The classic 1978 album Elvis Costello thought was destroyed by bad production: “Fucked up”
Production work is often overlooked by your average music consumer, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter how gifted a songwriter somebody is if they don’t have a producer on board who can properly translate that work onto a record – something Elvis Costello knows more than most.
Ask anybody about Costello, and you will invariably be met with a run-down of the bespectacled songwriter’s greatest hits, tracks like ‘Pump It Up’, ‘Radio Radio’, and ‘Oliver’s Army’, among various others. These are, after all, the songs that elevated Elvis Costello beyond the humble confines of his beginnings on the independent record label, Stiff. In the grand scheme of his career, though, Costello’s own recordings only make up a small part of his multi-faceted output.
Another part of that output is the production work that Costello has routinely thrown himself into over the years. From The Specials to Squeeze, Nick Lowe and Paul McCartney, the projects Costello has taken on as a producer have not been limited by genre, and his approach can be best described by his motivations for producing Rum, Sodomoy and the Lash by The Pogues, “I saw my task was to capture them in their dilapidated glory before some more professional producer fucked them up.”
A side effect of Costello’s dutiful production work is, of course, that he can recognise and accurately disparage bad production. For him, the mark of a good producer is being able to replicate the incredible sound of an artist’s live performances, as he once recalled to Pitchfork, “I remember seeing PJ [Harvey] on The Tonight Show. She stood there with just a guitar and did ‘Rid Of Me’. It was like seeing Howlin’ Wolf on Shindig! So great.”
Then, upon hearing the studio version of that track, Costello was incredibly disappointed. “I got the record, and it was nowhere near as good, but it didn’t matter,” he said. “For me, the record sounds like shit. That guy [Steve Albini] doesn’t know anything about production.”
Even Albinin’s apparent failure to capture the real sound of PJ Harvey, however, isn’t as criminal as Costello’s most-hated producer. “He might be the second-worst producer of a great record after Jimmy Iovine,” he declared, “Who totally fucked up Darkness On The Edge Of Town.”
It is worth noting, of course, that both Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau produced the bulk of that beloved record, with Iovine carrying out additional audio engineering, which is what Costello takes issue with.“It sounds like Bruce is in a fucking shoe box full of tissue paper,” the songwriter exclaimed, making his feelings towards Springsteen’s 1978 effort abundantly clear.
In spite of its perceived poor production, that LP still remains a source of worship for Springsteen devotees across the musical landscape, featuring some of the greatest songwriting efforts ever laid down by ‘The Boss’. However, Costello certainly isn’t alone in his hatred of the record’s production, with the E Street Band’s Steve Van Zandt also outspoken about the “terrible production”, resulting largely from Iovine’s inability to properly capture the sound of the group’s guitars.
Your average listener might not be able to pick out bad production work, but people like Van Zandt and Elvis Costello are abundantly aware that Darkness On The Edge Of Town, while still an incredibly successful record, isn’t half as good as it could have been had the quality of the production work been prioritised.
