Last week I was writing about Midnight Oil and the way Blue Sky Mining carried all this real-world weight underneath songs that could still make you want to turn the volume up. Songs that knew things. Songs written by people who had done the reading, felt the fury, and found a way to make it sing.

And it got me thinking about another album from the same year. February 1989. A few months before Blue Sky Mining landed. An album that came out on Valentine's Day, of all things, from a man who had spent the back half of the 1980s apparently trying to lose his audience, his band, and possibly his own name.

Spike by Elvis Costello.

If you know it, you know. If you don't, you're about to.

Here's where we were with Elvis Costello heading into 1989. The Attractions, his brilliant, slightly combustible band, were done. Or at least paused. He'd made King of America in 1986 essentially without them, then dragged them back for Blood & Chocolate the same year like he was testing something he already knew the answer to. He was crediting albums to "Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus" one minute and "Napoleon Dynamite" the next. He was writing songs with Burt Bacharach. He was writing songs with Paul McCartney.

The music press didn't quite know what to do with him. Was he having a crisis? Was this artistic reinvention or just chaos?

It was neither, really. It was Costello being Costello. Restless. Plural. The kind of songwriter who genuinely cannot stick to one thing because there are too many things worth doing. And with Spike, he stopped trying to choose.

He said it himself in the liner notes: he had the blueprint for five albums in his head. Warner Bros. had just signed him and given him a proper budget. They told him to make whatever record he wanted. So he made all five albums at once.

The logistics of this thing are genuinely wild. Ocean Way in Hollywood. Southlake Studios in New Orleans. Windmill Lane in Dublin. AIR Studios in London. Four separate locations. Four different groups of musicians assembled in each place. The whole thing produced by Costello alongside T Bone Burnett and engineer Kevin Killen.

Think about what that actually means. Different rooms, different sounds, different players, songs written in Dublin hotel rooms and on ship's cabins off the coast of Greenland. And yet somehow it holds together. Somehow it feels like one record.

Part of that is the writing. Costello's voice as a songwriter is so distinctive, so particular in its preoccupations and its rhythms, that you'd know it was him regardless of whether the Dirty Dozen Brass Band were playing behind it or whether Chrissie Hynde was harmonising on the chorus. (Both of those things happen on Spike, by the way. The cast list on this album reads like the guest list at some very strange and brilliant party. Marc Ribot. Jim Keltner. Benmont Tench. Allen Toussaint. Roger McGuinn. And yes, Paul McCartney on bass.)

Back then, I had no idea about any of this. I just had the sleeve. The cover image, which Costello described as "the beloved entertainer in captivity, hung up on the wall like a trophy in the boardroom." A clown face exploding from a golden Warner Bros. shield. Bizarre and somehow perfect. And on the back, all those song titles that seemed to promise something sprawling, something you'd need to sit with.

Which you did. Which you absolutely did.

The album opens with This Town, which sets you up for something spiky and satirical. And then track two arrives and the whole thing shifts on its axis.

Let Him Dangle is about Derek Bentley. If you're British and of a certain age, that name was in the air throughout your childhood, brought up again and again in debates about capital punishment. Bentley was nineteen years old, described at the time as having learning difficulties, and in January 1953 he was hanged at Wandsworth Prison for a murder he didn't commit. His sixteen-year-old accomplice Christopher Craig had fired the shot that killed PC Sidney Miles during a botched burglary. Craig was too young to hang. Bentley wasn't.

The whole case turned on four words. "Let him have it, Chris." Bentley supposedly said it as police confronted them on a rooftop. Was he telling Craig to shoot? Or telling him to hand over the gun? Nobody ever proved it either way. The defence claimed the judge was hell-bent on a conviction regardless of the evidence. The jury took just seventy-five minutes.

“Is there any question that Elvis Costello is one of our best songwriters, ever?”
- @DougGolden255 (YouTube Comments)

Bentley's conviction was finally quashed in 1998. Forty-five years too late.

Costello put it in a song. Not abstractly. Specifically. He tells the whole story, names the names, and then turns to face the camera: if killing anybody is a terrible crime, why does this bloodthirsty chorus come round from time to time?

It's devastating. And it's only the second track.

Now here's the thing about Spike that makes it so hard to put it in a box. Because after Let Him Dangle comes Veronica.

You probably know Veronica. It was his biggest American hit, reached number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100, number 1 on the Modern Rock chart. Bouncy, melodic, the kind of song that gets into your head in the first thirty seconds. Won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Male Video.

And for a while, if you didn't know the story behind it, you probably thought it was just a love song. Or maybe a quirky character piece. Something to do with a girl called Veronica.

It's about his grandmother.

Her name was Mabel Josephine Jackson. Her Catholic confirmation name was Veronica. And in the years before Spike, Costello had been watching her disappear into Alzheimer's disease, visiting her, sitting with her as she drifted between decades, sometimes completely gone and sometimes, as he put it on a VH1 interview, experiencing "terrifying moments of lucidity."

He brought an early version of the song to his first writing session with Paul McCartney. Which itself must have been a surreal afternoon, sitting down with a Beatle to work on a song about a grandmother in a care home. But Costello in his memoir described wanting the song to "defy the decay and have some sense of joy," wanting the music to smuggle something tender and painful onto the radio. And it did. McCartney brought in that Hofner bass, the same bass from a thousand Beatles records, and the song became something joyful and heartbreaking at the same time.

Did you hear that when it was a hit? Did you actually hear what it was about?

Or did you just hear the tune? Because the tune is irresistible. Which is sort of the point.

And then there's this.

By 1989, Thatcher had been Prime Minister for ten years. A decade of what Costello saw as systematic dismantling of communities, selling off of public assets, the Falklands War sending young men to die for reasons that kept shifting, miners broken and left behind, the country transformed into something colder and sharper and meaner.

