Punch The Clock: An Interview With Elvis Costello

The fifteen minute interview, as the great Pete Paphides recently pointed out, is a tricky customer. For every one where fifteen minutes is about ten minutes too long, there are many where an hour, or two, doesn’t even scratch the surface. Having spent decades listening to his music - I could point at eight albums, at least, that are unquestionable classics – as well as closely reading his interviews, sleeve notes, and that marvellous autobiography, Unfaithful Music And Disappearing Ink, I’ve always suspected that Elvis Costello would fall into the latter category. Having said that, will we take the fifteen minutes on offer? Of course we will.

Costello is on the Zoom circuit to push his new album with The Imposters, The Boy Named If, which is a very good, loud, clanging rock n’ roll record, and not a million miles away from some of those classics recorded with his first backing band and alluded to above. Indeed, in the circulated press materials, Costello has this to say, “This year, This Year’s Model came back to surprise us in another tongue. That edition is called Spanish Model. Both that album and The Boy Named If are records that are happening right now and if you want to draw a line between them, go right ahead.” Spanish Model, as he’ll sort of explain himself, was a 2021 release where Costello’s voice was removed from the master tapes of that first Attractions record and replaced with various Latin singers. So, as he indicated it was ok to do so, I’ll open by drawing that line. I have a thousand questions but, in my haste to maximise the allotted time, I make a balls of the first one.

“What record did you say?’ asks Costello, eyebrow raised above the rim of his dark glasses.

Spanish Angel. The re-jig of My Aim Is True. I mean, This Year’s Model.

“Spanish Model?”

Spanish Model! I do apologise.

“’Spanish Angel’ is the song I’ll write next week.”

I hold up a copy of This Year’s Model in my defence and point out it was purchased with my own money, which earns a laugh. I persevere. Did going back to those tapes reignite something for him? After all that palaver, Costello isn’t having it anyway.

“No,” he states, categorically. “Bear in mind I had recorded in Helsinki, in those carefree days when you could just get on a plane and go anywhere, and made some sort of noisy, clattery kind of music on my own, just for the hell of it. There’s a lot of guitar on ‘No Flag’ [on 2020’s Hey Clockface and inspired, at least in part, by The Stooges, according to the man himself] so you could draw a line from that to this record, but I don't really think this record sounds like those recordings.”

Maybe not, but it’s at least in the same clattery ballpark. Elvis fills in some more detail behind the Spanish Model project.

“We opened up the tapes again, the multi tracks, because we had to remix ‘This Year’s Girl’ for David Simon’s series The Deuce, and we heard how good everything still sounded. And when we took my voice out to put another singer in, as they had requested, I just had this notion to do this with every song on the record, in Spanish, and I knew Sebastian [Krys, multi-Grammy winning producer who has been working with Costello since 2018’s Look Now] knew which singers would have fun doing it. It was tremendous to hear the songs sung again in a very different way in another language, but I don't like to say, ‘Well, I've done that so now I have to do something different’. It's just what I'm doing. It's always been that way. I never really made a master plan.”

I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down

I start into my next question by saying that Costello has described Look Here as uptown pop. I’ve done it again, and he’s on to me.

“It’s Look Now! Look Here is a bit more threatening. I think that’s a better title. You could have an advert for it, ‘Look Here! Here’s these songs, you better fucking listen to them!”

Well, if that was an uptown pop record…

“Pat, I’m gonna call you up before I put every record out in the future and check that the title is really the one it should be, because you're coming up with better titles. Look Here and Spanish Angel. That's the remix album forty years from now. Spanish Angel is going to be the a Serbo-Croat remix of This Year's Model.”

When you record an album of Mink DeVille songs, call it Spanish Angel, I offer. I think he’s laughing with me, rather than at me. I think so. An uptown pop record like Look Now - a criminally underrated album - calls for some heavy duty arranging. Is a record like this one easier to do? This query sends him off again and it is at this point that I quietly crumble up my sheet of carefully prepared questions and throw it in the bin, feeling it best to just let him at it.

“They're all arrangements, but with Look Now, you had to give a bit more thought to where you didn't play, because if I had Steve [Nieve, Attractions and Imposters keyboard genius] just going out on every track, then it would obviously collide with where I'd written the orchestration. I wanted it to sound like when they used to go into the studio with an orchestra and all play at once so I knew where we should and shouldn't sing and play. That record is the kind of music I really love, and it's the kind of music that's on Imperial Bedroom [1982 if-it-ain’t-baroque-don’t-fix-it masterpiece] and on Painted From Memory [1998’s awe-inspiring collaboration with Burt Bacharach, more on which later]. Look Now was the first record The Imposters had made without being on location. We weren't in Mississippi, we weren't working with Allen Toussaint in New Orleans [2006’s The River In Reverse, you should buy that one too], we were doing something that was just us, some songs I'd had for a while, and some brand new songs.”

