Mojo, November 2018

Bibliography   72 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 UK & Ireland weeklies UK & Ireland magazines UK & Ireland newspapers US newspapers US rock magazines US music magazines US magazines US alternative weeklies European magazines European newspapers Canada  •  Mexico  •  Asia Australia  •  New Zealand South America  •  Africa Blogs  •  Fanzines  •  Books Online publications Mojo   1993 December 1994 June 1995 June 1995 August 1995 October 1996 January 1996 May 1996 June 1997 October 1998 January 1998 February 1998 July 1998 October 1999 July 1999 September 1999 October 2001 January 2002 March 2002 May 2002 December 2003 June 2003 July 2003 October 2003 November 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 December 2005 July 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2006 January 2006 June 2007 April 2007 November 2007 December 2010 March 2010 May 2010 November 2011 August 2013 July 2013 September 2013 October 2014 January 2014 December 2015 September 2015 December 2016 January 2018 February  2018 November 2019 January 2020 November 2020 December 2021 July 2021 September 2021 November 2022 February 2022 September 2022 October  2023 January  2023 April  2023 May Mojo Classic 2007 Vol. 2, No. 3 2008 Vol. 2, No. 5 UK & Ireland magazines  Arena Backhill Bang Bass Player Big Issue Brighton Magazine Buzz Magazine City Life City Limits Classic CD Classic FM Classic Pop Classic Rock Country Music International Cut Dark Star Dazed & Confused Emma Encore Eve Fab 208 The Face Flexipop Folk Roots Fresh GQ Get Rhythm Gramophone Guitar Guitar & Bass Guitarist Hi-Fi News & Record Review Hi-Fi World Hot Press In Dublin International Musician Jamming! Lancet The List Loaded Making Music Marxism Today Midweek Mojo Music Music Maker Music Technology Music & Video, May 1980 Music Week New Manchester Review New Statesman No 1 Noise! Opera Now Penthouse Phaze 1 Punter Q magazine Record Business Record Buyer Record Collector Record Hunter Rhythm Rock On RTÉ Guide Saga Select SFX Shindig The Skinny Songlines Sound International Sound On Sound Spectator Star Monthly Sun Zoom Spark Superpop Studio Sound Time Out Top Of The Pops Total Guitar Tracks TV Times Uncut Vive Le Rock Volume Vox Vulture Hound Waitrose Weekend What's Happening The Wire The Word ZigZag 19 magazine — The long honeymoon Tom Doyle Forty years an item, Elvis Costello and The Imposters (the artists formerly known as The Attractions) have come through penury, separations, and now their leader's cancer to deliver a 15th album as delightful and daring as any since This Year's Model. Are they learning to appreciate each other at last? "It's not nostalgia," they tell Tom Doyle. "But there's all this history there." February 2018 and step-by-step, star-by-star, Elvis Costello was making his way to work at EastWest Studios via the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. It was quite a commute: below his feet lay sidewalk-imprinted memorials to various figures of legend... Marlene Dietrich, Harry Houdini, even much-loved silent movie-era canine Rin Tin Tin. Every day, he began to search out more and more obscure names, snapping pics and texting them to his friends. "It became like a game," he smiles today. "I'd send a picture of somebody I'd found that day and I'd sort of go, 'Do you know who this is?' Because some of the names are not famous. Some of them, they're forgotten to time." Other names he discovered, however, were very much alive in Costello's mind, since they were involved in Look Now, the record he was making. One day he managed to find the star bearing the name of Carole King, whom he'd written a funky, soulful song with, knee-to-knee, in Dublin a quarter of a century before. Costello had only now pulled "Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter" back out of the drawer for these sessions. "I knew it was a good song and I didn't want to throw it away," he says. "It just never fitted on any record." Another day, he managed to locate Burt Bacharach's star. Costello and Bacharach had written and recorded an album together, Painted From Memory, back in 1998. For the singer, who'd loved Bacharach and Hal David's songs since he was a child, Burt was, of course, no longer a figure of myth. In fact, four days into the sessions, Costello was en route to meet him and to record two new songs they'd written, "Don't Look Now" and "Photographs Can Lie," both reliably melodically-rich and emotive. It's worth reminding ourselves that Burt Bacharach is now 90 years old. "Oh, y'know, he was only 89 then," Costello laughs. "But I never think about his age. He doesn't want to talk about it. He doesn't have a sentimentality about it that I can detect. He never has." Still, for Costello, there's a sense of ongoing wish fulfilment here. In some imagined '60s time slip, it's easy to picture him, sleeves rolled up bashing out the hits alongside Carole King in the Brill Building, , or inking out a lyric as Burt Bacharach sits at the piano dreaming up strings and horn parts. "Well actually, that's what I set out to do, to be a songwriter," he points out. "So I've got my wish." A wish that at one time seemed impossibly remote. He still has vivid childhood memories of accompanying his father, big band frontman Ross MacManus, up and down Denmark Street as he attempted to hawk a song to the publishers of London's Tin Pan Alley. "My dad wrote a few songs," he says. "He didn't get many things published. But he was taking a song around and it was pretty much a sad thing, probably. Y'know, you don't notice it when it's your dad. But I'm sure it was about the same welcome as I got later." By his early twenties, Costello's ambitions were to become a songwriter first, a performer second. In 1974/75, pop stars looked like David Essex, not Declan MacManus. "I had a face for radio, y'know," he chuckles. "I knew that much. Or I didn't fit. So I went to publishers. I'd arrive with a guitar and make them listen to me. 