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It is mid-afternoon and Elvis Costello is in full cry. A fast talker — and a fast thinker — he is currently winding up a typically digressive anecdote about his performance, the previous night, at the Royal Variety Show. "You know I was born in the same fucking hospital as the Royal Family?" He says. "Yeah, St Mary's. But I was baptised in Birkenhead and our family's from Liverpool, so I belong to both places. I don't really belong to London. I left a long time ago. I never felt at home here. I lived out in the suburbs. I relate to Hounslow and Richmond and Twickenham and Liverpool and Birkenhead. You find places that you fall in love with when you travel. Nowadays, we all travel virtually. But I've been travelling for 40 years, making friends and having adventures."
We're in Costello's hotel room in West London. Today he is dressed in a dark suit and tie which, combined with his glasses and greying beard, gives him a distinguished if slightly bohemian appearance — more affable Humanities professor than rock 'n' roll veteran. His voice still carries a soft, Liverpool brogue, with a slight mid-Atlantic lilt occasionally making its presence felt. Costello's latest adventure is The Boy Named If (And Other Children's Stories) — a characteristically diverse album anchored by the kind of pell-mell rock 'n' roll songs Costello has long specialised in. Made in cahoots with trusted lieutenants Pete Thomas and Steve Nieve and producer Sebastian Krys, its release marks an intriguing congruence in Costello's career. During the pandemic he oversaw four releases: a new studio album, Hey Clockface, an EP of French adaptations and remixes from Hey Clockface called La Face De Pendule A Coucou and two archive projects — a deluxe boxset of 1979's Armed Forces and Spanish Model, a reimagining of This Year's Model, using the Attractions' original 1978 backing tracks with current Latin American and Spanish artists adapting the lyrics into Spanish. Conspicuously, Armed Forces and Spanish Model brought into focus Thomas and Nieve's ongoing roles in animating Costello's expansive songbook, as either Attractions or Imposters, along with bassist Davey Faragher. Costello speaks highly of the three musicians, particularly how they rose to the challenges presented by the last few years. "I'm proud of the way we went about doing this record," he confirms. "You have a choice between hunkering down and doing mopey, whey-faced ballads about isolation or you can kick a hole in the box you're in."
Restless, passionate, involved — these appear to be Costello's preferred working methods. You can hear the excitement in his voice as he talks about the band's most recent American tour, during October and November, accompanied by Dylan's long-serving guitarist Charlie Sexton. But these recent positive experiences have come with their share of upheavals. Costello lost his mother in January — "the last time I saw her was on FaceTime, 90 minutes before she passed; when it came it came quickly, and for that I'm grateful" — while over the summer Costello, his wife Diana Krall and their twin boys relocated from Vancouver Island to New York. "We moved from Vancouver the week that the wind direction changed," he says. "The interior of Vancouver was on fire for like, four weeks, right? It was 47 centigrade in Kamloops. That's how hot is in the Mojave fucking desert. I was in New York four days, then there was a hurricane. Two weeks later, there was another one. Three days after that, as COP26 write some mealy-mouthed words about coal emissions, the whole of British Columbia nearly gets washed away. Don't fucking come round here telling me your problems. We better get it together otherwise we're all gonna fucking die."
 At this point, some of the famous, righteously angry Costello boils to the surface. It will rise up again during our interview — alongside the current, more reflective model — as he talks us through The Boy Named If, revisits the Attractions in their early peak, explores where Declan MacManus ends and Elvis Costello begins and reveals the joys of beating up Sting, every night. And his current worldview? "There's just truth and nothing else. We've had a lot of distorted truths, because there's money to be made in doing it and there's power to be had from having it. I'm not taking sides, because I think they're all guilty. Everybody's guilty. We're all guilty!"
Your father performed at the Royal Variety Show in 1963. How was it, following in his footsteps?
