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"You want to interview Steve?” asked Elvis Costello’s manager, the feisty pugnacious Jake Riviera. “Well then, you’d better ask him about amplifier settings.” He cracked a smile, and explained himself: “Steve’s been up all night and we’ve been kidding him about the guy from Musician magazine who’s going to ask about settings.” Riviera laughed.
I followed Rivera to the dressing room. There sat Steve arranger, composer. orchestrator and keyboard player extraordinaire. unshaven, dressed all in black. with a black fedora atop his head, slouched on the couch, he looked
like a sleazy character out of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil.
With straight face. Riviera introduced us.
"Now Steve." I began, before I'd even taken a seat "The first thing I want to talk to you about are your amp settings. A look of horror crossed Nieve's face. Suddenly there was laughter from the adjoining dressing rooms "Just kidding," I said,
For six years. twenty-five-year-old Steve Nieve has been a lieutenant in Elvis' army_ From the Peter Gunn- mystery of "Watching The Detectives," the first Elvis track he played on, through the horn-dominated soul revival Punch The Clock. Nieve has helped sculpt the unique pop sound that has made Elvis Costello one of the most respected of modern day rock 'n' rollers, Steve Nieve deserves to be respected as well. A classically trained pianist who studied at London's Royal College of Music. He can play garage-trashy a la ? and the Mysterians (This Year's Model), pump out Nashville honky-tonk (Almost Blue) or do a Booker T (Get Happy!). Perhaps his most stylistically distinctive work is evident on Armed Forces and Imperial Bedroom, where he works his classical roots into Elvis' material, giving the tunes a majestic neo-Sgt. Pepper quality.
Those classical roots still remain dear to Nieve who, when he's not recording or touring with Elvis, composes classical music In London. one can sometimes find him playing this music at a small French restaurant, L'Escargot.
Recently he recorded an entire album of his own compositions, Keyboard Jungle (on Demon Records), The music is not what one expects from a driving force in one of the key modern rock units. Recorded digitally in four hours, Keyboard Jungle, an album of instrumentals, finds Nieve and only Nieve holding forth on a Steinway grand.
"l like the idea of going against the system." said Nieve a softspoken young man not used to being interviewed (this was only his second interview—ever) "l think someday music won't be so commercialized There was a time, before record players. when people could make their own music, however terrible it was, to entertain each other at home. It seems to me that the way records are going. a lot of them are sounding the same as the last one I'd like to see a time when it goes back to that thing of people entertaining each other in their houses. rather than buying a record by Styx and they don't even know what the lead singer looks like. It's just a noise. It's just a record company-
produced thing And especially in America, the way the radio is set up, they completely dictate what kind of music those kinds of bands make. That's why my album probably won't get played on the radio But then it's completely what I
wanted to do.
Born in Bishop's Stortford, Nieve grew up in the small English town of Erith, just down the road from a factory where Vox organs were made his parents played classical music around the house and he took piano lessons from a neighbor beginning when he was six years old. It wasn't until Nieve turned fifteen that he got hip to rock 'n' roll "Studying classical music. they'd play you something and then you'd have to write it down by ear." he says "That was part of the training. Of course most of the kids were into pop music So one time the teacher said. 'Let's just listen to pop records: and he put on 'Metal Guru' by T Rex and we were sitting there writing it down;' Nieve
laughed at the memory "I thought. "This is great! So I had to go out and buy it. And that's what started it all going."
From there it was less than a year before he had bought his first Vox organ (which he played on Elvis & the Attractions' first American tour) and began playing in local combos including the Albinos ("We never played any gigs we
just rehearsed;-' and Second Foundation, a ten-piece band with a girl singer that covered the hits of the day. Still, playing pop music was a hobby, until the keyboard player joined the Attractions in 1977 .
That Nieve ended up in the Attractions was pure luck. He was attending the Royal ColIege of Music in London at the time But he was tired of college life. Nieve wanted out and thought it might be fun to play in a pop band. Looking through the musician's classifieds in the back Of Melody Maker, an ad for "keyboards for a rocking pop combo" caught his eye "'so I called them up and they had so many people calling them up that they were trying to put people off" said Nieve, lighting the first of numerous Camel cigarettes that he would chain-smoke during the interview. "'The secretary said to me, "Yeah we've got this Elvis Presley impersonator' I said, "Great I'll come down".
'lt was like an audition." he continued. "They had Steve Goulding from the Rumour on drums and I think Martin Belmont on guitar and I just walked in this room and there was a Hammond there; I had never seen a Hammond before so was trying to figure out how that worked. I just played three songs 'Less Than Zero' was one of the songs. This was before My Aim Is True came out I'd never heard the songs. It wasn't Iike I decided to join Elvis' group, I just wanted to get into a band But then after that we went into a place in Cornwall and rehearsed for a week. And then when I got back to London I got a message from the college that I'd been expelled so it was perfect timing,
The combination of Elvis Costello and the three Attractions - Nieve, bassist Bruce Thomas and drummer Peter Thomas —has been a particularly potent one. In six years they've recorded eight superb albums. Nieve says the group works intuitively, there's no formula for making an Elvis Costello record. "It's a difficult thing to talk about -cause we've recorded so many things and they're all recorded in different ways, really. Some albums we go away to a Iittle country cottage and stay there a week to learn the songs and they go through different transformations. Sometimes we'll be doing a song of Elvis' in some different way and we'll get up in the morning and he'll have been up all night and have rewritten the words because of the new music." And what has kept this band together for over six years? "Good question. Nearly all the bands that were around when we started have split up." he says.
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