New York Times, December 3, 2008

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Is it a talk show if the host sings?


Melena Ryzik

Elvis Costello would be a natural on TV — or so people kept telling him. For years he believed it, entertaining meetings with the BBC and others as far back as the late 1980s about developing his own show. But nothing stuck, even after he filled in as a host of Late Show when David Letterman was recovering from shingles in 2003.

Cue Elton John. John and David Furnish, his partner, are friends of Costello's through his wife, the jazz singer and pianist Diana Krall. So last year, when Furnish was approached by a Canadian production company about creating a music-oriented program, one frontman came to mind.

"David and I were sitting in our house in France," John said in a phone interview, "and we said, wouldn't it be great to do a proper, full-length musical show, because we live in a sound-bite culture. Elvis has experience, he's got an encyclopedic knowledge of music. We're both completely anorak, as they say in Britain, geeks or nerds, on music. He's the one."

The result is Spectacle: Elvis Costello With..., an hourlong show set to debut on the cable television network Sundance Channel on Wednesday. It is a mix of music and talk and music-oriented talk, with Costello, 54, serving as host and musical director; he also performs for — or with — all his guests.

Stylistically it is a blend of The Dick Cavett Show, Inside the Actors Studio and Charlie Rose, with singers like Tony Bennett, Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright and Smokey Robinson discussing their history and influences at length. (John is the guest on the premiere episode.)

While artists talking shop have long been a draw on cable — on Sundance's Iconoclasts they come from different genres — the appeal of Spectacle has much to do with Costello's intergenerational coolness.

Still, when Costello was approached, he didn't bite at first. "Well, I could do it," he recalled thinking. "But shall we?"

He was persuaded in part because there was "no compulsion to talk about the new product, the thing that's coming out next week," he said. "And nobody's saying, 'Wind it up after a couple seconds because we've got to get to the recipes."'

Instead there are more likely to be call-outs to semi-obscure musicians and discussions of the origins of the singer-songwriter. Each show begins with Costello performing a song written by or inspired by his guest — "Bordertown" in John's case; "If I Only Had a Brain" from The Wizard of Oz for Wainwright ("Rufus's songs are too difficult for me to sing," Costello said, so he referenced his re-creation of Judy Garland's Carnegie Hall concert) and Elvis Presley's "Mystery Train" for Bill Clinton, who will appear on the Dec. 17 episode. There are 13 episodes in all, taped in front of audiences at the Apollo Theater. Guests with the house band have included the guitarist Bill Frisell and the bassist Charlie Haden.

"When I met him for our pitch, he said, 'I want this be to a show about genres of music that may have been forgotten, about artists that haven't been in the spotlight and people performing in a way they haven't before,"' said Laura Michalchyshyn, the general manager of the Sundance Channel, who considered Costello's Letterman gig a de facto audition.

Before this interview in his Midtown hotel suite, Costello gulped a bit of soup while standing up. It had been one of those mad days, he said. But he was as sharply dressed as ever, in a gray hat, stiff-shouldered dark suit, blue floral shirt, pointy patent-leather shoes, black scarf printed with red skulls and several silver bracelets. Everything about him seemed rakish, from the tilt of his hat to the angle at which he finally sat on the couch, caressing a furry brown pillow.

He's an eager talker, though on the show he is equally — visibly — adept at listening. He keeps notes on a clipboard, à la David Frost, and, with a small staff, conducts research — he even visited Reed's studio — scouts for video and writes questions. For Clinton's appearance he uncovered other presidential musicians (Thomas Jefferson played the clavichord; John Quincy Adams, the flute), and asked him whether his speechifying was helped by the rhythm he learned as a saxophonist. ("Absolutely.")

Costello came up with the name of the show and was particular about its look. "It's not overlit," he said. "That's always bugged me about television. You feel like meat in a butcher's."

Making his guests comfortable enough to pierce the usual celebrity gabfest was paramount.

No one seems particularly concerned that the program has a definite baby-boomer slant. Though Sundance executives made suggestions about guests, in the end Costello, and Furnish and John, the show's executive producers, made most of the invitations themselves. "Not everybody that plays an instrument is actually that interesting," Costello said.

John added, "I just wanted to make a deeply intelligent set of programs that, in years to come, people can look back on as a historical reference."

Despite that shared interest in history, after more than three decades in the music business Costello was tiring of pop stardom himself; last year he was telling friends that he was done making records. "And I really believed it," he said. "It wasn't so much the making the record, it was all the other nonsense." Instead he made guest appearances on albums by Lucinda Williams, Jenny Lewis — she's also on the show — and Fall Out Boy. That last request came as a surprise: "I didn't even know they existed," he said. (He agreed, he said, because they seemed sincere.)

The collaboration with Lewis, an indie siren, spurred him to make another album with his band, the Imposters, and her as guest, called Momofuku, after Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen noodles. Though John is already talking about another season of Spectacle — he has lined up Eminem as a guest — the executives at Sundance are more measured. The show is a co-production of four studios in three countries, including Channel Four in Britain and the international distributor Fremantle Media (American Idol). "It's the four sets of financiers who will have a big post-mortem once the show goes on the air," Michalchyshyn said.

In the meantime Costello is not giving up live music. "Singing in front of a band is like standing in front of a jet engine," he said. "I'm not looking for a long-term career in television."

He added, "I don't watch television." Especially when he's on it: "How horrifying."

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New York Times, December 3, 2008


Melena Ryzik profiles Elvis Costello.

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