the radio offers a place of “sound salvation” for those willing to tune in. Costello returned to the song for ‘Radio Radio’ a few years later – he got it right first time.

Meanwhile, a clutch of songs on The Blue Print lean into Costello’s love for soul and R&B, suggesting he could’ve held his own as, say, an in-house writer at Hi Records. ‘I Hear A Melody’ – previously released on the 2007 deluxe edition – is a gospel-tinged gem, given a typically Costello twist when he hooks you in with the premise of the title before revealing he can’t find a truth in it, singing ruefully, “But I know it’s not right”. There’s more evidence elsewhere of his soulfulness – in the lovely, sighing melody of ‘Walk On’ or the wounded ‘Alison’ prototype ‘Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver)’.

The Blue Print also includes a bunch of songs that suggest Costello would’ve been equally at home knocking out hits on Tin Pan Alley, from the poignant ‘Poison Moon’ to the old-timey swing of ‘Mercury Wings’. Again though, he can’t resist a lyrical sting in the tail – the jaunty vaudeville of ‘Wave A White Flag’ coulda been a Broadway showstopper, were it not for the unrelentingly bleak lyrics of domestic abuse.

Hand written lyrics feature in the book

Disc three, Stranger In The House, offers more previously unreleased evidence of Costello’s burgeoning brilliance. Who among his contemporaries had the sheer songwriting nous to write something approaching ‘Just Like A Jukebox’ – an ingenious song from the perspective of a frustrated lounge singer – let alone file away an immaculate demo of it indefinitely? It’s the sound of jaded resignation, of dreams dying on the vine, made even more powerful by the fact that at the point it was written, its author could still imagine himself ending up in the same boat. Then there’s the disc’s title track, a tears-in-yer-beers country song so note-perfect that he’d end up recording it with George Jones a couple of years later – here we get both the previously released My Aim Is True outtake version and a touching, lo-fi take recorded with backing vocals from singer-songwriter Charlie Dore.

We’re given more evidence of Costello’s fascination with all things American with a cache of tracks from his mid-70s stint as the frontman of pub rockers Flip City. ‘Exiles Road’ sets a tale of Costello’s grandfather’s seafaring escapades to a Grateful Dead shuffle (half-inching the riff from ‘He’s Gone’) – there’s even a Garcia-esque softness to the vocal, but ultimately, it’s a curio which leans too heavily on its source. ‘Sweet Revival’ is more evidence of Costello’s infatuation with The Band, but at least it’s good fun, which is more than can be said for Flip City’s cover of one of Dylan’s dreariest songs, ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’.

Stranger In The House also offers early versions of tracks that would end up on My Aim Is True, including a couple of unreleased gems in a swinging bedroom demo of ‘Miracle Man’ and an early version of ‘(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes’ played as a sort of stuttering polka.

McManus had the talent, the know-how and the songs to be anything he wanted – as The Blue Print and Stranger In The House – show us in spades. But it took a little cosmic interference for him to take all of that and end up with Elvis Costello.

On 12 August 1976, the 21-year-old pulled a lunchtime sickie from his job operating the IBM computer at the Elizabeth Arden office in North Acton. Freedom secured, he took a tube to the office of Stiff Records. He’d seen an ad for their upcoming first single – ‘So It Goes’ by Nick Lowe, formerly of his old favourites, Brinsley Schwarz, and identified potential kindred spirits. McManus left a demo tape at the front desk, just as he had with every other label in town. But on the walk back had a stroke of luck as he bumped into Lowe himself. Within weeks, he signed to Stiff; a month later, he was in the studio recording demos with US country rockers Clover as his backing band and Lowe producing – things were finally moving.