“Hey Clockface was a mixture as well, because I didn't know where that recording was going to end. And of course, circumstances that we've all lived through affected the way that record was concluded. There were going to be more sessions but I came home and listened to, and liked, what I’d done - I'd cut twelve songs in five days - and two more pieces completed that puzzle.”

This brings Costello up to the genesis of The Boy Named If.

“After a couple of months of being home,” he continues with very little, if any, pause, “we started to realise we weren't going back on the stage anytime soon. Pete [Thomas, the man Costello recently said has been promoted to the position of best drummer in the world now that Charlie Watts is no longer with us] likes to be ready to play so he puts the hours in every day. What does he do? He goes down in his basement. What does he have in his basement? He has the same drum kit as he played on This Year’s Model. That's his practice kit, this Gretsch that he's always kept. A drum kit in a little room is kind of the sound that I started with, ‘Watching The Detectives’ is the sound of a drum kit bouncing off of a wall that's really close. He was playing along with all his favourite records but he was getting bored, he wanted to do something. I sent him one of these tunes, just me hammering it down on one guitar, and he sent it back to me with the drums in place. Then I sent it to Davey [Faragher, Imposters bass-playing hero who’s also togged out for Richard Thompson and John Hiatt].”

“I don't really think it's influenced by anything from the past,” he says, returning to my first question. “The uninhibited way we're playing, and the trust that we have in each other, is why it came out sounding energetic and vivid. The songs are about different times in life; you're leaving all the wonder and magical things of childhood and getting into lust and algebra when you're a teenager, then you're in your early 20s and you don't know what's right and wrong, but everything's exciting. Then you look back a little bit later at things you did, maybe you can take responsibility for them, maybe you can't. It’s not like my diary, it’s not my last confession, but they've made pretty vivid songs, to my ear. I'm really proud of the band in the way they've realised them with no concession to the circumstances. A lot of the music I heard in the early months of people not being out there playing sounded a little bit defeated, in a defensive crouch, that wasn't what I wanted from the music. I wanted the music to feel alive.”

Every Day I Write The Book

The Boy Named If certainly achieves that and it’s housed in a rather fetching package, bedecked with illustrations from the hand of one Eamon Singer, a Costello alias responsible for the cover art of Blood & Chocolate and Look Now, amongst others.

“I have to say it was quite a personal reason why I took to scribbling more avidly in recent times,” Costello explains. ‘My mother got very ill, she had a stroke. I was waiting by her bedside for about five weeks. When you're in a hospital ward and somebody's screaming, somebody's sleeping, somebody’s crying, and somebody’s complaining, you can't take a guitar in there. I wanted to do something to keep myself from worry. And something I could do very quietly, without imposing myself on anybody else, was to just sit there with this electric pencil and scribble away. Gradually, the pictures got more and more ridiculous, macabre, and humorous in some cases. They weren't anything to do with her circumstances, I was thinking about work I was doing.”

This reminiscence sparks a flash of anger. I can’t tell whether it’s directed at me or not.

“When people stridently don't like something, but they don't know where it comes from, that just makes me do it more. That's been my way with music, if people don't like things I do, I'll just do them to one-hundred percent. That's just my nature. Don't pick a fight with me about what I'm thinking, because you don't know what's inside my head. You're not a fucking priest or the Holy Ghost, you don't know my motivation, you don't know what's in my soul. If you want a song to sound different, fucking write it yourself. You can even pick up your own fucking pencil if you don't like this drawing… Fuck off.”

I’m not sure what happened there but Costello seems genuinely upset. I change the subject. Also included within the album/book are short vignettes or ‘fables’, expanding on each lyric. To pick one at random, the writing around ‘The Difference’ made me think that the song’s stabbing takes place on a stage rather than in ‘real life’. Costello explains their inclusion in the first place.

