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Elvis Costello was born Declan MacManus in West London in 1955. The son of a respected singer with Joe Loss’s Orchestra, he seemed to arrive fully-formed in 1977 with his epochal Nick Lowe-produced debut My Aim Is True. His ‘revenge and guilt’ hit single songwriting period ended with a series of characteristically catholic records: Get Happy!! (1980), a soul/Stax/R&B tribute; Almost Blue (1981), recorded in Nashville by legendary country producer Billy Sherill; and Imperial Bedroom (1982), a pop record embellished by orchestral arrangements. Of his more recent output two CDs stand tallest: Spike (1989), a sophisticated rock album featuring contributions from Chrissie Hynde, Marc Ribot and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, among others, and last year’s contribution with The Brodsky Quartet, The Juliet Letters, a song sequence for voice and string quartet. Costello has also served time as a producer (The Specials, The Pogues), composed music for film and television, and worked with George Jones, Johnny Cash, Chet Baker, and Hal Willner on the latter’s Mingus tribute Weird Nightmare. This month he releases Brutal Youth, an album of 15 new originals featuring, for the first time since 1986’s Blood And Chocolate, his three piece 70s band The Attractions. Costello has an enthusiastic, eclectic and authoritative passion for music; the Invisible Jukebox, despite running for over two hours, only touched the surface of his knowledge.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
“Allegretto” from String Quartet No 3 In F Major Op 73 played by The Brodsky Quartet (Teldec)
It’s the Brodskys. I haven’t listened to the record we made for a while, but it’s funny how different the timbre of the quartet sounds on that recording to when we recorded But still, it’s just like a singer – it is a voice that is instantly recognisable.
I went into a shop a couple of months ago and they were playing an old Beethoven string quartet recording by the Busch Quartet, and it was like somebody walking up to you and slapping you round the face. It wasn’t like a modern digital recording; it had such a mood, it was very individual. So I immediately bought it, and I wondered how much of the way it sounded was the same as what I like about old blues records. It had an atmosphere. I actually prefer analogue recordings, even with classical music. I can stand the hiss because I grew up with vinyl.
Do you know what they were playing?
No. I recognise certain parts of it. That was Shostakovich? Oh, I’ll get it in the neck from the Brodskys for not recognising that. But it didn’t sound like him, it sounded Spanish. But I like the way he incorporated Spanish music, that might have been considered light or banal, and made it into something. Sometimes he did it ironically, and sometimes he did it just because he liked it. I’m fascinated by the Brodsky cycle because they play it from memory, and that’s a daunting thing, to remember that amount of music.
The string quartets were probably less liable to interference than say the symphonies because the symphonies were the big philosophical and political statements in praise of the collective farms or something, the ones that got big articles written about in Pravda the next day, with the unseen hand of Stalin condemning him. Whereas, with that piece, it’s as if it couldn’t be more capricious and more personal.
The last time I read a decent interview with you, you were reading Testimony, Shostakovich’s memoirs.
Yes, and I believed it then at face value. I didn’t realise there was a controversy about it. And I’ve read other books about him since, and I think you have to pick intuitively what feels like the truth for the music, because even the things that he himself put his hand to are dubious. But there’s still some very chilling and some very funny things in the book. But also nobody wants to believe that someone like Shostakovich, who could write music that good, could be so rubbery of will, that he was just a stooge of the state.
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