DESERT ISLAND DISC
What Does He Care if the World is a Joke?
Elvis Costello & the Attractions' Blood & Chocolate

by Peter Gorman

In the fall of 1986 Elvis Costello was 32 years old. He had released 11 new records in less than nine years, at least one a year from 1977 until 1984, pausing only after Goodbye Cruel World, the only album of his that to this day Costello disowns. He was tired. Almost two years passed before his next release in early 1986, but it proved to be worth the wait: King of America, recorded with session men on loan from the dead Elvis, was widely praised as one of Costello's best records. He could have waited another two years before his next release, but he was back to his old ways, apparently refreshed, and before the year was over he released Blood & Chocolate.

The initial reviews of Blood & Chocolate were good, but critics had already spent themselves praising King of America earlier that year, and at that time critics were the only friends Costello's records had. The record barely got noticed. Radio programmers couldn't find a single. It peaked at #84 on the charts, the weakest showing of his entire career excepting an album recorded with a string quartet. Costello may have gotten his strength back, but now his audience was tired of him. Even his record company, Columbia, wanted nothing to do with him. "They hated it and buried it a rock somewhere in Utah," Costello wrote years later when the album was released as a CD on another label. He was to take another two years off before his next release. Blood & Chocolate was largely forgotten.

I'm taking it with me to my desert island in part because hardly anyone cares about it, and since I'll be the only person there the album will sit comfortably atop my island's hit parade. The record will also remind me that some things in civilization are worth doing without.

The sky fell over cheap Korean monster-movie scenery
And spilled into the mezzanine of the crushed capsule hotel
Between the Disney abattoir and the chemical refinery
And knew I was in trouble but thought I was in hell"
- Elvis Costello, "Tokyo Storm Warning"

Blood & Chocolate sounds disorienting at first, a jumbled mess. Most of the songs were recorded live in one take. Guitar, keyboards, bass, drums, and that's pretty much all of it. Guitar solos consist mostly of a couple notes or chords repeatedly stabbed at until it's time to return to the chorus or just end the song. Add producer Nick Lowe's three-chords-and-a-case-of-beer approach to everything and it was guaranteed that all the rough edges would show. The first song is called "Uncomplicated," which states it clearly and sets the tone. The song has two chords, one more than Costello originally intended. The song pounds, grates, exhilarates. We're off. And as the man sings, "this is only the beginning."

A brutally upbeat song follows the first, called "I Hope You're Happy Now," in which the singer makes it quite clear that happiness is the last thing he's hoping for. The Attractions, Costello's house band, are so tight on this record. "I Hope You're Happy Now" has a rapid, stuttering pulse while it drives everyone home. The Attractions were about to split with Elvis C., tensions were running high. "This is us truthfully," said Costello of the album. "We're 32, a couple of us have got divorced, we're pissed off and we've taken all the drugs and we've done all that stuff and we're stillalive, and this is what we sound like."

All the characters in the songs are drinking too much, slipping under the grip of lust or booze and ending up in the wrong places, getting into fights. When Costello was 22 he was quoted as saying that the only two things that motivated his songwriting were revenge and guilt. It was a drunken statement that made for great publicity. Ten years later it probably came true.

"So they flew the Super-Constellation all the way from Rimini
And feasted them on fish and chips from a newspaper facsimile
Now dead Italian tourists' bodies litter up the Broadway
Some people can't be told, you know they have to learn the hard way"
- Elvis Costello, "Tokyo Storm Warning"

My desert island needs a description. It is not a tropical paradise with sandy beaches and balmy weather, idyllic pastures hidden in the hills, Eden before mistakes were made. My desert island is in a city park, in the middle of a pond that is surrounded by an iron fence. People walk by on their way to work or wherever and pay me no mind. They convince themselves not to look. Some of the local kids are different, they stare at me and shout out names, when I'm hidden in the island's clump of trees they beg me to come out. At night lovers sit together holding hands on one of the park benches just beyond the fence. They ignore me. Sometimes I sit out on the shore of my island and wonder what would happen if I swam to shore, but I never do it. I am here because I am guilty of something, or I didn't fit in, or something else unspoken but heeded nonetheless. Kafka is writing my story. I accept my fate. This is my only way of ending up on a desert island, unless I were to take a sea cruise and abandon ship in search of my sanity. I am the man on an island in a city park, and people have learned to live with me. I don't bother them, they don't bother me, except when they really get on my nerves and then I turn up Blood & Chocolate really loud. If I were somewhere else I might not take it, but this is where they have put me. So Blood & Chocolate it is.

