Hot Press, January 14, 2022: Difference between revisions
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'''The bright, shiny, and brilliant ''The Boy Named If'' is the latest chapter in the on-going Elvis Costello show, and 2022's first must-own album. "I'm always anxious to do anything that's a new adventure, because you come out of it knowing something you didn't know when you went in," he tells Pat Carty. | '''The bright, shiny, and brilliant ''The Boy Named If'' is the latest chapter in the on-going Elvis Costello show, and 2022's first must-own album. "I'm always anxious to do anything that's a new adventure, because you come out of it knowing something you didn't know when you went in," he tells Pat Carty. | ||
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The 15-minute interview, as the great Pete Paphides recently pointed out, is a tricky customer. For every one where 15 minutes is about 10 minutes too long, there are many where an hour, or two, doesn't even scratch the surface. Having spent decades listening to his music — I could point at eight albums, ''at least'', that are unquestionable classics — as well as closely reading his interviews, sleeve notes, and that marvellous autobiography, ''Unfaithful Music | The 15-minute interview, as the great Pete Paphides recently pointed out, is a tricky customer. For every one where 15 minutes is about 10 minutes too long, there are many where an hour, or two, doesn't even scratch the surface. Having spent decades listening to his music — I could point at eight albums, ''at least'', that are unquestionable classics — as well as closely reading his interviews, sleeve notes, and that marvellous autobiography, <!-- Unfaithful Music And Disappearing Ink --> ''Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink'', I've always suspected that Elvis Costello would fall into the latter category. Having said that, will we take the 15 minutes on offer? Of course we will. | ||
Costello is on the Zoom circuit to push his new album with The Imposters, ''The Boy Named If'', which is a very good, loud, clanging rock 'n' roll record, and not a million miles away from some of those classics recorded with his first backing band and alluded to above. Indeed, in the circulated press materials, Costello has this to say: "This year, ''This Year's Model'' came back to surprise us in another tongue. That edition is called ''Spanish Model''. Both that album and ''The Boy Named If'' are records that are happening right now and if you want to draw a line between them, go right ahead." | Costello is on the Zoom circuit to push his new album with The Imposters, ''The Boy Named If'', which is a very good, loud, clanging rock 'n' roll record, and not a million miles away from some of those classics recorded with his first backing band and alluded to above. Indeed, in the circulated press materials, Costello has this to say: "This year, ''This Year's Model'' came back to surprise us in another tongue. That edition is called ''Spanish Model''. Both that album and ''The Boy Named If'' are records that are happening right now and if you want to draw a line between them, go right ahead." | ||
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it back to me with the drums in place. Then I sent it to Davey [Faragher, Imposters bass-playing hero who's also togged out for Richard Thompson and John Hiatt]." | it back to me with the drums in place. Then I sent it to Davey [Faragher, Imposters bass-playing hero who's also togged out for Richard Thompson and John Hiatt]." | ||
[[image:2022-01-14 Hot Press page 44.jpg| | [[image:2022-01-14 Hot Press page 44.jpg|x140px|border|right]] | ||
"I don't really think it's influenced by anything from the past," he says, returning to my first question. "The uninhibited way we're playing, and the trust that we have in each other, is why it came out sounding energetic and vivid. The songs are about different times in life; you're leaving all the wonder and magical things of childhood, and getting into lust and algebra when you're a teenager, then you're in your early twenties and you don't know what's right and wrong, but everything's exciting. | "I don't really think it's influenced by anything from the past," he says, returning to my first question. "The uninhibited way we're playing, and the trust that we have in each other, is why it came out sounding energetic and vivid. The songs are about different times in life; you're leaving all the wonder and magical things of childhood, and getting into lust and algebra when you're a teenager, then you're in your early twenties and you don't know what's right and wrong, but everything's exciting. | ||
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<span style="font-size:120%">''' | <span style="font-size:120%">'''Everyday I Write The Book </span> | ||
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''The Boy Named If'' certainly achieves that and it's housed in a rather fetching package, bedecked with illustrations from the hand of one Eamon Singer, a Costello alias responsible for the cover art of ''Blood & Chocolate'' and ''Look Now'', amongst others. | ''The Boy Named If'' certainly achieves that and it's housed in a rather fetching package, bedecked with illustrations from the hand of one <!-- Eamon Singer --> Eamonn Singer, a Costello alias responsible for the cover art of ''Blood & Chocolate'' and ''Look Now'', amongst others. | ||