'Cos I just believed everything that was in Jimmy Durante movies: 'I gotta song fer ya...'" We know how the story unfolded: the provocative name change in '77, the donning of the horn-rims and the foregrounding of his sneery punk-ish attitude. Elvis Costello became a very different kind of bandleader from his father, fronting the rattling, thrilling Attractions. But still, particularly in those early days of doggedly touring America, it was his songs that kept him afloat. When Linda Ronstadt covered Costello's first future standard, the aching "Alison," in '78, the singer publicly turned up his nose at her comparatively syrupy treatment of the song, while at the same time stating, "I didn't mind spending the money that she earned me." "I wasn't terribly gracious," he almost winces now. "I'm immensely grateful in retrospect." In truth, the most important thing for him was ploughing the money back into keeping The Attractions on the road. For all of his songwriting adventures outside his erstwhile group and now The Imposters, he has always been a band man at heart. "You can find posters with us and Talking Heads playing in Seattle for 99 cents," he says, reflecting upon those first Attractions tours. "So how were we making any money? We weren't. That first year was touch-and-go. So being a songwriter was the important thing. Because we probably wouldn't be sitting here right now." Here right now is on the opposite coast of America, in Studio A of the Jimi Hendrix-founded Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, New York. After Los Angeles, this fabled facility was Costello's next stop in the creation of Look Now. Whereas in California, he'd recorded in Studio Three of EastWest, formerly United Recorders, where Pet Sounds was made, in New York he was working in a room that had once reverberated with the sounds of Stevie Wonder nailing down "Superstition" and Bowie and Lennon trading lines on "Fame." Electric Lady seems in many ways unchanged from its golden era. Hendrix's artist friend Lance Jost's psychedelic space fantasia canvases still adorn the walls of the corridors and live room. An enormous faded photograph of a naked female gazing side-on at the lens, an outtake from the shoot for '68's Electric Ladyland, is mounted in the lounge, where Costello — in navy shirt, cream baseball cap and aviator shades — sips from a bottle of water as outside the city boils in a 35-degree August heat. Earlier this year, on Monday, March 12, the day that the Look Now sessions moved here, Costello received a phone call from his doctor calmly informing him that a recent test the singer had undergone had proved positive for a "small, but very aggressive" male-afflicting cancer. Only four months later — post-surgery (and having been given the all-clear) — did Costello reveal the health scare, if not the exact details of it, in a statement, when he was forced to cancel some European dates. "At first I wasn't going to tell anybody," he shrugs. "Cos I figured it wasn't really that dramatic. I went back to work too early and it was as simple as that, y'know. I over-calculated my ability to recover. The advisories for this kind of surgery say it takes between three and four weeks, depending on whether you have a desk job or an active job. Well, guess what, my job is not quite being an Olympic runner. But it's something like sprint, recover, travel 500 miles on a bus overnight." Pete Thomas, Attractions and Imposters drummer of 40 years standing, says he was impressed with how coolly Costello dealt with the diagnosis and treatment. "Cos that stuff can freak you out," he stresses. "In retrospect, he probably should've taken a bit more time before we went on the road. I think he was a bit too gung ho. Because his whole thing has always been, y'know, he is designed to win. He does not lose." Yet Costello admits that, pre-surgery, singing the songs for Look Now at the microphone in a Vancouver studio, mortality was on his mind. Particularly when he had to deliver the words "allow me to just dictate my dying will" in strummy, upbeat opener "Under Lime": "Oh yeah, it was a bit weird when I got to that line (laughs). Knowing that the procedure was up ahead... it's gotta sharpen you up. I mean, there's no better reason to be alert to the moment." For this reason, and many others besides, Look Now is a particularly vital-sounding collection of songs and performances that ranks up there with Costello's very best records. It's especially welcome since, after the commercial under-performance of 2010's 16-track-long, wide-ranging and unfairly-overlooked National Ransom, he announced that he was done with making albums altogether. Long-time keyboard sidekick Steve Nieve wasn't so sure if he believed him. "In a one-word answer... no," Nieve