“Pump It Up” by Elvis Costello & the Attractions

"Pump It Up" came tearing out of This Year's Model in 1978, Elvis Costello's second album and the first he made with the Attractions at his back, and Radar Records put it out as a single with Nick Lowe in the producer's chair.

Costello wrote it in reaction to his stint on the Stiffs Live Tour, and he took his cue from Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues". The result sounds like it was written with the engine still running: twitchy, taut and in a tearing hurry, a song that never quite sits still long enough to catch its breath.

Wedged between "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" and "Radio Radio" in his run of singles, it stopped at 24 in the UK, but its reach has long since outgrown that peak. It has become one of the songs people know Costello by, a fixture on his compilations and a regular on critics' lists of his best work. The promo clip was shot through a fisheye lens, and that warped, bulging view suits the song's jitter just fine.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.