BlurtTube Vid: Elvis Costello no Glasses!

Now you know why this one's considered "alternate" and, uh, "rare"...

By Fred Mills

In a sense, Elvis Costello grew up with MTV; you can still catch some of his early/mid ‘80s clips on VH1 Classic for proof - the good, the bad and the ugly.

This one's among the "ugly."

"The Only Flame In Town" hailed from EC's justly-maligned 1984 album Goodbye Cruel World, and aside from the fact that the song, uh, sucks, somebody at Columbia Records talked our hero into removing his trademark specs when filming the clip. Bad move. Indeed, a substitute clip was apparently also filmed, and that's the one that went into rotation on video channels. It was only marginally better, but that's beside the point - take a look at EC squinting at the camera and prepared to do some squinting yourself.

The ultra rare sans glasses video is below, followed by the more familiar one. Caveat: the audio is slightly out of synch in the former, but hey, it's all lipsynched anyway so who cares!