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It was an evening for softies. Seeing Elvis Costello trading riffs with Bob Dylan at The Point a few weeks back, I came over all sentimental (just for about ten minutes, y'understand).
Close enough to witness the intense delight on Costello's face, I experienced an unexpected contact high.
You see, I believe that, like many of us, Elvis is first and foremost a fan. A talented one, sure, but it's his sheer enthusiasm for music that prevents him from diversifying and cutting back on his musical output.
Not for Elvis the salmon farm in Scotland or the golf course in the Canaries. His is the traditional studio tan of the genuine music buff.
The last time I'd met Elvis he was enthusing about an astonishing Dylan performance he'd seen in the States. Watching Bob buddy up to him on stage at The Point I knew I was looking a bloke who'd just hit the winning combination in the lottery of his dreams.
It seemed a fair reward for 18 years of devotion to excellence.
I know I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was, when, one afternoon almost four years ago he casually remarked that he had an album's worth of cover versions of other people's songs ready for release.
But there was Mighty Like A Rose and, subsequently, Brutal Youth, to be released before we would get to hear the stuff he'd bashed out in a fortnight in a studio in Barbados in '91.
Those fans who've been aware of the diversity of Costello's musical taste have been eagerly awaiting Kojak Variety. which has only now been issued.
Around the time of his big crossover hit "Oliver's Army," Elvis let slip his treatment of Rodgers and Hart's "My Funny Valentine."
Far from being an aberration, the track signalled the willingness of punk's poet laureat to acknowledge a span on musical influence that stretched beyond the MC5 and Iggy and The Stooges.
Recorded four years ago, Kojak Variety includes a version of Dylan's "I Threw It All Away" from the Nashville Skyline album.
"Such was the departure of that record's vocal and writing style that the simple beauty of this song seems to have been overlooked." explains Elvis.
"I performed the song on my very first solo tour in 1984."
No wonder he was looking so chuffed when Dylan threw his arm around him at The Point.
Indeed the new album opens with a string of lyrical riddle redolant of Dylan at his most surreal and playful.
"How many wrinkles in a pickle? How many hairs in a head? How many waves in the ocean? How many crumbs in bread? ... Where do eyeballs come from?"
"I found 'Strange' (the track in question) on the B-side of a Screamin' Jay Hawkins single on Roulette." says Elvis.
"I've tried not to cut songs that are too familiar."
The songs on Kojak Variety offer a musical roadmap to the musical landscape of Costello's development as a writer and performer.
"When I first heard some of these songs, there was only about three hours of beat music on the BBC Light Programme per week," he recalls.
"Rock 'n' roll was actually old people's music to anyone under 13 — particularly as Elvis Presley was doing mock-operatic stuff like 'It's Now Or Never.'"
What's become common currency was, back then, steeped in mystery.
"Rhythm and Blues was an exotic style that my favourite pop groups said they liked," he says.
"For example, the songs that The Beatles didn't write turned out to be by Arthur Alexander and Smokey Robinson."
Music for Elvis became an obsession and a personal odyssey, a quest for the Holy Grail.
"The first time I travelled across America, I haunted countless thrift stores and pawn shops which offered the chance of discovering an entire album by some group or singer that I had previously only known from singles or a scrappy compilation record."
The influence his father Ross MacManus had on the young Elvis shouldn't be overlooked.
"For as long as I remember my father was with the Joe Loss Orchestra," Elvis has said. "Other people's dads went to the office, mine went to the Hammersmith Palais."
On Kojak Variety, Elvis pays homage to those seminal influences he picked up from his father's collection.
"One of the great albums in my parents' collection when I was very young was a ten-inch album by Peggy Lee called Black Coffee," he recalls.
"I'm not sure whether 'Fever' was on that disc but I've listened to Peggy Lee all my life and somewhere along the way I got curious about Little Willie John."
Elvis treats us to a rollicking version of "Leave My Kitten Alone" on the new set.
Ross MacManus was also a source of other, more unusual records.
"He used to bring home all kinds of 'A' label advance copies and even acetates of songs he was to learn for the week's radio broadcast," recalls Elvis.
"The process of securing "live" or radio covers was still crucial to both record companies and music publishers.
"As late as the release of The Beatles' Rubber Soul, when they hardly needed a helping hand, their publishers were still sending out acetates of non-single tracks such as 'Girl' and 'Michelle' so that the songs were covered by the radio dancebands."
"When my dad was finished learning the song he gave me the record," says Elvis. "It means that I am actually the second member of the MacManus family to perform Little Richard's Bama Lama Bama Loo."
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