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When a jarringly bright, ballsy, and bothered singer calling himself Elvis Costello introduced himself to a malnourished pop music scene in 1977, many insisted he and his new wave ilk would be a passing, if rather impolite, phase.
Not to be. Today Costello can fairly be described as a pillar of modern music. His recorded output features a slew of memorable songs (many of them hits) that reveal a songsmith constantly pushing the boundaries other musicians are rarely even aware of.
Costello's second album, This Year's Model, introduced the Attractions, a group of musicians intimately sympathetic to his style and message. In the space of a minute and fifty-eight seconds, lead-off track "No Action" defined the drummer's role in this new music: Pete Thomas positively punches Costello's tale of personal politics with alternately hyper tom fills and crash-ride flourishes, dynamically driving the point home with loads of personality and even more energy.
As Costello's music evolved, so did Thomas's playing. The boundless energy unleashed on early albums made room for more relaxed, thoughtful, and restrained grooves, yet his playful drumset arrangements and edgy drive were always available when the songs called for them.
In 1986, Elvis decided to turn over some new musical stones, recording for the first time without the Attractions and for all intents and purposes leaving the members without a steady job. Thomas soon filled his schedule with studio work, broadening his scope and proving his great skill and versatility with acts such as Squeeze, Matthew Sweet, John Paul Jones & Diamanda Galas, Richard Thompson, Graham Parker, Los Lobos, Tasmin Archer, and British hard rock act Little Angels, as well as various non-Attractions Costello tours and albums.
A couple of years ago, Costello recorded Brutal Youth, featuring the return of the Attractions as a unit and kicking off a several-year-long projected working relationship, which will soon result in another album of new material. EC was recently in New York City for a series of shows at the Beacon Theater, where he introduced many of the songs — several of which the band heard for the first time days before, and which were having their arrangements worked out at soundcheck.
Thirty-three stories below Pete Thomas's hotel room window, a gaggle of blaring fire engines, police cars, and ambulances are announcing a blaze across the street, while a deceptively pastoral Central Park silently stretches northward in the background. Inside, Thomas calmly sips a cup of coffee, recalling the mixed feelings he had in 1986, when Elvis put the Attractions on hold with no definite plans for reuniting.
"When that umbrella disappeared, it was a bit of a worry. I sold my house and got a smaller flat, because you really don't know what to expect when something like that happens.
For almost nine years we'd been going around acting new wave and punky, like we were the best group in the world and everyone else was rubbish. Suddenly we were out in the world on our own, and there were all these people saying, "Oh, look who's here, then. It's mister 'I'm great and you're not.'" [laughs] But it was good for me in a way. I realized that I had to pull myself together a bit, and I gave up drinking. Having to earn a living doing different things is different from being in a band. It was a bit quiet for a while, but I started putting myself about.
What sort of gigs did you do at first?
Fortunately I got the gig as drummer on The Jonathan Ross Show on TV, which was like the Letterman show in America. I did that for about four years with Steve Nieve, the keyboardist from the Attractions. Every artist that came on the show had to use us as a backup band. So I got to play with just about everybody — Paul McCartney, Roy Orbison, Elton John. Suddenly I was in all these different disciplines. I had to get used to how all these people work, every day. Your perceptions become very heightened.
The best thing that came out of that was that Paul McCartney came on the show. It was the first time he had appeared on live TV for twenty-five years. The first song that I ever learned on the drums, when I was ten, was "I Saw Her Standing There," and that was one of the songs that we did. So when he turned around to me and went, "A-one, two, three, four!" just like on the record, I was off. It was just fantastic. I was all over the place, just wailing. He was really happy with it as well.
The other great guest was Ronnie Spector. When she picked the mic' up and started singing, "The night we met...." in that voice, that was the only other time that the hairs just stood on the back of my neck. I was thinking, "Hold on — don't blow it now!"
