The Quietus, October 21, 2020

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Baker's Dozen

Pump 'Em Up! Elvis Costello's Favourite Music


Paul Stokes

Elvis Costello tells Paul Stokes about his lockdown life and new album Hey Clockface as he guides us through Baker's Dozen tales including being taken under the sinful wing of Iggy Pop and the time he nearly joined Blur.

Lockdown could have been very different and very lonely for Elvis Costello. A resident of Vancouver, Canada, the singer-songwriter was thousands of miles away on a tour of his native UK at the moment things started to close across the globe. "I was looking at the deteriorating situation, and asking 'how long can we stay in the game here?' I don't have any legal status in Canada – I live in here in Vancouver where my boys go to school – I had to keep my eye on the borders which were starting to close," he recalls of the predicament facing him in mid March. Not that it inspired total panic, and Costello even managed to play a show in his childhood heartlands at London's Eventim Apollo (still "Hammersmith Apollo" to him) as lockdown hung in the balance. "I was waiting for word from above, divine intervention, a letter from Boris Johnson, a glimmer of common sense, anything!" he says. "In the end I remember standing in the wings at Hammersmith after the main set and saying, 'Ok guys, let's play ["Mighty Like A Rose" track] 'Hurry Down Doomsdays The Bugs Are Taking Over'. At least let's have some humour at this moment!' So we went out and played that and closed the show."

Eventually, postponing his final few dates, the singer-songwriter dodged the bugs and doomsday, making it back to Canada to spend most of his corona enforced isolation in an idyllic cabin on Vancouver Island with his family… and his audio files. Having completed two, week-long recording sessions just before hitting the road for the tour, the enforced break allowed him to make sense of the results.

The first, taking place in Helsinki, was an entirely solo set up which resulted in a collection of beat-flecked, punkish tracks. His second week in a studio swung the other way, as he was joined in Paris by a group of virtuoso musicians assembled by long term keyboard player, The Attractions' (now The Imposters) Steve Nieve. The jazz-leaning group improvised their way through a series of newly written songs, adding a dixie swing to Costello's smouldering emotions.

So far, so apart, in fact the man born Declan McManus initially thought of digitally drip-feeding the tracks out individually, before lockdown actually did him a favour. Asked to provide words and sing remotely over music recorded in New York by jazz trumpeter and composer Michael Leonhart, Costello felt the new material bridged his two previous sessions, helping him to assemble the disparate yet curiously coherent new album Hey Clockface with co-producer Sebastian Krys. "Although there were really radical contrasts between the approach musically and the mood of something like'No Flag' and 'I Do (Zula's Song)', there was a way to make work to our advantage," he suggests. "I have to give Sebastian credit because he wasn't involved in the physical recording but mixed it afterwards. He heard all the music as we put it down and did the final mix."

That the new record mixes tracks interwoven with clarinet solos, and sonic blasts from Costello's fuzzed-up guitars, might surprise some, but the Baker's Dozen he has selected for The Quietus neatly demonstrates the breadth of musical machinations that go on behind his horn-rimmed glasses. In November 2000 Costello recommended 500 albums for Vanity Fair ("When in doubt, play track four – it is usually the one you want," he suggested for navigating the recommendations), yet such is his hunger for music only Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan, Damon Albarn and Iggy Pop are represented amongst that list and his 2020 selections – the latter is the only artist with record that actually doubles up!

Despite this Costello's 13 picks still include from tunes that adorned his childhood, a recent online discovery and the latest, just released album by his wife, the jazz singer and pianist Diana Krall. - though isn't the only member of his household to inspire his Baker's Dozen selections. Costello explains that his teenage son rekindled his interest in Gorillaz after he got into the band independently via an interest in remixing and animation. After almost joining Blur for the night (see the entry) – and surely overdue his own invite as a Gorillaz guest – Elvis explains that it was thanks to his offspring and Albarn that he got to enjoy a moment of true music fandom, something you suspect from his passionate conversation is still a prime motivation by his heroic consumption of music. "I couldn't believe my eyes, but I was walking through the lobby of this hotel and there was Bobby Womack sitting in a chair," recalls Costello of the time when both artists played Glastonbury 2013 – Womack performing the Bravest Man In The Universe album which spun out of his work with Gorillaz. "I was there with both my boys, introduced them to Bobby and he was great and really kind to them. I was so thrilled, I was a real fan meeting someone I loved. Just as I was walking away he called me back just said, 'Let's do something before it's over' and quoting his own song, I said 'Bobby, it's never over!' It was so great just to speak to him. Just the greatest!"

