Get Happy!! is the fourth studio album by the English singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, and his third with the Attractions — keyboardist Steve Nieve, bassist Bruce Thomas and drummer Pete Thomas (no relation). It was released on 15February 1980 through F-Beat Records in the United Kingdom and Columbia Records in the United States. Produced by Nick Lowe and engineered by Roger Béchirian, the sessions began in London but moved to the Netherlands after Costello found the material derivative of his previous album, Armed Forces (1979). The sessions were problematic but resulted in a large number of songs; the final album contains 20 tracks across a single LP.
A departure from Costello's prior works, Get Happy!! was influenced by R&B, ska and soul music of the 1960s. Two cover songs are included: Sam & Dave's "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down" and the Merseybeats' "I Stand Accused". In contrast to the upbeat music, the mostly downbeat lyrics concern doomed romances and other recurring themes. Initial album sleeves reversed the side listings, which was corrected for later reissues. The cover art reflects the soul influence and was designed to resemble a 1960s Stax record, with the UK release featuring a pre-worn sleeve image.
Initially delayed due to a dispute with Warner Bros. and Costello's former label, Radar Records, Get Happy!! charted at No. 2 in the UK and No. 11 in the US, but sold less than Armed Forces. It was supported by a UK tour and three singles, of which "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down" reached the UK top five. The album received positive reviews from music critics. Many focused on the quantity of tracks, which they felt varied in quality, although others gave high praise to the record and to Costello himself. It is retrospectively viewed as one of his best works. Appearing on lists of the best albums of the 1980s, it has been reissued multiple times with bonus tracks.
Background
Costello and the Attractions had supported his third studio album, Armed Forces, on the Armed Funk tour in America from February to April 1979. The tour was plagued with issues, including drug and alcohol problems, aggressive behaviour from Costello and his manager Jake Riviera toward the press, and uneven performances that led to critical and audience backlash. In March, Costello engaged in a drunken exchange with Stephen Stills, where he insulted various American musical artists, including James Brown and Ray Charles, using racial slurs. Costello quickly acknowledged the incident without apology in a press conference when details became public, and he received further backlash including death threats and Armed Forces being pulled from radio stations. By the tour's end, Costello's reputation in America was nearly destroyed. Bruce Thomas later admitted: "We never really recovered from that tour. Every time Elvis is doing something well, he kind of sabotages it." His reputation in the United Kingdom remained largely unaffected, mostly due to newspapers failing to pick up the story. The author Mick St. Michael compares it to the worldwide response from John Lennon's 1966 more popular than Jesus comment.
Costello referenced the incident in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1982, feeling that it "outweighs my entire career", but later reflected in his 2015 memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink: "So what if my career was rolled back off the launching pad? Life eventually became a lot more interesting due to this failure to get into some undeserved and potentially fatal orbit." Although he remained with Columbia Records, he did not tour America again until 1981, in support of Trust. Following the disastrous tour, he decided to reevaluate himself and his career. He ended his relationship with Bebe Buell and reconciled with his wife Mary. Apart from recording the occasional demo and doing promotional gigs, he and the Attractions took some time off from each other over the summer of 1979; Costello produced the Specials' debut album in June while his band recorded an album released in September, Mad About the Wrong Boy. During his time working with the Specials, Costello taped demos at Archipelago, a small eight-track studio in Pimlico, London, playing all instruments himself. This yielded versions of "Black and White World", "Riot Act", "Five Gears in Reverse", "Love for Tender", "King Horse", "New Amsterdam" and "Men Called Uncle". According to his biographer Graeme Thomson, Costello had grown to hate the sound of Armed Forces and aimed to take a different direction for his next album.
Recording
Costello and the Attractions regrouped at London's Eden Studios in September and October 1979 to rehearse the new tracks but, having written and performed some of the material during the preceding tour in a style similar to Armed Forces, Costello was displeased with the results, finding them derivative and too "new wave". Bruce Thomas recalled: "We sounded like the Jags. Bad Elvis and the Attractions impersonators, basically, who played everything fast and in eights." Thomson noted that the band's classic sound was now outdated and the initial attempt at "B Movie" sounded like "a desperate attempt" at rewriting "Oliver's Army" (1979). Wanting a new direction, Costello immersed himself in the soul music he'd enjoyed as a teenager, and purchased several soul records in London's Camden Town, such as Motown Chartbusters Vol. 3 and Atlantic Records' This Is Soul, which he gave to the band as inspiration. They then went back and re-arranged many of the songs in a more rhythm-and-blues style. The band also grew tired of Eden and relocated to Wisseloord Studios in Hilversum, Netherlands, with producer Nick Lowe and engineer Roger Béchirian.