laughs. "He's got a fire inside of him that he can't put out." Thanks to Bacharach's presence, there are inevitable shades of Painted From Memory in parts of Look Now, though mostly it's a record coloured with soul, partially inspired by Dusty In Memphis. The last few years saw Costello sporadically emailing song demos to his Imposters bandmates, often simply recorded through the microphone of his iPad at home in Vancouver. Bit by bit, the others built up a file of over 30 songs. When the singer told Pete Thomas that he'd been steeping himself in Springfield's 1969 classic, the drummer set himself a task of trying to cherry-pick Costello's demos into a playlist that matched the running order of Dusty In Memphis in tempo and tone. "I just sent it to Elvis and said, Well, actually, you've got an album that would pretty much do the same thing. Y'know, if you did this one a bit faster and if you did this a bit funkier... There was no big masterplan or anything. It was just something I did. But for some reason, it tickled his fancy and sort of got him going. 'Cos he wrote back and he was like, 'Y'know what? You might be onto something here.'" "Pete didn't make the [ultimate] choices," Costello says. "But his thinking about it made me think, Well, OK, maybe there is enough already written here that would at least make a start. There was one other important springboard into the sound of Look Now, namely Costello and The Imposters' 2017 US live revival of his 1982 album Imperial Bedroom, under the banner of the Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers tour. That record's intricate baroque pop arrangements were a creative high watermark for Costello and band upon its release, being effectively the close of the first chapter of the story of Elvis and The Attractions that had taken them from the propulsive pop of This Year's Model and Armed Forces through the '60s soul combo shapes of Get Happy!! and the dalliance with country covers on Almost Blue. Back in '82, for the first time, here they were in a top-flight recording studio, AIR on Oxford Street, with a producer, Geoff Emerick, whose experience on the sessions for the latter Beatles albums (Revolver onwards) could help bring to life Costello's orchestrated visions. "That really felt like something when we were there," says Costello. "You'd look out the little porthole window down at Oxford Circus and there's all these people going home. Thinking of it now, it seems very romantic. Pete Thomas's memories of making Imperial Bedroom are slightly blurrier. "I remember it being another level of intoxication," he laughs. "When we did "Beyond Belief," I'd been up all night. Elvis said I could have one go at it, and if I didn't get it right, I was fired. "But, yeah, it was fantastic. Paul McCartney was in the next studio [recording Tug Of War]. Ringo came in at one point and just listened to what we were doing. We'd been playing for four or five years and the band was really good, and they were great songs. We all loved that Beatle style of doing things. We were definitely ready to give it a shot and it was amazing. Steve came up with all those arrangements, which we didn't really know he could do." However, trying to replicate those expansive strings-and-brass arrangements on-stage in the early '80s with the limited digital keyboard technology of the day was a hit-and-mostly-miss affair. Existing YouTube evidence of the band (sandwiched on the bill between Genesis and Blondie) bravely attempting to tackle "...And In Every Home" at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia in August '82 comes over like Sgt. Pepper suffering austerity cuts. "So feeble," Costello grins. "We had this machine, an Emulator, and Steve played sort of a distillation of his arrangement. We never had the patience to unravel the puzzle of how to play that music live. We'd done it in the studio and then we went and sort of just kinda ran at the songs... the way we ran at everything." "It was all over the place," says Thomas. "I mean, it never sounded like the record. It was always about three times faster." By the 2017 tour, the tech was now in place to replicate those sounds. And the band's handling of the Imperial Bedroom structures fed directly into Look Now. "It definitely showed us that we could do something more ornate," Thomas adds. "That we could be more organised, really. As opposed to our normal sort of crash-bang-wallop approach to things. I think Elvis saw that we could approach trickier material and orchestrations in a grown-up way. That we were probably old enough now to do it (laughs)." Costello admits that shining a light on the darker corners of his catalogue during last year's jaunt proved instructive in moving forward. "Some of the songs that have a powerful reaction in the audience were never even singles," he says. "A song like "Almost Blue" or "Man Out Of Time," to take two from that album, have endured through repetition. Joni Mitchell came to our show at UCLA and she came back after and said, 'Who wrote "The Long Honeymoon"?' And I went, I did..." The singer has talked up Look Now as striving for a combination of the melodic splendour of Painted From Memory and the elaboration of Imperial Bedroom. Today, he retreats slightly from that position. "I wouldn't hang too much on that remark I made," he insists. "All I was saying was the scope of Imperial