And fast… by early 1977, My Aim Is True was recorded, the result of a further three sessions with Clover and Lowe. If you’ve got this far, you’ll know it’s one of the great debut albums of its time, a thrilling collision of whip-smart songwriting, heart-on-sleeve vocals and musicianship that was way ahead of the punk pack. ‘(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes’ somehow combined a lyric about a Faustian bargain – for sex, creative genius, love? – with one of those melodies of his that seems to flow effortlessly, hitting your heart before your head can catch up. The gorgeous ‘Alison’ invented a new genre of love song (if it’s about love at all that is), sung from the perspective of a somebody projecting their feelings onto what could be a near-stranger – what right does he have to decide her problems… what kind of imagination comes up with that line about fingers in the wedding cake? You’ll have your own favourites, of course – the original album is here (with the addition of the peerless noir of ‘Watching The Detectives’ at the end) on disc one, remastered from the original masters.

Album in the bag, the transformation into Elvis Costello began. First with Stiff founders Jake Riviera and Dave Robinson foisting a new name upon him. “I can’t recall if my initial reaction was shocked silence or laughter, but they were quite serious. If this was a test of my resolve, perhaps I passed,” Costello writes in the sleevenotes. Next up, the thick black horn-rim glasses, initially without prescription lenses. And finally, a cheap borrowed suit and Barney Bubbles’ retro artwork – all of which would fix Costello as some kind of Buddy Holly throwback. “It seemed the squarer I looked, the better the camera liked it,” writes Costello. “I had the beginnings of a character that I could inhabit and embellish as a way to keep people out of the zone in which I did the actual work.”

With Elvis Costello born, next came the backing band. Disc four of the set is devoted to the early days of Costello’s crackerjack backing band The Attractions – Steve Nieve (keys), Bruce Thomas (bass) and Pete Thomas (drums). Not that there appeared to be much bedding in needed – over a series of soundchecks, radio and TV sessions and live performances, we hear the band become an explosive force of nature, simultaneously egging Costello on. “We didn’t come 4,000 miles to watch people sit down,” Costello threatens the crowd at a November 1977 show at the Old Waldorf, San Francisco, “I wonder if any of you can still dance,” before launching into a raucous ‘Pump It Up’. Other highlights among the unreleased material are a powerhouse ‘Mystery Dance’ from their return trip to the US the following summer and a swaggering, organ-heavy ‘Waiting For The End Of The World’ from a December ’77 show.

The final disc of the set, Covered In Clover, features a triumphant 2007 run-through of My Aim Is True plus an encore with Costello backed by John McFee (guitar), Sean Hopper (keys) and Johnny Ciambotti (bass) of Clover, plus Pete Thomas. It’s terrific fun, but it’s unlikely you’ll be going back to it too often. Those early discs, though – the songs that turned Declan McManus into Elvis Costello – that’s a different story. In the following decades, he’d explore all the musical avenues those demos suggest and many more, but when it came to his debut, he chose wisely. When he said his aim was true, he wasn’t kidding.

Review by Jamie Atkins. The My Aim is True 5CD super deluxe edition is out now.

