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A few years ago, when introducing a magazine list of 500 albums he thought essential to anyone's life, Elvis Costello wrote: "It is my experience that music is more like water than a rhinoceros: it doesn't charge madly down one path; it runs away in every direction."
He could have been speaking of his own fluid musical career — its many directions since 1977, from pop, country and R&B to jazz collaborations, classical song cycle and orchestrated works, may seem dizzying to the uninitiated (and occasionally to the converted). They all have at their heart the phrase he used a decade ago as the title of a now typically eclectic concert: a case for song.
"There are lots of different ways to write songs," says Costello during the first part of two lengthy discussions we have as he begins recording an album with legendary New Orleans R&B songwriter and producer Allen Toussaint. And Costello seems to be working his way through every one of them.
When he toured Australia a year ago it was in the company of his "beat group," the Imposters, playing pumped-up R&B, country and rock 'n' roll. His album with the Imposters had been preceded by North, an album of subdued piano-and-vocal-based songs that drew equally from classic American songbook writing and 19th-century German song, or lieder.
A few months ago, he was on stage in New York as part of a star-studded jazz concert in aid of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, playing one of the Charles Mingus songs for which he has written the lyrics and vocal line. He followed that with a concert at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, where he performed a set between soul giants Solomon Burke and Aretha Franklin ("so, no pressure at all," Costello says, ruefully).
But wait, there's more. He arrives in Sydney next month for a three-part, four-night series during the Sydney Festival, where he will perform markedly different concerts with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Brodsky Quartet and a guest soprano, and his long-time pianist, Steve Nieve, including excerpts from his unfinished opera based on the life of Hans Christian Andersen.
Before his arrival, he will release a double album, My Flame Burns Blue, featuring a suite version of Il Sogno — his orchestrated score for an Italian ballet company production of A Midsummer Night's Dream — and a live concert accompanied by Dutch jazz/swing/classical group the Metropole Orkest, where they performed music Costello had written or arranged for chamber group, orchestra, soprano, rock group and jazz big-band.
For all its complexity and variety, the Metropole concert is notable for its energy, freedom and obvious pleasure. "That word 'playing' has the word 'play' in it for a reason," says a pleased Costello, who explains that this album is the delayed realisation of a plan he and his record company hatched to help his audience bridge the gap between Costello the songwriter and Costello the composer before the release of Il Sogno on CD.
"People tend to get slightly suspicious when they approach a record that's outside of their regular experience of music. One of the ways that we could ensure there might be some more people out there intrigued by it would be to explain how I came, musically speaking, to write an instrumental piece on that scale," Costello says. "Obviously, I didn't go to school on it; I went to school on it through experience. And that experience had been gathered over a 10- to 12-year period. And this album tells an interesting story of all these different types of songs and the book of arrangements that had been developed and adapted and then all caught on the fly, on one occasion."
Of course, this decade in which Costello has been writing outside rock and pop forms is only part of the story. Born Declan Patrick MacManus in 1954, the third generation in a four-generation (so far) family tradition of working musicians, Costello was brought up in a London house overflowing with music. His father, Ross MacManus, was a trumpeter and singer with the show bands that ruled British radio and concert halls after the war and his mother, Lillian, ran jazz clubs and managed a record store.
Family legend has it that among Declan's first words were "Siameses" and "skin," referring to his preferred songs: Peggy Lee's "The Siamese Cat Song" and Frank Sinatra's version of Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin." That early fondness for classic American song and a nascent interest in the jazz that was always played around the house soon merged with his love of the Beatles and, in particular, soul and R&B.
Why was an Irish-Anglo boy in London and, briefly, Liverpool, so taken with the sound of black America? The answer could well explain Costello the musical polymath as much as MacManus the inquisitive boy.
"I suppose I am attracted to the passionate side of it," Costello says. "I know that I feel it can deliver ideas, that the style and the power of the records I loved — whether it be records tipped towards the blues end of the equation or the rhythm end of the equation — was what we called, when I was growing up, 'soul music'. I really love that expression, because it covers so many things in my mind: George Jones, Frank Sinatra, Hank Williams.
"I am also not a very big fan of rock music. I am really a fan of the roll, not the rock," he chuckles. "I am interested in soul, in ballad music that can tell a story or capture a mood and I'm interested in music that swings. I am not interested in square music."
The Beatles
"The first single I ever physically owned was 'Please Please Me,' and it had 'Ask Me Why' on this side, which is another unusual song, even unusual for their early canon. Imagine releasing a song like 'Ask Me Why' or 'Things We Said Today' as a B side. And With the Beatles, that second Beatles album, [it had] great songs like 'Not A Second Time,' 'Devil In Her Heart,' 'You Really Got A Hold On Me.'
