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A few years ago Elvis Costello announced that he wasn't sure if he'd ever make a record again. Discouraged by declining sales for CDs and bored with the industry, he started playing all-new songs with his regular band, the Imposters, and declared that if his fans wanted to hear new material they'd have to pay for a ticket. Thankfully his retirement from physical product was brief, since otherwise we'd have missed out on last year's rocktacular Momofuku and the new country-acoustic Sacred, Profane & Sugarcane. Both were recorded quickly which Costello sees as being the way of the future.
"Records have a slightly different role to play in our working life now," he explains. "We're having more fun making them because they're not necessarily going to be the agenda for the next couple of years of your life. It's about following the way that you're feeling at that moment. You know, I can find merit in all the records I've made: some people like more than others and I can see their point about some that they have problems with. But I was following my own train of thought, and that's actually what you are being paid to do."
He also accepts that many fans have their favourite era – an inevitable response to the fact that his albums range wildly, from the spiky urgency of his late 70s albums like This Year's Model and Armed Forces to the country rock of 2004's The Delivery Man, the experimental 1993 Brodsky Quartet collaboration The Juliet Letters, his 2004 opera Il Sogno, the loose rock of 1994's Brutal Youth and the lush torch ballads of 2003's North. It's not as though there's an easy-to-pigeonhole Elvis Costello Sound.
"There is just my voice and it has its limitations," he shrugs. "Writing a very concentrated group of songs isn't an affectation. For example, I don't hear bluegrass on this record but I accept that the instrumentation is that some sort of bluegrass band, or at least some sort of country band. Obviously North was written on the piano with my orchestrations and it was a record written from experience and transformation of the heart [covering the end of his long-term relationship with former Pogues bassist Cait O'Riordan and the beginning of his new life with jazz singer Diana Krall] it wasn't like 'an exercise in writing'. It was completely raw."
But surely it's understandable that some people saw North as being something of a genre experiment with...
"I've never made one single genre experiment," he spits. "I can make that statement very clearly. When I see that expression, I think it's kind of like critical shorthand for 'I can't understand this' or 'It isn't something that [con]forms to my narrow idea of who this person is'. And it's not just me, it's lots of people that are treated that way. I have never done anything as an exercise."
Not even the Painted from Memory albums with Burt Bacharach? That wasn't a chance to try writing with one of the all-time great melodists?
"Definitely not!" he insists. "That wasn't an exercise, except in that was a way in which it to exercise your imagination and your ability to respond to somebody with that kind of vivid and singular musical language."
On the subject of at the past, one of ...Sugarcane's highlights is a new version of 'Complicated Shadows'. Certainly the rollicking country strum lifts the song compared with the leaden rock arrangement on 1996's All this Useless Beauty.
"Well, thank you. The song was written much closer to the way we play it [on the new album]. I mean, it was originally intended for Johnny Cash. I think at first it probably sounded a little bit too much like a Johnny Cash song, and I didn't want to record it leaning that way with [his band] the Attractions." A bark of a laugh. "But about four people bought [All this Useless Beauty]. The only people who remark on whether it's a good or a bad thing, or even whether I have recorded this song twice, are obviously people who are following my career very carefully."
Costello's never been afraid to rearrange his older songs, and reveals that he's been working up some surprises for his solo acoustic visit. "I could play two completely different shows," he enthuses of his Sydney dates. "There are enough songs that are reasonably well enough known that you could structure it that way. And of course, even if you stay on stage for six hours, people will come up to you and say, 'well, you know, you didn't play that.'"
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