Tracklisting

My Aim Is True Elvis Costello / 5CD super deluxe

    • CD 1
      1. Welcome To The Working Week – 2026 Remaster
      2. Miracle Man – 2026 Remaster
      3. No Dancing – 2026 Remaster
      4. Blame It On Cain – 2026 Remaster
      5. Alison – 2026 Remaster
      6. Sneaky Feelings – 2026 Remaster
      7. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes – 2026 Remaster
      8. Less Than Zero – 2026 Remaster
      9. Mystery Dance – 2026 Remaster
      10. Pay It Back – 2026 Remaster
      11. I’m Not Angry – 2026 Remaster
      12. Waiting For The End Of The World – 2026 Remaster
      13. Watching The Detectives – Single Version
    • CD 2: The Blue Print
      1. I Turn Around – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      2. Losing You – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      3. Leverman – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      4. Citizen Junction – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      5. I Hear A Melody – Pathway Studios
      6. Poison Moon – Bedroom Recording
      7. Wave A White Flag – Bedroom Recording
      8. Mercury Wings – Ms. Dore’s Tape**
      9. Jump Up – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      10. No Star – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      11. Walk On – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      12. Radio Soul – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      13. Clean Money – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      14. Don’t Put A Levy On My Love – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      15. Play It Safe – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      16. Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver) – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      17. I Can’t Turn It Off – Hope & Anchor Studio
    • CD 3: The Stranger in the House
      1. Radio Sweetheart – My Aim Is True Outtake
      2. Cheap Reward – Bedroom Recording
      3. Mystery Dance – Bedroom Recording
      4. Stranger In The House – My Aim Is True Outtake
      5. Running Out Of Angels – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      6. Just Like A Jukebox – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      7. I Don’t Want To Go Home – Pathway Studios
      8. Blame It On Cain – Bedroom Recording
      9. Blue Minute – Ms. Dore’s Tape**
      10. Pay It Back – Bedroom Recording **
      11. Exiles Road – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      12. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      13. Sweet Revival – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      14. Pay It Back – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      15. Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver) – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      16. Living In Paradise – Hope & Anchor Studio**
      17. Welcome To The Working Week – Pathway Studios
      18. Miracle Man – Bedroom Recording**
      19. Miracle Man – Pathway Studios
      20. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes – Ms. Dore’s Tape**
      21. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes – Pathway Studios
      22. Waiting For The End Of The World – Pathway Studios
      23. Living In Paradise – My Aim Is True Outtake
      24. Call On Me – Pathway Studios
      25. Watching The Detectives – Pathway Studios Trio Version**
      26. No Action – Pathway Studios Trio Version
      27. Poison Moon – Ms. Dore’s Tape**
      28. Stranger In The House – Ms. Dore’s Tape**
    • CD 4: Becoming The Attractions
      1. Alison – What’s On Granada Reports
      2. Introduction By Dave Robinson – Live, The Nashville Room
      3. Mystery Dance – Live, The Nashville Room
      4. Pay It Back – Soundcheck, The Nashville Room
      5. Radio Sweetheart – Soundcheck, The Nashville Room
      6. Sneaky Feelings – Soundcheck, The Nashville Room
      7. Crawling To The U.S.A. – Soundcheck, The Nashville Room
      8. Lip Service – Pathway Studios**
      9. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes- with Introduction Top Of The Pops**
      10. Interview No. 1 – Good Afternoon with Mavis Nicholson
      11. Watching The Detectives – Good Afternoon Broadcast**
      12. Interview No. 2 – Good Afternoon with Mavis Nicholson
      13. Hoover Factory – Good Afternoon Rehearsal**
      14. I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself – Live Stiffs, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.
      15. Whole Wide World – Live Stiffs, University Of Leicester, Leicester, U.K.**
      16. KSAN Intro – Old Waldorf, San Francisco, CA
      17. Pump It Up – Old Waldorf, San Francisco, CA**
      18. Lip Service – Unknown Field Recording**
      19. Mystery Dance – Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**
      20. Blame It On Cain – Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**
      21. Less Than Zero (Dallas Version) – Warner Theater, Washington D.C.
      22. Waiting For The End Of The World – The Agora Ballroom, Cleveland, OH**
      23. Miracle Man – Warner Theater, Washington D.C.
      24. Watching The Detectives – Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**
      25. I’m Not Angry – Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**
    • CD 5: Covered in Clover
        1. Welcome To The Working Week (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
        2. Miracle Man (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      1. No Dancing (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      2. Intro To Blame It On Cain (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      3. Blame It On Cain (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      4. Alison (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      5. Intro To Sneaky Feelings (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      6. Sneaky Feelings (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      7. Intro To Red Shoes (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      8. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      9. Less Than Zero (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      10. Mystery Dance (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      11. Pay It Back (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      12. I’m Not Angry (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      13. Waiting For The End Of The World / Gloria (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      14. Watching The Detectives (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      15. Moon (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      16. Intro To The Love Trilogy (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      17. Love Has No Pride (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      18. Love Is Gone (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
      19. (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**

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