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On the inauspicious date of Friday, March 13, 2020, Elvis Costello was on stage at the Hammersmith Apollo with his band the Imposters, performing the encore to what would be his last big gig held in London before the first Covid lockdown. That morning's front page had led with a government warning that "many more families are going to lose loved ones" and a smattering of empty seats in the venue testified to a growing sense of public unease. Costello's response? He launched into a storming rendition of his apocalyptic 1991 rocker "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)"; sample lyric "Better make like a fly, if you don't want to die".
"Maybe it was in bad taste," he concedes now, smiling. "But you've got to whistle past the graveyard sometimes."
The following day, the remaining dates of his live tour were cancelled and he flew to Vancouver, where he shares a home with his third wife, Canadian jazz pianist Diana Krall, and their twin teenage songs, Dexter and Frank. "So then I'm staring at the ocean thinking, "Do I just sit here watching the waves until it's all over? Or am I gonna make a record?" In fact he made three.
By October 2020, Costello had completed Hey Clockface, a moody, experimental collection assembled long distance with various collaborators. Last year, he followed it with Spanish Model, a radical remix of This Year's Model, his classic 1978 album with the Attractions, this time featuring Spanish and Latin American pop stars. And here he is kicking off 2022 with The Boy Named If, a thundering set of fierce, wordy, melodic belters that fizz with the energy of his early new wave hits.
"You have a choice between hunkering down and doing minor-key, whey-faced ballads about isolation, or trying to kick a hole in the box you're in," he says. "We're all gonna fucking die, so we might as well enjoy it while we can!"
The album began as a two-way collaboration between Costello and his longstanding drummer Pete Thomas, who is based in Los Angeles. "I went out on the back porch and put down electric rhythm guitar and vocals and sent it to him. He went into his basement in LA and next thing the drum part would come back, just like in a rehearsal."
Thomas really drives the album, playing the same drumkit that he used on This Year's Model 44-years ago. Davey Faragher — who replaced original Attractions bassist Bruce Thomas when the band effectively reassembled in 2002 — recorded his parts in California. Virtuoso keyboard player Steve Nieve filled out arrangements from his home in Paris, France.
When it came to the recording process, Costello insists: "I don't want to hear the words 'lockdown', 'quarantine', 'remote'. There's nothing remote about recording when you have instantaneous communication. Normally, in the studio, you play with headphones on. So what difference does it make if [that track] comes from thousands of miles away? Engineers are constantly fighting for separation so they can get clarity in the final mix. Well, here we had all the separation you could want!"
While for Costello's older fans the new album will evoke the furious pop rock of the Attractions in their prime, he is bullishly insistent that this is no exercise in nostalgia. "It's not back to basics, 'cos there's nothing basic about this band. Steve Nieve wrote an opera, he can play any instrument that has keys on it and a few that don't. And now that Charlie Watts has gone, Pete's been promoted — he's the greatest living rock 'n' roll drummer."
As for Costello himself, he is indisputably one of the world's pre-eminent singer-songwriters — up there with Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell — his densely intelligent lyricism matched by a dazzling musicality. The son of big band singer Ross MacManus (vocalist for the Joe Loss Band in the 1950s and 60s), he initially struggled for years on the folk pub circuit, performing solo as Declan MacManus. "I was resident for a while in the Half Moon in Putney; they paid me in beer and sandwiches," he recalls. "The songs were intimate — torrents of words, a bit purple and audacious and romantic — but I couldn't really command a room."
He signed to Stiff Records in 1976, "still doing a country, ragtime thing". And then punk exploded and Costello was repackaged as a new wave sensation. The brilliant Nick Lowe was brought in as producer and his manager Jake Riviera suggested he change his name: "Elvis" chosen as a deliberate affront to rock traditionalists, plus "Costello", a family name once used as an alias by his father. By then, he points out, "I wasn't an angry young teenager. I was 22, married with a kid, working in a bank. Jake invented the image."
During the next decade, Costello had one of the greatest hot streaks in British pop history, seven incredible albums in seven years, starting with My Aim Is True in 1977 and including his masterpiece, Imperial Bedroom, in 1982. After the hits started to dry up, the Attractions disintegrated in 1986 (bowing out with a final superb record, Blood & Chocolate).
