Shipbuilding

Is it worth it?

I listened to this song a great deal when I was young, so when I played it a few days ago, I was taken straight back to my childhood bedroom, in a way that hasn't really happened with other songs I listened to a lot at that time, because I've also listened to them plenty since, so the memories are spread around.

But, Shipbuilding, in 95-96, I listened to as much as anything but Going Underground, but have not listened to it all that much since.

Why did I listen to it so much then? Well, it started, as so many things do for me, with a list (never thought it would come to this).

The Times ran lists around 94 and 95 of the 100 Greatest Songs and Albums of All Time, and they were probably the first such lists I'd ever come across outside the Capital Radio Hall of Fame, coming at the matter from a completely different angle, with Careless Whisper nowhere to be seen. I'd heard of most of the songs on the list, without necessarily having heard them, and they were mainly, I think, hits, but I remember Shipbuilding, which I'd not heard of and was not a hit, was incongruously high.

So I bought The Best of Elvis Costello. I'm not sure what I thought of Shipbuilding initially. It's such a non-pop song. I'm sure I liked Oliver's Army more. 

Coincidentally, there was a little course at school around that time about jazz (some kind of non-curriculum thing) and we watched a film about Chet Baker, so that was an added point of interest. And, what with Our Friends in the North etc, this was when I became interested in British and American recent political history, so the stars were aligned for Shipbuilding.

I heard the Costello version before the Robert Wyatt version and I still prefer it. Suede covered it for Warchild and that was decent, but it's still Costello's I prefer.

The brief, slightly odd, history of it, is that Clive Langer wrote the music, didn't like his own lyrics, gave it to Elvis, he wrote the lyrics, they gave it to Robert Wyatt, he had a small hit with it, Elvis, a year later, put out his own version. So there is not, in the usual sense, an "original" and a "cover".

I listened to it so much and so closely. I'm not sure Costello has ever sung better. He takes such care to do justice to the lyrics. I would come to learn that there are very few protest songs with such empathy and melancholy to them. I'd listen to it and/or sing along to its unusual phrasing, its series of memorable spaced but connected bon mots -  "is it worth it" "it's just a rumour that was spread around town" "well i ask you" "diving for dear life when we should be diving for pearls". I knew every note, every bar, every breath.

And yet I stopped listening to it. I guess there were a few steps. When I moved from cassette to CDs, I bought four Costello albums - My Aim is True, Imperial Bedroom, Blood and Chocolate and Painted from Memory, and definitely switched my close attention to I Want You, primarily, which would get the same note-for-note phrase-for-phrase treatment as Shipbuilding.

But, then, I just became less of a fan of Elvis Costello. I genuinely think it may have been his version of She on 2000's Notting Hill soundtrack, which is so hideous, and exposes all the negatives in his marmite voice. It's funny, I've stuck with Bob Dylan's late career vocal (though it wouldn't be true to say it didn't take several years before I was actually truly one of those weirdos that actually came to love late-Dylan-voice), but I just found Elvis's difficult to deal with. I did not like his duet with Jenny Lewis, 'Carpetbaggers' at all. I have listened to some of his late albums, but, again, never quite with the required enthusiasm.

It's strange. He could easily have been one of my all-time favourites, he's such a brilliant and consistent songwriter, but it just hasn't worked out like that. 

I wonder if it's galling to him that several of his top songs on streaming sites are covers. I also wonder if it bothers him that his biggest hit, his most radio-friendly pop smash, never gets played anymore (for obvious bad-word related reasons).

Anyway, Shipbuilding is still a great song, a singular masterpiece, really. Costello has several truly great songs, and many many excellent albums. In a way, he may well be the closest Britain's had to Dylan, and this is his ... Hurricane? Maybe?