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February 2018 and step-by-step, star-by-star, Elvis Costello was making his way to work at EastWest Studios via the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. It was quite a commute: below his feet lay sidewalk-imprinted memorials to various figures of legend... Marlene Dietrich, Harry Houdini, even much-loved silent movie-era canine Rin Tin Tin. Every day, he began to search out more and more obscure names, snapping pics and texting them to his friends.
"It became like a game," he smiles today. "I'd send a picture of somebody I'd found that day and I'd sort of go, 'Do you know who this is?' Because some of the names are not famous. Some of them, they're forgotten to time."
Other names he discovered, however, were very much alive in Costello's mind, since they were involved in Look Now, the record he was making. One day he managed to find the star bearing the name of Carole King, whom he'd written a funky, soulful song with, knee-to-knee, in Dublin a quarter of a century before. Costello had only now pulled "Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter" back out of the drawer for these sessions. "I knew it was a good song and I didn't want to throw it away," he says. "It just never fitted on any record."
Another day, he managed to locate Burt Bacharach's star. Costello and Bacharach had written and recorded an album together, Painted From Memory, back in 1998. For the singer, who'd loved Bacharach and Hal David's songs since he was a child, Burt was, of course, no longer a figure of myth. In fact, four days into the sessions, Costello was en route to meet him and to record two new songs they'd written, "Don't Look Now" and "Photographs Can Lie," both reliably melodically-rich and emotive.
It's worth reminding ourselves that Burt Bacharach is now 90 years old. "Oh, y'know, he was only 89 then," Costello laughs. "But I never think about his age. He doesn't want to talk about it. He doesn't have a sentimentality about it that I can detect. He never has."
Still, for Costello, there's a sense of ongoing wish fulfilment here. In some imagined '60s time slip, it's easy to picture him, sleeves rolled up bashing out the hits alongside Carole King in the Brill Building, , or inking out a lyric as Burt Bacharach sits at the piano dreaming up strings and horn parts. "Well actually, that's what I set out to do, to be a songwriter," he points out. "So I've got my wish."
A wish that at one time seemed impossibly remote. He still has vivid childhood memories of accompanying his father, big band frontman Ross MacManus, up and down Denmark Street as he attempted to hawk a song to the publishers of London's Tin Pan Alley. "My dad wrote a few songs," he says. "He didn't get many things published. But he was taking a song around and it was pretty much a sad thing, probably. Y'know, you don't notice it when it's your dad. But I'm sure it was about the same welcome as I got later."
By his early twenties, Costello's ambitions were to become a songwriter first, a performer second. In 1974/75, pop stars looked like David Essex, not Declan MacManus.
"I had a face for radio, y'know," he chuckles. "I knew that much. Or I didn't fit. So I went to publishers. I'd arrive with a guitar and make them listen to me. 'Cos I just believed everything that was in Jimmy Durante movies: 'I gotta song fer ya...'"
We know how the story unfolded: the provocative name change in '77, the donning of the horn-rims and the foregrounding of his sneery punk-ish attitude. Elvis Costello became a very different kind of bandleader from his father, fronting the rattling, thrilling Attractions. But still, particularly in those early days of doggedly touring America, it was his songs that kept him afloat. When Linda Ronstadt covered Costello's first future standard, the aching "Alison," in '78, the singer publicly turned up his nose at her comparatively syrupy treatment of the song, while at the same time stating, "I didn't mind spending the money that she earned me."
"I wasn't terribly gracious," he almost winces now. "I'm immensely grateful in retrospect."
In truth, the most important thing for him was ploughing the money back into keeping The Attractions on the road. For all of his songwriting adventures outside his erstwhile group and now The Imposters, he has always been a band man at heart. "You can find posters with us and Talking Heads playing in Seattle for 99 cents," he says, reflecting upon those first Attractions tours. "So how were we making any money? We weren't. That first year was touch-and-go. So being a songwriter was the important thing. Because we probably wouldn't be sitting here right now."