Recording took place throughout the remainder of October 1979. Despite the change in scenery, the sessions were enveloped with problems. The band drank frequently, while Béchirian recalled it being a "cocaine haze", adding: "It wasn't pleasant at all. You could see the seams coming apart at that point." Having played the majority of songs live before going into the studio on previous albums, the band now had little time to pause as the new songs were being rearranged frequently. Nieve suffered an emotional meltdown, and Bruce and Pete Thomas were unhappy with their bass and drum sounds. Lowe also found issues with the studio, even having Costello record his vocals in the booth designed for string instruments: "[It] was extremely Euro. It was like trying to make a record as the Eurovision song contest was going on all around you."
The band recorded a large number of songs during the sessions, and almost all of the 20 tracks fitted onto the resulting album were under two-and-a-half minutes in length. According to Costello, the vinyl cutting and pressing process had to be precise to fit all of them onto the two sides of an LP. Two cover versions made the final tracklist: the Sam & Dave B-side "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down" and the Merseybeats' "I Stand Accused". Although covers had frequently appeared in Costello's live sets and as B-sides, Get Happy!! marked the first appearance of non-original material on one of his UK studio albums. The Archipelago recording of "New Amsterdam" was kept for the final album, as Costello felt it could not be improved upon. Outtakes that appeared as UK B-sides included "Girls Talk", an alternate version of "Clowntime Is Over", and a cover of Betty Everett's "Getting Mighty Crowded".
Music and lyrics
Musically, Get Happy!! represents a departure from Costello's previous records, taking influences from the R&B and soul sound of the 1960s, as well as ska. Michael Gallucci of Ultimate Classic Rock described it as "a throwback to '60s R&B music played with new wave bite". In his book Let Them All Talk, the biographer Brian Hinton states that with Get Happy!!, the artist invested in "soul sources with an introspection and bitterness previously alien to the genre". Costello said that not all the tracks took direct influence from R&B and soul: "Human Touch" was influenced by his recent work producing the Specials; "Men Called Uncle" and "Beaten to the Punch" owed a debt to the early-1960s Liverpool sound that also included The Merseybeats' "I Stand Accused". Some critics inferred the songs on Get Happy!! were a response to the events of the Armed Funk tour, although in his 2003 reissue liner notes, Costello said "Riot Act" was the only track on the album to refer to the incident, further commenting:
The album's title is taken from the song of the same name, written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler. The biographer Tony Clayton-Lea finds it an ironic comment on the LP's "steeped in discontent" lyrical content. The upbeat arrangements are in stark contrast to the lyrics, particularly on "King Horse". Reviewing the album on release, critic Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times found the song titles hint at the "jarring encounters" described throughout, naming "Beaten to the Punch", "Temptation", "Possession", "Clowntime Is Over" and "High Fidelity". The biographer David Gouldstone splits the tracks on the album into songs concerned with public issues ("Opportunity", "Clowntime Is Over", "5ive Gears in Reverse" and "Temptation") and songs detailing personal conflicts (all other tracks). He notes that almost all the songs have narrators, with "King Horse" highlighting that they all have human failings. A theme of doomed romance, inspired by the artist's former relationship with Buell, appears in "Beaten to the Punch", "Riot Act", "Men Called Uncle", "New Amsterdam" and "B Movie". Additionally, The Ringer Elizabeth Nelson retrospectively found that Costello intended "Temptation", "Opportunity" and "Possession" to be "a kind of Burroughs-like, cut-up trilogy", dissecting them as "a tortured romance in three acts" or "a plan for military domination".
The original album sleeve labels for Get Happy!! were reversed; side one began with "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down" and ended with "Riot Act", while side two started with "Love for Tender" and ended with "High Fidelity", which was corrected for later reissues. The author James E. Perone argues that the swapping is significant, as the album makes "more rhetorical sense" with "Love for Tender" as the opener and "Riot Act" as the closer.
Side one Opening track "Love for Tender" is an upbeat R&B track that demonstrates the soul influence with a James Jamerson-style bass and Motown-era handclaps and percussion. The rushed song uses thematic punning to reference both affection and monetary advances. A reworking of the Armed Forces outtake "Clean Money", Costello stated that he used the same "You Can't Hurry Love" riff that the Jam used for "Town Called Malice", a 1982 UK number one. Nelson found the opening lines ("You won't take my love for tender?") set a precedent for the entire album, in which "one clever but fractious phrase after another unspools as though autogenerated from a demented mail-order catalog". "Opportunity" is the first of several cryptic songs on the album. The partly autobiographical number contains references to being watched or under surveillance, which the narrator is powerless to do anything about except wait for opportunities to come. Gouldstone gives an interpretation of the song as "a dissident aside on the values and organisation of post-war Britain".