Bedroom, if I started to do it now, it would be different. I'm in a different place in my life. The perspective of the lyrical writing is very different, the type of things I know how to do are different and the band have all this accumulated experience." That band, of course, being The Imposters, not The Attractions. After the latter group initially fell apart following a last Glastonbury performance in 1987, bassist Bruce Thomas penned a touring memoir, The Big Wheel, in 1990, which portrayed the never-named Costello ("The Singer") as a grumpy control freak. Although relations between the two were sufficiently repaired for The Attractions to reunite in the '90s for touring and two albums, Brutal Youth (1994) and All This Useless Beauty (1996), the wounds were soon reopened, with Thomas later admitting that he was "deliberately fucking it up" on-stage. Costello, Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas regrouped as The Imposters with former Cracker bassist Davey Faragher in 2001. Still, it was a highly unusual move to change the band's name due to the departure of one member who'd seemingly stopped caring. "A lot of groups would just carry on," Thomas accepts. "They would just call it Elvis Costello And The Attractions with another bass player. But Bruce was a big part of The Attractions. Also, because it was after a break, it was the idea of starting fresh. Davey is more like an R&B player really, whereas Bruce was more of a melodic player. With Davey's approach, things tended to sort of groove more." "We're not The Rolling Stones," says Costello, "where you have somebody playing like Bill Wyman. We're a different group playing a different way with a different sensibility. We've changed over 40 years, not stayed the same for 40 years. That's the big difference. We're not trying to be a replica of what we did before." It's tempting to wonder, though, in this age of the nostalgia tour, whether any promoters have suggested to Costello that changing the name of The Imposters to The Attractions would help them sell more tickets? "No. 'Cos they wouldn't necessarily," argues Costello. "That's a long time ago. Nobody cares except a handful of people who've been worrying too much about all of these things far too long. You know what? That other band? It ain't ever coming back." "The three of them already had a chemistry," says Davey Faragher, who first met Pete Thomas on the Los Angeles session scene. "Y'know, at first I was trying to honour the original bass parts, which I still do on The Attractions' stuff. But I have a different feel from Bruce really. I probably gave it just a slightly different slant." That much was evident with the first appearance of The Imposters on record, 2002's When I Was Cruel. The high emotional Remaining text and scanner-error corrections to come... Tags: Look Now  •  The Imposters  •  The Attractions  •  This Year's Model  •  Carole King  •  Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter  •  Burt Bacharach  •  Painted From Memory  •  Hal David  •  Don't Look Now  •  Photographs Can Lie  •  Brill Building  •  Ross MacManus  •  Tin Pan Alley  •  Declan MacManus  •  Jimmy Durante  •  1st US Tour  •  Linda Ronstadt  •  Living In The USA  •  Alison  •  Talking Heads  •  Seattle  •  Jimi Hendrix  •  The Beach Boys  •  Pet Sounds  •  Stevie Wonder  •  David Bowie  •  John Lennon  •  Pete Thomas  •  Under Lime  •  National Ransom  •  Steve Nieve  •  Dusty In Memphis  •  Imperial Bedroom  •  Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers Tour  •  Armed Forces  •  Get Happy!!  •  Almost Blue  •  AIR Studios  •  Geoff Emerick  •  The Beatles  •  Revolver  •  Beyond Belief  •  Paul McCartney  •  Ringo Starr  •  And In Every Home  •  JFK Stadium  •  Sgt. Pepper  •  Almost Blue  •  Man Out Of Time  •  Joni Mitchell  •  The Long Honeymoon  •  Painted From Memory  •  Glastonbury 1987  •  Bruce Thomas  •  The Big Wheel  •  Brutal Youth  •  All This Useless Beauty  •  Davey Faragher  •  The Rolling Stones  •  When I Was Cruel << >> Mojo, No. 300, November 2018 Tom Doyle talks to Elvis Costello, Steve Nieve, Pete Thomas and Davey Faragher. Mat Snow reviews Look Now. Images Photos by James O'Mara and Richard McCaffrey. Photos by Keith Morris and Rick Bronks.   Inset photo by James O'Mara.   Page scans. Look Now Elvis Costello & The Imposters Mat Snow From wistful to imperial Costello in vintage form. In 1998 Elvis Costello co-created the sumptuously poignant Painted From Memory with his hero Burt Bacharach. Twenty years on, Burt is back as co-writer of "Don't Look Now" and "Photographs Can Lie," as contributor to "He's Given Me Things," and as gravitational influence almost everywhere else. Even though fans are long familiar with three-quarters of Costello's default band since 1977 and the trademark turf and tropes — from blimpish satire ("I Let The Sun Go Down") to seedy screen seduction ("Under Lime") to songs Dusty should have sung ("Suspect My Tears") — his invention is undimmed but disciplined, his finesse masterly. And, this being the prolific songsmith's first album since 2013's collaboration with The Roots, Wise Up Ghost, his quality control is cranked to 11. Self-produced with Sebastian Krys, Look Now bounces with unforced, uncluttered and cleverly fleshed vivacity, every song a cherishable gem.   Page scans. Cover.

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