Having escaped a solitary lockdown to make a varied and passionate record like Hey Clockface – let alone the scope of this Baker's Dozen – you suspect for Elvis the love affair with music is never going to be over.

Hey Clockface is released on 30th October, to begin reading Elvis Costello's selections please click the image below

Mike Sammes – Music For Biscuits
The Mike Sammes Singers were in the shadows of popular music when I was a boy. Their precise vocal stylings were heard on many records, from the onomatopoeia on 'I Am The Walrus' or the choral support of 'Tears' by Ken Dodd, through countless radio appearances and on the credits of such essential viewing as Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation marvels: Stingray and Fireball XL5. I am grateful that Jonny Trunk [writer, DJ and founder of Trunk Records] rescued these Mike Sammes gems from the group's work in advertising. The album is worth it for the 'Dulux Super Three' jingle alone, in which some copy-writing wag proposed, "Groucho, Chico and Harpo" along with several other utterly bizarre Super Three line-ups from "The Three Musketeers" through, "Babs, Joy and Teddy"; the Beverly Sisters and the strangest of all; "Stalin! Churchill! Roosevelt!", all sung in perfect harmony, in praise of a brand of paint. Those were the days.

Ben Webster – Music For Loving
This collection gathers several album's worth of Ben Webster ballad performances. I could start with a favourite song, say, 'We'll Be Together Again' and listen forever and never care again. I've known many of these songs since early childhood, there are even some like, 'My Funny Valentine' that I've recorded myself [b-side to 'Oliver's Army'], when that seemed the least expected thing to do. Truthfully, it takes a lifetime to really learn everything that is within these songs and this is what you hear in these recordings. Now as shadows gather, I don't even need to hear a vocalist singing many of these lyrics; the mood and the implications of each story are all here in Webster's playing. Like his contemporaries, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, this is a voice without, or beyond, literal definition. If you cannot sense the story being told, I'd check with your undertaker. The orchestrations are sweet and very much of their time, I imagine they were written with the thought of making these records more appealing. Only a fool would dismiss them as saccharine, they are but the canvas, as once Webster plays, everything falls away and nothing else matters.

Bob Dylan – Rough And Rowdy Ways
Upon hearing the last six or so minutes of 'Murder Most Foul', in which Dylan unfolds a litany of singers and actors names, song and film titles, I found myself filled with tears but not out of despair but because those named are no more lost to us than hope itself. They weigh in the balance on the side of worth and even a little truth, against all of the viciousness that has taken place since the brutal events in November '63, described in the opening stanzas. This song is "about President Kennedy" in the same way that, Moby Dick is about a whale of a time. Make no mistake, this is a writer and - perhaps more importantly - a singer, operating at the top of their powers. Backed by an ensemble playing with the closest attention to the narrative line, the album is sung with incredible nuance that belies most estimations of what it takes to be a great singer and one which I suspect is informed by Dylan's investigations into so many great American songbooks over these recent years.

To my ear, this is someone making an inventory of what is left that matters; the succour of a muse, a creature made from spare parts, the refusal to throw your shoes into to the crowd in an act of glib showmanship, rather it piles up all these whispered endearments, pleas, citations, asides, villainous threats and one particularly audacious passage in which Generals Grant, Zukhov and Patton are all cited as having cleared a path for "Presley to sing".

I cannot think of another songwriter who would have proposed such a verse and it is such that makes this a record for the hours and the ages. We all of us live in The Time Of Homer… Simpson, that is. Dylan's words and music dwell at the fork in the road where the Other Homer and the roadmaster, Bill Monroe, trade secrets.

Fiona Apple – Fetch The Bolt Cutters
I heard more original music in the first five or six songs of this extraordinary record than I had in the last five or six years. I've been fortunate enough to once stand next to Fiona and witness what she can do to a song - in that case, it was my tune, 'I Want You', which she rendered with the intensity of the most desperate Shakespearean soliloquy.