“You picked an unusual one as an example. First of all, the reason they exist, is because I wanted there to be a physical object that people could hold in their hands. When we were originally planning the release of this record, there was, as you know, a shortage of vinyl. A vinyl record would at least be 12" by 12" and there would be space for some illustrations. I was told that there wouldn't be any vinyl, the release would be a little plastic thing with the CD, but mostly would be the stream and downloads. We all, I'm sure, like the accessibility of being able to call up a number on your computer, and hear it right away. The downside is any suggestion of a program in which you're supposed to initially consider music is very fractured by that delivery. It's like you toss the songs into the stream, and then they just float away, like a bunch of sticks. There isn't any way to hold the centre of the story Having arrived at the idea that the songs were a collection of stories, children's stories or people acting like children, and having gone so far as to draw the cover, with a story within a picture, I thought, why don't we just make a book. Very quickly, I wrote these short stories. What happened immediately before the song started playing? What happens immediately after? What's happened in the background when this is happening in the foreground and vice versa?”

"There's some agreement between the lyric and the stories. In other cases, there's other implications in the story, or even the illustration can suggest something, like with 'What If I Can't Give You Anything But Love' there's a big clue to what that might be representing in the picture of the big green guy with a knife. Take out of that whatever you want. You've got to leave somewhere for the listener's imagination to go even if you're given all of these bits of information - song, story and drawing. Some people see the drawings as just decorative. Other people might look at them and go, Oh, does that have any connection to this song or this story? Depends on who you are or what your curiosity is."

“You don't have to see the story book to enjoy the songs, you also don't have to know that ‘The Difference’ is based on a line from Paweł Pawlikowski's film Cold War but it is, as was ‘I Do’ on Clockface. We had a discussion about the possibility of adapting that film for the stage and although these songs are not from a score, they were me working out how some of the implications of scenes and lines in that story might work in song. ‘The Difference’ comes from a specific line in the film, you'll find it if you watch it again. Sometimes a line in Shakespeare or a line in the Bible can inspire a song. ‘Watching the Detectives’ doesn't specifically refer to a film noir, but it's obviously about somebody becoming very absorbed with detective film or detective show, whatever you imagine it to be.”

“I've always taken cues in songs from unusual sources, sometimes they're experience, sometimes they're observation. I can think of maybe five songs on Brutal Youth that have either titles, images, or whole narratives that come from paintings. I didn't say that at the time because people would have thought I was out of my mind. That wouldn't have lined up with, ‘Oh, he's back with the old band and aren't they rocking?’. That was easier to say than actually listen to what songs are about. Some people are lazy and just want an easy explanation for anything that happens. You know that's true.”

For The Stars

Brutal Youth is one of my favourite Costello records, partly because it rocks, but I take his point. Elvis is still talking so I’m not going to stop him. Sticking with song writing I point at the scene in The Beatles: Get Back where McCartney, who Costello is no stranger to, pulls ‘Get Back’ out of the air and ask if it ever works like that for him.

“It can do, it can do. I had the structure of these songs pretty clear. Steve actually complained, because of the way it worked - we didn't all play simultaneously at any time, because it's not possible over distance. It was mostly me and Pete. It might be a slightly contentious thing to say that the rhythm section of The Attractions, in some senses, was the words and the drums, because the other two guys were playing kinda decoration all the time. Yeah, they locked in as a proper rhythm section, all four of us would, just playing relentlessly on something, but some key agreement in a lot of the records I made with Pete is the flow of words, and a lot more words than many people use. It only works because we're in some kind of relationship, and here we started with that. Steve, when we sent him a three man version of, say, 'Penelope Halfpenny', said, 'What the hell do I play on this? You finished this!' I think what I find attractive about Steve's contribution to this record is he was forced to play ingeniously inside what had already been laid down and therefore we got different things because he's so used to leading our group, and why would you not have him lead, he's got so much imagination? It does no harm to do it a different way now and again, and of course there are songs like 'The Man You Love To Hate' where he just took over and there's no room for anybody else. It's just him, which is great because he can do that. Listen hard to what he's doing even on something like 'Magnificent Hurt', which is a pretty simple song. Listen to the way he plays inside that funny dissonant solo that I play. It's really smart. And that's that trust again, it comes from years of understanding how we think."

"I know that you can will a song into existence," he says, remembering the question. "I found that comforting that even the Beatles have to just sing nonsense words sometimes until the real words emerge. You've got the rhythm, you've got the cadence, the melody, you've got everything but the sense, and sometimes that’s the last thing to appear. Sometimes it’s the first thing and you could propose two or three different tunes to carry that idea. There is no hard and fast rule. If I knew how to do it, I’d do it all day long, and I'd be writing songs for Adele. Some people talk about it as a muse thing, sometimes it feels trance like, and sometimes it's just work. Because these songs were written close together, there was obviously some connection. But I didn't sit down and say I'm going to write a concept record like a Yes album. It wasn't that kind of thinking at all.”