We also had Roy Orbison on. It was funny, because the theme of the show that night was outer space, and the whole band was dressed as space men. We all had silver suits on and aerials on our heads and blond wigs and green faces. I swear he never even noticed; it was towards the end of his life, and he was ill at the time. He walked out, they put his guitar on, we did "Pretty Woman" and "In Dreams," and then he just went off again. He may have noticed and thought, "Just another weirdo group." Playing with him was pretty amazing, though, "In Dreams" particularly. That was eerie.
After the show folded up, I started getting proper sessions, because a lot of people had seen me working with different people and knew who I was. People I'd never heard of were asking me to do jingles and proper sessions. That went on for a while. I got it going pretty good. Producer Mitchell Froom was a big help. I had worked with him with Elvis, and he seemed to like what I was doing, so he got me on Los Lobos and Richard Thompson albums. My favorite kind of music has always been country & western swing — stuff like the Flying Burrito Brothers and Commander Cody — so getting to play on Kiko by Los Lobos was one of the best moments of my life. Those guys don't know any bad licks.
That was a sort of breakthrough album for them.
I'll always be proud to say that I played on "the Chicano Sgt. Pepper's" — that was one of the reviews. It did go to some different places.
What is it like working with producer Mitchell Froom?
Mitchell has a way of explaining things without being too serious, and he can get you in the mood when things aren't going quite right. If you can do that as a producer, you can draw out things that go beyond just good playing; you can get moods. Also, he doesn't flog a dead horse. You might have spent quite a long time rehearsing it, but you generally have it within two or three takes, and it doesn't sound played out. He can see when your brain is sort of fried.
Mitchell and his engineer, Tchad Blake, also like to screw with the sounds. They've got these big flight cases full of the weirdest amps, African instruments.... It really encouraged me to get into a lot of things like that. It's the complete opposite to samples. You don't go out and get yourself loads of samples, you just get yourself loads of biscuit tins and bells and sort of invent the sounds that people will end up sampling.
Vic Firth makes these mallets with maracas in them. As soon as I'd got them out of the bag and showed them to Mitchell and Tchad it was, "Right. We'll have them on everything." It's also really good if you use a straight stick in one hand and do a tom pattern with a maraca with the other one; it sounds like this really tricky maraca part. It's better if you don't think about it and just play naturally. A couple of really surprising little rhythmic patterns have come out of it. There's a track on Elvis's Brutal Youth called "You Tripped At Every Step," where I've got a maraca in the right hand and a stick in the left hand.
Mitchell also produced Richard Thompson's Mirror Blue, which you played on. You mentioned to me earlier that there were times when you played different parts from various kits at the same time.
Oh, every track. It's a complete stripdown. It's finding things that work. I've always been vaguely musical on the drums. I always try to tune them well and find cymbals that are in tune, and this was just a progression from that. There is a track on Richard Thompson's album called "Fast Food" that's supposed to sound like the tills going in a fast-food shop. I used this Red Indian bass drum, and it was like, "Well, that tambourine doesn't work; we'll tie some gaffer's tape around this triangle and hit it on the second beat." Half the time you've got a piano stool with something gaffered to it, something else taped to your knee, some African or Indian ankle bracelets around your bass drum foot.... One of my favorite tracks from that album is "Shane And Dixie." I actually used a children's beginner snare drum on that.
 The only problem with all this is that occasionally Mitchell will say something like, "Okay, Pete, in the third verse just play the bass drum half as much," and you just fall apart. You begin to quiver and go, "I can't play." Every now and then you just have to go for a walk around the block or something. It's not like you are playing anything that resembles something you've done before. It's not like you're playing rock 'n' roll. With Los Lobos, they had me playing cumbia beats and things, which I had never played before.
The first time you were approached to do that sort of unusual stuff, with all of this freedom of choice as to sounds and techniques, did that freak you out?