Here right now is on the opposite coast of America, in Studio A of the Jimi Hendrix-founded Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, New York. After Los Angeles, this fabled facility was Costello's next stop in the creation of Look Now. Whereas in California, he'd recorded in Studio Three of EastWest, formerly United Recorders, where Pet Sounds was made, in New York he was working in a room that had once reverberated with the sounds of Stevie Wonder nailing down "Superstition" and Bowie and Lennon trading lines on "Fame."
Electric Lady seems in many ways unchanged from its golden era. Hendrix's artist friend Lance Jost's psychedelic space fantasia canvases still adorn the walls of the corridors and live room. An enormous faded photograph of a naked female gazing side-on at the lens, an outtake from the shoot for '68's Electric Ladyland, is mounted in the lounge, where Costello — in navy shirt, cream baseball cap and aviator shades — sips from a bottle of water as outside the city boils in a 35-degree August heat.
Earlier this year, on Monday, March 12, the day that the Look Now sessions moved here, Costello received a phone call from his doctor calmly informing him that a recent test the singer had undergone had proved positive for a "small, but very aggressive" male-afflicting cancer. Only four months later — post-surgery (and having been given the all-clear) — did Costello reveal the health scare, if not the exact details of it, in a statement, when he was forced to cancel some European dates.
"At first I wasn't going to tell anybody," he shrugs. "Cos I figured it wasn't really that dramatic. I went back to work too early and it was as simple as that, y'know. I over-calculated my ability to recover. The advisories for this kind of surgery say it takes between three and four weeks, depending on whether you have a desk job or an active job. Well, guess what, my job is not quite being an Olympic runner. But it's something like sprint, recover, travel 500 miles on a bus overnight."
Pete Thomas, Attractions and Imposters drummer of 40 years standing, says he was impressed with how coolly Costello dealt with the diagnosis and treatment. "Cos that stuff can freak you out," he stresses. "In retrospect, he probably should've taken a bit more time before we went on the road. I think he was a bit too gung ho. Because his whole thing has always been, y'know, he is designed to win. He does not lose."
Yet Costello admits that, pre-surgery, singing the songs for Look Now at the microphone in a Vancouver studio, mortality was on his mind. Particularly when he had to deliver the words "allow me to just dictate my dying will" in strummy, upbeat opener "Under Lime": "Oh yeah, it was a bit weird when I got to that line (laughs). Knowing that the procedure was up ahead... it's gotta sharpen you up. I mean, there's no better reason to be alert to the moment."
For this reason, and many others besides, Look Now is a particularly vital-sounding collection of songs and performances that ranks up there with Costello's very best records. It's especially welcome since, after the commercial under-performance of 2010's 16-track-long, wide-ranging and unfairly-overlooked National Ransom, he announced that he was done with making albums altogether.
Long-time keyboard sidekick Steve Nieve wasn't so sure if he believed him. "In a one-word answer... no," Nieve laughs. "He's got a fire inside of him that he can't put out."
Thanks to Bacharach's presence, there are inevitable shades of Painted From Memory in parts of Look Now, though mostly it's a record coloured with soul, partially inspired by Dusty In Memphis. The last few years saw Costello sporadically emailing song demos to his Imposters bandmates, often simply recorded through the microphone of his iPad at home in Vancouver. Bit by bit, the others built up a file of over 30 songs. When the singer told Pete Thomas that he'd been steeping himself in Springfield's 1969 classic, the
drummer set himself a task of trying to cherry-pick Costello's demos into a playlist that matched the running order of Dusty In Memphis in tempo and tone.
"I just sent it to Elvis and said, Well, actually, you've got an album that would pretty much do the same thing. Y'know, if you did this one a bit faster and if you did this a bit funkier... There was no big masterplan or anything. It was just something I did. But for some reason, it tickled his fancy and sort of got him going. 'Cos he wrote back and he was like, 'Y'know what? You might be onto something here.'"
