Record Collector , 1995 Pt.3

RC: After Goodbye Cruel World" came out you started playing shows as the Coward Brothers with T Bone Burnette. One minute you were Howard Coward, the next you were issuing albums like King Of America" and Blood And Chocolates, where you were masquerading under ridiculous names. Was it all an attempt to get away from people's preconceptions of what Elvis Costello was going to dot

EC: I think my whole career had been that ever since Trust". The name changing and all that stuff-such psychological meanings have been read into it. On the one hand, it's obviously a blessing to have such a powerful image from your first few records, but in the other way, it's limiting, as people only see you in those terms. And when your own record company defines you in those terms, then it becomes difficult, because they're not even helping to promote the new image.

The country record was one attempt to escape, Imperial Bedroom" was another-and not just attempts, either, I was actually doing it. It just goes to show you how powerful the original image was. Until you come up with a suitably contrasting one, you won't really get it over to people. It the singles anyway, but there's some great pieces of music. Shipbuilding" is a beautiful piece, and King Of Thieves" was one of those long, unwieldy, allegorical songs which were made listenable by Clive's production style.

To balance them, we had a thing like Every Day I Write The Book", that anybody could whistle, and that was written in 10 minutes, as a spoof. Originally I tried to do it as a lovers' rock song, and then we grafted on this kind of modern rhythmic treatment. It always begged to be done in some kind of pop style.

RC: It's strange that as you were heading towards the musical mainstream you were writing political songs that couldn't have been further from the spirit of 1983, when Mrs Thatcher won the election.

EC: I think I'm smart enough to know that if you're distancing yourself from the mainstream, less and less people are hearing the things you're saying. The worst thing about being subversive is saying, Now I am being subversive", because people will run away. But there is something subversive about having Every Day I Write The Book" on the same album as shipbuilding" and Pills And Soap".

Pills And Soap" had already been a hit, of course, albeit with a bit of a con trick on the retailers and the BBC, when we threatened to delete it in a week, which helped catapult it into the charts. But in effect it was a broadside, a protest song.

RC: The follow up to that song was Peace In Our Time" on "Goodbye Cruel World". Wasn't there supposed to have been enormous controversy when you performed it on 'The Johnny Carson Show' in the States? What happened

EC: Nothing. It's been written up by Greil Marcus as if it was a great collision between two cultures, which is very flattering, but I was there and he wasn't, and what actually happened is that they couldn't physically hear what I was singing. It just didn't go in.

It was an unsuccessful song in that sense, as it didn't have the musical equipment to get the message over in the way that Shipbuilding" and Pills And Soap" had. It had a pretty melody-not mine, in fact, as I lifted it, but I'm not gonna tell you where from in case I get sued!

RC: After Goodbye Cruel World" came out you started playing shows as the Coward Brothers with T Bone Burnette. One minute you were Howard Coward, the next you were issuing albums like King Of America" and Blood And Chocolates, where you were masquerading under ridiculous names. Was it all an attempt to get away from people's preconceptions of what Elvis Costello was going to dot

EC: I think my whole career had been that ever since Trust". The name changing and all that stuff-such psychological meanings have been read into it. On the one hand, it's obviously a blessing to have such a powerful image from your first few records, but in the other way, it's limiting, as people only see you in those terms. And when your own record company defines you in those terms, then it becomes difficult, because they're not even helping to promote the new image.

The country record was one attempt to escape, Imperial Bedroom" was another-and not just attempts, either, I was actually doing it. It just goes to show you how powerful the original image was. Until you come up with a suitably contrasting one, you won't really get it over to people. It took until 1991 to really do it. But by then, I'd stopped worrying about it, because it wasn't holding me back any more.

I made Goodbye Cruel World", and I was having a miserable time-I was getting divorced-and I basically ran away to sea and went off on a solo tour. I hated the record by the time I got back, I knew we'd got most of it wrong. But we were locked into releasing it or else I would have gone bankrupt, at the exact moment when I couldn't afford to go bankrupt, because I was getting divorced. I couldn't scrap the record, so I let it come out, warts and all.

Now when I hear it, there are some passionate performances in there, but they're muted by the arrangements. But it was no fault of Clive and Alan. I feel apologetic to anyone whose favourite record it is, but I can't lie and say that I think it's a good record- particularly the pop songs, that were put on there with an even more calculating ear for the nuances of the charts.