Yeah. It caught me unaware to start with. It's like when anybody asks you to do something different, it's like, "Hmmm, why should I?" But I cottoned on pretty quick because the whole thing with them is that it's fun. Quite often they'll just use a pair of mic's. So that might mean that your crash cymbal has got to be sort of behind your right shoulder, you have to put tape over the hi-hats because they are too loud.... I've done sessions for them where I'd go to bed at night and it's like, "Why does my neck hurt like this?" And it's because I've been sitting all day with the bass drum way over here, just because it sounds great like that. I try to sneak things in, move a cymbal so it's easy to hear. Then it's like, "Have you moved that cymbal?" [laughs]
But like I said, the important thing is that it's just fun. Sixty or seventy percent of the time, everyone is really pleased with the end result. It's as if everyone has been working together on a surrealist painting. When you've got chains hanging off a cymbal and some old bells tied to your leg, and it comes back sounding like a tom cat in a scrap yard or something — and as a total piece of music, it works — then it's a real thrill.
When it came time for you to do other albums....
Oh, I've gotten into terrible trouble like that. I've wasted a lot of people's time, [laughs] When I did Squeeze's Some Fantastic Place album I was like, "Why don't we try this: I'll get this old steel drum and some claves and this African bongo and then we'll make up a loop and put it through a fuzz box and then we'll all play to that...." We'd be listening back and they'd be looking at me like, "What are you doing to our song?"
Were you able to get any of these ideas through in the end?
No. But it is fun to go through the conventional thing as well. I did come unstuck, though. I was all full of it — "Oh, I know how to do this funny stuff — and they were all just like, "Well we don't want it."
The John Paul Jones album with Diamanda Galas, The Sporting Life, sounds like a style that people aren't used to hearing you play. How did that come together?
There is an engineer called Richard Evans who works at Real World Studios. John Paul Jones lives near there, and he'd been using Richard on various projects. Apparently Richard said he'd seen Diamanda performing in a cathedral in New York, stripped to the waist and covered in blood, and he decided that she was the girl for him. John Paul was very enthusiastic about it, so he decided to dust his bass off because he really hadn't played a lot since Led Zeppelin. So this was all quite a big deal.
The two of us had played together once on a Rod Stewart session, which was pretty awful. Rod kept coming in in the wrong place and seemed like he didn't want to be there at all. It was all vaguely embarrassing. But anyway, I went down and spent the afternoon with John Paul and we had a chat. He's very professional. The first thing that I noticed in his office was that he had a pile of records that I'd played on.
Was it daunting when you saw that?
No, not at all, because I thought, well, he's done his homework and he's rung me after listening to all that. He obviously knows I don't regularly play this sort of stuff, so he was under no illusions.
Having seen that, I went out and bought Led Zeppelin records and went downstairs in my studio and played along with them all. That turned out to be very useful because there are all these little tricks that he and John Bonham had, which he told me about later, 3/16 and 5/16 turnarounds, which they could do on a nod. He was also very concerned about the drop on it — not just the fact that you've got it, but the way you land on the 1. It's got to be like nothing's happened. So you can't be like, "Yahoo, I know how to do that!" I shouldn't tell you, but he said they used to do it to muck up Jimmy Page, [laughs]
What was the recording process like?
He had gotten this old digital recording system that you couldn't edit on. So that meant that all the takes had to be done live from beginning to end. He said most of the Led Zeppelin tracks used to look like scrap books, all edits and things. So that was pretty daunting because some of these new songs were like five, six minutes long. He's got this great studio overlooking a lake and rolling hills, and usually there was just me and him in there, with vocals added later. He had his eight-string bass, with three amps — a bass amp, a mid-amp, and a trebley amp — all set up around my drums. We would work very conscientiously getting all that stuff worked out. When we did get the takes it was a real feeling of achievement. There is an Egyptian-sounding one called "Hex," which was a bit odd. Having worked with Mitchell and Tchad was good for songs like that, because I wasn't at all scared about setting up a completely mad kit that suited playing that beat.
After listening intently to the Zeppelin stuff and then working with him, did you find that you wanted to work some of those ideas into other situations? Did it change your playing or your thinking in any way?
There are so many odd accents in his stuff, and I really got into that. So I got more interested in playing hand-to-hand rather than doing all the cymbal crashes with the right hand. If you figure out where your crashes are going to be, you'll stay balanced on your stool. You also don't necessarily start the roll with the right hand. Sometimes I would actually sit there with a bit of paper and figure out how I could do the sticking more comfortably. So I did have to do a bit of self-tuition on some stuff that I find myself doing automatically now.
Did you get to play any of that music live?
No. I was set to do the tour, and I got quite excited about it. I was wondering how many bats and vampires I could incorporate into my stage set. [laughs] But Elvis decided to extend the touring we'd been doing with the Attractions. John Paul and Diamanda were really good about it. I rang them up and said that Elvis wanted to carry on, and they just said, "Well, Pete, you are an 'Attraction.'"
But it was a shame. I'd certainly like to work with him again. He plays great Tamla/Motown-style bass, and it was great listening to all his old stories. Having worked with him and having listened to the sort of riffs he comes up with, I think that old John Paul had a lot more to do with the writing in Led Zeppelin than a lot of people give him credit for. I felt a bit funny sometimes being his drummer. Every now and then he'd get all misty-eyed.
Sometimes I couldn't resist playing a couple of those John Bonham fills, and he'd be like, "Boy, it's like playing with Bonzo again." You could tell he really loved him and was quite gutted by his loss. John Paul was the one who found him, and he spoke so sentimentally about it.
You mentioned before that you have your own studio in your house.
I've done a few albums there — one for Martin Belmont from Graham Parker & the Rumour, one for the singer from Little Angels. They're just low-budget things that give people a chance to have something pressed out. The reason I built the studio was really for myself. I'll get demo tapes and I've got to learn the music before I do a session, and you need a decent soundproof room for that.
How do you approach a demo?
It depends. A good example would be when I got the job doing Los Lobos' record. I've just done my second album with them, but when I got the job doing the first one, I got the demo tape, which didn't have any drums on it. First I wrote out sketches — verse eight bars, bridge, chorus... Then I bought every record by Los Lobos and sat down and played along for two or three days. I got used to the way the whole thing drops, and I'd play along to see what would work, just trying to get an all-around idea and think of as many angles as I can.
Quite often I just play along with my hands. A good way to start is to just play the whole song hand-to-hand without worrying about what you are going to do. Just see where accents naturally fall. Even if you might end up doing something completely different in the studio, if you're prepared, then you'll be confident going in.
One of the more unusual projects you found yourself involved in was Little Angels' Jam album.
That's probably the most successful album I've done a session on; it got to Number 1 in England. It was sort of a Bon Jovi thing. Bryan Adams sang on the last single that we did, which was fantastic; I got to be Mickey Curry for ten minutes.
That was the loudest I've had to play on any record. They put me in the middle of this huge room. The engineer had done Aerosmith records, and they wouldn't use echoes or reverb, so I had to get the loudest snare drum I could find — it's made by a chap called Mike Bigwood in Norwich, and it has replaceable panels in it — and I had to whack it as hard as I could. We ended up screwing two 24" bass drums together. Everything was concentrated on me. There were five sets of stereo mic's going back into the farthest corner of this room, mic's behind me, mic's over there...
You certainly seem to be open to lots of different playing situations.
I really enjoy it when it's like that — when there are people with a bit of imagination and you feel that you can rise to it and that it's not just having to play along with a click track. I hate it when people get you to tune up the toms even before you've started playing the songs. It's like, I can't tune the toms until I've heard the song.
You've worked on several projects with Jerry Scheff, who was Elvis Presley's bass player. One album is Elvis Costello's Kojak Variety, which features covers of songs that have influenced him for years. Was there any feeling that you had to really nail the original grooves?
Not really. We would maybe get one listen to the original, and then we were on our own. It was a very basic setup with only a few mic's. Larry Knechtel was also on that, and he's played piano on everything, going back to Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep — Mountain High." His big influences were all that wild New Orleans sort of stuff. Players like that don't need to be told how to play that stuff.
The thing I liked about these great American players was all these expressions that they've got. English people will just go, "You're speeding up," but an American might say, "Hey, man. You're getting a little up on it," which isn't as insulting and doesn't get your back up immediately. It's like, "I'm getting up on it. Oh, I see — that's quite clever." [laughs] They say, "Why don't you grease it up a little?" "Oh, grease it up a little? Well, I don't mind doing that." Things like that put you in a great mood and put you at ease.
Jerry's really interesting. He sets up grooves in his head, like a Bo Diddley rhythm, even though the song doesn't have a Bo Diddley rhythm. But then he'll explain that to you, so you become aware of that and you keep eye-to-eye contact. Suddenly you notice that his bass runs have got those accents in it, and it gets really exciting — and no one else knows what you're doing. He and I also did Richard Thompson's album, which was done live.
Getting back to the aspect of groove: On the early Elvis albums, a part of the appeal of them is this forward energy, this real band sound. On Elvis's Brutal Youth [1994] you can hear that at times, but it also sounds like you are able now to control that groove — you can pull back, play more behind the beat. Is that something that has been consciously approached?
The Attractions was a typical British beat band in a way. Bruce Thomas likes to push the beat on the bass, and I was a very big fan of speeding up. It's just an English thing, like the Stones. If you listen to "Honky Tonk Woman," it's twice as fast at the end as it is at the beginning. It's just an English thing to either be right up on the beat or ahead of it. And that's exciting. The takes on those early albums are the ones that didn't speed up too much, which was sort of painful.
Nick Lowe, who's a great producer, was really into winding everybody up. And he is very funny, so you are laughing all the time. When he tells you that you need to do something a little bit harder, you don't mind, you go and do it. Suddenly four hours have gone by and everybody's parts have gotten more complicated but more blended together. By ten o'clock at night, you are all playing this raging thing. You listen to it the next day and it doesn't even sound like you. It was like he was able to draw things out that never would have occurred to us, which is great. Plus, we were all young and mad, thrilled at being pop stars and all that.
But there is also a natural noise that happens when the four of us play together. Bruce is a very excited bass player, Steve is very excited on the piano, and Elvis is excited too. But I've always been interested in the American style of playing, which is a laid-back sort of thing, like Bonnie Raitt and Paul Butterfield records — those had the coolest grooves. That was always one thing that I aspired to but never really got to do. Some friends and I had a band for a while called the Tex Pistols, and we used to play in Mexican restaurants and things. We always used to aspire to that kind of thing. But it wasn't really until I got to play with Jerry Scheff and James Burton and those guys that I got to do it seriously. There are people who do it better than I can, like Jim Keltner, but at least I've had a chance to do it and I know what it is. I've had it explained to me by a few people.
Knowing what it is and actually doing it are two different things, though.
You realize that it's really down to who you are playing with. If you are playing with people who play like that, especially piano players, it's just easy. It's only a struggle when you've got people who are pushing the beat. When I was young, I used to hitchhike out to Mitch Mitchell's house. He was my hero, and he lived in this pink house with purple flowers, not too far from where I grew up. I used to stand by the gate, and eventually I got asked in and he showed me around. It was the greatest thing. He showed me into his studio and there was that double black Gretsch kit and all these amplifiers with "JHX" written on them, and I thought, "Oh, wow." Then he took me into his music room — this room that was all covered in tapestry, with quadrophonic speakers — and he played Elvin Jones and said, "Always remember, if you are a drummer, you are only as good as the people you play with."
 So that's what I mean when I say that when you actually get to play with a piano player that plays that bluesy groove stuff — Paul Carrack is very good at it — it's suddenly easy to play like that. And I've got Elvis to thank for all that. He's the one who hired all those guys and fortunately kept me around as well. It was great to meet all those different people.
There are obviously reasons people like Elvis continue to use you. What do you think it is about your playing or your personality that enables musicians to enjoy working with you?
It might be that I'm not the slightest bit concerned with pushing any technique onto a track if it doesn't need it. I'm not going to sit there thinking, "Oh, I can get one in here." I used to do that, and it was sort of exciting — like with the early Attractions stuff. It was like, "Oh, I can do a funny roll here" or "I can do 16ths on the hi-hat for a bit here." But I'm quite happy now to just do what's required and not go through any sort of arguments or anything. If someone says, "I don't like that, would you do this?" I say, "Yeah, fine." I don't get on my high horse about anything.
