Brutal Youth is an album by Elvis Costello, released in 1994. This album contains the first recordings Costello made with his band the Attractions since Blood and Chocolate (1986). About half the album features a band consisting of Costello (guitar), Steve Nieve (keyboards) and Pete Thomas (drums) with Nick Lowe (not a member of the Attractions) on bass. Costello himself plays bass on two tracks (2 and 8), and the complete Attractions line-up (Nieve, Pete Thomas and Bruce Thomas on bass) appears with Costello on tracks 3, 4, 6, 9 and 10. Brutal Youth was the third, and most recent of Costello's albums, to peak at number two in the UK Albums Chart, following on from Armed Forces (1979) and Get Happy!! (1980). Content Costello began writing the material for Brutal Youth after writing a set of pop punk songs for Wendy James' 1993 album Now Ain't the Time for Your Tears. Under the working title Idiophone (named for an instrument "made of naturally sonorous material"), Costello began recording these songs at Pathway Studios with former Attractions drummer Pete Thomas; he explained in a 1994 interview, "To be honest with you, I have to admit that I had decided to do this record all by myself. But then I had to face this reality: I'll never be a drummer. So I called Pete." Ultimately, Costello found the minimalist sound at Pathway, where he recorded My Aim Is True, to be limiting, moving recording to Olympic Studios. Upon arriving at Olympic, Costello recruited another ex-Attraction, keyboardist Steve Nieve, as well as former producer Nick Lowe on bass guitar. Though this arrangement, informally nicknamed "the Distractions", performed on a significant portion of the album, Lowe bowed out on tracks that he felt required a more melodic and complex style of playing than he could provide. At the urging of producer Mitchell Froom, who had been a fan of the Attractions, Costello recruited the final missing Attraction, Bruce Thomas, who had worked on other records with Froom at the time. Thomas and Costello had the most fraught relationship of all the former bandmates, making Costello initially hesitant to make the call: Although only five songs on the album feature the full Attractions line-up, Brutal Youth was marketed as an Attractions reunion album, Costello sought to dispel notions that the album was a retro pastiche and that the reunion was a bid for commercial