Tramp the Dirt Down is his response to all of that. And it does not pull any punches.

The song is essentially a wish. He wants to live long enough to see her die. When they finally put her in the ground, he'll stand on her grave and tramp the dirt down. That's it. That's the song. Built around Irish instrumentation, low whistle and bouzouki and something that sounds almost like a wake, this slow Celtic fury that builds and builds, Costello's voice tightening as he goes through the charges against her.

He almost scrapped it. He said in an interview that he kept thinking, that's not really how I think, I'm more balanced than that. But then he decided the song wasn't meant to be balanced. It was meant to be the moment when you don't know whether to laugh or kick the television in. The unreasonable response. The thing you can't say in polite company.

When Thatcher died in 2013, the song climbed to number 79 on iTunes. Costello performed it live, but he prefaced it each night with a story about his own father's death from dementia, saying that's a fate he wouldn't wish on anyone, including his worst enemy. He reframed it as a song about burying not a person but an idea. A political idea that he believed had done enormous and lasting damage.

That reframing matters. Because Tramp the Dirt Down isn't quite the straightforward revenge fantasy it seems on the surface. The bridge is where it gets complicated. He describes seeing a newspaper photo of Thatcher kissing a crying child during a campaign. "What did this man think she was thinking, holding that child's face? Can you imagine all that greed and avarice coming down on that child's lips?" It's grotesque and specific and it's about a politician's relationship with performance, with the performance of compassion. It's angrier than just wanting someone dead. It's about what power does to people, and what those people then do to everyone else.

What I love about Spike, and what I didn't have the vocabulary for when I first heard it, is that it's genuinely unified by a sensibility even while it jumps wildly between styles. New Orleans brass funk on one track. Celtic folk ballad on the next. Burt Bacharach-indebted pop. Rattling rockabilly energy. Acoustic songs written alone and elaborate ensemble pieces built in studios across three countries.

Costello knew what he was doing. He described it as born from the idea that things had become so absurd that laughter was sometimes the only response. Comedy and tragedy on the same record, on adjacent tracks, making you lurch between them. That's not confusion. That's a very specific emotional truth.

Did you get that from it at the time? I'm not sure I did, not fully. I felt it, in the way you feel things when you're young and music is hitting you sideways. But I didn't understand the architecture of it.

Now I do. Or I'm getting there.

There's a moment in God's Comic that I keep coming back to. It's this darkly funny thing about God imagining his own retirement, sitting in a lounge suite while the world winds down, ordering dessert. It sounds absurd and it is absurd. But underneath it there's something real about the relationship between performance and belief, between the role we need someone to play and the exhausted person playing it.

Is that just me hearing it that way? Maybe. But Costello put it between Veronica and Deep Dark Truthful Mirror. That sequencing is not accidental.

Here's the nostalgia layer on this one, and it's a real one.

When Spike came out, I had no way of knowing that Costello had written some of it in a cabin on a ship in the North Atlantic. No way of knowing that he'd found out Burt Bacharach was recording in the next studio while they were laying down Satellite, and that Bacharach came in to listen and seemed quietly amused that someone was trying to sound like him. No way of knowing about the mix being done entirely by hand at Ocean Way, no automation, six musicians pulling faders at the same moment to get the dynamics right on each track.

No way of knowing the full story of his grandmother Molly, or the fact that Veronica was her confirmation name and that's where the title came from. Or that Costello had nearly not put Tramp the Dirt Down on the album at all because he thought it was too much, too unbalanced, not how he really felt.

You had the sleeve. You had the lyric sheet. You had the NME if you were lucky enough to catch the right week. That was it.

And in some ways that was fine, because the songs were strong enough to mean something without the context. The anger on Tramp the Dirt Down was legible even if you didn't know every specific it was referring to. Veronica broke your heart even if you just thought it was a love song. Let Him Dangle made you feel the injustice even if you didn't know the name Derek Bentley.

But now we can know. Now you can spend an hour reading the liner notes from the 2001 reissue, written by Costello himself, full of asides and diversions and stories about his grandfather the military bandmaster who walked around Dublin in a British Army uniform at exactly the wrong time. You can read about Marc Ribot doctoring his guitar with bulldog clips to get a different sound. About Michael Blair bringing a breaker's yard worth of metal percussion to the sessions.

It changes how you hear it. It doesn't replace the feeling. It deepens it.

Spike came out on Valentine's Day 1989. Think about that. Elvis Costello releasing an album that includes a song about a wrongful execution and a song about dancing on Margaret Thatcher's grave on the most romantic day of the year. There's something very Costello about that.

It peaked at number 5 in the UK. Number 32 in America. Veronica was everywhere. And then the 90s arrived and the world moved on and Spike became one of those albums that hardcore fans cite reverentially while everyone else has vague memories of the hit single and not much more.

That's the wrong way around. Go back to it.

Start at the beginning. Let This Town set up the world as Costello sees it in 1989. Let Let Him Dangle knock you sideways. Let Veronica do its thing, but this time with the knowledge of who it's really about. Try to hold Tramp the Dirt Down and God's Comic in your head at the same time, tragedy and comedy, fury and absurdity, and see if that doesn't feel like a pretty accurate description of the world.

Because here's the thing. The things Costello was angry about on Spike, the miscarriages of justice, the cynicism of power, the things sold out from under people who never got a say, the performance of compassion by people who have none. They're all still there. He wasn't documenting a moment. He was documenting a pattern.

Put it on again. Properly this time. And read the credits while you're at it. Look at what it took to make this thing, all those cities and studios and musicians, all those stories feeding into fifteen tracks.

Then tell me it doesn't sound different.

The following articles and sources were consulted in researching this piece: