Twenty Fine Fingers

According to Elvis Costello, in his autobiography “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink“, “Twenty Fine Fingers” was written on the same day as “Pad, Paws And Claws“:

Paul now called for some more writing sessions, spread over a few days. This would mean having to stay overnight near the studio. I didn’t much venture out into the countryside in those days. When we’d mixed Punch the Clock outside of London, I’d asked a local cabdriver what people did for fun in the nearby village and he’d replied, “Oh, it’s all wife-swapping and witchcraft around here.”

I’ d always suspected as much.

But this wasn’t going to be like 1977, when I had to kip on a broken sofa in Clover’s rat-infested rehearsal room. I was sleeping in a nice feather bed in the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor Suite of a quaint local inn. I don’t know what legend was attached to the name on the door of the room, but it was just big enough for a four-poster bed and an ice bucket.

On my first night there, I walked into the bar for a glass of tonic and bitters. A sightless, slumbering dog, wheezing by the fire, caught the scent of my wretched soul and began barking and snarling at me. It then hauled itself up on all fours with considerable effort.

“Don’t worry about him, he wouldn’t hurt a fly,” said the landlord. “He’s as blind as a bat.”

At which the Pew-like Alsatian reared up on its hind legs, pinning me against the flocked wallpaper with its fore paws. The grey film of cataracts obscured its eyes, but its slobbering muzzle seemed to be working fine, and the dog seemed determined to locate my neck in order to sink in a fang.

“Ah, he’s just playing with you, the silly old sod,” the landlord declared as he balled up a beer-soaked tap cloth and aimed it at the beast.

The next day we wrote “Pads, Paws and Claws” – which took its title from a children’s book about big cats that I’d found in a junk shop, rather than immortalizing my encounter with the hellhound of Rye – then we dashed off a little rock and roll tune called “Twenty Fine Fingers.”

We were now working on two or three songs a day. Whenever Paul and I completed a number, we’d go downstairs to the recording studio on the ground floor and cut a demo with just two guitars or the piano.

They remain the most vivid and uncluttered versions of our songs.