“Is it worth it?
A new winter coat and shoes for the wife
And a bicycle on the boy’s birthday”
Mournful and moving, Shipbuilding is one of Elvis Costello’s most touching compositions and was written about the Falklands War, which pitted Margaret Thatcher against the Argentine dictator General Galtieri.
According to Clive Langer, he had written the tune for former Soft Machine man Robert Wyatt, who has turned 80, but wasn’t happy with his wordage. So he played the tune to Elvis Costello at a party, and within days Costello had produced what he described as “the best lyrics I’ve ever written”.
In an interview with the NME in 1983, Mark Bedford — ie Bedders of Madness — who played double bass on the recording, recounted the song‘s convoluted history:
“The original plan was an EP called Ten To Nine, with different vocalists: Elvis, Clive, Steve Allen. But once Elvis had done some more work on the lyrics and changed the song to Shipbuilding, they decided to approach Robert Wyatt and his version was so special that it came out as a straight single.”
The lyrics are something of a slow lament, juxtaposing the jobs that war brings to small manufacturing towns, with the death of the area’s youth in the conflict itself. The conversations about how the Falklands War would reopen some of the shipyards in the north of England were stirring. The idea that conflict on the other side of the world brings opportunity to prosper was a hot topic among the fellas who’d never been to war like their old man did.
It seemed like a heavy serious tune when kids like me were still listening to Adam Ant and Visage. And yet, a touch of post-rationalising aside, the intonation between bicycle and birthday chimed with me at the time. The 45 was released in August 1982, two months after my thirteenth birthday and the month before returning to Sir Frank Markham for the second year of secondary school.
I’d been patiently petitioning my union rep father for a BMX of my own. How was I supposed to understand the cost, the politics and the ups and downs of Thatcher’s war?
When Costello released his own version in 1983, some preferred its dramatic piano intro overlaid with some velvety smooth crooning, and a cameo from legendary jazz man Chet Baker. But for my mind the Robert Wyatt recording (one of David Bowie’s favourite 45s) that is the most affecting.
Indeed, it‘s Wyatt‘s delivery that makes Shipbuilding so unbearably poignant. The opening line of “Is it worth it?…” goes straight to how beaten down the narrator is. There is a sense that if there was one vocalist who could empathise with, as well as convey the anguish of, the shipyard workers being consigned to brutal irrelevance, it was this card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain turned Spanish expat.
Yet it‘s the closing line of “when we could be diving for pearls” that reveals the futility of his existence – and, indeed, so many of us. Wyatt, a paraplegic since an accident in 1973 uses his fragile, reedy speak-sing voice matter-of-fact but very clever phrasings to accentuate the poignancy in the song’s lyric, making you feel every second of hurt and despair in his devastating delivery.
Though you won‘t find it on too many shiny poptastic Now compilations, Shipbuilding has become something of a modern folk song. To hammer that status home, with admirable aplomb, Sussex Britpoppers Suede turned in a coruscating cover of the song for a War Child benefit disc in 1995.
Steve Pafford
“Sounds like the buggers mean it”: 40 years after the Falklands War is here
Perfect 10: War songs of the ’80s that aren’t by Culture Club is here
