100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 No Action

02 This Year’s Girl

03 The Beat

04 Pump It Up

05 Little Triggers

06 You Belong to Me

07 Hand in Hand

08 (I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea

09 Lip Service

10 Living in Paradise

11 Lipstick Vogue

12 Night Rally

Journalist Nick Kent hit the nail on the head in the New Musical Express when he summed-up This Year’s Model as ‘uneasy listening’.

In 1976 Elvis Costello was a 22-year-old computer operator in the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics company, living in the suburbs with his wife and son and playing mediocre country rock in his spare time. A lengthy stint with the first Clash album convinced him to uncover his own feelings of rage and disgust that were channelled into his debut My Aim Is True. Recorded on the run, that album was a watershed at the height of the punk summer in July 1977.

‘The only two things that matter to me, the only motivation points for me writing all these songs are revenge and guilt,’ Costello told Nick Kent in his first press interview. ‘Those are the only emotions I know about, that I know I can feel. Love? I dunno what it means, really, and it doesn’t exist in my songs.’ The question then was how to find a band that could be both nasty and literate to do these songs justice?

The first album was recorded with a band who just happened to be there. But Costello needed a combo of his own and the Attractions was hastily assembled. Keyboard player Steve Nason aka Nieve was a teenage student at the Royal Academy of Music, while bassist Bruce Thomas and drummer Pete Thomas were unrelated jobbing musicians. It proved a devastatingly potent combination, with Nieve’s Vox Continental loading Costello’s poisonous pen with hydrochloric acid, while the rhythm section steadily punched body blows. His targets were love on ‘Lipstick Vogue’ (‘Sometimes I think that love is just a tumour/You’ve got to cut it out’), fascists on ‘Night Rally’, the music business on ‘Lip Service’ – and that was just the start of it.

‘The Attractions made a huge difference to these songs,’ Costello admits. “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea” originally used the same stop-start guitar figure as the Who’s “I Can’t Explain” (or for that matter the Clash’s “Clash City Rockers”). Bruce and Pete came up with a more syncopated rhythm pattern and Steve found a part that sounded like sirens, although he rarely played the same thing twice so you had to pay attention.’

Pete Thomas pounded up a storm on ‘Chelsea’ with its spastic reggae and staccato guitar as Costello spat out lyrics like ‘They call her Natasha when she looks like Elsie’ – a putdown worthy of Dylan. The last song written and recorded was the monster beatfest ‘Pump It Up’, which was cut in one take. According to Costello it questions ‘Just how much can you fuck, how many drugs can you do, before you get so numb you can’t really feel anything?’.

The album – which Costello described as ‘a ghost version of [the Rolling Stones’] Aftermath, the album to which I listened more than any other at this time’ – was recorded in a total of 11 days and was squeezed between constant touring across the UK and the US on a diet of alcohol and speed, while Costello’s marriage was crumbling around him. And it glows with the sound of a man whose greatest dreams have just come true – everything is a little excited, a little nervy and definitely paranoid. But at his moment of triumph Costello faces his own shortcomings. It’s hard to look away from a psychic car crash.

‘It was at that point that everything – whether it be my self-perpetuated venom – was about to engulf me,’ Costello reflected on This Year’s Model. ‘I was rapidly becoming a not very nice person. I was losing track of what I was doing, why I was doing it, and my own control.’ And yet, as so often happens, Costello’s turmoil was our reward.