"I have to say it was quite a personal reason why I took to scribbling more avidly in recent times," Costello explains. "My mother got very ill, she had a stroke. I was waiting by her bedside for about five weeks. When you're in a hospital ward and somebody's screaming, somebody's sleeping, somebody's crying, and somebody's complaining, you can't take a guitar in there. I wanted to do something to keep myself from worry. And something I could do very quietly, without imposing myself on anybody else, was to just sit there with this electric pencil and scribble away. Gradually, the pictures got more and more ridiculous, macabre and humorous in some cases. They weren't anything to do with her circumstances, I was thinking about work I was doing." | "I have to say it was quite a personal reason why I took to scribbling more avidly in recent times," Costello explains. "My mother got very ill, she had a stroke. I was waiting by her bedside for about five weeks. When you're in a hospital ward and somebody's screaming, somebody's sleeping, somebody's crying, and somebody's complaining, you can't take a guitar in there. I wanted to do something to keep myself from worry. And something I could do very quietly, without imposing myself on anybody else, was to just sit there with this electric pencil and scribble away. Gradually, the pictures got more and more ridiculous, macabre and humorous in some cases. They weren't anything to do with her circumstances, I was thinking about work I was doing." | ||
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"You picked an unusual one as an example. First of all, the reason they exist is because I wanted there to be a physical object that people could hold in their hands. We all, I'm sure, like the accessibility of being able to call up a number on your computer, and hear it right away. The downside is any suggestion of a programme in which you're supposed to initially consider music is very fractured by that delivery. It's like you toss the songs into the stream, and then they just float away, like a bunch of sticks. | "You picked an unusual one as an example. First of all, the reason they exist is because I wanted there to be a physical object that people could hold in their hands. We all, I'm sure, like the accessibility of being able to call up a number on your computer, and hear it right away. The downside is any suggestion of a programme in which you're supposed to initially consider music is very fractured by that delivery. It's like you toss the songs into the stream, and then they just float away, like a bunch of sticks. | ||
"Having arrived at the idea that the songs were a collection of stories, children's stories or people acting like children, and having gone so far as to draw the cover, with a story within a picture, I thought, why don't we | "Having arrived at the idea that the songs were a collection of stories, children's stories or people acting like children, and having gone so far as to draw the cover, with a story within a picture, I thought, why don't we | ||
just make a book. Very quickly, I wrote these short stories. What happened immediately before the song started playing? What happens immediately after? What's happened in the background when this is happening in the foreground and vice versa? | |||
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"You don't have to see the story book to enjoy the songs, you also don't have to know that 'The Difference' is based on a line from Pawel Pawlikowski's film ''Cold War'' but it is, as was 'I Do' on ''Clockface''. We had a discussion about the possibility of adapting that film for the stage. 'The Difference' comes from a specific line in the film, you'll find it if you watch it again. Sometimes a line in Shakespeare or a line in the Bible can inspire a song. 'Watching the Detectives' doesn't specifically refer to a film noir, but it's obviously about somebody becoming very absorbed with detective film or detective show, whatever you imagine it to be. | |||
"I've always taken cues in songs from unusual sources, sometimes they're experience, sometimes they're observation. I can think of maybe five songs on ''Brutal Youth'' that have either titles, images, or whole narratives that come from paintings. I didn't say that at the time because people would have thought I was out of my mind. That wouldn't have lined up with, 'Oh, he's back with the old band and aren't they rocking?' That was easier to say than actually listen to what songs are about. | |||
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<span style="font-size:120%">'''For The Stars </span> | |||
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''Brutal Youth'' is one of my favourite Costello records, partly because it rocks, but I take his point. Elvis is still talking so I'm not going to stop him. Sticking with songwriting I point at the scene in ''The Beatles: Get Back'' where McCartney — who Costello is no stranger to — pulls "Get Back" out of the air and ask if it ever works like that for him. | |||
