Thursday, June 15, 2023

David Stubbs - Elvis Costello and the Attractions live at Royal Albert Hall - Melody Maker - January 31 1987

 

























Possible explanation for the lyric that befuddled Stubbsy? Not this case but something similar... 



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4 comments:

  1. EdJune 16, 2023 at 6:43 AM

    I am absolutely haunted by those "Christmas every day" people. (As you say, I think there are several of them.) It gets at something really fundamental about the nature of existence. What happens if you take a transient experience, a moment of peak joy, and try to make it permanent? Is that heaven, or hell?

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  2. SIMON REYNOLDSJune 16, 2023 at 11:08 AM

    It is kind of chilling and does speak to something profound about human desire and how it can be misdirected - the folly of trying to stay at some perfect point in your life, or in pop history (as with Teddy Boys, or Deadheads).

    But possibly shamefully I tend to use this clip as an easy source of amusement - I forgot about it for years at a time and then stumble on it again and immediately double up with laughter. There's something about the fact that he has Christmas pudding for breakfast - and tragicomic that each night he wraps up presents for himself (3 presents no less!) The same ones, over and over? Or new ones? That would be expensive - and my idea of hell (having to think of gifts, even for oneself, is torture).

    Presumably he has crackers and has to pull them himself, one hand on either end of the cracker.

    It's a bit like an elective Groundhog Day.

    One has to wonder what traumas or disappointments in life would lead someone to this repetition-complex.

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  3. AnonymousJune 16, 2023 at 6:43 PM

    The basic meaning of that lyric is pretty obvious: it’s always Christmas in the cupboard at the top of the stairs, because that’s where you keep the tinsel and lights. But is that meant to be a consolation, a little light still burning in the bleak world of the song? (It’s from Battered Old Bird, on Blood and Chocolate.) Or is it a trite delusion that the character in the song uses to avoid facing up to reality? Your guess is as good as mine.

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    1. SIMON REYNOLDSJune 17, 2023 at 11:09 AM

      wow that would never have occurred as a possible meaning of the lyric, but it makes sense

      I remember Allan Jones, editor of MM and a stalwart Costello-ite, picking up on David's comment and insisting the lyric was perfectly legible - about an eccentric bedsit character who keeps the Christmas decorations up all year long. So "cupboard" meaning not literally a cupboard but a small poky bedsit on the top floor.

      I just looked up the original song - "Battered Old Bird" - and there's a reference to a landlady and various tenants (a pair of old maids, the Macintosh man, who is always typing through the night). A house full of human wreckage. In which case, Jonesy's interpretation fits, I think - although the lines in question are in quotations and said by the Macintosh Man so maybe it's just some strange image from his broken brain.

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