Elvis Costello's celebrated 1989 Spike album is set for a deluxe vinyl reissue on March 4th. The album, which first paired Costello and Paul McCartney, will be released for the first time as a double album set with the inclusion of the track “Cold Train Robbers.”
The collection, now pressed on 180-gram audiophile vinyl, is limited to 2,500 copies on light green vinyl — as personally selected by Costello himself.
Spike, which was Costello's first album for Warner Brothers, was released on February 6th, 1989, hitting Number 32 on the Billboard 200 and topping the magazine's Modern Rock charts.
The album featured appearances by both Roger McGuinn and Paul McCartney, who co-wrote two songs — “Veronica,” which marked Costello's one-and-only Top 20 hit to date, and the rollicking “Pads, Paws, And Claws.”
Paul McCartney recently looked back on his brief — but fruitful — late-80's collaboration with Elvis Costello: “With Elvis, you're not going to have too much shyness; that's one thing — he's not shy, y'know? He's definitely got an opinionated attitude, y'know? But, as I say, in this context it's great. It was good fun, we sat down to write some stuff, eventually ended up writing wrote nine things.”
Although Elvis Costello is by far one of the most scholarly singer-songwriters when it comes to pop music in the 20th century, he understands that the actual art of songwriting is as big a mystery to him as it was to his heroes: “Music just starts to arrive in your head and at your fingertips and you don't have any choice but to — y'know, unless you're a real fool — to take it on, and try and work out what it is that is happening.”
