What do you get?
When an arranged marriage blossoms: a 4-CD box set of their entire collaborative output.
By John Aizlewood.
Ivory power: Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello hit the right notes.
Elvis Costello & Burt Bacharach
★★★★
The Songs Of Bacharach & Costello
UME. CD/DL/LP
IN 1977, as musical revolution swirled around them, faux punks Elvis Costello & The Attractions shared Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself with their spittle-dispensing audiences. A version played at the University of East Anglia opens the fourth and final disc of this collection: it’s straight and reverent, hushed and tasteful. As Costello notes in a whopping 10,000-word accompanying essay to a collection which hoovers up every song Bacharach and Costello wrote together and much more, it was “like waving a fist full of red-rags at a pile of bullshit, but I can assure you there was not the slightest hint of irony in my performance.”