Shipbuilding: Diving for pearls

In the world of pop there is a hit parade reserved for true evergreens. There are few songs that stand up as classics 25 years after their initial release. The Elvis Costello and Clive Langer composition Shipbuilding is one of them.

Here are the top 10 reasons why:

1. A melody. Heartbreaking is not a big enough word to describe it.
2. Harmony. Those vocal harmonies, especially on the Wyatt and Costello versions (on which they are tracked by the lead singers themselves), are inspirational; every note just seems perfect. Again, the BBC’s ‘Sold On Song’ site sums it up: “The verse slides through a series of stuttering chord changes that look like they’re heading for G minor, but a tender G major is the destination. All crowned by the sublime phrasing of ‘diving for pearls’, of which Stan Getz would have been mighty proud.”
3. Haiku-like lyrics, creating the atmosphere and telling a story in the minimum of words with maximum elegance and imagery. Especially touching is the unexpected but perfectly pointed line “It’s all we’re skilled in”, which has a Boys From The Blackstuff poignancy: “Gizza job! I can do that!” Costello himself considers it to be one of his best lyrics.
4. The Costello/Langer double-whammy. Madness/Tim Finn producer Clive Langer says he wrote the melody for Robert Wyatt but didn’t like his own lyrics enough and so asked Elvis Costello to come up with some.
5. The Robert Wyatt pre-original ‘cover version’. It isn’t only the fact that the song was written for him that makes his the definitive version of Shipbuilding rather than Costello’s. Wyatt took a minimalist, piano-based approach to the arrangement, and in 1982 his interpretation reached number 35 in the UK charts. Wyatt once said: “I am a real minimalist, because I don’t do very much. I know some minimalists who call themselves minimalist but they do loads of minimalism. That is cheating.”
6. The Chet Baker connection. As a blogger notes about the Elvis Costello version: “There is a beautiful Chet Baker [trumpet] solo near the end of Shipbuilding, a melancholy, lingering lamentation of progress.” Never has the choice of an instrumentalist better suited the mood of a song.
7. The cover version ‘acid test’. You can’t kill a great song, and to diminish it is very difficult — listen to the cover versions below*.
8. The song’s documentary value links it to the theatre, TV shows (two characters in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet supposedly helped rebuild Falkland Islands infrastructure in the years after the war) and poetry, as well as the new vocabulary that entered the language during and after the Falklands conflict.
9. A socio-historical perspective also links the song to the demise of the Cammell-Laird and Harland and Wolff shipyards and the bitter taste left by unemployment and the gap between Thatcher’s yuppie paradise and reality for the majority in early-1980s Britain.
10. Repeatability. Just try listening, back-to-back, to the also-ran cover versions*. Here, in reverse order of quality: Karen Oberlin’s twee jazz take; Hue and Cry doing their best to mangle it into a Reeves and Mortimer ‘club singer’ tune (even they can’t quite kill it); Swan Arcade almost destroying its harmonic structure, but not quite; Tasmin Archer’s tame and rather dull pop version; Suede’s Brett Anderson giving it a sardonic spin, as the BBC’s Sold on Song website says; and tRANSELEMENt, a Brit indie band that is now no more (cursed by their use of upper case?), nevertheless worth checking out for those Pendle, Lancashire accents. Their version is a free MP3 download, and the seagulls are perfect.

I have a memory of seeing Robert Wyatt performing Shipbuilding on Top of the Pops, but it may just be wishful thinking; some say the song was denied airplay by the supposedly pro-Thatcher BBC, but I certainly recall hearing it on the radio. Perhaps later, on either Charlie Gillett’s A Foreign Affair show or Richard Digance And Friends on London’s local Capital Radio, around 1984.

For me, Shipbuilding sums up a sorrow implicit in being British: betrayal of the poor by the rich; the working classes by the aristocracy; the voter by the politician. The Brits are feeling it now, about Blair and the debacle that is been the Iraq War. And it comes with some heavy baggage, dating from centuries of conquest and failed diplomacy to incorporate Maggot Scratcher’s self-serving jingoism during the Falklands conflict. It’s been a while since I was up north, but I bet you can still feel the legacy of it in northern industrial towns like Sunderland, where things in the early 1980s were so grim that yet another war and the possibility of being notified as the next of kin was still a better bet than unemployment.

It’s a once-in-a-lifetime feeling, discovering a pop song that is not only a killer tune, like Dancing Queen or Black Coffee, but which also manages to say something about lives wasted, the Hobson’s choice between cannon fodder and dole scum, of “Diving for dear life/When we could be diving for pearls”.