The Top 20 Elvis Costello Songs of All Time

9. “Watching The Detectives”

Elvis Costello was busy in the middle of 1977 with the task of finding a proper band to accompany the verbal gymnastics of his songs. The audition process was expedited with the help of bassist Andrew Bodnar and drummer Steve Goulding, who were both members of The Rumour, Graham Parker’s backing band. Tired of playing the same Costello songs from his debut album My Aim Is True over and over with various auditioners, the trio decided to take on a song Elvis wrote after listening to The Clash’s debut album.

“Watching The Detectives,” the song the trio produced that day, with organ and piano overdubs later added by Steve Nieve, became Costello’s first hit single. It still sounds startlingly fresh today, with Goulding’s drums miked so hot that the opening salvo can vibrate your spleen, Bodnar’s sly reggae groove playing off Nieve’s choppy organ, and Elvis’ creeping guitar riffs aping the score of some long-forgotten film noir.

The individual instrumental elements are bold, but they crucially leave enough open spaces for Costello to breathlessly express his point of view. In addition, the inherent tension in the music mirrors the sexual frustration of the song’s put-upon protagonist, who can’t get the attention of the object of his desire because she’s too busy watching old films on TV.

In lesser hands, the subject matter could have been trivial. Costello turns it into a clever commentary on the nature of obsession. The guy in the song, unable to make any inroads with the girl, gets sucked into the violence on screen. “You think you’re alone until you realize you’re in it,” he sings. While his terror rises, the girl registers no emotions (“She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake.”)

In the stunning final verse, the perspective zigzags wildly between the movie and those watching it, the lines between fiction and reality thrillingly blurred. The girl’s symbolic murder at the end of the song (“It only took my little fingers to blow you away”) represents a permanent severing of the fragile tether connecting these two.

Early critics who picked up on the song’s more aggressive imagery and based on that labeled Costello “angry” and lumped him in with the burgeoning punk scene were missing a big part of the story. That reading misses the insecurity, the fear, and the frustration in the lyrics, among many other shadings; indeed, Elvis was already far too complex even at this young stage of his career to be painted with such a simple brush. “Watching The Detectives” is nothing short of staggering, a show of songwriting prowess so colorful that no one could ever confuse it with the same old black-and-white.

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