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It's 5.30PM on a Tuesday afternoon in the studio of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York. Showtime. Fallon, an affable Saturday Night Live graduate with none of the thorny egotism of a Jay Leno or David Letterman, likes to create an atmosphere of relaxed goofing around and his favourite playmates are the men he proudly calls "the greatest band in late night": Philadelphia hip hop crew The Roots.
Tonight, as every night, the eight members squeeze themselves onto a compact, split-level stage, anchored by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, the huge, teddy-bear-shaped drummer that Rolling Stone has dubbed "America's bandleader." In this role Questlove possesses the comical hangdog demeanour of a sitcom dad, and wears a suit like he's been blackmailed into it.
Questlove will later tell Mojo that music is his "second language," but it feels more like his first. The Roots warm up the crowd with some Stevie Wonder, play walk-on music for guests Gillian Anderson and comedian Aziz Ansari, jam with Maroon 5 keyboardist PJ Morton, back up R&B singer J Cole, punctuate Fallon's cornier jokes with sardonic drum fills, and take part in the semi-regular "Freestyln' with The Roots" segment. Fallon asks the band to improvise songs about various audience members in randomly selected genres: today it's '50s swing, reggae and Daft Punk. A nod and a murmur from Questlove and they're off. They've yet to encounter a style they can't play or a guest's song that they can't learn in less than an hour.
Since Fallon took the Late Night reins from Conan O'Brien four years ago, the show has transformed The Roots from well-regarded if low-profile workhorses into national treasures. In a country that has no dedicated national music programming, the late-night talk Show is live music's most important shop window. Driven by Fallon's fandom, Late Night attracts guests of the calibre of Prince and Bruce Springsteen while spurring rival shows to raise their own game musically. The Roots are its engine room. Now the show has indirectly allowed the group to make an album with Questlove's hero, Elvis Costello, the brilliantly ominous Wise Up Ghost.
Costello's own history at 30 Rockefeller is somewhat more chequered. Just two floors above the Late Night studio is the home of Saturday Night Live, where Costello made his live US TV debut in 1977. Midway through the agreed performance of his debut US single "Less Than Zero," the spiky 23-year-old — whom the Village Voice nicknamed the "Avenging Dork" — called a halt and led the Attractions into "Radio Radio," his as-yet-unreleased dig at censorious broadcasters: "I wanna bite the hand that feeds me." SNL producer Lorne Michaels was so enraged that he told this limey upstart that he'd never work in television again.
"We rubbed each other the wrong way," Costello later tells Mojo. "They were kind of pleased with themselves and we were super-arrogant on our first trip to America. We thought we knew everything. We knew nothing."
Ironically, many Americans who were too young for new wave have since come to know Costello best through TV, where he has played the role of dapper renaissance man since mending his bridges with SNL in 1999. He has been a regular guest, and even stand-in host, on Late Show With David Letterman. He has cameoed in The Larry Sanders Show, The Simpsons, 30 Rock, Treme and Two And A Half Men. Five years ago, he launched his own chat-and-jam TV show, Spectacle, and filmed the first four episodes in the very studio where he had once incurred the wrath of late-night's gatekeepers.
That tasty irony is just one indicator of how American music television's surprising resurgence has regenerated the careers of two former outsiders. Both Questlove and Costello had given up hope of wooing the American public with hit records, only to find their way into the beating heart of the culture via the small screen.
Only when you see Costello and Questlove sitting side-by-side in the midtown Manhattan offices of Blue Note Records do you get the full odd-couple impact. They talk like they dress: Costello's answers are sportive and precise. Questlove's shaggy and loose. What unites them is an encyclopaedic understanding of music history. They spend a good five minutes discussing the discovery of some long-lost Stevie Wonder reels before Questlove remembers he's being interviewed and sheepishly apologises for the digression. Clearly they could go on like this for hours, laughing at each other's anecdotes, nodding approvingly at relevant points, relishing the chance to discuss nothing but music.
In terms of vast knowledge and passion in diverse genres, they are perhaps each other's only rivals. Both are regarded as popular music's leading tour guides, au fait with all the main drags and most of the backstreets. They know a lot about a lot and like to share their expertise by compiling long, annotated playlists for magazines or giving lovingly curated iPods to friends. When Beyoncé and Jay-Z had their first child last year, Questlove filled four (four!) devices with a round-the-clock soundtrack for little Blue Ivy Carter. "You gotta get them while they're young," he reasons. The iPod The Roots gave to Costello before they began working together last September included tracks the singer couldn't even remember recording.
"We're Elvis Stans," Questlove says bashfully using the Eminem-inspired slang for an obsessive fan. As far back as The Roots' first meeting with Fallon and Lorne Michaels, Questlove and Roots engineer Steve Mandel agreed that Costello topped their wishlist of guests to perform with. "Of all the people who visited Late Night, the person we wanted to freak out the least was Elvis. I so didn't want to drop the ball." He laughs. "It's so weird to say this in front of him now."
Ever since he outgrew his youthful Mr Angry persona in the mid-'80s, Costello has been one of music's most relentlessly agreeable participants. Booking a benefit gig, tribute album or awards show? Costello's your man. Such sociability is new to Questlove. Playing up to 230 shows a year left The Roots little time for networking, and Questlove is naturally shy. "Even 18 years into our career, the idea of shaking hands with people we admired was new," he says. "I thought this was a retirement gig, Every act falls off so we might as well fall off gracefully. I forgot to consider the possibility that things could get better."
When Costello, who currently lives in New York with his wife Diana Krall and their twin boys, first appeared on Late Night in November 2009, The Roots set about seducing him with arcane knowledge. For his walk-on music they played the old jingle for R White's Lemonade, composed by Costello's dad Ross MacManus, and featuring the young Declan MacManus on backing vocals and bass. For the actual performance, the band prepared "High Fidelity" in its slower, Bowie-inspired demo form. By Costello's third visit to Fallon, last March, Questlove had summoned the courage to ask him about working together, no strings attached.
Costello had in fact decided he was done making albums, and would be happy just performing live from now on; but, true to type, he was hooked by the prospect of an unusual alliance.
"Your natural curiosity leads you down trails and some of them are going to seem like false trails to people who liked you first," he says. "The penny doesn't necessarily drop until a long time afterwards. Thu do something really different, people get horrified — the sky is falling! — and then 10 years later they're telling you, 'Oh, I get that now.' You've always got people walking in and out of the door, unless you're in the business of trying to rule the world and having as many people as possible like you for the most basic reasons. That's not a musical vocation. That's how you become Mussolini."
Did he ever have the Il Duce instinct? He shakes his head. "Except maybe around 1978 when we thought about moving to Austin to try and crack America." He smiles grimly. "As if that was possible."
Costello describes the new album as "a slow-crawling snake". For the first few months, starting last September, The Roots laid down tracks in their tiny rehearsal room-studio at Late Night ("It's like the fucking TARDIS," marvels Costello) and sent them to the singer. "It's like that game where you fold a piece of paper in three and draw the head of an animal and someone else draws the body," says Costello. Later, they decided they had to be in the same room. Steve Mandel's initial idea was to rework Costello's back catalogue: their first song together, "Stick Out Your Tongue," was a hair-rais-
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