"Pete didn't make the [ultimate] choices," Costello says. "But his thinking about it made me think, Well, OK, maybe there is enough already written here that would at least make a start.
There was one other important springboard into the sound of Look Now, namely Costello and The Imposters' 2017 US live revival of his 1982 album Imperial Bedroom, under the banner of the Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers tour. That record's intricate baroque pop arrangements were a creative high watermark for Costello and band upon its release, being effectively the close of the first chapter of the story of Elvis and The Attractions that had taken them from the propulsive pop of This Year's Model and Armed Forces through the '60s soul combo shapes of Get Happy!! and the dalliance with country covers on Almost Blue.
Back in '82, for the first time, here they were in a top-flight recording studio, AIR on Oxford Street, with a producer, Geoff Emerick, whose experience on the sessions for the latter Beatles albums (Revolver onwards) could help bring to life Costello's orchestrated visions.
"That really felt like something when we were there," says Costello. "You'd look out the little porthole window down at Oxford Circus and there's all these people going home. Thinking of it now, it seems very romantic.
Pete Thomas's memories of making Imperial Bedroom are slightly blurrier. "I remember it being another level of intoxication," he laughs. "When we did "Beyond Belief," I'd been up all night. Elvis said I could have one go at it, and if I didn't get it right, I was fired. "But, yeah, it was fantastic. Paul McCartney was in the next studio [recording Tug Of War]. Ringo came in at one point and just listened to what we were doing. We'd been playing for four or five years and the band was really good, and they were great songs. We all loved that Beatle style of doing things. We were definitely ready to give it a shot and it was amazing. Steve came up with all those arrangements, which we didn't really know he could do."
 However, trying to replicate those expansive strings-and-brass arrangements on-stage in the early '80s with the limited digital keyboard technology of the day was a hit-and-mostly-miss affair. Existing YouTube evidence of the band (sandwiched on the bill between Genesis and Blondie) bravely attempting to tackle "...And In Every Home" at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia in August '82 comes over like Sgt. Pepper suffering austerity cuts.
"So feeble," Costello grins. "We had this machine, an Emulator, and Steve played sort of a distillation of his arrangement. We never had the patience to unravel the puzzle of how to play that music live. We'd done it in the studio and then we went and sort of just kinda ran at the songs... the way we ran at everything."
"It was all over the place," says Thomas. "I mean, it never sounded like the record. It was always about three times faster."
By the 2017 tour, the tech was now in place to replicate those sounds. And the band's handling of the Imperial Bedroom structures fed directly into Look Now. "It definitely showed us that we could do something more ornate," Thomas adds. "That we could be more organised, really. As opposed to our normal sort of crash-bang-wallop approach to things. I think Elvis saw that we could approach trickier material and orchestrations in a grown-up way. That we were probably old enough now to do it (laughs)."
Costello admits that shining a light on the darker corners of his catalogue during last year's jaunt proved instructive in moving forward.
"Some of the songs that have a powerful reaction in the audience were never even singles," he says. "A song like "Almost Blue" or "Man Out Of Time," to take two from that album, have endured through repetition. Joni Mitchell came to our show at UCLA and she came back after and said, 'Who wrote "The Long Honeymoon"?' And I went, I did..."
The singer has talked up Look Now as striving for a combination of the melodic splendour of Painted From Memory and the elaboration of Imperial Bedroom. Today, he retreats slightly from that position.
"I wouldn't hang too much on that remark I made," he insists. "All I was saying was the scope of Imperial Bedroom, if I started to do it now, it would be different. I'm in a different place in my life. The perspective of the lyrical writing is very different, the type of things I know how to do are different and the band have all this accumulated experience."
That band, of course, being The Imposters, not The Attractions. After the latter group initially fell apart following a last Glastonbury performance in 1987, bassist Bruce Thomas penned a touring memoir, The Big Wheel, in 1990, which portrayed the never-named Costello ("The Singer") as a grumpy control freak. Although relations between the two were sufficiently repaired for The Attractions to reunite in the '90s for touring and two albums, Brutal Youth (1994) and All This Useless Beauty (1996), the wounds were soon reopened, with Thomas later admitting that he was "deliberately fucking it up" on-stage.