There is such imagination, humour and passion in songs like, 'I Want You To Love Me', 'Shameika' and 'Under The Table', so if I suggest these qualities are "in balance" it is the kind of fearless, improvised seesaw of art and craft, like a raw plank dropped on a log on a woodland clearing. The constant surprise of the arrangements and the proximity of the singer to feeling means that I have absolutely no idea how this all came into being and I like it better that way.

King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band – 'Snake Rag' ft Louis Armstrong
I chose this track over all the other Louis Armstrong music that I might have proposed because I recently saw Ralph J. Gleason's Jazz Casual interview with Louis from 1963. The extraordinary aspect of the conversation is that much of it consisted of Gleason playing Armstrong his own recordings while the camera remained on Louis' facial expressions as he revisited the early highlights of his career. This performance with King Oliver was the most moving to behold as the older Armstrong smiled at the startling invention of his younger playing, while his words revealed deep respect for his mentor. They say the revolution will not be televised but this clip (and this record) prove that this old saying must have exceptions.

Tshegue – 'Muanapoto'
There is not so much to tell you here. This EP track came to my attention via a video clip, one with that rarity of having a suggestion of a narrative and suspicion of truth about it. The video is such a rare thing, these days, we used to a lot more of those narrative videos and no one seems to make them any more. You could hear the track and really like it as music, but then you see that video and because I don't really know what the words are saying it made me realise there were all these other implications. The way the camera moves around was really good and it really opens it up. This ensemble - a singer from the Democratic Republic of Congo and a Franco-Cuban mixer - were entirely new to my ear and I can only hope they surprise and engage you in the same way. It's good to put something on the list that you haven't liked for a hundred years, it's good to have something that's hit you hard right away and you're enthusiastic about right now and share one of those, because sometimes things get missed.

Nicole Atkins – Italian Ice
Over the years, my brother T Bone Burnett has introduced me to a great number of people I never imagined I would ever meet, from the bassist, Ray Brown and guitarist, James Burton, to memorable encounters with Willie Dixon and Jerry Lee Lewis. In September 2019, T Bone invited me to a concert screening of Easy Rider that he was producing at Radio City Music Hall in which the soundtrack would be re-created live. John Kay was there to deliver roof-raising versions of, 'The Pusher' and 'Born To Be Wild' while Roger McGuinn sang, 'I Wasn't Born To Follow' as beautifully as ever.

Among the artists charged with singing songs by artists no longer with us was Nicole Atkins. She easily surpassed the soundtrack version of 'The Weight' by the group Smith. What astonished me more was that I had never heard this voice before. Between the near demise of the music press and the needle in the haystack searches on the internet, I am both dismayed and thrilled to encounter music I have somehow failed to register. I soon obtained a stack of Nicole's own records and found so many fine songs and some killer singing and playing, proving once more that you can respect the "Then" and still be about, "Now". On Nicole's new album Italian Ice, you'll sense a strong understanding of songcraft but the stories of 'Never Going Home' and 'St Dymphna', the humour, and the emotion of the voice are all her own. Don't let this one slip by.

Gorillaz – Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez
Pop music invites the donning of disguises and the assumption of aliases. Take a daft handle, don some horn-rim spectacles and you can be anyone you want to be and a few that you don't. I mention this because there was that one night when I was nearly in Blur. We were both supposed to feature on The Frightful Friday Show or one of those pale knock-offs of Ready Steady Go in the 90s.

This was during the first blush of Britpop and I guess the pace had got a little hectic, so one of the band members had gone missing. Someone - perhaps a record company wag or one of the television producers - floated the idea that I might deputise for Graham Coxon. There was no way in the world I could have covered for Graham's excellent guitar playing and I seriously doubt any of their fans would have been fooled by my slightly robust silhouette, whether or not I was wearing similar glasses.

Nevertheless, in the Marvellous World of Showbiz, this narrowly avoided catastrophe was enough to make me feel a certain distant kinship. I observed the on-going, Battle Of The Bands as if it were a boxing match between Freddie Mercury and Freddie Garrity. I loved a lot of Blur's later records and particularly the first album by Damon Albarn's excellent other band, The Good The Bad and The Queen, but most of all, the visual characters of the Gorillaz animations seemed to free the participants to take to the dancefloor and the skies with equal vim and vigour.

