The cavernous rehearsal studio is littered with amplifiers branded 'Elvis Costello, London'. But we're in Dublin's dockhands, not Elvis's old stamping ground of Acton and Brentford.
Scattered provocatively around the studio are cassettes marked 'EC Demos 95', and stacks of lyrics. They're the skeletons on which Elvis-a Dublin resident for several years- and the Attractions are building a new album, preceded by some plunging in at the deep end shows at New York's Beacon Theatre in late July. Like Costello's recent a Kojak Variety covers set, this record has a theme: the songs that Elvis has given away, or at least tried to.
Under consideration are semi familiar tunes like "The Other End Of The Telescope", co written with Aimee Mann for her ormer band, 'Til Tuesday, plus offerings custom built for the likes of David Crosby. Trouble is, he turned it down. "Yeah, it's a shame he didn't do it," Elvis says phlegmatically. But playing it myself, I've discovered what's wrong with it as far as he's concerned. Too many words."
It's an accusation that Elvis has heard from the press, too, along with the line that he should quit trying to be an all round musical genius, and concentrate on cranking out two minute gems of cynicism and brutal youth with the Attractions.
Costello has no truck with such a shortsighted view of his role. Throughout our interview, he claims disinterest in the workings of the rock press, and contempt for those who want to fix him in stone as the sneering icon of "This Year's Model". After his cross cultural excursions of recent years - film soundtracks, semi classical song suites, and genre crushing festivals at London's South Bank Centre - Elvis has the taste of artistic freedom in his nostrils.
Other men - Scott Walker, for instance - might have used their new found highbrow profile as an excuse to junk their juvenile back catalogue. But not Costello. He's not only proud of his past, but-as you'll see this month and next-damn near impossible to shut up once he gets the titbit of nostalgia in his teeth. Exuberantly enthusiastic about his entire professional career, he still retains a commendably clear perspective on where he's been, and how he changed along the way.
To mark the revamped CD release of 1986's Blood And Chocolates-the climax of a two-year reissue campaign with Demon Records -Elvis agreed to talk his way through two decades of musical adventures. This month, he steams through the decade from his 'Honky Tonk' demos to Blood And Chocolate"; next month, his progress from "Spike" to today comes under his fiercely self analytical stare. Never short of words, or passion, Elvis Costello talks as good a story as he sings.
RECORD COLLECTOR: When did you first realise that making music was going to
become a career
ELVIS COSTELLO: I knew I had a career when I was 14. It just took the rest
of the world a long time to figure it out, and for me to work out how to do
it. But I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
RC: The early albums sound so frenetic, though, that a long term career seems like the last thing on your mind.
EC: Well, I'd had an eight year wait! I'd been writing songs since I was 14, though if I went back and looked at them, I'd find them pretty embarrassing now. Some of the tapes that have surfaced are pretty embarrassing.
But when you're convinced that this is your vocation, you think it's inevitable that you will eventually have the chance to do it, even if you do other jobs to pay the rent.
By the time I got to 22, I'd had several false starts at getting bands together, some of them documented, some of them so fleeting that no one knows about them. And I'd had several attempts at doing demos on my own, some of which later led to my getting signed -plus others which never surfaced, and remain a mystery to me. There were various people on the fringes of publishing and producing, but who weren't actually attached to labels, who obviously saw something in what I did, and they got me in to make a demo hoping that they could sell a piece of it. Fortunately, they didn't come to anything because there are a lot of artists who have these really half assed tapes that surface later.
RC: One of which was the so called Honky Tonk Demos' tape, which you used for the CD of My Aim Is True" . . .
EC: Well, that was my official demo tape, the one that really got things started for me. It was made in my bedroom, on a friend's Revox. Before that, I'd sent out tapes I'd made on an old Grundig, which sounded pretty funky. I was sending out 20 songs at a time. I didn't know enough to realise that no publisher has the patience to listen to 20 songs, in the hope that the 18th one is the one that's good. They listen to the first song, and if it doesn't show great promise, they throw it away.
So by the time I made that tape,I had a pretty good idea from bitter experience that you had to make a presentation, just like putting on a show. I'd also been playing solo a lot, so I was much better at presenting my songs to hostile audiences, and winning them over.
So I made a little show reel, as it were, at home, of six songs, five of which still exist, and sent it off to various people. One of them was ('Honky Tong' DJ) Charlie Gillett, who played it on the radio. That really got things going. I had several different people after my signature then, none of them aware of the others' existence. Charlie had a rather halting plan to sign me to his label, Oval Records while Virgin offered me a really pitiful deal- even then I knew enough to laugh at it. It was Stiff who had the initiative to say, Let's do it now". It seemed almost magical after two or three years of getting really indifferent, or completely bewildered, responses to all the tapes I'd created.
RC: How did you feel about the gimmicky side of Stiff, with all those snappy slogans and T shirts
EC: I actually made up some of the slogans. I used to go there on the train after work, which made me feel as if I was involved in the music business full time. I hadn't actually turned professional yet, and I was making My Aim Is True" in stages, using sick days and holidays off work. It only took about 24 hours of studio time, but I had to keep working, because I had a wife and child to support.
