The legendary duet album that never was; Paul McCartney releases reissue of
record, including songs with Elvis Costello
David Bauder The Associated Press
<http://newspapers.web.ca/news/nr/en/The%20Toronto%20Star> The Toronto
Star , Mar. 22, 2017
Paul McCartney's Flowers in the Dirt box is as much an archeology project as a
reissue, in which listeners can discover the bones of a landmark album that
could have been made but wasn't.
Two of the reissue's three audio discs are devoted to McCartney's songwriting
collaboration with Elvis Costello in 1987 and 1988, which produced some 15
songs. Listening to the work, some of it first made available this week, it's
hard not to wonder why they didn't make a duet album like Costello later did
with Burt Bacharach. Instead, they decided not to alter their original plan.
The mythical disc could have started with "My Brave Face" and "Veronica", two of
each man's biggest hits of the 1980s. And that was only the beginning.
"Looking back, you could say that," McCartney told The Associated Press. "If
we'd just done a few more of these demos, we could have made a crazy album. But
we didn't. That was as far as we got."
McCartney initiated the partnership at the suggestion of his manager. The former
Beatle was looking for varied sounds, styles and producers as he began work on a
new album. McCartney and Costello worked for a few weeks in a room above
McCartney's studio in Sussex, England, where they'd write a song a day and
immediately go downstairs to record it
"There were many echoes, working with Elvis and working with John (Lennon),
because I know Elvis is a big Beatles fan," McCartney said.
They're all from Liverpool, too. McCartney worked with Costello as he did with
Lennon, two men with acoustic guitars sitting across from one another. With
McCartney left-handed, it felt to him like looking into a mirror.
"I think the key was not to turn up in short trousers with my fan club card
sticking out of my top pocket," Costello said. "I'd been asked to write songs in
1987, knowing what I know, having done what I'd done for that whole 10 years,
which seemed like a long time then. Paul knows what he's done and he knows I
love him.
"That said, you're bound to look up sometimes and think, 'Bloody hell, it's
him!'" he said.
In this week's reissue, one disc contains nine of those 15 songs, recorded the
day they were written. Another disc features the same songs produced by the two
men later with a band added, primarily sung by McCartney since it was his album,
after all.
To a certain extent, something is lost in translation.
Take the song "Tommy's Coming Home," for instance. Inspired fun with McCartney
and Costello singing together, the tempo slows and the song drags in the full
band version.
The two-man recordings "have a lot of charm and a good deal of cheek," Costello
said. "You can almost hear us laughing out loud at what I call 'the Mersey
cadences.' It's in the blood. It's in the water. It's in him and it's got to
come out."
The songs they wrote were dispersed between the two men or left on the shelf.
Four were included on Flowers in the Dirt, including the stately "That Day is
Done" and the call-and-response "You Want Her Too."
Costello later recorded "So Like Candy" and "Pads, Paws & Claws". Some demos
creeped out through the years.
"My Brave Face" could have been as big as anything he and Lennon had written,
McCartney said. His pride in some of the songs he had written without Costello
is one reason Flowers in the Dirt took shape the way it did. But you can hear
another reason between the lines listening to him talk. Perhaps he didn't want
to pull Costello into the weight of comparisons that he felt for all of his
post-Beatles career.