Having dug all the early Gorillaz releases, I had truthfully lost sight of much of their output until just the other day, when one of my 13-year old lads told me he had been following the intermittent bulletins from Gorillaz' Song Machine and recited all the lore and backstory of the characters and we sat down to watch a sequence of videos.

Everyone of them knocked me out but I was especially drawn to 'Désolé' with an incredible vocal by Fatoumata Diawara that really lifts it all out of the water and 'Pac-Man' with verses by ScHoolboy Q and the timely refrain of "I'm stressin' out".

Woods Of Birnam – 'Du Bist Alles' (from Babylon Berlin soundtrack Vol. II)
The astonishing visual and dramatic scope of German television drama serial Babylon Berlin is illuminated by violent metallic scoring in keeping with the more fantastic excesses of the plot and cabaret music from the late 20s, along with lovely adaptations of Bryan Ferry songs in period style. The dance sequences are like Busby Berkeley at a rave but my favourite musical moment came with the third series and this exquisite and touching ballad of dedication, 'Du Mist Alles' by Woods Of Birnham.

Fats Waller – 'How Can You Face Me?'
Although this song is to be found on a supposedly definitive collection, it is not as well known as other Fats Waller songs that have slipped into common and even careless language. I would be content if the song, 'Keeping Out Of Mischief Now' was playing when they carry me out. I'll just have to decide whether it should be to Waller's original or the Louis Armstrong version from Louis Plays Fats. When we say definitive, that is a fluid term with Thomas 'Fats' Waller, who gave up the copyright on some of his best known tunes in meagre cash purchases, only to go around the corner to sell the same song again to a different publisher. This must have infuriated the co-writer of this tune, Andy Rasaf, whose life story would make a cinematic epic of its own but by biographical account was rather less chaotic in style and action. That said, this tune sees the writers in perfect accord. I love it so much that I had the trumpet player, Mickael Gaschë, quote the theme for the opening refrain of the title track of my new album, Hey Clockface, while I sang a few lines of 'How Can You Face Me?' to bring the performance to a close.

Iggy Pop – 'Some Weird Sin'
It was my great good fortune to stumble into a San Francisco club on my very first night in the U.S.A. and witness Iggy backed by the Sales Brothers, storming through songs from the recently released Lust For Life and tunes held over from The Idiot and his days with The Stooges. I was making my American debut at the same venue, the following night, so the club management took me backstage after the set and I suspect that Iggy recognised an innocent abroad, whatever the bravado of my demeanour. To this day, I think fondly of the time he took to speak to with me with touching concern. Over the next weeks and months, The Attractions and I saw many miles and much misadventure. Our traveling soundtrack was a small handful of cassettes played at top volume in a station wagon; Iggy's two Berlin records and their David Bowie companions, ABBA and The Beatles were about all we could agree upon. Quite soon, it was all too easy to identify with being "Stuck on a pin" as I sought out weirder and weirder sins to commit.

Down the years I've found myself sharing a festival bill with Iggy and Bjork in the Tokyo dockyards, when a typhoon forced a re-location of Fuji Rock. Whether listening to Iggy's tremendous recent records, Post Pop Depression and Free, watching Gimmie Danger – Jim Jarmusch's remarkable documentary on The Stooges – dialling in to Iggy's wonderful BBC 6 Music Radio show or digging his genial 2020 version of 'C'est Si Bon' in a trio with Thomas Dutronc and my wife [Diana Krall], I am always put in mind of this starting point and how much it will always mean to me.

Diana Krall – This Dream Of You
I make no apology for writing at length about my wife's new record. She is, in every sense, a knockout. The work of the interpretive recording artist is something that I feel is less understood today than in the 1950s, when Sinatra was making his most enduring records. I believe this is because of the rise of the facile cover and all those gladiators shovelling glitter or dirt onto songs for the delectation of a talent contest jury. What I know is that it takes a very long time to get within a song in order to have anything to say of lasting worth. Assumptions made about any women known for a glamorous cover image, singing within a sophisticated studio production, risks the listener skating over the surface of a process they simply don't understand. I sometimes wake in the small hours and hear a piano playing in another room. Sometimes it's a dream, other times it isn't.

