Subject to change: Elvis Costello’s ‘This Year’s Model’

There is something wonderfully suspicious about the moment Elvis Costello became Elvis Costello.

Born Declan MacManus, the son of a working musician, he had spent years playing pubs and working ordinary jobs before My Aim Is True made him the unlikely face of a new kind of British rock star. The album was critically adored, his songs sharper than most of the guitars surrounding them, and his emergence from the pub-rock circuit placed him in rebellion against the excesses of prog, disco and arena rock. Yet Costello had another problem: the band behind him wasn’t quite the band he heard in his head.

Clover, the American country-rock group that backed My Aim Is True, was good at giving the songs room. Costello wanted less room. He wanted impact, tension, interruption. He wanted musicians who could match his wryly written rage about desire, identity and control. He found it in the Attractions: Steve Nieve on keyboards, Bruce Thomas on bass and Pete Thomas on drums. Nick Lowe, who produced the debut, returned to the controls and helped turn their nervous energy into something startlingly precise. Recorded quickly in London, This Year’s Model sounds less like a young songwriter settling into his career than one discovering that his career might already be trying to swallow him.

“So you had better do as you are told / You better listen to the radio.”

Costello arrived carrying an unusually crowded record collection. Bob Dylan taught him that lyrics could be conversational and densely constructed at once. Joni Mitchell showed him how ambiguity could live inside exact language. Van Morrison gave him soul without surrendering mystery. The Beatles and his father, Ross MacManus, supplied lessons in melody, versatility and survival. The Clash led Costello deeper into ska and reggae, sounds that would become increasingly important to his vocabulary. His father’s example may have mattered most: MacManus moved between styles and audiences without ever quite belonging to any of them, a useful model for a son who would soon make genre-hopping an art.

All those threads converged on This Year’s Model, making it part of the larger 1977-78 explosion without making it sound like anyone else’s record. Television stretched punk toward art-rock; Patti Smith turned poetry into abrasion; Talking Heads put twitchy rhythms on the dance floor; Blondie smuggled pop sophistication into the downtown racket; Devo turned alienation robotic; The Jam gave British guitar music a harder political edge. Costello took another route, making the songs faster, tighter and more literate, as though the pop song itself had been put under interrogation.

The album’s central anxiety arrives immediately. “No Action” turns romantic frustration into a compulsive loop, while “This Year’s Girl” examines the woman being admired, consumed and discarded by a world obsessed with freshness. Steve Nieve’s Vox Continental organ gives the song restless propulsion, its attack recalling the British beat and R&B records Costello loved. “Pump It Up” turns desire into a commodity and then the commodity into a chant: sex, celebrity, fashion and entertainment consumed until the consumer is exhausted. “Little Triggers” slows things down just enough to reveal the damage underneath, turning a relationship’s smallest gestures into detonators.

Then the Attractions tighten the screws. “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea” moves with clipped, almost martial insistence, Costello sneering at a world where desire and identity are both performances. “Lip Service” takes romantic language apart and finds salesmanship underneath it. “Lipstick Vogue” is all swagger and accusation, while Pete Thomas pounds the drums with the in-your-face force Costello and Lowe deliberately wanted from the new band. The result recalls the Kinks and the Who without becoming an imitation. And then comes “Radio Radio,” where the target expands from lovers and celebrities to the machinery shaping what everyone hears. What happens when the thing designed to give us choices starts deciding what those choices are?

That is where This Year’s Model becomes more than a collection of clever songs. The title is a worldview. Today’s model becomes yesterday’s model almost immediately: women, celebrities, lovers, musicians, fashions, political ideas. Punk itself was already becoming something the music industry could package and sell, leaving Costello simultaneously the new thing and someone terrified of becoming obsolete. He had created “Elvis Costello” as a stage identity, turning himself into a product while writing about the dangers of becoming one. Everybody on this album is looking at somebody, and almost everybody wants something from the person being watched.

The cover makes that paranoia visible. Designed by Barney Bubbles and photographed by Chris Gabrin, it places Costello behind a camera rather than simply in front of one. He is photographer and subject, observer and object. Who exactly is being photographed here? The woman? Costello? The audience? The artist as product? We are all models eventually, standing in front of somebody else’s lens and wondering which version will make the cut.

Costello’s legacy is partly the lane he widened for artists who wanted punk’s urgency without surrendering melody, wit or intellectual curiosity. Crowded House carried forward his knack for immaculate pop songs that become stranger the closer you listen. Billy Bragg turned the literate, politically alert songwriter into a punk-era vocation. Radiohead inherited the suspicion that beautiful music could conceal something deeply uneasy underneath. They Might Be Giants pushed intelligence, absurdity and pop economy into stranger corners. Liz Phair brought that same combination of melodic directness, sexual candor and lyrical self-awareness into the intimate world of indie rock.