Costello, Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas regrouped as The Imposters with former Cracker bassist Davey Faragher in 2001. Still, it was a highly unusual move to change the band's name due to the departure of one member who'd seemingly stopped caring.
"A lot of groups would just carry on," Thomas accepts. "They would just call it Elvis Costello And The Attractions with another bass player. But Bruce was a big part of The Attractions. Also, because it was after a break, it was the idea of starting fresh. Davey is more like an R&B player really, whereas Bruce was more of a melodic player. With Davey's approach, things tended to sort of groove more."
"We're not The Rolling Stones," says Costello, "where you have somebody playing like Bill Wyman. We're a different group playing a different way with a different sensibility. We've changed over 40 years, not stayed the same for 40 years. That's the big difference. We're not trying to be a replica of what we did before."
It's tempting to wonder, though, in this age of the nostalgia tour, whether any promoters have suggested to Costello that changing the name of The Imposters to The Attractions would help them sell more tickets?
"No. 'Cos they wouldn't necessarily," argues Costello. "That's a long time ago. Nobody cares except a handful of people who've been worrying too much about all of these things far too long. You know what? That other band? It ain't ever coming back."
"The three of them already had a chemistry," says Davey Faragher, who first met Pete Thomas on the Los Angeles session scene. "Y'know, at first I was trying to honour the original bass parts, which I still do on The Attractions' stuff. But I have a different feel from Bruce really. I probably gave it just a slightly different slant."
That much was evident with the first appearance of The Imposters on record, 2002's When I Was Cruel. The high emotional intensity of The Attractions was still there, but along with it came a new soulful slinkiness in songs such as "Spooky Girlfriend" and with the retro-future lounge groove of partial title track "When I Was Cruel No. 2."
"When I Was Cruel was gonna be a beatbox record," says Costello, "and then I sort of ran out of the angles that that really could sustain. Some of the songs just needed a rock 'n' roll band playing them. I mean, The Imposters, they play as a team. (Laughs) Which wasn't always the case with The Attractions."
Through 2004's Mississippi-recorded The Delivery Man, elegant 2006 collaboration with Allen Toussaint, The River In Reverse, 2008's raw-edged Momofuku and parts of National Ransom, The Imposters proved their twin capabilities for drive and soul.
"He's taken us on many great adventures," Nieve says of Costello. "We had an amazing adventure with Allen Toussaint and investigated all that kind of stuff. Some of the things that we learned from that are apparent on this album."
'The Singer' holds, however, that not until Look Now has the power and musicality of The Imposters been fully captured in the studio. The others say there might be a good reason for that. In much the same urgent, production-be-damned manner shared by Bob Dylan and Neil Young, Costello often switches the red "recording" light on as quickly as possible, trying to capture lightning in a bottle. Even if that bottle ends up getting cracked in the process.
"Elvis is not the world's most patient person," says Thomas. "If we're in the studio and we're all set up, like we were for Momofuku or even The Delivery Man, if he's got his mic and he's got his guitar on, then he wants to get going. It's like, 'Follow me, come on.' It's fantastic, y'know, but it doesn't give you a lot of time to hone your parts. If he feels he's got the vocal, then that's the take."
"There's something to be said for that," adds Faragher. "But then there's always compromises. It has a certain something and you can't deny it. But then the bridge is fucked up or something (laughs)."
Keeping the band — and himself — on their toes was a theme Costello revived on the 2011-13 world tour, a reprise of his 1986 Spectacular Spinning Songbook show, with its wheel of fortune rotated by lucky audience members, randomly selecting tunes from a pool of 150.
"It was a bit challenging," Faragher admits. "Some of the songs wouldn't come up for three weeks and you're like, Oh shit. It's not like his songs are simple either."
