DVD Review: Elvis Costello The Right Spectacle

Elvis Costello does indeed make The Right Spectacle in this comprehensive video history. Right up front, let's establish that this is a must-own DVD for even fairly casual Elvis fans. Indeed this would be a good starting place to turn someone on Elvis Costello. It'd make a great stocking stuffer for a music hungry teenager.

The main program contains 27 music videos, all his videos through the Brutal Youth album. Looking at them now, and chronologically like this provides a useful view of his whole career.

The first couple of videos are particularly cheap, just the band miming in a white room. There's a lot to be gained from watching Elvis' body language in these bare clips.

Notably, there's a move that he makes where he's walking on his ankle, especially at the end of "Pump It Up" which has monkeyed with me for years. It's like he's a wounded animal that has just extracted his mangled foot from a bear trap.

They get better and at least slightly bigger budgeted as we progress. They start involving locales, and a few costumes and extras, such as the various foreigners working for "Oliver's Army."

"New Lace Sleeves" stands out nicely. As Elvis notes in the accompanying commentary (which can conveniently be accessed as subtitles rather than audio), the Police video for "Every Breath You Take" a year or two later looked notably like this. With due respect to Sting's classic, I think this is an even better song- though this was something written as a teenager.

The real centerpiece, of course, is the classic MTV hit "Everyday I Write the Book." Elvis has always downplayed his biggest American hit single as "a bad Smokey Robinson song." In fact, it's a very GOOD Smokey Robinson song.

The video makes it just doubly irresistable, though, with the beautiful royal parody. The images of Prince Charles at the typewriter (with his boxing gloves on) giving his beloved a determined gaze as he ponders the next chapter of his book- those are priceless, as are the alternately wistful and disgusted looks of Diana.

His other biggest US hit single was "Veronica," co-written with Paul McCartney. The prologue of this involves Elvis directly explaining his recollections of his grandmother in the nursing home with Alzheimer's. I'm no scholar of the Billboard charts, but I bet this is the only Top 40 hit ever on this topic, and those opening recollections really add a lot to the song.

Article Author: Al Barger

Unreformed hawkish Hoosier hillbilly Al Barger runs the still squeezin' down the psychodelic Kentucky moonshine at More Things. What with the paranoid religious visions, the Pentecostal music, visions of God and anarchy running amok and such, somebody …

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