I had a ball on the solo tour. It was my first time as a professional, but I'd done it a lot in my apprenticeship, as it were. I always enjoyed it. I could pick any song any night. I did lots of covers I'd never done before, like at Threw It All Away", that I didn't get to record until Kodak Variety". I did songs one night and then never again. The American leg was particularly great, and I think I sang the best I've ever sung.

I also met T Bone on that tour and we became great pals. We started having fun with the Coward Brothers thing, which became one of my devices to stop the tour being the sensitive singer songwriter thing, which I'd been dead against. I was a fan of all that

it was the first album I'd done without the Attractions. Originally it was supposed to be half with them and half without, but it just didn't work out. Every session before they came seemed to be more productive than I had anticipated, and the record was at least three quarters done by the time they arrived.

Because of the tension of suddenly shifting from working with them to working with other people, I think it put them on edge and made them defensive and hostile, which made me hostile, and the sessions were a disaster. We just managed one good track, and then they left, and I finished the record with various combinations of people.

RC: A lot of that tension and angst seems to have gone into Blood And Chocolate", which reunited you with the Attractions.

EC: I suppose it might have done, though I tried to push it out of my mind when I got back. I'd agreed to do another record, but it was like, Let's do this one and see how far we can go on". We're pretty much the same now, we haven't really made any great plats to go on forever and ever.

The experience of doing King Of America" without the Attractions showed me one of the problems on the records we'd done with Clive and Alan-the band was simply falling apart. We'd seen too much of one another-familiarity breeding contempt and all those cliches. Time had gone by so quickly, I hadn't realised we'd been working together for eight or nine years. But once we. were in the studio for "Blood And Chocolate", it all worked very well.

On King Of America", I managed to get much more directness than on the previous records, and I thought that if I could do it in Hollywood with these guys I'd never met before, surely I could do it with these people I've worked with for all this time. So we set up and played as loud as we did on stage. It didn't really sound like This Year's Model", but the component parts were just the four of us, and we did very few overdubs. We played as much a combo sound as possible-which is the sound we used on Brutal Youth".

RC: Who were you thinking about when you wrote those lines about You think it's over now" on Uncomplicated "?

EC: I don't know, it just popped into my head. I wrote it in the kitchen. I don't know whether to some extent I was writing the band's own story. I think there's a little bit of that, but I've never been one for writing self consciously about Here's me in my hotel room with my guitar feeling sad about being on the road". I've tried to avoid those. But there were quite a few accounts-not scores-being settled on that record. Then there were some quite personal things on some songs-Battered Old Bird" is like a little bit of my childhood.

Some tracks used the studio in a more sophisticated way, but we were still using raw material. On I Want You", for instance, everything you hear on the last minute of that record is all from my vocal mike. That's the only thing in the mix. You can hear the band, but only when they're bleeding through onto my voice. So it was a really primitive recording-just one mike in the middle of the studio. That's the only way we could achieve that low dynamic

RC: What was going on on Tokyo Storm Warning", besides the end of the world

EC: It was little snapshots put together. It's a protest song too. I love that, it's one of my favourite tracks. It started in Tokyo one time I went there and it was like a sci fi nightmare, which it is sometimes. You can feel as if you've been taken to another planet. Then I just added in these other things, some of which are real-like the Heysel Stadium, the dead Italian tourists", and continuations of the theme of Pills And Soap". It's mixed up, like a camera swirling round. I was always surprised it wasn't a hit. But maybe releasing that and I Want You"-six minute singles, back to back-wasn't the way to do it!

As a man who professes complete indifference to the workings of the rock press, Elvis Costello has occasionally let down his guard. "There is nothing at all the matter with some journalists that a quick slap in the face couldn't sort out", he wrote to one particularly dismissive reviewer of his adventurous song cycle, "The Juliet Letters" in 1993. The feeling has been mutual. After a decade, from "My Aim Is True" to "Blood And Chocolate", during which Costello enjoyed hometown-hero protection from critical disfavour, his work since 1989's "Spike" has been the focus of continual petty sniping. Some times, he's raised his head from the trenches and fired back. Maybe that's the price you pay for ambition. After abandoning his seemingly permanent backing band, the Attractions, in 1987, Costello dared to venture outside the cosy matiness of the London rock scene. Albums like "Spike" and the much under-rated "Mighty Like A Rose", with their Los Angeles sessionmen and guest appearances from the U.S. rock aristocracy, appalled those who reckoned that the man's natural home was singing "Oliver's Army" on stage at the Hammersmith Palais.

