Esquire, January 2014

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Esquire

Magazines
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Esquire Q & A

ELVIS COSTELLO

Scott Raab

Scott Raab talks to the musician about YouTube, Pompous critics, Questlove, Hank Williams, and how he just never got into Zeppelin.

Lunchtime, Blue Note Records offices.

Scott Raab: I brought this ancient “Alison” single to show you. Can’t remember how I came across it.
Elvis Costello: I’ll bet you it has strings on it. We put those cheap synth strings on the track before there were really even synths. They said. “The strings will make it a hit!”

SR: It didn’t work.
EC: It was never a hit. It wasn’t even a hit for Linda Ronstadt. I’m grateful that she recorded it, because the money that brought in kept us afloat in the first few years, when we weren’t selling any records at all.

SR: Amazing how different the music business is now.
EC: It was very much more word of mouth. You could say to someone, “Have you heard this?” and they would never have heard of it. Although I suppose that’s what the recommendations on the Internet now try to replicate. I found on YouTube a fantastic interview and performance of Bill Evans on Finnish television, playing a beautiful version of “Alfie”. Evans plays “Alfie” like it was a Bach prelude or something. I showed it to Burt Bacharach.

SR: It’s an incredible archive, but utterly chaotic.
EC: There’s both good and bad to YouTube. In some ways, it levels everything out. On the other hand, much less can escape, good and bad. People can’t really understand that now, when everything is available and everything is annotated, but you used to watch a television show and it was just gone. You really had to pay attention. Its mythic power came down to the fact that you saw it once. Hendrix being on the Lulu show and switching songs – I filed it away long before I was even playing an instrument. It was just so thrilling when television went out of control.

SR: You once pulled the same switcheroo.
EC: I did it a couple times. Only one time did anybody notice.

SR: The Saturday Night Live incident is what I remember.
EC: I also did it on English TV, but that was just us being drunk – nothing particularly revolutionary.

SR: To a large degree, you’re still defined by your first few albums as the “angry young man” – Mr. Revenge and Guilt.
EC: I went to quite some lengths a number of years ago- 30 years now, nearly – to dismantle the initial character that was sort of a contrivance between my naturally inappropriate appearance for the job of rock’n’roll singer and, to be honest, my natural reticence and shyness.

SR: Shyness?
EC: I’m an only child, and I wasn’t particularly confident when I started. So what came across as aggression was quite often just uncertainty. And then, of course, you get a reaction from it and, like anything, you lean into it a little bit more. That’s not a strategy I would recommend, but in the end it becomes sort of a calling card.

SR: The same sort of typecasting was applied to Lou Reed, rest his soul.
EC: One of the real shames about the way people wrote about him is that they insisted on seeing him through the filter of the first impression of the Velvet Underground records, as if he were never anybody else but that man. They were missing the humanity that was in those songs and instead focused on the darkness. And then failed to grasp what was going on in the development – that he was a human being.

SR: Artists are supposed to be difficult.
EC: I think people in this line of work, if they’re good at what they do, then you’ll find that they’re a little bit odd. And socially awkward.


Remaining text and scanner-error corrections to come...

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Esquire, January 2014


Scott Raab interviews Elvis Costello.

Images

2014-01-00 Esquire page 19.jpg
Page scans.

2014-01-00 Esquire page 20.jpg


2014-01-00 Esquire page 22.jpg
Page scans.


Photo by Danny Clinch.
2014-01-00 Esquire photo 01 dc.jpg


2014-01-00 Esquire photo 02 ns.jpg
Photo by Neil Swanson.


2014-01-00 Esquire photo 03 kc.jpg
Photo by Kevin Cummins.


2014-01-00 Esquire cover.jpg
Cover.


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