"It can do, it can do," he considers. "I know that you can will a song into existence. I found it comforting that even The Beatles have to just sing nonsense words sometimes until the real words emerge. You've got the rhythm, you've got the cadence, the melody, you've got everything but the sense, and sometimes that's the last thing to appear. Sometimes it's the first thing and you could propose two or three different tunes to carry that idea. | |||
"There is no hard and fast rule. If I knew how to do it, I'd do it all day long, and I'd be writing songs for Adele. Some people talk about it as a muse thing, sometimes it feels trance-like, and sometimes it's just work. Because these songs were written close together, there was obviously some connection. But I didn't sit down and say I'm going to write a concept record like a Yes album. It wasn't that kind of thinking at all." | |||
Thank God for that, says I, and Elvis nods in agreement. There's a reissue of that ''Painted From Memory'' collaboration with Burt Bacharach mentioned earlier due this year. Costello seemed only too happy to expound on it at length. The clock had now gone out the window so I just sat back and enjoyed listening to the man talk. | |||
"Burt's effect on me as a listener goes right back to Perry Como singing 'Magic Moments' on television in the '50s," he reflects. "I can remember that very vividly. I really have a very strong memory of hearing Cilla sing 'Anyone Who Had A Heart' and not knowing why it made me feel peculiar. The music's really odd. You probably know it's written in different time signatures, and for a slow song, it has this weird effect on you, because it breaks out of metre. | |||
"As I got older, I could appreciate that sort of carnal or sensual implication of so many of Burt's songs. There are songs I could point at, before Burt and I ever met, where I was attempting to speak in that kind of language, with differing degrees of success. Maybe it's better that I couldn't get closer to the model and I just came up with my own song like 'Accidents Will Happen.' I{{nb}}remember thinking, 'That's sort of like Burt.' It doesn't sound remotely like him, but in my mind, it was indebted to him in some way. | |||
"From the time we've written together, we wrote an album, it was reinterpreted by Bill Frisell [''The Sweetest Punch'', which also features the great Cassandra Wilson], a bunch of people recorded 'God Give Me Strength' [commissioned for the 1996 movie ''Grace Of My Heart'', and one of Costello's greatest achievements], and we were approached to write a musical based on it, but it never really cohered. | |||
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"Those were some of the songs that Burt led The Imposters in the studio on ''Look Now'', that was an amazing session — <!-- 'Look Now' --> 'Don't Look Now' and 'Photographs Can Lie' — and there were other songs that we'd written together which The Imposters and I recorded with Steve Nieve playing, like 'He's Given Me Things.' | |||
"There's still more, we were asked to write a score for ''Austin Powers'' and he wrote some fucking beautiful tunes. I wrote all of the music in 'Stripping Paper' on ''Look Now'' for that ''Painted From Memory'' musical. I gave that song to Burt, and he said, 'That's finished, I'm not gonna add anything.' That's a pretty big compliment." | |||
"The best thing of all was in Capitol Studios, maybe two months ago, with Burt and a 30-piece orchestra," he continues with a grin. "It's like the dream, you're in the studio, like Cilla doing 'Alfie,' you're in the booth with a little chair that Sinatra used to lean on! Capitol is really a place to go to. When you walk down the hallway, it's like, get ready, because it's [pointing at imaginary pictures on an imaginary wall] Nat Cole, Peggy Lee, Sinatra, Gene Vincent, it's intimidating. I suppose people feel the same way about Abbey Road and probably feel the same about Windmill Lane, there's history in there and that's something that can spook you out or lift you towards doing a good job. It was really something." | |||
Even someone of Elvis' stature has got to be pinching himself in that situation. | |||
"Burt was standing up at the board, looking at the score and I knew what was coming," he recalls. "The voice comes on the talk back [breathless Burt burr], 'Elvis, you're not singing the right melody at bar 12.' I just got one note wrong in the melody and he's heard it and then he's like, 'We gotta really pay attention to downbeat at 61.' Nothing escapes his notice, every single time I've been on stage with him, he's the same. It's not like he's unreasonably demanding, he's just got incredible focus. | |||
"Listen to those records he orchestrated and partly produced at Scepter, how incredibly focused every part is in the orchestra and in the rhythm section, everything is serving the story. It's at a level that really probably very few groups other than The Beatles, in a very different kind of form, have. It's never less than it needs to be. People are making Lego now by comparison. Two bar phrases, end on end, 12 people to write a song — great if you like it, but Burt can write the whole thing, and the orchestration. The only thing he doesn't do is write words, that's my job." | |||
