Information about When I Was Cruel
Irish Independent, 2002-03-02
- Joe Jackson
|
|
Old punks never die, they just fall in love |
|
|
Love is like a brick through a blue window
Elvis Costello tells Joe Jackson how love has taken the gloom out of
his melancholy outlook
ELVIS Costello's new album, When I Was Cruel due for release in April
opens with a deliciously evocative track called 45. It tells of how
he has measured his life according to singles and albums since, basically,
the day he was born.
Not surprisingly, perhaps. After all, Costello is the son of a mother
who worked in a record store and a father who was a singer with the
Joe Loss Orchestra. He also was born Declan Patrick McManus in Paddington,
London, in 1945 and remembers "liking records a lot as a baby"
and responding to favourites.
"Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra, the records my folks had,"
he explains. "In fact, the first record I remember listening to,
as a child, maybe before I could speak, was Songs for Swinging Lovers,
which had I've Got You under My Skin. That's the first record I remember
responding to. And Only the Lonely still, to this day, is one of my
favourite albums. That's a Sinatra record from the late Fifties and
it's particularly melancholic."
Sinatra's more melancholic side also found a parallel in Costello's
psyche.
"I have a quite melancholic disposition," he says. "The
first song I ever wrote was in E minor and called Winter, which was
when I was 13! And you are that way disposed when you're that age."
Maybe. But by this time Elvis also had discovered the "sheer joy
of rock 'n' roll, in the shape of the Beatles". And the delights
of sex. On an unconscious level, of course!
|
|
ELVIS COSTELLO: 'I havea quite melancholic disposition.' Photo:
David Conachy |
|
|
"I remember hearing Anyone Who Had a Heart when I was 10 and it
made me feel peculiar," he remembers, laughing. "It's an erotic
song. The music, not the words. And the music of Bacharach is really
torrid. And how it made me feel was like a sexual feeling you don't
have the words for because you grew up in a time when all that was swept
under the carpet. Yet a few years later, when I heard Girl by the Beatles
and Play with Fire, by the Stones I realised these were songs with a
feel of decadence, a sense of young men having truly adult experiences.
I definitely was attracted to all that! And later on, in the Seventies,
I also realised that Dylan's Blonde on Blonde was the overt version
of what Girl was about. But by then you'd got girlfriends so you know
what these things are. And now I know I've lived long enough to have
lived the life that's in the songs on Blonde on Blonde. Yet everything
Dylan was writing at the time was heightened by the life he was living
and the drugs that were around. I never had that experience."
Meaning? Elvis Costello never was the kind of amphetamine freak Dylan
was when he wrote Blonde on Blonde ?
"Strangely enough I hadn't done that at 16!" Did Elvis do
it later? "No comment!"
This answer should come as no surprise. Elvis Costello rarely if ever
talks about what his biographer Tony Clayton Lea described as the "substance
abuse" of his mad, early days touring. But Elvis will admit that
at the beginning of his career, which started with the success of his
album My Aim Is True in 1977, he'd often get "fired up" on
vodka before gigs.
"It got me in the mood," he says. "Yet I never really
liked vodka very much. Nowadays I don't have to do anything. And there
isn't any dark story. I just quit drinking. I lost the taste. And, as
I say, I have quite a melancholic disposition. So as you get older you
have to watch that drink is a depressant. In fact, there's two songs
on the new record that are about the tendency to embrace just the gloomy
side. Tart and My Little Blue Window. The blue window is the one you
can choose to look through all the time. And you need the hooligan in
your life the person who loves you to break that for you. You need your
partner to shake you out of that. And you need to be able to do it for
them. You don't need love like an aspirin for toothache. You need love
like a brick through a blue window."
Believe me, it is surprising to hear the usually intensely private
Elvis Costello refer, even tangentially, to his "partner".
Y'see, as with his drug use, Costello rarely, if ever, speaks publicly
about his partners. Including his first wife whom his biographer refers
to only as Mary or his marriage to Cait O'Riordan, which has since ended
(sic). Though, when pushed, Costello does reveal he is "in
love" at the moment. But then his new album also features at least
one song, 15 Petals, which celebrates love in a way that is relatively
new to Costello, who admits he hasn't written many love songs. So to
paraphrase "torrid" Bacharach's Alfie what's the song all
about, Elvis? "The mad way being in love makes you feel,"
he responds, laughing. "The place it takes you to, the actual physical
destination, and the way it takes you out of yourself."
Not only that, Elvis Costello is just as passionate about his new album
as he was about My Aim Is True. Or Songs for Swinging Lovers.
"I am!" he responds. "And I really enjoyed making this
record here in Dublin. This is where I live, this is my home. It has
been for 12 years. And the production team who worked with me Ciaran
Cahill, Leo Pearson and Kieran Lynch deserve equal billing with the
musicians, because they gave the whole flow to this record. So this
kind of rock 'n' roll record we couldn't have done without the environment
these guys helped me create. That's part of the reason I love living
in Ireland!"
Joe Jackson