But it was the semi-classical "The Juliet Letters" which severed his insider status in the rock press. No matter that the project sparked his most eloquent and compressed Iyric-writing in years: former pub-rockers from the Hope & Anchor circuit weren't supposed to dress up in penguin suits and hang out with the local symphony. A much-hyped reunion with the Attractions -including bassist Bruce Thomas, author of the Elvis-baiting novel, 'The Big Wheel'-for the admittedly impressive "Brutal Youth" restored his favours with the Nick Hornby crowd. But the sneering reviews for "Dark Deep Blue", a mini-album from his genre busting week of concerts during the recent 'Meltdown' festival, confirmed that the rock establishment still finds it hard to accept any Costello record that doesn't comprise three minute Beatlesque pop songs. Without even a biographer in the last eight years to attempt an explanation on his behalf, Costello's recent work can often seem wilfully eccentric, to the point of self-destruction. Which is why it was important to find out where Elvis had been heading, and why, since "Blood And Chocolate" destroyed the predictable progress of his career in 1986. As you'll see, conforming to anyone else's expectations is low on the man's list of priorities. And if that means annoying his audience or his record company

RECORD COLLECTOR: You made about a dozen albums in nine years before you joined Warners. In the nine years since then, youve only issued about half that number. Is there a clause in your contract that says you cant make albums more than every two years or so

ELVIS COSTELLO: I think that their machinery isn't geared up for it to be your turn more often than that, though I have been pushing them and also, I've been working on other things. I've written more songs in this period than in the period before, so from that point of view, my output is higher. I've had the opportunity to do things like, I'm on my third film project now, or fourth if you count the children's thing I did last year, and there have been collaborative things I wouldn't have had time to do if I'd been constantly on the road. The main thing that altered my schedule after 1986 wasn't so much the record contract as the absence of a regular band. It meant that I toured less, because I either toured solo or had to put a band together- and to justify that expense, it had to be in support of a record. When my first album for Warners, "Spike", was made, it was such an ambitious record in terms of instrumentation that I wasn't planning on touring at all with the band. In fact, the first tour I did after "Spike" came out was solo. It was only after the record started to become a success that I assembled a band to go on the road. The success was somewhat unexpected, because all the way through my time at Columbia in America, they kept saying "If you could just do 'This Year's Model' or 'Armed Forces' again, everything would be sorted out. So we gave them stuff that, without actually sitting down and working it out as a formula was as close to that as we could get. With "Blood And Chocolate", we said, "This is us truthfully, we're 32, a couple of us have got divorced, we're pissed off, and we've taken all the drugs and we've done all that stuff and we're still alive, and this is what we sound like. And you know what? We're much much better at it now." They didn't like it. They hated that record at Columbia. So then I went to them and said, listen, I don't want to fuck about like this anymore. You tell me what record you want, and I'll make it for you. You name the producer-I'll go in with him. I11 fight with anybody, I don't care, with Mutt Lange or any of these guys that were making the big hit records of the mid-80s. I'll pit my musical personality, voice and strength of will against his, if that's what it takes. But they didn't want to do that. They said I could make any record I wanted. I said I've got two or three different ideas. I want to make a sort of orchestrated record like Burt Bacharach used to make, using tuned percussion; and I'd like to do some stuff in New Orleans. I've got five other blueprints for records I can make." As it turned out, I ended up on Warners with "Spike", and I combined all those ideas onto the same record. They could all have been different albums, but that seemed a bit indulgent. And oddly enough, that was exactly what I got accused of being when "Spike" came out-though I don't know if people would have thought I was being even more indulgent if I'd done a whole record on each theme. Maybe it would have been more digestible. But I wasn't sure that I actually wanted to sustain any of those themes to that extent. To me, they were all different parts of music that I like. Obviously I moved pretty far away from the Attractions' sound quite consciously. There were a couple of moments that hinted at the old sound: the bad guitar player's friend, the tremolo guitar, features throughout my career, so there's some of that on "Spike". But the arrangements were very different to what I'd done before, partly be cause it was very rare for more than three instruments to be played simultaneously during the sessions. As a result, the arrangements are very painterly, with little bits added here and there, and then you rub that bit out and add another bit-it was a very creative use of the studio. But it frightened the hell out of people who were used to safer, combo sounding arrangements. Then out of the blue we had this massive hit with "Veronica", which was much more successful in America than anything else I' ever done. With the single I wrote with McCartney, "My Brave Face", I suddenly had two Top 20 singles out of nowhere, after year sof Columbia saying "if only he'd do what we told him". Suddenly I was a pop singer again I don't know what the people who bought "Spike" on the basis of hearing "Veronica" on MTV made of the rest of it, particularly "Chewing Gum" or "Miss Macbeth". I think there are some really beautiful songs on that record, and I'm really proud of it. Sometimes when I put it on, I go "What on earth is going on there?", because I've played some of the songs in more concise, more organic band arrangements since I made the album. "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror" has been played by the Rude 5 and then the Attractions, and it's become a very tough R&B song. When you hear the skeletal version on the record with two sets of piano and a tambourine for most of it, and then the Dirty Dozen Brass Band coming in, it's a very peculiar construction. There was also some very light-hearted music on "Spike", like "Pads, Paws & Claws", and "Chewing Gum", the playful stuff that I love. And the album's got "Tramp The Dirt Down", which worked very well on the recorded version, and as a rawer solo performance.