Enthusiasm is also really important, because a lot of the time in the studio if something doesn't work out, the black clouds of gloom come in, and suddenly you find you are in a room full of people all staring at the floor and not looking at each other. One person will go, "Well, we could try it reggae." But if you can just come bouncing in like, "Come on chaps. Let's just go and run it a few more times," normally, you'll find that it's something simple that needs to be fixed.
Let's face it: Most of the time what we have to play on the drums isn't that hard. But if you can put people at ease, then you're creating an environment where you can play music. That's the sort of thing Levon Helm is so good at. He'll tell some great story about his childhood, and you can't help but be in a good mood and get enthused.
I've also got a great wife and a great daughter, and I'm pretty happy, so it's not hard to find that enthusiasm unless I've stayed up too late, which sometimes happens. But it's important to get a handle on that as well. You're working, so you only party when you've got the next day off. People rely on you to be on the ball.
Let's talk about your early drumming experiences.
When I was nine my mum bought me a Beatles album and my grandma bought me a drum. From there it was pretty much heads down, that's what I wanted to do. When I was about eleven I took lessons from a guy who was in the Salvation Army. He was a real bastard and never smiled, but he got me to do paradiddles and flams and all that stuff. Later I played in the youth orchestra.
I left school when I was sixteen and worked for a haulage company on the docks for a year and saved up enough money to buy a white pearl Gretsch drumkit — which I'm playing tonight. I've got endorsements and bought other kits and all that, but when I play this kit I can do anything with it. I just know how to get sounds out of the toms, where the rims are and all that.
Anyway, about 1971, when I was sixteen, I answered an ad in The Melody Maker for an audition with a group called Ocean, in London. I got a friend to run me up in his window-cleaning van with all the ladders and stuff, and I met these guys. They were all very posh, and all of their parents were quite wealthy, so even though they weren't a very famous group, they had nice houses to rehearse in. I got the gig with them, so it was like the first audition I went for I got. It was amazing luck really.
I made myself a little nest in the kitchen of one of their apartments, and I played with that band for a while. Then I met this lad called Paul Riley, who is my oldest friend. He plays bass with Nick Lowe at the moment, but at the time he was playing with a guy called Robyn Scott, who later became M and had a hit with a song called "Pop Music." So I joined that group for a while, and then the two of us joined a country-swing band that needed a rhythm section, Chilli Willi. That was my first proper pro band, with a van and a PA system. We used to get twelve pounds a week, and we were all hippies. We played at universities and pubs, lots of festivals. Lots of people dancing in the back waving their arms, lots of girls with hairy legs.
Completely opposite to the Attractions.
Oh, yeah. A lot of hair came off when I was doing the Attractions. We all became new wave; all the cowboy shirts went. But Chilli Willi did a concert at the Roundhouse for a magazine called ZigZag, and we opened up for an American singer-songwriter called John Stewart. He had just gotten a deal with RCA, I think. He was originally in the Kingston Trio, and he wrote "Daydream Believer" for the Monkees and a lot of songs for the Lovin' Spoonful. But they couldn't afford to bring his drummer over, and since I was in the group that went on before him and my drums were set up, they asked me if I would play drums with him.
I got all John's albums, learned the songs, and played with him. Chilli Willi soon folded up, so I rang him up from a phone box in the pouring rain in London, with a pile of ten-p. bits in my hand, in this little voice: "Hello, John? It's Peter. Do you remember me?" He was like, "Yeah, I sure do." I was living in a squat at the time — just cold water. My wife and I were cooking on a camping stove.
He said he had just had an argument with his drummer, and that he would fly me over to L.A. I could pay him back the airfare out of my salary. "Would $400 be alright?" I turned to my wife and said, "You won't believe this." The next thing we knew we were picked up at the airport and driven out to his house, and we're sitting on the cliffs in Malibu in a Jacuzzi, drinking Scotch, watching the whales heading north.
John's a very nice chap; he taught me all about America. His previous drummer was Russ Kunkel, so I was right in that gang that I wanted to be in. I was also jamming with Lowell George at the time; he'd come around and pick me up in his truck. But John Stewart was always very happy for me after I was with Elvis. I had a tour of England with Elvis once, and when he had some time off he came over and I put together a little band for him.
