Richard Cook on Elvis Costello, Prince and the pitfalls of longevity
Anyone who's survived 20 years in rock music must have something going for them. The short and merry life of the pop star is sometimes extended by a combination of luck, talent and versatility, but not often, and to have anything like two decades of even middling success to look back on is a huge achievement. Still, it must be a sore point with both Elvis Costello and The Artist Formerly Known As Prince to be seeing out the 1990s as vaguely remembered veterans, rather than the golden boys of a decade and a half before.
Costello, admittedly, has largely turned his back on competing in the charts in favour of a sort of middlebrow niche in fine musical art. Always a man of erudition when it came to almost any kind of music, his recent leanings have been so far removed from the pub-rock that got him started, you'd think he was embarrassed by much of his ancient history - as smart and unrepeatable as so much of it was. The two-disc compilation The Very Best of Elvis Costello (Universal Music TV) has restored him to the top ten, trawling through a vast catalogue of records and ending up with a surprisingly quirky and sometimes mystifying collection. The problem for the compilers was how rapidly Elvis's hits actually dried up: there is probably only a single CD's worth of genuinely familiar material here. The rest is padded out with oddball B-sides and obscure album tracks, many of which are actually superior to obvious fodder such as the intensely annoying "Oliver's Army". What stands out are short, sharp shocks such as "Big Tears" and "Talking in the Dark", or haunted heartbreakers such as "Almost Blue" and "Man out of Time". When the second disc winds up with his collaborations with Burt Bacharach and the Brodsky Quartet, Elvis isn't so much out of his depth as leading us where we don't care to go. He may find contemporary composition and Broadway lounge music fascinating, but it doesn't mean we want to hear him living out his hobbies in public.
If Costello's career has settled down rather than capsized, that of Prince - we'll stick to that name for now - has gone into freefall compared with his previous eminence. The most feted and influential black musician of the 1980s has been a forgotten man in this decade, attracting more attention for his various name-changes and contractual wrangles than his music - which has remained, despite it all, rich and profound. There are few better examples of how business problems can suppress excellence than Prince's commercial decline. Perhaps it was sheer bloody-mindedness for him to release a three-CD set at a time when he desperately needed a single hit, but 1996's Emancipation (NPG) was critically hammered and sold disastrously. Yet it remains a tour de force which would be simply beyond anyone else to recreate.
Prince has been unable to come to terms with the way black pop has moved away from the virtuosity and signature genius on which he previously thrived. Now that most records are programmed rather than "played", where is an instrumental master and obsessive perfectionist to go? The Vault . . . Old Friends 4 Sale (Warners) is his final shackle-breaking record with his old company, a collection of odds and ends from 1985 to 1994. It was released at the beginning of this month and sold fewer than 3,000 copies in its first week, a situation unthinkable for the old Prince. Even Jethro Tull's new album made a higher debut in the charts, for God's sake. Its ten tracks may be no more than a scrapbook of bits and pieces, yet it shames most of the albums released this year. From the blues pastiche of "5 Women " to the jazzbo strut of "It's About That Walk" to the gorgeous widescreen balladry of "Old Friends 4 Sale" itself, it proves that Prince's bodacious wizardry, an endangered trait in the cold world of 1990s pop, can survive fashionable erosion, even if only a few of us are listening. He has since signed a new deal with a new label: may he be around to unsettle us for another 20 years yet.
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