"The musical side of it was very erratic," says Costello, "because we didn't know what we were gonna get. Some nights we'd get four finale numbers first. Other nights we'd get four ballads."
Far more demanding were Costello and The Imposters' shows in Europe this summer, after their leader's too-swift post-surgery return to the stage. The June 21 gig at Madrid's outdoor Real Jardín Botánico Alfonso XIII proved particularly problematic, and dramatic, when the singer chose to tackle his brilliant but lung-busting '96 Bacharach co-write, the all-too-fittingly-titled "God Give Me Strength."
"We're playing in a botanical garden," Costello says, "so in addition to everything else that was going on, there were these heavily-scented blossoms in there. It totally shut my voice down, like an allergic reaction, y'know. I have slight asthma and just certain types of pollen trigger it."
"Pollen?" laughs Thomas. "What a load of bollocks. I mean, there might have been a bit of pollen. But about halfway through, I think he almost fainted. He actually had a bit of an episode. But he kept going and there's people in the audience going, 'Come on man! You can do it!'"
"Pete said, 'You looked really weird,'" grins Costello.
"I went for this note and heaven knows what note I hit. No wonder the audience reacted, 'cos the last time they saw somebody do something like that, they were producing a sword from behind a cape (laughs). I plunged it into the neck of a song."
"But that's who he is," Thomas adds. "He's not just gonna walk off and go, 'Fuck this, I'm going home.' He will see it through if it kills him. He would rather drop dead than screw up 'Pump It Up.' He will motor on until all the wheels have fallen off."
Throughout all of this, there is a strong feeling that — for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer — The Imposters have got each other's backs. "The thing that really impressed me," says Look Now producer Sebastian Krys, "was just how supportive they were of each other in the studio. If something wasn't going well, if somebody was getting a little bit discouraged about something going on, another member would just sorta go, 'No, let's just keep going on, we'll get this.' It really amazed me just how much they trust each other and each other's sensibility."
"Three of us have shared a good part of the last 40 years," emphasises Costello. "And we're not in the slightest bit sentimental. But things start to happen. You start to go through big transitions, and inevitably you start to really appreciate the friendship, as well as the musical collaboration."
"I mean, I look at Elvis and Steve, and Davey," says Thomas, "and they're my friends. When we play together now and we're in our sixties, it's a fantastic feeling. It's not nostalgia, or if it is, it's absolutely fine. But there's all this history there."
It's perhaps venturing into dodgy territory to ask Pete Thomas and Steve Nieve what they believe age and wisdom have brought to Costello: notorious for flashes of belligerence in his early career. But here we go.
"He's a lot more kind of approachable now," reckons the drummer. "I think for a long while he was 'Elvis Costello'. Not exactly Mr Angry, but he had this thing, and sometimes it was hard to get through to him."
"Age has brought to Elvis a kindness," explains the keyboardist. "His three sons, I think, bring him a different kind of complexity that I really like. Elvis was always a very wise man. But now he's more fluid and he has more branches to his tree when he writes his songs. His songs have become more and more deep and more and more surprising."
Ask Costello himself the same age/wisdom question and he laughs as he compares himself — less than three weeks before his 64th birthday — to Archie Rice, the struggling music hall performer played by Laurence Olivier in Tony Richardson's 1960 film The Entertainer.
"That's my role model," he offers, a mischievous glint in his eyes detectable through those aviator sunglasses. "Seedy sort of fading glory down the seaside. They asked me recently would I contribute to the campaign to save Hastings Pier? I said, 'Well, I didn't save it the night I played there...'"
But seriously, folks. There has been in latter years, Costello admits, a slow and gradual coming to terms with his past. "It's coming around to feeling it's OK if people want to hear your 40-year-old songs," he concludes. "In fact, it's an actual compliment. But what you don't want to do is stop at that and become self-satisfied. You've got to push on."
In other words, there's plenty left to achieve. Not least that star bearing the name "Elvis Costello" on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.
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