You think they're so dumb, you think they're so funny

Elvis Costello - 'Night Rally' (This Year's Model 1978)

It's 7th November 2016.

Elvis Costello is performing his final gig of the year at New York's Beacon Theatre. As part of his Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers Tour, he'd opened his set with 'The Town Where Time Stood Still' (an outtake from sessions for Punch the Clock) on nine of the previous 11 occasions. The setlist also had as many as 19 songs that featured at every one of the dozen shows. So, any deviation would have been slightly out of the ordinary.

So when Costello began that show with the final track from This Year's Model, 'Night Rally.', a song that doesn't even feature in the original US version, which is bookended by 'Radio Radio' it was unexpected. If that wasn't already strange enough, the song hadn't been played live for almost forty years.

Back in the late 1970s, a frequent topic of Costello's songs was the threat of right-wing nationalism that was bubbling to the surface in the UK. His debut single, 'Less Than Zero', is about Oswald Mosley - the British Union of Fascists leader in the early 1930s. His 1979 album Armed Forces features a song concerning the National Front, 'Green Shirt' and 'Two Little Hitlers.'

'Night Rally' is a typical Elvis Costello song with the type of melody and word play you'd expect from him even so early into his career. It is clearly a warning that is the reverse of the old Gandhi quote;

First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

If you reverse that and imagine a politician you ignore, laugh at and then eventually they win. That is who Costello is warning us about. Indeed, he predicts that at some point, we will, willingly or otherwise, be falling in line and running forth to the titular night rally. It doesn't take me to tell you that this is about the rise of the Nazi Party in inter-war Germany and how there were prominent people in Britain at the time who thought in similar ways. If we weren't picking up on that, we have some symbolism of armbands and "showers" closely associated with that period of history.

Other songs on the album are less severe, more tongue in cheek and not in any shape or form actual warnings about the rise of fascism in your own backyard. There's no real take-home from 'Pump It Up' that could be considered relevant and prescient for the most recent years in The Bad Place. It's also not cut from the same angular and bright pop-punk template as the songs which are so angular they consist of triangles.

In his autobiography, Costello talks about listening to David Bowie and Iggy Pop's then recent music, products of 1977's Berlin. Those songs are brittle and austere with sombre moods, ominous synthesisers, and distant snare drums, and it is on this song, Costello, and the rest of the Attractions nail what he called an “alarm bell” of a song.

When Costello played to a massive crowd in South London in 1978 for the Anti-Nazi League carnival, it made perfect sense to open the show. What was going on the week of 7th November 2016 to compel Costello to dig out this alarm bell for a rare live outing?

The following day, Donald Trump won the 2016 US Presidential Election.

Now, in 2021, the song is part of a Spanish language look back at the parent album and tackled by Uruguayan signer Jorge Drexler.