I want peace of mind on my island, that's all, I don't want a newspaper. There are no headlines on Blood & Chocolate. There's lots of blood but nothing graphic. Death wears a big hat, but that's only because he's a big bloke. The music overcomes, survives. Uncomplicated for sure, but astonishing, too. One song is called "I Want You." Who hasn't said this, who hasn't thought it? Costello takes the title and runs away with it, singing about desire in a way that both amazes and appalls. Even the singer is nervous; "I'm afraid I won't know where to stop," he says. He's in love, maybe. I don't know. By the end of the song he's singing in a primal whisper. It's the sound of someone who wishes he had been born somebody else. On my island the sound is cathartic.

My island is like my bedroom at home without the electricity. The portable stereo runs on batteries. I read by sunlight (they send me the worst fluff, but occasionally something riveting slips by the censor). My food arrives on the shore in floating baskets, mostly dried goods. The occasional six pack (rotgut stuff with patriotic titles) finds it way to me. Sometimes I place messages in empty beer bottles and set them afloat in the pond. I usually get no response, though sometimes kids will send me back some misspelled dirty words. There's a song on Blood & Chocolate called "Home is Anywhere You Hang Your Head" that sums it all up for me. Who needs to be alone in the middle of an ocean when the same isolation can be accomplished in any urban setting?

"So you look around the tiny room and you wonder where the hell you are
While the K.K.K. convention are all stranded in the bar
They wear hoods and carry shotguns in the main streets of Montgomery
But they're helpless here as babies 'cause they're only here on holiday
- Elvis Costello, "Tokyo Storm Warning"

In a way the entire record is Costello's strange morality tale, a snapshot of self-destructive behavior and what it will cost. What to make of a real oddball of a song called "Battered Old Bird"? It's about some psychotic old man living upstairs, the result of stupid living, and a young boy's downstairs getting ready to grow up so he can drink to excess and take his pills and screw his strangers because it makes him happy, and home won't be where it used to be just anywhere he hangs his head. And he won't learn from anything, and he won't want to, he will be happy in his misery, he won't know any better. ("You think he should be sent outside playing with the traffic/ when pieces of him are already scattered in the attic"). From a whisper to a scream, then the song is over. And the moral of the story? Those who don't learn from misery are doomed to repeat it. Something like that.

The last three songs find Costello trying to dance among the ruins. "Crimes of Paris" is Elvis as the word wizard, puns and clever phrases that don't add up to much, but the music is so catchy and propulsive that the lyrics never get in the way. The music reaches the sublime in the penultimate number, "Poor Napoleon." Costello took the moniker "Napoleon Dynamite" for this record, but whether he's singing about himself or someone else in this song it doesn't really matter. An arching melody, a simple organ, a bass solo at the end that on this record counts as beautiful excess, and Napoleon is happily banished to his island, which might as well be his bedroom. "Next Time Round" is the last song, and it happens to have one of the catchiest riffs and melodies Costello ever composed, with the band pushing the song and the album to a rousing finish. It's good to be left standing in the end.

Beyond the fence I can sometimes hear them talk about my island confinement: they ask each other,"Does he live there by choice?" I do not know the answer to this. And like anyone else stranded on a desert island, I have no idea how long I will be here.

"The day ended as it began
He was seconds older than the man he was this morning, and
the world has wiped its mouth since then
or maybe it was yawning"

- Elvis Costello, "Home is Anywhere You Hang Your Head"

Costello was at his peak in 1986, and he's never really been the same since. With each new record he demonstrates his versatility, styles mingled or taken straight, always interesting, rarely more than that. His vocals are often strained, especially on his ballads, but on Blood & Chocolate his voice finds whatever it takes to fit every twisted note. He sings of a man in the supermarket shouting at the customers, a boy hiding from a neighbor who once did something really nasty with an axe, thugs caught in tourist traps, children in grown-up clothes, Napoleons dreaming of Russian conquests from their bedrooms where they struggle with jealousy and impotence. I first heard Blood & Chocolate when I was 21 and a college friend brought it back to the dorm. Thirteen years later I'm writing a desert island column for the worldwide Web that has over two million sites. I'm glad that you're out there, but it's not like I know that you're there. I might as well be on an island, everyone is an island but some are more an island than others, the bigger the city the easier it is to be alone. The only desert island I'll ever be on is one on which everyone can see me, and when that happens I will do my best to take Blood & Chocolate with me because it was ignored too, and it will get me through the night.

But if I do end up in the South Pacific, I'm taking Brian Eno's Another Green World.