Thank God for that, says I, and Elvis nods in agreement. There’s a reissue of that Painted From Memory collaboration with Burt Bacharach mentioned earlier due this year. Again, I make a mistake, and refer to it as an anniversary release.

“Yeah, well, it’s not an anniversary,” Costello corrects me. “I don't understand anniversaries myself. You celebrate your birthday, you celebrate your wedding anniversary, because it's the day that you remember. I was at my mother's house the week before last, closing it up really. She passed in January. That's a melancholy assignment, but it's one where you're looking at the documents, the records, the little clippings, the photographs, that illustrate a life. The Wednesday was the tenth anniversary of my Dad's passing but I missed him just as much the day before and the day after, it wasn't really like a heavier day. It was only a heavy day if I agreed that it was and those two things colliding wasn't the greatest thing in the world for the spirit. It was something you have to face and it's logical in its progression... Remind me of the question again?”

I was asking about working with Bacharach.

"Oh, Burt. Yeah."

Costello seemed only too happy to expound on their relationship and work at length, using it as a jumping off point to somewhat explain his approach to music and song writing. The clock had now gone out the window so I just sat back and enjoyed listening to the man talk.

“Burt’s effect on me as a listener goes right back to Perry Como singing ‘Magic Moments’ on television in the 50s. I can remember that very vividly. I really have a very strong memory of hearing Cilla sing ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’ and not knowing why it made me feel peculiar. The music's really odd. You probably know it's written in different time signatures, and for a slow song, it has this weird effect on you, because it breaks out of metre. As I got older, I could appreciate that sort of carnal or sensual implication of so many of Burt's songs. There are songs I could point at, before Burt and I ever met, where I was attempting to speak in that kind of language, with differing degrees of success. Maybe it's better that I couldn't get closer to the model and I just came up with my own song like ‘Accidents Will Happen’. I remember thinking, ‘that’s sort of like Burt’. It doesn't sound remotely like him, but in my mind, it was indebted to him in some way.”

"People just didn't have so much of a manifesto for everything they did thirty or forty years ago, we weren't asked such difficult questions or asked to explain ourselves in those ways, and even less in Burt's time. Nobody ever questioned Burt about the inside of the music. They just accepted that he was a great composer. And he wrote for tremendous singers like Dionne Warwick."

“From the time we've written together, we wrote an album, it was reinterpreted by Bill Frisell [The Sweetest Punch, which also features the great Cassandra Wilson], a bunch of people recorded ‘God Give Me Strength’ [commissioned for the 1996 movie Grace Of My Heart, and one of Costello’s greatest achievements], and we were approached to write a musical based on it. We worked on it for three or four years. It got as far as the workshop performance, but it was clear that the new songs that we'd written and the old songs never really cohered, and the story that the writers wrote kind of competed with the songs, to be honest, I think they fought a fight that they couldn't win. That sounds a bit arrogant that there was more narrative in some of the lyrics than there was in the story. So it never was gonna work."

"Those were some of the songs that Burt led The Imposters in the studio on Look Now, that was an amazing session - 'Look Now' and 'Photographs Can Lie' - and there were other songs that we'd written together which The Imposters and I recorded with Steve Nieve playing, like 'He's Given Me Things'. There's still more, we were asked to write a score for Austin Powers and he wrote some fucking beautiful tunes. I wrote all of the music for 'Stripping Paper' on Look Now for that Painted From Memory musical. I gave that song to Burt, and he said, ‘that's finished, I'm not gonna add anything’. That's a pretty big compliment.”

"I think we will put a record which presents the original songs, and some sort of version of what could have been added to that, ranging from studio versions to really great vocal and piano demos, not just my voice but some other singers who did them at the time, what we call production demos, really amazing performances of some of these unheard songs."

