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Elvis Costello is a mighty resilient artist. Next time you find yourself sweating the small stuff, think about this: The song Costello and his co-producers mixed at the end of the sessions for his latest release, When I Was Cruel (Island), is titled "The Imposter vs. the Water Tide," because, he says, "The weekend that we recorded it, seven feet of water came into our storage space and destroyed all my guitars. Hopefully, some of them will be salvageable. We did lose a lot of instruments and amplifiers, and sadly, the little 15-watt Sears Roebuck amplifier, which was the sound of this record, will probably not survive, but I think I got my money's worth out of it. It was an impulse buy in Red Bank, New Jersey. I just saw it in a shop window, and it lasted till the last day of the session. It was starting to complain that day. Little did it know that its days were numbered." He displays a surprising sense of humor under the circumstances, but maybe that's because, for Elvis Costello, the spirit of his work has always been at least as important as the tools.
In fact, pre-production for When I Was Cruel began as much with the pursuit of a feeling as with firm ideas about sounds. "I decided I wanted to make something like a rock 'n' roll record, but I didn't want it to go like one that I'd made in the past," Costello explains. "In other words, you go into a room, and you teach people rhythmically what you think it goes like, and they interpret that, and, obviously, they feed back to you a lot of ideas of their own. That's been very productive, and, obviously, when I had a band of my own [The Attractions] and we toured all the time, we worked the different permutations of three chords or nine chords or however many chords we were using, and different rhythms, pretty well. We made a lot of records, and many of them pretty good, I think, but I don't have that setup anymore. I don't have a regular band, so I was trying to find something that gave that propulsion to the music.
"So, I started messing around with some really simple machines, kind of kids' drum machines, really. I described it as having a thing with big, orange buttons on it — if it had big, orange buttons, I'd probably like it — and a really cheap little sampler that runs on batteries, so that means you can take it anywhere and record anything.
"I pretty much had the blueprint of certainly a good half of the record, either having just written in the way I've always written — just with a guitar or a piano, though in this case, it was all on the guitar — or the ones that were particularly rhythmically propelled, they were really integrated with these kind of big, stupid machines. They're big, bold strokes machines, incapable of any sort of subtlety. So, I had demos of me sort of bashing the songs out, and it was thrilling, because it was like rebounding off of a band the way you do at the very beginning."
As you can guess from Costello's description of his working method, the sounds he was working toward during the writing process were much more rhythm-driven and somewhat more electronic than the type of music he's normally associated with. When he was ready to dig deeper into the actual sounds and arrangements that would end up on the album, Costello reassembled a production team that he had worked with recently on some film music. Costello and the three members of the technical team – engineer Ciaran Cahill, assistant engineer/editor Kieran Lynch and engineer/programmer Leo Pearson – are collectively referred to as The Impostor, and each is credited with co-producing the album.
“We tried to work as a team, and nobody was the boss particularly ,” Costello says. Obviously, I’m governing the thing, from the point of view I’m writing the songs and I know what I want to hear, but I allowed them responsibilities for different areas. Ciaran Cahill took care of the engineering, and Kiaran Lynch of the editing and housekeeping, and Leo Pearson more of the rhythm processing. If we created a sound and we wanted it twisted a little bit to give it a little more character or a little bit more grit. Leo usually had that job.”
“Elvis liked what we were doing,” says Pearson, who has done programming for Irish groups The Corrs and U2. “He hadn’t worked a lot, or maybe ever with MIDI stuff and digital, and he got a bullet out of some of the sounds we were getting together.”
The team went to work in Dublin, Ireland’s premier facility, Windmill Lane, to develop their ideas and track with a band: Pete Thomas on drums, Cracker’s Davey Faragher on bass and Steve Nieve (who joined the sessions close to the end) on piano/keyboards.
“I didn’t really intend for there to be any other musicians on this record,” Costello jokes. “I thought I’ll only call anybody else when I run my out of fingers myself. And then, by coincidence, I suppose, the other person I have to thank for bringing the other arm into the music – apart from the fact that I would have run out of technique as an instrumentalist – was Bob Dylan. He came and did a show outside of Dublin, and I was asked to open for him. If that hadn’t happened, I might not have put the band together to play that show. And because coincidence brought Pete Thomas and Davey Faragher to Europe at that time, and I was able to ask them to do that show with Steve Naïve, who lives in Paris, we found ourselves in the situation of having a rock ‘’n’ roll combo in Dublin at exactly the same time as I was going to go in and record the proper versions of these songs I’d been working on at home.”
The recording sessions were fast and furious, by design, because Costello believes strongly in the importance of immediacy and momentum in making a rock ‘n’ roll record. The group were after quite a variety of sounds, however so a number of approaches were used.
“Elvis would have a kind of a seed or an idea – a demo he’d recorded in his kitchen – and the song was taken from there,” explains Ciaran Cahill, who has known Costello since Cahill was the assistant engineer on All This Useless Beauty six years ago.
“Then Leo would start off getting a groove together, picking out some sounds, and we just kept layering. On the album, there are many different approaches to recording, from putting the band in a room and letting them go at it full-tilt, to looping up something that Pete Thomas was playing.”
Recording was through the facility’s 72-input Neve VRP Legend console, using Amek mic pre’s as well as the pre’s in the board. “We recorded to 2-inch on a Studer A827,” Cahill says. “We used lots of very nice, posh microphones on the drum kit: Neumann U47s and (AKG)C12s as overheads, and then standard [Shure] B58 on the snare drum, 87s on the toms and one U47 being heavily compressed by an 1176 UREI compressor. Guitars and everything after that we used basically Shure Beta 58s, and for vocals. Especially for vocals. A lot of the vocals were done in the control room.”
“The setup in the live room pretty much stayed the same, and the setup in the control room as well,” says Lynch, who, in his three years as a staff engineer at Windmill Lane, has worked with artists including U2, The Cranberries and R.E.M. “We had the drummer right down at the dead end of the room with loads of screens around him,” says Cahill. “We had the bass player next to him with his amps screened off from the room, and then he had Elvis in a kind of booth of screens with a vocal mic and whatever DI he needed for guitar, and sometimes they’d all play in the room together. Then he’d come in and lay down the guide vocal in the control room with us.”
There are songs on the album like “45,” “Alibi” and “Tear off Your Own Head (It’s a Doll Revolution)” that are vintage-rocking Costello: stuttering, slamming, distorted guitar, jungle drums and the almost tongue-in-cheek bounce of Steve Naïve’s keyboards. But as Costello intended, When I Was Cruel also takes him into some new territory, such as on the album’s sultry, complex title track, which even contains a sample (!).
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