London Telegraph, January 15, 1993

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London Telegraph

UK & Ireland newspapers

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Costello makes a concerted effort


Douglas Kennedy

Why has pop's most important songwriter teamed up with a classical quartet for his latest albums Elvis Costello talks to Douglas Kennedy

Elvis Costello is on holiday this week. But for him, that doesn't mean sitting under a sun dappled palm, sipping a piña colada. He'd rather use his time off to listen to music. This week the man who has frequently been called Britain's most important pop songwriter has been attending Andras Schiff's cycle of Schubert sonatas at the Wigmore Hall (reviewed on this page). And he's so keen on this Hungarian pianist that he's cutting short an already brief visit to New York to be back in time for one of Schiff's recitals.

"Going to concerts is my idea of a holiday," he says. Costello has been spotted at the Royal Festival Hall whenever the London Philharmonic are in session, not to mention at this month's crop of Wigmore Bach recitals by Shostakovich's favourite pianist, the great Tatyana Nikolaeva.

Indeed it was at a concert of Shostakovich's music a few years ago that Costello first came across the Brodsky Quartet.

The Brodskys are known as a group who have rewritten the rule-book of chamber-music etiquette — dispensing with the usual white-tie-and-tails in favour of designer clobber by Issey Miyake, and playing old Dave Brubeck tunes as encores. Costello, however, was more intrigued by their immaculate musicianship.

"Before I attended their Shostakovich concerts, I knew nothing about the Brodskys. But what struck me immediately about them — besides their remarkable playing — was their presence on stage. Their fierce dedication to the music. Even though I really hadn't a clue about the music they were playing, let alone any other classical music."

Less than 12 months ago, the man who first made his mark in the mid-Seventies as a sort of punk Buddy Holly — the author of such great pop standards, as "Oliver's Army," "Alison" and "Watching the Detectives" — couldn't read or write music. Now he's mastered crotchets and quavers ("though my sight-reading is crap") and he's also just released an extraordinary album with the Brodsky Quartet, The Juliet Letters a song sequence which is bound to bemuse both classical and rock pundits alike, yet is undoubtedly one of the more original musical collaborations to have hit the streets in years.

Then again, anyone who's followed the remarkable career of Declan Patrick MacManus (as he was christened in London in 1954) knows that, musically speaking, he has a gambler's incessant restlessness — a willingness to, say, bring out a record of Nashville standards (Almost Blue) at a time when he could easily have veered into Top of the Pops territory. Or to release a brilliantly virulent critique of the 1980s (Spike) when no one seemed to be writing so-called political songs any more.

"I guess I just get bored very easily," he says when asked why he is so stylistically restless. "I mean, what's the point of doing the same stuff over and over again?"

He now lives on the outskirts of Dublin with his second wife, Cait O'Riordan (one of the Pogues), saying that he left London because "you could buy a real house in Dublin for the same price as a shoebox in London". But it's obvious that he has shrewdly detached himself from the more parochial aspects of life in the Irish capital and flees back to the Big Smoke whenever ennui hits.

He is someone who likes knocking around ideas, yet has little time for small talk. Now on the brink of middle age, his once-pinched Stan Laurel-esque face may be fuller, but what strikes you most about him is his enthusiasm — the fact that he refuses to assume the mantle of the jaded, well-heeled rock star and still cares so passionately about the business of making music.

"The idea that art must be formidable is something that was dreamed up in French cafés," he says. "And that's half the problem with so much contemporary musical composition — it all sounds like it's been developed in the same intellectual cloister, the same hothouse. And I hate the idea that certain people are going to listen to The Juliet Letters and think that this is my attempt at 'serious music'. Everything I do is serious."

No doubt, there will be critics who will refer to this album as Costello's "cross-over" disc. It's a term that enrages him "Back in the Seventies, there was a whole spate of collaborations between rock musicians and orchestras — all of which were pretty painful. I wasn't interested in making 'my classical album' or writing a series of songs for string quartet. I simply wanted to work with the Brodskys. And the result is a full-blown collaboration."

After agreeing to work together on a musical project, Costello and the Brodskys met informally over a number of weeks, doing nothing more than talking incessantly about music, playing each other pieces they admired, feeling each other out. "I think that, at first, we held him a bit in awe," says the quartet's cellist, Jacqueline Thomas. "We also knew that he had respect for what we did. But there was never any sense of Elvis and us being in opposite camps. From the outset, it was clear that we would work together as a quintet."

Though the idea, as Costello says, was to "explore the under-used combination of voice and string quartet", the form that this collaboration would take only became clear after Costello's wife showed him a newspaper clipping about some curious academic in Verona who had taken it upon himself to answer all letters addressed to "Juliet Capulet" (though how this eccentric got hold of these missives was not fully explained).

Suddenly, the proverbial light-bulb appeared over Costello's head why not write a chain of songs based on an unlinked group of letters? The Brodskys were intrigued, and after everyone went home initially to try their hand at a suicide note (which they read to each other the next day), the collaboration moved into full swing, with the Brodskys and Costello thrashing out words and music over an extended "trial and error" workshop period.

The result is a compelling sequence of 20 communiqués — most concerning obsessional matters of the heart which can't be pigeonholed as "chamber rock" or Costello's attempt to write his Op 1. Like the man himself, they are unapologetically idiosyncratic. And wholly original.

"I'm not going to give you any crap about how these songs are a death blow to everything that's come before them," he says with a droll grin. "Or how they 'encapsulate the neurosis of the 20th century'. They're just songs that the Brodskys and I wrote together "

"But they are serious songs," I note.

"Of course," Costello says with another evil smile. "We're dead serious musicians which, I suppose, is better than being dead and serious."

Tony Parsons reviews The Juliet Letters in tomorrow's Weekend section.


Tags: The Juliet LettersThe Brodsky Quartet

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The Daily Telegraph, January 15, 1993


Douglas Kennedy profiles Elvis Costello upon release of The Juliet Letters.

Images

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Clipping.


Photo by John Stoddart.
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Page scan.
1993-01-15 London Telegraph page 17.jpg

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