13.1.22 Once it seemed so appealing

 Have I mentioned Elvis Costello yet?

This is currently a slight mania of mine - replacing the CD versions of his albums with vinyl. It's not really replacing, more augmenting, the CD versions are going no further than safe storage in the loft, I don't part with stuff easily.

That said, we carried out a major loft clearance last year: started on the warmest day of the year, went through huge amounts of sorting and a lurgy that definitely wasn't covid but certainly felt like it, laid me low for three weeks and saw me spending one of those weeks sleeping on a blow up bed in the study as I was coughing endlessly and keeping the rest of the world awake all night before finally finishing as winter set in. A room in the roof that had previously required crampons to cross is now somewhere where those that wish to go up there (me, basically) can easily access books, DVDs, video games (and consoles), comics and records. Everything the soul needs basically.

I'd wanted to do it for - literally - years, J got involved after watching Stacey Solomon sort out someone's house and improve their lives through tidying their surroundings. I've no idea what it's called but it's one of those shows that's endlessly watchable for the nature of the heartstrings tugging that it's going to give you. Like DIY SOS before Nick Knowles lost the gig. And the tidying of the loft, disposal and donation of all the stuff we really didn't need, genuinely removed old energy. There was a revitalisation to it. 

An aside, as ever, as though all the above weren't already aside: were you aware that Spike Milligan invented the word 'lurgy'? No, me neither until a week ago. The word that my dad always used for some unspecified illness came from The Goon Show and I never knew. Dad also reference 'the galloping kiyanker' on many occasions. I've no idea of the etymology of that one. Or, in fairness, the spelling.

Elvis Costello then. I think the addiction to revisiting the vinyl started with a copy of Get Happy - an album that I didn't buy in the closing down sale of Walton Vale's Ali Baba Records because somebody had clearly put a coffee cup down on the album.

It's part of the sleeve design, idiot.

Twenty tracks of snappy, beat based pop which sounded so much more fun across two sides of black plastic than it did in one go on a shiny silver thing. I moved from there to Almost Blue, the album with the sticker advising 'Warning - contains country music' which was fine by me, I grew up on country music. I know far too much about Slim Whitman for a man of even my advancing years. Armed Forces next. With the lovely four way fold out sleeve that alters the back cover and the hit single Oliver's Army which the man himself has now requested that radio stop playing because of the presence of a word that made sense in context in 1979 but is now far more problematic (his statement on this was really straightforward).

Aside again: I can't find my copy of 'The Man' his mid 80s hits collection. I didn't give it away, I don't give vinyl away. I don't tend to lend vinyl to others. (Though I did lend a mate my copy of Gary Numan's 'Living Ornaments' live box set somewhere around 1982 and still haven't had it back ;) ). When I was alphabetising my vinyl (What? Obviously I've alphabetised my vinyl, why would you think I hadn't? The only shock in all this is that I hadn't done it decades ago. This - *this* - was the reason for clearing the loft, everything was to facilitate this) it wasn't there. Simply wasn't there. And I don't need it, I've got everything on it but the fact it's not there is nagging at my OCD something wicked.

Anyway. Imperial Bedroom, which is what we're talking about today.

(Checks back cover for release date) 

It's 1982 so Elvis is big. A proper pop star, a major figure, he has hits, the public love him, basically. So he alienates a portion with an album that goes everywhere and does everything, contains some of his very greatest songs but (as I recall it) no hits. It's got Beyond Belief which is one of the truly great album openers, a song that slinks its way into the work, whispering in your ear how "History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats", it has Almost Blue - which is the title track of that previous album which it doesn't actually appear on and ends up as a Chet Baker track -

(Yet another aside: the second time me and J went to Amsterdam it rained, we took shelter in a hotel bar, drank red wine and, on coming outside, found a plaque commemorating the fact that this was the hotel where Chet died, possibly on the spot where he lay after falling from/being pushed from a window above, quite sobering that.)

- it has the Bacharachian splendour of Kid About It and the sheer glory of Man Out Of Time which hurtles in and out on screeds of feedback surrounding a massive sixties-esque ballad.

It's an album of sweep, of grandeur, of sprawl, intended to encompass everything: soul, pop, orchestrated chamber pop. It's produced by Geoff Emerick who engineered Sgt Pepper - that doesn't mean he adds psychedelia, it means he brings scope. (He'd later produce The Bunnymen's Reverberation which I'm sure we'll come to, definitely brings the psych to that).

And the public didn't get it. I don't think. That's the perception I had then and retain now and - as said many times - this place is all about recall and gut instinct.

In fairness, I didn't buy it until years later myself despite owning and adoring Man Out Of Time on 12' single. 

And this is where the two sides of vinyl approach triumphs over the CD. On CD it feels too long, it feels like the second half is too downbeat compared to the first. On vinyl you can make it two separate statements.

And wallow in the ambition.