Originally, I was the first artist signed to Stiff. Nick Lowe was the first artist on the label, but he wasn't actually signed. Despite that, I ended up with the 11th release on the label. All these records came through from people like the Damned and Richard Hell, which were very much tied to the moment, so their timing was crucial. It was frustrating for me, because I wanted to get on with it.
Not that it changed my life when Less Than Zero" did come out. In fact, the first three singles did nothing. But I'd amassed enough material over these sessions to make up an album, which was when (Stiff bosses) Jake Riviera and Dave Robinson asked me to turn pro. I said, Only if I can earn as much money doing this as I do in my job, because I have my responsibilities". If I'd been on my own, I'd have taken the risk, but I couldn't for my family. So they promised they'd pay me the same as my job-which wasn't a fortune so it wasn't too difficult. We put some ads in the papers for musicians, formed the Attractions, and that was it. I turned professional the week the album came out.
RC: I was intrigued to discover that some of your most unusual early songs like Hoover Factory Dr Luther's Assistants and Ghost Train" were all written by the time you cut My Aim Is True".
EC: Yes, I did have these slightly baroque songs. I know I performed Hoover Factory" when I first appeared in London, before my record came out. I did a guest appearance with the Rumour, at the Nashville Rooms. I wrote it simply because I used to go by the Hoover Factory every day on the bus to work.
I wasn't stupid. When I wrote the first album, I saw that the most direct and most aggressive songs seemed to hit home. The rhythm of the times was like that. I seemed to get across to people with those ones, both when I played in clubs and when I was sending the demos in.
I was writing songs very fast, and one day I went to Pathway Studios where Nick Lowe was producing a Wreckless Eric record. Wreckless was very nervous, so Nick took him for a drink to loosen him up a little bit, and I recorded eight songs while they were gone just guitar and voice. That was the bulk of the demos for My Aim Is True". Up until that point, Stiff had actually considered launching Wreckless and myself on the same record, like Chuck Meets Bo", with a side each. They didn't really think either of us could sustain a whole album, in terms of the audience's tolerance for two such unusual singers.
Then it became apparent that I had five times more songs than him, and that they needed to do a full album with me. A lot of those other songs didn't get recorded until later, when we needed B sides. By then, I had an audience, so I could record other kinds of songs, without running the risk I would have done earlier of giving the game away and showing that I knew more than three chords.
RC: Because if My Aim Is True" had started with Ghost Train, the reaction would have been quite different.
EC: Or if it had started with Stranger In The House", which was the first thing recorded at the sessions. We left that off because the country element of that song would have put me back on the other side of those style wars that were going on. At that stage of my career, I could have been killed by that sort of thing.
RC: Why did you start to write country songs.?
EC: I started listening to country music seriously about 1970, which was when I started to become interested in what should be called Americana music-groups like the Band the Grateful Dead's records of the time, and particularly the Byrds' "Sweetheart Of The Rodeo". And I got curious to find out who these country singers were that these band were covering.
It's pretty much the same process people went through in the 60s, discovering Howlin' Wolf through the Rolling Stones, or Little Willie John through Fleetwood Mac. I went through that to some extent. For some curious reason, though, I didn't like the Rolling Stones when they were doing blues. I thought they sounded ridiculous, because we had some real R&B records in our house, so I knew how that was supposed to sound.
But country had never really got into our household. Jazz, R&B and soul were there, but not country, so I discovered it for myself It was quite hard to find, because unless you were really a specialist country fan, you wouldn't know George Jones' stuff, or Merle Haggard. Then it was a natural step to try and write something in that style. I liked the plainness of the chords, the churchy harmony.
RC: You've said elsewhere that you were incredibly influenced early on by people like the Band, Little Feat and Lowell George. Now hard was it to escape the American influences on your songwriting?
EC: I didn't even worry about them. Obviously, John Lydon and Ian Dury sang with a very pro¬nounced English delivery, and Pete Shelley with a Mancunian accent, but most singers had that transatlantic pop voice-even the Beatles did, though sometimes they sounded more American, and sometimes they accentuated the Liverpool accent. It's all acting. I talk in a voice that's much lower than I sing. And I never found any problem with it.
Some people thought that singing with a proletarian delivery, and a certain kind of regional accent, whether that was London or Manchester or Bristol, was some sort of badge of authenticity. That's bollocks. It's what's in your heart that matters. I no longer hear any geography in good singing.
RC: How calculating was your involvement in punks Did you deliberately allow yourself to be marketed as part of that movement.?
EC: I didn't really care if I was part of it or not. It just gave my career a degree of propulsion. In retrospect, it's been seen as calculated and there are always these style wars that go on all the time, but they only exist in the music business, not in the real world.
The truth is that most of the people writing about punk in London had come up from the suburbs, and they were very defensive and protective about the things that facilitated their escape from their horrible, empty lives. They took it out on the people who lived in the towns they came from. When you went down to Plymouth and there were just three kids with safety pins stuck in their lapels rather than wearing bin liners, they were having a hard job living up to what they had been taught to think was groovy. I hated that sort of tyranny. It's so insignificant-it goes by in the bat of an eyelid.