“The best thing of all was in Capitol Studios, maybe two months ago, with Burt and a thirty-piece orchestra,” he continues with a grin. “It's like the dream, you're in the studio, like Cilla doing 'Alfie',you're trying to sing this difficult song with a conductor - Vince Mendoza did the orchestrations - and this killer band, very different from The Imposters, much more Burt's choice of people. I wanted that, I wanted it to be his voice in the music. You're in the booth with a little chair that Sinatra used to lean on! Capitol is really a place to go to. I've only ever done a couple of things or mostly watched my wife record there. But we did The New Basement Tapes [recordings of late sixties Dylan lyrics set to new music] there, and I did a song with Roger McGuinn [the former Byrd covered 'You Bowed Down' on 1990's Back From Rio with Elvis helping out on backing vocals] many years ago. When you walk down the hallway, it's like, get ready, because it's [pointing at imaginary pictures on an imaginary wall] Nat Cole, Peggy Lee, Sinatra, Gene Vincent, it's intimidating. I suppose people feel the same way about Abbey Road and probably feel the same about Windmill Lane, there's history in there and that's something that can spook you out or lift you towards doing a good job. That's why people go to Muscle Shoals, they want to get some of that flavour. It was really something.”

Despite his own stature, Elvis has still got to be pinching himself in that situation.

“Burt was standing up at the board, looking at the score and I knew what was coming. The voice comes on the talk back, [breathless Burt burr] "Elvis, you're not singing the right melody at bar 12." I just got one note wrong in the melody and he's heard it and then he's like, "Vince, We gotta really pay attention to downbeat at 61." Nothing escapes his notice, every single time I've been on stage with him, he's the same. It's not like he's unreasonably demanding, he's just got incredible focus. Listen to those records he orchestrated and partly produced at Sceptre, how incredibly focused every part is in the orchestra and in the rhythm section, everything is serving the story. It's at a level that really probably very few groups other than the Beatles, in a very different kind of form, have. It's never less than it needs to be. Most everybody else's recording, there's something that's a bit more blurred. There's only a couple of people that you could literally write that orchestration down and it will be like classical music, in its attention to be what it is. People don't really have access to that, because they're making Lego now by comparison. Two bar phrases, end on end, twelve people to write a song - great if you like it, but Burt can write the whole thing, and the orchestration. The only thing he doesn't do is write words, that's my job.”

Beyond Belief

Even at this stage, Costello’s still learning from people like Bacharach.

“Christ yeah. I'm not feeling sorry for myself but I left school at seventeen, which is later than my mother who left school at fourteen, and sold records from then on. I've worked at trying to be a musician ever since, I never really could do any other job. I did do other jobs, like we all do to pay the rent, but I didn't have any formal education beyond that, and I stopped paying attention much earlier. I'm not book learned in any way in terms of literary things and I don't have any formal musical education. I took some music lessons from Michael McGlynn [Irish composer and founder of Anúna, who worked with Costello and The Chieftains on ‘Long Journey Home’] when I was forty, to break this bloody mental block I had about musical notation. Once I was away, I was able to write and imagine things, I could communicate with people that I really wanted to work with, like The Brodsky Quartet. Little details in the music was escaping, because I didn't know how to write them down accurately, so it was very necessary. I was very grateful to Michael for being so patient. He started out trying to teach me piano. That was impossible, because I'm so left handed. If I could have two left hands, I'd be alright. This hand doesn't really do much, but you get what you get. All of those things look like some scheme, and for some people it's, 'Oh, you're trying to make yourself look smart doing that!' That's only because they have an orthodox view about music that's begins and ends with rock. I don't even like square rock, gimme rock and roll. After a certain point, I dial it out and I'm listening to The Temptations. I want syncopation. Your imagination goes, ‘I want more complex harmony’. It doesn't mean I have to only write that because I love three chord songs, but if it's only going to be this narrow church, that's not what I do.”

“Whether you can command it all, or have it serve you is another matter, but at least be aware of it and don't talk down to it, because there's beautiful things happening just out of your view. And that's why I would always be anxious to do anything that's a new adventure, because you come out of it knowing something you didn't know when you went in. Burt is a perfect example, there was a lot to learn from observation and out of it we wrote a bunch of really great songs, which I never would have dreamed of doing. When he was playing piano from Marlena Dietrich in 1963, when my dad [Ross McManus, with Joe Loss and his Orchestra] was on the Royal Variety Show with The Beatles, who would have thought that I would write songs with two of the people on the bill? It sounds like a grandiose thing to say, but do you suppose I could have ever dreamed that in my wildest imagination at nine years old? And that's actually what happened.”

At this point, the understandably exasperated record company lady, Rainar, interrupts our call. I throw my hands up in apology and she shoots me a look like I’ve just dropped a piano on her cat. Can’t blame her, mind. I say my thanks to Costello, and take the chance to thank him for all those great records that I’ve been listening to for years. “Not at all, really good to speak with you,” says our man, “and thanks for your questions.”

Honestly, I had loads of them.

_________
The Boy Named If is out now.
Elvis Live!