"I was exactly the right age to be hit by them full-on. My experience — seizing on every picture, saving money for singles and EPs, catching them on a local news show — was repeated over and over again around the world. It was the first time anything like this had happened on this scale. But it wasn't just about the numbers — Michael Jackson can sell records until the end of time, but he'll never matter to people as much as the Beatles did."
■ The Beatles: With The Beatles (1963).
Charles Mingus
"I remember my dad [trumpeter and singer Ross MacManus] giving me a big stack of records one day that he had been listening to and he thought I would be interested in and Oh Yeah was one of them — a Mingus record. I think that was the first Mingus record I had.
It was a record I played and puzzled on. But bear in mind I was mostly interested in two- or three-minute pop songs.
"These pieces were longer and they didn't have words, all the things that I appreciate people have difficulty approaching when I write songs of a different shape, such as The Juliet Letters or the songs from North, which some people thought didn't have melodies because they didn't have obvious choruses. As a young kid I was just attracted to 'Oh Lord, Don't Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me' [from Oh Yeah] because it was vocal, a way into it I could understand and then, little by little, I became interested in the sound of it. And when I was a bit older and more curious I was still more interested in the gospel-like elements of Mingus, the call-and-response element, the music of gospel rather than necessarily the meaning. I think I was also attracted to the belligerence that the music implies."
■ Charles Mingus: Oh Yeah (1961).
Bruce Springsteen and Randy Newman
Once when asked about some demos of his early '70s band, Flip City, sounding like early Bruce Springsteen, Costello said: "That's who we were copying. When Bruce came to London for the 'future of rock 'n' roll' gigs in 1975, we were like, 'Who are these johnny-come-latelies?' We'd been digging him for years. I loved The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. The songs are so operatic. Then he narrowed it down. I learned something from that. When he wanted to get over, he wrote Born to Run. When I made My Aim Is True, my favourite record was Randy Newman's first album."
■ Bruce Springsteen: The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (1972).
■ Randy Newman: Randy Newman (1968).
Dimitri Shostakovich
Costello went to see the Brodsky Quartet in London in the '80s because he had developed an interest in Shostakovich. He became such a Brodsky fan — as they were of his work — that they decided to work together. This prompted him to learn musical notation, freeing him for his grander orchestral works to come. His Shostakovich interest had begun seriously a few years earlier in Melbourne when he visited the Hill of Content bookshop. "What I like to call the 'Hill of Contempt'. It's one of those bookshops where there is always a book you haven't picked up anywhere else. I picked up a copy of Testimony, which is a supposedly faulty memoir, but it had enough information and it was written in a particularly dreamy way that while I had heard Shostakovich before this told me a lot more about the man.
"I had heard several Russian quartets perform his work, but to see a young — younger than me — quartet playing this music [the Brodsky Quartet series in London] and to see them play all of the quartets over a number of days was pretty amazing."
■ Dimitri Shostakovich: The String Quartets (Brodsky Quartet, 1991).
Franz Schubert
"You can't be a good songwriter if you've never heard Schubert; it doesn't make any sense. If you call yourself a songwriter and don't listen to Schubert, you're not going to know what you're doing. Because there's so much to learn. It's in another language, but the beauty and the economy of the way some of these songs are written is so fantastic. I spent a lot of time listening to what people think of as classical music, or art song, from the 19th century, principally. I mostly start with Schubert and Schumann, two or three titles by Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky. There are 20th-century songs, some of them more folk-influenced, such as Vaughan Williams, including some Britten."
From these, Costello says he went back to madrigals and Monteverdi and Elizabethan composer John Dowland, seeing the connections to folk tunes and more.
"It was good to hear some sort of common feeling between some of these songs from the time of Henry Purcell and songs that I liked in jazz. I just could hear it. I don't think it makes me particularly talented in any way. It's just something that interested me, that area of song. There are lots of different ways to write songs."
■ Franz Schubert: 22 Lieder (boxed set, 1997), Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore, Meerestille.
Aretha Franklin
"Aretha's album I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You is one of the most extraordinary pieces of music. It's so intense. In the same way that I feel about the Beatles — I feel very fondly about With The Beatles even though, if I really analyse it, Revolver is my favourite Beatles record — I'll always have a special affection for the first album of hers I heard.
"But that is a wonderful record that wasn't just a collection of singles, or if it was it certainly doesn't sound like it. I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You has a lot of really great performances, which happened to be recorded around the same time with a really riveting central performer."
■ Aretha Franklin: I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You (1967).
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