One of Costello’s best known songs and a prime example of his witty wordplay, “Pump It Up” is pure sexual frustration, its high octane lyrics being a pun for the speaker’s desperate pleas for both sexual release and the raising of the booming music he’s overwhelming himself in. Allegedly, Costello wrote the song while sitting on the fire escape of the Newcastle Hotel during his 1977 tour. In his 2015 autobiography Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, Costello acknowledged that the song owed an inspiration to Bob Dylan:

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