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{{ | <span style="font-size:120%">'''Beyond Belief </span> | ||
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Even at this stage, Costello's still learning from people like Bacharach. | |||
"Christ yeah. I left school at 17, and I've worked at trying to be a musician ever since," he says. "I don't have any formal musical education. I took some music lessons from Michael McGlynn [Irish composer and founder of Anúna, who worked with Costello and The Chieftains on "Long Journey Home"] when I was 40, to break this bloody mental block I had about musical notation. Once I was away, I was able to write and imagine things, I could communicate with people that I really wanted to work with, like The Brodsky Quartet. | |||
"Little details in the music were escaping, because I didn't know how to write them down accurately, so it was very necessary. For some people it's, 'Oh, you're trying to make yourself look smart doing that!' That's only because they have an orthodox view about music <!-- that's --> that begins and ends with rock. I don't even like square rock, gimme rock 'n' roll. After a certain point, I dial it out and I'm listening to The Temptations. I want syncopation. Your imagination goes, 'I want more complex harmony.' It doesn't mean I have to only write that because I love three-chord songs, but if it's only going to be this narrow church, that's not what I do. | |||
"Whether you can command it all, or have it serve you is another matter, but at least be aware of it and don't talk down to it, because there's beautiful things happening just out of your view. And that's why I would always be anxious to do anything that's a new adventure, because you come out of it knowing something you didn't know when you went in. Burt is a perfect example, there was a lot to learn from observation and out of it we wrote a bunch of really great songs, which I never would have dreamed of doing. | |||
"When he was playing piano <!-- from --> for Marlene Dietrich in 1963, when my dad [Ross MacManus, with Joe Loss and his Orchestra] was on the ''Royal Variety Show'' with The Beatles, who would have thought that I would write songs with two of the people on the bill? It sounds like a grandiose thing to say, but do you suppose I could have ever dreamed that in my wildest imagination at nine-years-old? And that's actually what happened." | |||
At this point, the understandably exasperated record company lady, Rainar, interrupts our call. I throw my hands up in apology and she shoots me a look like I've just dropped a piano on her cat. Can't blame her, mind. I say my thanks to Costello, and take my chance to thank him for all those great records that I've been listening to for years. | |||
"Not at all, really good to speak with you," says our man, "and thanks for your questions." | |||
Honestly, I had loads of them. | |||
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'''''The Boy Named If'' is out now. | |||
{{tags}}[[The Boy Named If]] {{-}} [[Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink]] {{-}} [[The Imposters]] {{-}} [[This Year's Model]] {{-}} [[Spanish Model]] {{-}} [[The Attractions]] {{-}} [[My Aim Is True]] {{-}} [[No Flag]] {{-}} [[Hey Clockface]] {{-}} [[Iggy Pop|The Stooges]] {{-}} [[This Year's Girl]] {{-}} [[David Simon]] {{-}} [[The Deuce]] {{-}} [[Sebastian Krys]] {{-}} [[Grammy Awards]] {{-}} [[Look Now]] {{-}} [[I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down]] {{-}} [[Imperial Bedroom]] {{-}} [[Painted From Memory]] {{-}} [[Burt Bacharach]] {{-}} [[Allen Toussaint]] {{-}} [[The River In Reverse]] {{-}} [[Pete Thomas]] {{-}} [[The Rolling Stones|Charlie Watts]] {{-}} [[Watching The Detectives]] {{-}} [[Davey Faragher]] {{-}} [[Richard Thompson]] {{-}} [[John Hiatt]] {{-}} [[Everyday I Write The Book]] {{-}} [[Eamonn Singer]] {{-}} [[Blood & Chocolate]] {{-}} [[The Difference]] {{-}} [[Pawel Pawlikowski]] {{-}} [[I Do (Zula's Song)]] {{-}} [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare]] {{-}} [[Brutal Youth]] {{-}} [[For The Stars]] {{-}} [[The Beatles]] {{-}} [[Paul McCartney]] {{-}} [[Cilla Black]] {{-}} [[Anyone Who Had A Heart]] {{-}} [[Accidents Will Happen]] {{-}} [[Bill Frisell]] {{-}} [[The Sweetest Punch|Bill Frisell: The Sweetest Punch]] {{-}} [[Cassandra Wilson]] {{-}} [[God Give Me Strength]] {{-}} [[God Give Me Strength covers]] {{-}} [[Grace Of My Heart]] {{-}} [[Don't Look Now]] {{-}} [[Photographs Can Lie]] {{-}} [[Steve Nieve]] {{-}} [[He's Given Me Things]] {{-}} [[Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me|Austin Powers]] {{-}} [[Stripping Paper]] {{-}} [[Alfie]] {{-}} [[Frank Sinatra]] {{-}} [[Nat King Cole]] {{-}} [[Peggy Lee]] {{-}} [[Windmill Lane Studios]] {{-}} [[Beyond Belief]] {{-}} [[Michael McGlynn]] {{-}} [[Anúna]] {{-}} [[The Chieftains]] {{-}} [[Long Journey Home]] {{-}} [[The Brodsky Quartet]] {{-}} [[The Temptations]] {{-}} [[Ross MacManus]] {{-}} [[Joe Loss Orchestra]] {{-}} [[Royal Variety Performance]] | |||
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Revision as of 21:26, 11 February 2022
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