A face in the crowd

Do you think music bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the soul? I do.

As you may know I went to a concert in Dublin at the weekend to see Elvis Costello at the intimate Vicar Street venue. It only hold maybe 2000 people and has a “supper club” feel to it. The layout is seated around a table of four people. My table had only two people sitting at it, me and my wife. For whatever reason, the other two people never turned up so I had brilliant views to the stage and it was the only such table

The concert lasted two and a half hours and it was just Costello and his long-term associate Steve Naive on grand piano, organ, accordion. I was concerned about how strong Elvis’s voice would be. It started scratchy for maybe the first half an hour but as he got more into it, the voice improved and he finished wonderfully.

There’s a tricky thing we need to talk about and it’s this - the “awkward lyrics” that sit in the middle of his biggest selling and most popular song “Oliver’s Army”. As I explained here the other day, it had been written following a visit to Northern Ireland in 1978 and it is anti-war/imperial in sentiment. (Like “Shipbuilding”, which he also did) He tried to capture this in the song which brings us to the couplet which has given all the problems.

“Only takes an inch of trigger, one more widow one less white n*gger”

This has caused so much heat and ill informed comment and he actually talked about it on stage for the first time to my knowledge - emphasising the huge significance of the use of the word WHITE before n*gger. This was a slang term for an Irish Catholic in some circles, it has NOTHING whatsoever to do with race. He was referring to his grandfather, obliquely. But we live in an age where everything is about bloody race and so he even stopped performing it live!

On Saturday night, he did do the song and when it got to THAT moment, he let the audience sing the line, before producing a megaphone that made a police siren noise pretending we were all under arrest. It was funny. He then went on to say that when he wrote those words in 1978, they were honest and in context. It clearly rankles him that he is portrayed as a “racist” just because of the term “White N*gger”. Here is the last few seconds of the song …

Anyway, there were many highlights for me. He did a spine tingling “Good Year for the Roses”, a lovely “She”, a transcendent “Alison” and many other lesser known but still fantastic songs. Which brings me to the point of this article.

For some years now, I find his music seems to affect me and I can’t explain it, intellectually. I do like his sometimes sad and reflective lyrics and I enjoy the odd snarl that lingers from the early years but the net result is more than all of that. Why do I have a lump in my throat so often? Why do I feel so moved? I don’t quite know and I cannot rationalise it.

Perhaps the simple truth is that great art, including music, somehow bypasses the senses and cuts straight to our soul? And so it is with his music and me.