Actually, I never saw any of the punk bands until later. I liked the Clash's first record: it was quite influential in its spirit rather than its music, because I didn't think any of them could play to save their lives. Not that it mattered. But I wasn't at all interested in the Malcolm McLaren scene, I thought it was completely fake. I liked the Pistols' records, because I thought (producer) Chris Thomas made a tremendous sound, but I don't think they had a lot to do with it. The Pistols and Clash records stand up, and the Buzzcocks, who were a pop group who played fast, but a lot of the other groups were pretty awful.
RC: Did you feel any more at home with the great new wave' explosion?
EC: I know nothing at all about new wave. As far as I remember, Polygram Records invented new wave as a slogan to sell a bunch of crap American records like the Runaways, and stuck 'em all on a compilation with a Boomtown Rats track and something by the Dead Boys. They called it "New Wave" because it wasn't fast enough to sound like punk. And the name stuck. I just thought all slogans were stupid-except for the ones we made up to make fun of the music being pigeonholed. I was the one that coined the "surfing on the new wave" phrase, because it was asking to be said-like, there is a new wave, and I'm right on top of it.
RC: On This Years Model", you incorporated lots of influences from the British bands of the 60s.
EC: Yeah, we never made any bones about the fact that we ripped stuff off from other things. Sometimes it was done very consciously, and sometimes it was simply me thinking about it and not telling the rest of the band.
RC: How easy is it to do that and still be original
EC: I usually ripped off things I didn't like very much. I was quite a long way into my career before I did anything too overtly. They were usually quite subtle, like there's a 6th chord at the end of "Lip Service" like there is at the end of "She Loves You". That's a fairly off the wall one. There's maybe a suggestion of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" at the end of "Party Girl". The Beatles were my main influence, but there weren't really Beatles references until we got to the stage where we were pretty confident that we could do it with wit.
Some of my singing early on sounded more like Van Morrison, because he was one of the people I listened to constantly-him and Rick Danko from the Band. And Georgie Fame, only I don't sound anything like him! The only time I maybe do is on "Kojak Variety", when I did a Mose Allison song, and it's hard to escape from Fame's kind of delivery with Allison's songs.
It was never a problem, because a lot of the things we borrowed from were things I'd been passionate about some time earlier, so I was past the stage of being overwhelmed with them. I could look back at them affectionately. I knew all the Small Faces records backwards when I was 13, but I didn't have the ability or the platform to use what I'd learned from them until I was 23. So when we did "You Belong To Me", and it sounded like "Watcha Gonna Do About It" (Small Faces) crossed with "The Last Time" (Rolling Stones) I didn't really think about it, because the references were so fleeting. It was more that the whole spirit of "This Year's Model" was related to the Stones "Aftermath", because it was about the same kind of moment in somebody's life, updated for the late 70s.
RC: "This Year's Model" has several songs that seem to be attacking the fashion industry in all its guises, but it s packaged in a very self consciously 'modern' way- and "Armed Forces" even more so.
EC: Barney Bubbles, who died a few years ago, did all our artwork until "Imperial Bedroom", and he had a mind like an art encyclopaedia. He would borrow from different periods quite shamelessly, in a very witty way-he did a poster for "Watching The Detectives" that was a blatant take on Warhol, and there were the obvious Picasso references on the "Imperial Bedroom" painting.
If a thing amused me when I saw it, I didn't ponder the significance of it. When you buy a box of cornflakes, you eat the cornflakes, you don't eat the packet. You might look at the packet when you're eating the cornflakes-and it's the same thing as a record. We wanted to catch people's eyes. If they looked at "This Year's Model" and said, "Why is it printed off register as the initial pressing was, it was because we wanted people to ask exactly that. It meant they'd pause just that little bit longer in front of our sleeve.
Although it wasn't my idea, exactly the same thinking was behind me changing my name, because it stopped people dead in their tracks and made them say, He can't be called that! He is called that!" By that time, they'd noticed me more than the bloke called Joe Smith.
A lot of the things are simple like that, and it's a mistake to read more into them. If you'd interviewed Barney, he might have had another agenda. Obviously, there is a certain irony to the fact that the record's called This Year's Model - and I'm behind the camera looking at her! And I've no idea what's happening on the back of the record, where I'm flying through the window, or what the washing machines and the dummies are about. Or the Sinclair TV, which didn't exist at the time. There weren't any colour TVs of that size. Even the things that appeared to be fashionable were actually fantasy. As to me having a fashionable image, well, my suit cost me two dollars from a thrift store. It was hardly the height of fashion.
The "Armed Forces" sleeve was very involved. I loved it, it was very funny. We wanted to make it as impractical and ghastly as possible. There were kitsch elements of pop art in it, of trash art that you buy from Woolworth's, of postcards that are disposable and you lose them. It was never supposed to live forever, so it's ironic that we've ended up reissuing the thing.
That's why we put the first reissue package out in a cardboard box that falls apart after six months, and it's in horrible colours. We weren't trying to make it leather bound and gold embossed just because we were reissuing it. We wanted to make it as cheap and horrible as it was when it was issued originally.
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