Green Shirt – Elvis Costello And The Attractions (1985)

Description

Additional information about this, Elvis Costello & The Attractions vinyl art.

Elvis Costello – The Artist

Declan Patrick MacManus (born 1954), better known by his stage name Elvis Costello, is an English musician, singer, songwriter, composer, record producer, author, television presenter, and occasional actor. He began his career as part of London’s pub rock scene in the early 1970s and later became associated with the first wave of the British punk and new wave movement that emerged in the mid-to-late 1970s. His critically acclaimed debut album, My Aim Is True, was released in 1977. Shortly after recording it, he formed the Attractions as his backing band. Costello and the Attractions toured and recorded together for the better part of a decade, though differences between them caused a split by 1986. Much of Costello’s work since has been as a solo artist, though reunions with members of the Attractions have been credited to the group over the years.

Green Shirt – The Song

Green Shirt is a song written by new wave musician Elvis Costello and recorded by Costello with his backing band the Attractions. The song appeared on Costello’s 1979 third album, Armed Forces. Lyrically inspired by the influence of the National Front and the Quisling Clinic in Wisconsin, “Green Shirt” features a vocal recorded by Costello after a “night of carousing”.
“Green Shirt” was not released as a single at the time of its 1979 release, but in 1985 it saw single release to promote The Man: The Best of Elvis Costello. The single reached number 68 in Britain. Since its release, the song has been lauded by critics as one of Costello’s best album tracks and has made several appearances in Costello’s live setlist. “Green Shirt” was described by Elvis Costello as “a paranoid song that I wrote … about the simplification of seductive signals, the bedroom eyes that lead to tyranny”. The song was lyrically inspired by the Quisling Clinic, a building in Madison, Wisconsin that Costello reportedly saw and wrote down the name of while driving past. Costello later wrote that, while he had only ever associated the name “Quisling” with Norwegian fascist Vidkun Quisling, the combination of “Quisling” and “Clinic” had “conjured up some kind of Boys from Brazil nightmare”. Costello also cited the rise of the National Front in Britain as inspiration.

The Long-Sleeved Shirt – The Shape

This record has been cut into a long-sleeved shirt. A shirt is a cloth garment for the upper body (from the neck to the waist). Originally an undergarment worn exclusively by men, it has become, in American English, a catch-all term for a broad variety of upper-body garments and undergarments. In British English, a shirt is more specifically a garment with a collar, sleeves with cuffs, and a full vertical opening with buttons or snaps (North Americans would call that a “dress shirt”, a specific type of collared shirt). A shirt can also be worn with a necktie under the shirt collar.

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