Goodbye Cruel World is Elvis Costello's ninth album overall and the eighth with his backing band the Attractions. It was released in 1984 by F-Beat Records in the UK and Columbia in the US. Tensions within the band—notably between Costello and bassist Bruce Thomas—were beginning to tell, and Costello announced his retirement and the break-up of the group shortly before they were to record Goodbye Cruel World. Costello later said that in making it, they had "got it as wrong as you can in terms of the execution". Costello wrote at his official website: "I think the first time we ever got really attacked for a new release apart from when we first started was Goodbye Cruel World, and to be honest I knew it wasn't a good record by the time ... It was the only one I was tempted to ... I was committed to it. I'd spent too much money on it to not release it and I thought on balance the good things that I'd got wrong in the studio that were in the song writing probably outweighed the bad things that I'd allow to happen in the production, which is not distracting anything from the effort that Clive Langer made to do the best. I mean, I announced to them that it was the last record I was ever going to make before we went in the studio. I decided to quit for all kinds of weird personal reasons ... I was really down about lots of other things and I really just decided I wanted to do this one record, and I was asking them to make a record they weren't really set up to do, which was essentially a 'live-in-the-studio' record. And then we had a loss of nerve about that and started to edge it back towards the kind of production they did anyway. But the damage had been done, we'd started out to record a folk-rock record, which is what it originally sounded like, which you can hear in some of the more soulful songs, like Home Truth, which is an unbelievably painful, true song. I made Clive Langer's life impossible, and I take full responsibility for the failure of the production, 'cause I was asking them one time to do one thing and the next to do another, and changing my mind every 15 minutes and driving everybody in the band mad. And really just getting it as wrong as you can in terms of the execution of what are basically a bunch of really good songs."
Reception
The album's production, was not in line with Costello's other works, relying heavily on electronics and an overall slick, trendy feel. Thus, the record is not regarded among his better works; Costello's liner notes to the 1995 reissue on Rykodisc open with the statement, "Congratulations! You've just purchased our worst album." Trouser Press wrote: "Goodbye Cruel World seems awkward and forced. The playing’s overly baroque, the melodies mild and too much of Costello’s edge is sublimated by the Langer/Winstanley cushion of sound." The album is represented on Elvis Costello compilation The Very Best of Elvis Costello, by the cover song "I Wanna Be Loved". For his own personally selected best-of compilation "Love Field" is the only representative from this album, and appears only on the CD iteration of the collection.