Listen to This Year’s Model late at night in a Winnona Park bungalow, when the day’s noise has quieted but your brain hasn’t received the memo. It is especially good for those evenings spent sitting around worrying about the times ahead, because Costello understands the peculiar terror of feeling that everything is changing while everybody else seems to know the new rules. Turn it up. Let the organ, bass and drums crowd the room until the words arrive faster than you can file them away. The record doesn’t calm you down. It makes your unease more articulate.

And perhaps that is the question This Year’s Model leaves behind: what does it do to a person to live in a culture that constantly reminds them they can be replaced? Costello offers no reassurance. Just velocity, wit and a refusal to stop looking back at the camera. Nearly fifty years later, the models change faster, the cameras multiply and the sales pitch has only gotten better. The anxiety remains.

If St. Vincent’s Actor asks what happens when identity becomes performance, Costello’s album gets there from the other direction: what happens when performance becomes identity? The questions rhyme, even when the guitars don’t.

In Costello’s world, accidents will happen. Maybe that is the small mercy. We are never entirely in control of the version of ourselves that survives.

The model changes.
The camera keeps rolling.
And the record keeps asking who, exactly, is doing the looking.

Megan’s favorite song on this album is “This Year’s Girl”, the thematic backbone of the entire record, which outlines society’s preoccupation with image, fame and consumption. It opens with a seductive drum-and-guitar swagger with theme song charm, then slips into a beautifully haunted minor-key arrangement as it calls out the objectifying male gaze. The song is built around Steve Nieve’s swirling, clackety organ, which gives it a lurid, carnival-like, slightly sinister feel. At the center of the song is a woman treated as a disposable commodity: the fashionable “girl of the moment” who is styled, looked at and consumed, then replaced by next year’s model. Perfectly echoing the album title, Costello defines the woman as not only a fashion model, but as a product that gets updated on a schedule.

Costello’s lens is zoomed in here. The band is locked in so tight the feeling is nervy, and his critique of misogyny is in focus. He spotlights the hypocrisy of a man with unrealistic expectations for how a woman should look and act, who likely holds himself to no such standard. In a world where sex still sells and keyboard warriors feel entitled to weigh in on women’s bodies, the song feels as pointed now as it did in 1978.

Wendell’s favorite song on the album is “Radio Radio,” and it still hits with the force of a brick through a television screen. The Attractions launch into that opening as if somebody has just pulled the fire alarm, Pete Thomas pounding the drums, Bruce Thomas driving the bass and Steve Nieve’s organ slicing through the racket. That weird hiss underneath it all still gets me screaming along and pumping my fist like I am 15 and have just discovered that rock music can, in fact, be pissed off for a reason.

I first encountered Costello much younger, in a national news segment about the Second British Invasion headed for our shores. In those glorious three-channel days, the segment was clearly designed to scare the hell out of American parents, with Sid Vicious spitting blood onto the crowd while London punks vandalized and generally behaved like civilization had packed its bags. Then there was this bespectacled British nerd, somehow being presented as part of the same invasion. My parents took one look at him and sneered at this British runt who had the nerve to steal the King’s name. Naturally, I wanted to know everything about him. Then I heard about the SNL controversy, which was irresistible to a kid who had already decided this Costello character was worth watching. He cut off “Less Than Zero,” switched to “Radio Radio” and effectively told network television where it could stick its playlist, veins popping from his forehead as he tore into the song while Lorne Michaels was reportedly giving him the finger for the duration.

By the time I finally heard “Radio Radio” a couple of years later, I was primed. The song did not disappoint, and neither did the frenetic video that came with it, Costello in full Buddy Holly nerd mode, thick glasses and twitching limbs, looking like somebody had plugged a nervous system directly into the mains. Costello fires off his lyrics with the precise fury of a guy who has read the contract and found the fine print insulting, while the Attractions sound like they have come looking for a fight and don’t much care who gets it first. I didn’t fully understand the revenge fantasy at first. I just knew the song made me furious in the best possible way. These days, the target is easier to recognize. We have streaming services in the hands of an astonishing number of fools determined to anesthetize the way you feel, predicting what you will like, smoothing off every interesting edge and delivering an endless buffet of musical wallpaper. Costello wanted none of it. He wanted the radio to fight back. He still does. And after all these years, even though I appreciate the promise of an early bed, so do I.

Elvis Costello’s work can be found here, and his music is available on all streaming platforms and wherever records are sold. You can hear his songs on SiriusXM stations First Wave, Deep Tracks, and Classic Rewind. He was last in Atlanta in October 2025, when he brought the Imposters to the Coca-Cola Roxy, with Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas still anchoring the band that helped make This Year’s Model sound so gloriously unhinged. Catch him when he comes back around: he often closes his shows with “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” Wendell’s favorite Costello song and personal operating philosophy. His aim, apparently, is still true.