Since then, music of all genres has poured out of Costello: 33 albums in total, including collaborations with songwriting maestro Burt Bacharach, New Orleans R'n'B arranger Alain Toussaint, opera singer Anne Sofie von Otter and strings stars the Brodsky Quartet. He has written songs with Paul McCartney and sung with Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and Tony Bennett. Perhaps surprisingly, for such a gifted composer, many of his biggest solo hits have been cover versions, most famously George Jones's "A Good Year For The Roses" and Charles Aznavour's "She" (which Costello performed on the soundtrack to Notting Hill in 1999). Are his own songs simply too dense and complex for mainstream appeal? Costello shrugs; "I don't mean for the songs to be heard, understood, digested and discarded all in the same afternoon."
We are talking in Ronnie Scott's, the storied Soho jazz club where Costello once performed with revered jazz outfit the Mingus Big Band. "I'm sure the jazzers were wondering, 'What's that old punk doing up there?'" He indicates a lamplit booth. "My mother was sitting over there, with Diana and Matt," he says referring to his wife and his elder son from his first marriage to school sweetheart Mary Burgoyne.
For Costello, family is a constant touchstone. One song on the new album, "The Death of Magic Thinking," grapples with "the borderline of childhood and adulthood [where] there's a fear and thrill about anything sexual. It's enticing, intriguing and intimidating, and maybe you don't really want to leave the magic of childhood behind, which I sense in one of my sons." From that starting point, Costello captures "snapshots of times in your life when you might be told to stop acting like a child — which for most men is the next 40 or 50 years". He laughs. "I'm 67 now, I've got a 47-year-old son and two 14-year-old sons, so you see little moments, flashes that remind you of a different stage, and you begin to make connections. The stories start to tumble out."
Last month, some viewers were surprised to see Costello appear at the Royal Variety Performance in front of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. His father — who died in 2011, aged 84 — had appeared at the same event with Joe Loss in 1963, and his picture was projected on to a screen behind Costello as he sang. "I'm glad it was there, but I knew if I turned around, I would lose it," says Costello now, suddenly choking up with emotion.
"I was there to honour him. It's no secret that I don't have strong royalist feelings, despite accepting a gong [Costello was awarded an OBE in 2019 for services to music], which, as I said at the time, just shows they don't read my lyrics. My dad sang 'If I Had A Hammer,' about the dignity of labour, because he was a working man his whole life."
Costello's Irish paternal grandfather "was an orphan who ended up in the British Army in the second battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment, wounded in France in 1917", while his maternal grandfather spent five years on a farm in Poland, after being captured in 1915.
"So you can f--- off if you give me a hard time about whether I turn up for [the Royal Variety Performance], something that represents that continuity. I'm two generations away from making my living with a shovel, and I'm deeply grateful for my grandfather's story. He learned to play the trumpet in the army, and because my grandpa played, my father wanted to play trumpet too, and because my father played, I … realised I couldn't play the trumpet!"
Costello's mother died in January last year, aged 93. "She was at my show in Liverpool on the last tour. She insisted on coming, which was beautiful." Again, Costello wells up as he speaks.
He had his own health scare in 2018, "a cancerous malignancy, which required me to have an operation. If I hadn't been so proud and tried to do a tour that spring, it would have remained between me and my surgeon. I'm strong as an ox, now, I think." In the years since, Costello has lost close friends to both cancer and Covid. "It's been tough at times," he says. "But you have to go on. And we do."
He intends to be back on tour with the Imposters in June. One number fans are unlikely to hear him play, however, is his biggest British hit, "Oliver's Army," which reached number 2 in the UK charts in 1979. A song about the army and imperialism, it has recently fallen foul of cancel culture owing to his barbed inclusion of the "n" word to describe a British private ("Only takes one itchy trigger / One more widow, one less white n-----").
"If I wrote that song today, maybe I'd think twice about," he says. "That's what my grandfather was called in the British army — it's historically a fact — but people hear that word go off like a bell an accuse me of something that I didn't intend.
"On the last tour, I wrote a new verse about censorship, but what's the point of that? So I've decided I'm not going to play it." When the song is broadcast on the radio the offending word is often bleeped out which, says, Costello, "is a mistake. They're making it worse by bleeping it for sure. Because they're highlighting it then. Just don't play the record!
"You know what," he continues, "it would do me a favour. Because when I fall under a bus, they'll play 'She,' 'Good Year for the Roses' and 'Oliver's Army.'" Which means, Costello points out, that if you take that last one out of the equation, "I'll die, and they will celebrate my death with two songs I didn't write. What does that tell you?"
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