Must Have Been A Wonder

That Fatal Mailing List #86: "Hoover Factory" (1980)

It might be easy to overlook “Hoover Factory,” a demo that’s less than two minutes and made its debut as one of the B-sides of the “Clubland” single in 1980, along with “Clean Money.” For Elvis Costello, it was a turning point in his songwriting, as he describes in his 2015 memoir, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink: 

For a brief while, I took the number 105 bus to work from a housing estate near Heathrow Airport, along the Western Avenue, to North Acton. Every day I’d wait until we passed the art deco temple of the Hoover vacuum cleaner building.

I’d just heard the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner,” which name-checks such exotic locations as the Stop & Shop. I thought if Jonathan Richman could sing about a supermarket, there should certainly be a song of praise for this architectural marvel and so wrote:

Five miles out of London on the Western Avenue
Must have been a wonder when it was brand new
Talkin’ ’bout the splendor of the Hoover Factory
I know that you’d agree if you had seen it, too

It’s not a matter of life or death
But what is? What is?
It doesn’t matter if I take another breath
Who cares? Who cares?

When I wrote those lyrics I was through the door to a different, less ingratiating way of speaking.

There was a new mood in town.

My gentle, sometimes heartfelt, sometimes trite little songs were not going to command a room, much less the fickle attentions of radio listeners. I needed a new vocabulary and different music. 

Why “Hoover Factory”? What about this song made it stand so far apart from the other material EC was writing at the time? 

It’s a little hard to say without viewing a contemporary timeline of what was written when, but from what we’ve seen of EC’s early songwriting, it’s easy to imagine “Hoover Factory” being a step away from the relative emotional simplicity of “Poison Moon,” “Lip Service” or “Wave a White Flag.” 

“Hoover Factory” may seem slight in retrospect, under two minutes and with a raw lurching accompaniment from EC himself playing all the instruments. But it did start to reveal a wider emotional palate for his songwriting, one that at the same time feels more specific. There’s a mix of nostalgia and regret here, but with a lived-in realism that lingers; it doesn’t come to an easy resolution, and so these feelings coexist uneasily in the mind. 

Rather than Costello providing a tidy conclusion to the emotional journey of the song, or even just an emotional landscape that’s easily mapped and understood in a pop song, EC is now charting unknown territory. Unknowable territory. He’s writing music and lyrics that express feeling and ideas that are suggestive, not prescriptive. As a listener, you’re left to find your own way into the song, and interpret these uneasy words from within a beautiful haze: 

It’s not a matter of life or death
But what is? What is? 
It doesn’t matter if I take another breath
Who cares? Who cares? 

Listen to “Hoover Factory” on the streaming service of your choice.