RC: Having seen you perform that live, I always found it rather an uncomfortable experience, as if you were getting a cheap round of applause by hitting an easy target. The audience seemed to be congratulating themselves for hating Margaret Thatcher.

EC: It was cathartic, though. Perhaps better than shooting her, but not very much better.

RC: I almost ended up feeling sorry for her. Remember that Neil Young line in "Campaigner" "Even Richard Nixon has got soul

EC: But she doesn't have a soul. She will burn in hell. I can see what you mean, though. Some times when you see a big gang of people baying for blood, it can be uncomfortable, but that's not my fault. I'm not there in the audience, I'm on the stage singing the song. I hadn't sung "Tramp The Dirt Down" for a while until recently, but I started again be cause the principles that the song was reacting against seemed to be creeping back. But before then I'd stopped singing it, probably for something like the reason that you say, that it's kind of an easy round of applause. But there are times when it seems appropriate. Like any song that's written as a reaction, the further away you are, the more it assumes irony. The distance changes the meaning slightly.

RC: Your next album was "Mighty Like A Rose', which seemed to have more of an organic feel than "Spike".

EC: Maybe it's the presence of a band, even though it was a session band, so it didn't have the same we're-all-in-it-together-and-we're-all on-the-same-payroll mentality about it as the Attractions. Since "King Of America", I'd toured on and off with the Confederates, who were Jerry Scheff, Jim Keltner, Mitchell Froom and James Burton. Elements of that band became the core who played on "Spike", along with Marc Ribot and Michael Blair, and after that I toured with them. So then I recorded "Kojak Variety" in the spring of '90, and after that the original plan was that I would record "Mighty Like A Rose" with the Attractions. We went to Barbados for two weeks and cut "Kojak Variety" as a sort of farewell to that band. I'd been working with them since '85 in the studio and '86 live and it was getting to be like a bunch of old friends. I thought, well, I won't see these guys for a couple of years-maybe not ever again, if I get back going with the Attractions, and we like what we do. So we went and had some fun recording these cover versions. By then I had Larry Knechtal playing piano, who was the only person that I hadn't recorded with up to that point. Then the plan to do the record with the Attractions fell through, so I went back to Hollywood. I still used a floating cast of musicians-James Burton came back in for a couple of things, and Nick Lowe played bass on one track. The drumming was split more evenly between Jim Keltner and Pete Thomas, whereas on "Spike" I used a variety of drummers besides those two. When it came to "Mighty Like A Rose", I just tried to find the solutions to the questions inside a group of musicians, rather than using any instrumentation that flew into my head. Though that isn't to say that there weren't some quite bold arrangements.