I can work at a crowded kitchen table with the pressure cooker squealing and lads laughing and screaming their heads off and no one can reach me. What Diana does, requires still, concentrated hours, even years, to get down to a new way to hear, 'How Deep Is The Ocean?' and strip it of Broadway bombast and meditate on what other story may be within the song. This record has given me such joy, as I watched Diana revisit incomplete sessions from 2017 and, together with the master engineer, Al Schmitt, fashion these takes into a album for the present moment. Diana was a piano player long before she was a singer, starting out in local sports bars and desolate hotel residencies, where any or every tune might be requested and played for scant attention or for little reward. She was lucky to come from a family in which playing music for yourself was still part of daily life. In her late teens and early 20s, she took lessons with the genius accompanist Jimmy Rowles, the pianist Alan Broadbent and the bassist Ray Brown. All of this informs one of my favourite cuts on this record; an impromptu duo with bassist John Clayton on 'I Wished On The Moon', notes tumbling down like falling stars. Singers of true curiosity may reveal corners of songs others haven't noticed or appreciated; the hymn of hope in 'Autumn In New York' and the closing deadpan glance over the shoulder of 'Singing In The Rain'.

Such is the performance of 'This Dream Of You'. Bob Dylan's own rendition is fairly opaque but it is a composition of possibilities and resonance equal to those of Irving Berlin. Diana is joined by drummer Karriem Riggins, Dylan's long-time bassist, Tony Garnier, guitarist Marc Ribot with Stuart Duncan's Stroh's violin - a device like a tiny gramophone horn that projects an eerie tone from the violin bridge - blending with the family accordion of Randall Krall. In the summer of 2019, I sat in L'Olympia in Paris and heard Diana and her band unveil this arrangement for an audience who very conceivably might have been discovering the song for the first time. I am so glad that there is now a record of it for you to share until we can all be together again.

John Baker/BBC Radiophonic Workshop – The John Baker Tapes
And so we close as we began with another of those arcane corners of recorded sound, a collection of John Baker's electronica conceived in the same BBC department from which Delia Derbyshire sent children scurrying behind the couch with her arrangement of Ron Grainer's theme music for Doctor Who. British readers may know that John Baker was the brother of the BBC newsreader, Richard Baker, back when the Corporation had modest funds to support the innovative work being done at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Baker was an amazingly resourceful composer with an evident sense of humour and the ability to create music out of pure sound, something that we take for granted since synthesisers came out of the sonic laboratory and into the dance clubs.

Jonny Trunk is once again responsible for compiling this collection of imaginative pieces, most of them soundtracks for radio dramas or short themes for news or magazine programmes, my favourite being an appearance by Baker explaining how he created the insanely fleet, marimba-like piece accompanying the Reading Your Letters feature on the long-running BBC Radio 4 show, Woman's Hour. Armed only with razorblades and a cider bottle from which water was slowly emptied, Baker recorded this sound and then edited it to create the pitches and duration of his rapid melody. I trust his enthusiastic explanation satisfied the "listener from Tring" as much as it may delight us to this day.


Tags: Hey ClockfaceIggy PopBlurEventim ApolloMighty Like A RoseHurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)HelsinkiParisThe AttractionsThe ImpostersSteve NieveNew YorkMichael LeonhartSebastian KrysNo FlagI Do (Zula's Song)Vanity Fair 500Louis ArmstrongBob DylanDiana KrallBobby WomackGlastonbury FestivalMy Funny ValentineOliver's ArmyLester YoungBob DylanBill MonroeFiona AppleWilliam ShakespeareLouis ArmstrongTshegueT-Bone BurnettRay BrownJames BurtonWillie DixonJerry Lee LewisRadio City Music HallRoger McGuinnBlurTFI FridayFats WallerHow Can You Face Me?Mickael GaschëLust For LifeThe IdiotDavid BowieBjorkFuji Rock FestivalFrank SinatraKarriem RigginsMarc RibotStuart DuncanL’Olympia

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The Quietus, October 21, 2020


Paul Stokes interviews Elvis about Hey Clockface. Elvis chooses thirteen current favourite records.

Images

2020-03-00 Buzz Magazine photo 01 rdp.jpg
Photo credit: Ray Di Pietro

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