While I was in California, though, Jake Riviera, who used to manage Chilli Willi, came to visit me. He had started up the Stiff label and was in town with the Damned, who were on Stiff at the time. Jake played me a tape of Elvis's first album, and I thought that it was fantastic. Jake told me that Elvis was putting together a band, and I thought that I'd love to do it. So I went back to England, hoping to get the job. Fortunately, I did.
Was it a big audition?
Not really. There weren't any other drummers there when I went in. And I had done my homework. We just played the songs and he said, "Yeah, fine." So it was the old Thomas luck. Whenever I see my mum she just looks at me and says, "I don't know how you do it." [laughs] I was obviously a bit of a worry to my folks. Once I discovered rock 'n' roll, I wasn't doing my homework or going to school very much.
What were the early days with Elvis like?
It was a fairly volatile combination. I think any good group is; you need to have a certain chemistry. It's horrible when the shit comes down, but a lot of the times it is good to clear the air. It might not be much fun at the time but you do get somewhere. Elvis is definitely aware of the fact that a bit of tension is a good thing. If he wants to do a really wild, rocking show, there is nothing like annoying a couple of us. Suddenly it's like, "Well, I can play the drums, and I can play the drums hard, fast, and a lot." Then you come off and he's just smiling at you, and it's like, "You bastard." [laughs]
 The main difference between now and then is that we are a lot straighter now. Back then, everyone was drinking for maximum enjoyment and doing various other things as well. For as much fun as you have, the next day there are also the terrible hangovers, and tempers are a lot shorter. So it's just less volatile now — or at least if it is volatile, it's more genuine. If there is a problem, normally we get to the bottom of it a lot quicker, and there is a lot less sulking.
Because we have all played with different people, there is a broader range of experience to draw on now. Elvis's writing is trickier now as well. I think he'll admit that sometimes he didn't know what he was writing about early on. He'd just come up with a good-sounding hook line and then some couplets and things. But now, especially these new songs that we are doing, you might need to be a crossword expert to figure them all out, but he knows exactly what they are about. I just ask him to explain it, and we'll suddenly realize, "Oh, yeah. We're not playing this right; he's talking about molesting children."
One characteristic of your parts is that they are always very playful.
Well, we were all appallingly graphic. If there are any lyrics about doors being slammed or bells being rung, it's not long before someone starts doing a "bang" or a "ding." If there is a sad lyric, we'll play something sad, though sometimes it comes out as humorous. But as long as it's not too corny it's alright. Sometimes his eyebrows go up and he's like, "I don't think we'll be having that." Then the front doorbell rings...
Since you're playing with Elvis again, as well as with other people, there must be schedule and loyalty issues to deal with.
Since we did Brutal Youth and got the Attractions back together, it's almost like what I've built up has now come slightly unstuck. I still get the calls, but I have to keep saying, "Well, I'm doing this with Elvis." The vaguely spoken deal with Elvis was that the four of us would get back together for a couple of years. But sometimes what happens is that when you make an album with someone else, they want you to promote it and do the tour. Of course, Elvis doesn't really know what he's going to be doing in three months time, so there is definitely juggling, which is about diplomacy and trying not to upset everybody.
I don't have a manager, so sometimes I get it wrong. It's great to have options, but sometimes you do upset people. Also, you may have played with one bunch of musicians who do want to do the tour, but maybe you and the bass player have been asked to do something else. Then if you do the other thing, the guitarist won't get to do the tour. My wife is pretty good at handling this stuff. She talks a lot of sense, I talk a lot of rubbish. Eventually she'll just roll over in bed and wave a finger at me, "You better ring them and tell them you're not doing it." I'm so used to agreeing to everything. It's best to be as honest as you can with people.
There is a way that things have of actually falling right in the end, like a release date is moved and suddenly a conflict doesn't exist anymore. If you are pretty straight with people then they usually try to work around you, or they get someone else. Sure it's difficult. But there are obviously worse problems to have.
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