Two good things about rock music: how it makes even cynics get emotionally involved when they least expect it; how the best moments are the ones when something takes you off guard. When punk started, people were slumped over the table at our place, full of booze, arguing all night about what punk MEANT. Some of us had been out and seen it, some of us hadn't, but everybody had a violent opinion (the trouble with British critics is that they are self-conscious. It's not enough to like or dislike, you have to know what it all stands for. After all, why did thousands of kids want to jump on each other's heads?). When Elvis Costello started I couldn't understand the fuss. Simon Frith and I would phone each other after a gig: "Does it make any sense?" No.

Having to have an opinion, I decided I probably didn't like Costello at all. Repressed little bloke with his paranoia. It wasnft just that I had a sneaky feeling he didn't like women much—he didn't like anyone. But he didn't dislike them the way Johnny Rotten did—positive, angry. Costello was just plain spiteful. Like the kid at school you feel sorry for because he hung around the playground banging the chalk brushes on the wall to feel useful—until he sneaked to teacher because you wouldn't let him join your gang.

With all that going against him, why can't I stop playing Armed Forces? Definitely the* element of surprise; the music winking its allegiances back to early 60's U.S. groups, even Phil Spector; spreading his voice . . )| was corrupted and I don't hold it against him at ail. Yet he's still full of sly fear—a more positive paranoia than Stephen Stills ever showed on "For What It's Worth". Maybe Armed Forces is really an overtly political album in a way that his others weren't.

I liked Joe Jackson's first single. "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" came out late last year and I thought it sounded a lot like "Watching The Detectives" (even if I didn't like Costello I had to admit he wrote clever songs) except that it was cheerful: Back from America after three weeks, I found that the British music papers had gone Joe Jackson crazy, the single was in the charts, and I'd realised he sounded a lot like Steve Miller and used Steely Dan chords. One minute Jackson was just a funny little bloke with a record about standing in his room looking out the window (and a great first line: "Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street'"—not Costello's armed boys, the furry kind). Now he's The Next Big Thing. Even NME's Charles Shaar Murray can't find anything bad to say about Jackson's new album Look Sharp—except that it's time Joe bought a new tie.

At Dingwall's, a club where you're lucky to see the stage never mind hear who's on it (and where last time gentle Jesse Winchester played three fights broke out in ten minutes not ten feet $way from us), Jackson provoked nothing more than good feeling. I'm not sure that's enough for me but his songs are quite clever, he seems to enjoy himself in a fairly poker-faced way, and certainly must be sharp in that he managed to reproduce his on-stage performance so accurately on the album that you don't really know which came first.

Jackson comes from a seaside town, did all those Elton/Rick Wakeman things like going to the snotty Royal Academy Of Music, started a "new wave" band, Arms and Legs, even worked cabaret at the local Playboy Club to raise the cash to make a demo. Which may explain why he's so determined to be heard but that what he has to say isn't unusual. He's taller than I expected, bit of a receding hairline, and looks at the mike all the time he sings as if it was both the cause and answer to his problems. Kitted out in a striped suit, big tie and white shoes, A&M package him as the first—and so far only—exponent of "Spiv Rock". Les§ meaning than "punk" or "new wave", just an off-shopt of the old pub circuit "good time" band ethos, but still, any label in a storm.

His songs are about not having a girlfriend while all his friends have one (and sneering at the principle of "Happy Loving Couples"); the usual '78/"79 anti-consumerism stand; and one good stab at what Women's = Liberation has done to his libido. The | thing is that Jackson is really comfortf able about all tfiis, much as he tries to £ convince you otherwise. His songs are artful but eventually harmless, which is okay. But they just reflect a scenario; Costello actually creates one. Joe will probably go on recording little songs about "life", nicely crafted jobs, which most people can identify with without fear to their psyche. But it's unlikely people will sit around tables wondering what he stands for.

The same week, I saw Costello for the first time in six months. Hammen smith Palais is a local dance hall where big bands come out on a revolving stage and a staircase runs up the side for exits and entrances of lead singers. Costello didn't use the revolve, but he did run up and down the stairs like the Beatles in A Hard Day's Night, even unhooking his guitar strap as he went. I liked the gig better than Joe Jackson's even though Costello still doesn't leave himself the space on stage to play his new tracks with the deliberation of the recordings, and the act doesn't build so much as run over you. "Green Shirt" sounded terrific, but it was the only one of the new numbers that did. Jake Riviera, who fashioned this model ip the early days of Stiff then took him to Radar, would have smiled if he'd seen the set piece going on in front of me. Two lines into "Oliver's Army" a nice touch of irony occurred when a young, weaving, stoned guy make it across the stage twice, was hurled off by bouncers ) and finally did a face-out, stage left, with one of the larger "protection" boys. Meanwhile, the Attractions played up a sweat (and sounded better than ever) while Costello stood in his unnecessarily drip-dry shirt.

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Costello seems to have a problem Joe Jackson will never have to face— holding on to his anti-establishment stance while moving a few rungs further up. Some people think he's lost the former already. It's the same all over. The critics who thought he was subversive stuff on the early Stiff tours have become disenchanted. Their boy made it big and started datihg Todd Rundgren's ex. Must mean a credibility gap. (I bet this time over Bob Christgau will accuse him of selling out.) Meanwhile the new converts, like Frith and myself, are enthusiastically seduced and love it. Britain's had strikes for three months and we kept being told there's a "crisis". Crisis, what crisis? Nothing really changes. ¶|&