That, truthfully, is all it was about. It's not a secret that I don't really have any strong royalist leanings. My dad sang "If I Had A Hammer" — a song about the dignity of labour. He was a working man his whole life. My grandfathers, one of them lay wounded in a ditch for five days in France in 1917, the other spent five years on a fucking pig farm in Poland, having been captured in 1915. I'm two generations away from making my living with a shovel and I'm deeply grateful for the continuity. My grandfather was taught to play the trumpet, and because my grandfather played the trumpet, my father wanted to play the trumpet. He could also sing and entertain, which he did until he couldn't do it any more. When it was no longer possible for my dad to be in his own dwelling, I went to look at a potential home for him — Brinsworth House in Twickenham. It was originally founded by George V as the Variety Artists' Benevolent Fund. Some of the artists I grew up listening to on radio spent their last years there. The rooms are all named after people who've made donations. This is nothing against Brinsworth House, or the people who work there, but if my dad had to spend his last days in a room named after Jim Davidson or Bernard Manning, he would never have forgiven me.
The last tour ended quite abruptly, of course.
Yes. The opening night was in Liverpool. That was emotional. That was the last night my mother saw me play. She was 93. As we went round, it felt like the most welcomed that we've been. But by the time we got to Hammersmith Apollo, it was clear from the previous three days that things were about to go wrong. On the Wednesday, I was at Anfield watching Liverpool getting beat by Atlético. There were 55,000 people, 5,000 of whom had come from Madrid, a place that was already in chaos. The next night in Manchester, I could see holes in the crowd at a sold-out house. Same happened at the Apollo. Then it got serious. Then as we probably all did, I lost friends pretty quickly. I was home by the end on Vancouver Island.
How's it been, being back on the road lately — and with Charlie Sexton, too?
Charlie's an old friend. During the summer, we couldn't get Steve's papers together to get him into America, so Charlie stepped in. We did a guitar lineup as The Layabouts, which is another remembrance of my dad. He used to record cover records that you bought in the petrol station. Sometimes he'd be the singer on four different songs on these EPs. When he did "I Wanna Be Your Man" by the Stones, he was in The Layabouts. Anyway, we had fun playing a two-guitar rock 'n' roll lineup. Then Steve got his letters of transit. Davey is playing double bass in the show. It's a whole new thing. We've got quieter and more swinging. We have more space, we listen to each other. I said to Steve, "I've never done this, we've always been in a wind tunnel of our own ego." Like most British rock 'n' roll bands, it's just a free-for-all. "How does it start?" Like this? GAAARRRGGHHH! "How does it end?" No fucking idea!
Where did you start work on The Boy Named If?
After we finished Spanish Model and Hey Clockface, I thought, 'What am I going to do?' Pete was the catalyst. Pete is a dedicated athlete of a musician. He does his 100 lengths — his hours in the basement, playing his Gretsch kit. He was fed up playing around with records he already knew, so I said, "Let's make a new one." Why in the world would we let a little thing like distance get in the way? I went out on the back porch with my electric guitar and put down some rhythm lines and vocals, sent it to him. Next thing, the drum part comes back. I won't hear the words "lockdown," "quarantine" or "remote working." There's nothing "remote" about recording when it's instantaneous communication. It's the same as when you're in the studio, you've got headphones on and you hear the band playing. What difference does it make if it comes over thousands of miles? You can't play simultaneously — that we haven't managed to do yet, but I'm sure NASA are working on that. You often add parts to records, engineers are constantly fighting for separation so they can get clarity on the final bits. We had all the fucking separation we needed.
You've worked with Pete and Steve, on and off, for over 40 years. What do they bring to a session?
They're learning all the time. Pete taught himself double bass. Steve wrote an opera, for fuck's sake. Getting a modern opera produced at the fucking Theatre du Chatelet — there's people in the modern classical music establishment who'd cut off their right arm to get that done. It was tremendous fun to do. I was the chief of police. I got to beat up Sting every night for a living. By the way, Sting, was a very good sport to do that. He was actually saying, "You're not roughing me up enough. You've really got to grind that jackboot into me spine when you've got me on the floor." He was good!
The full title for the album is The Boy Named If (And Other Children's Stories). It's not a concept album, though, is it?
"The Boy Named If" is about the idea of the imaginary friend and the moment you leave childhood. The other songs are little snapshots of times where the adult world is frightening — particularly anything sexual. It's enticing, it's intriguing, it's frightening. But the flipside is that you don't really want to leave the magic of childhood behind. That's why there's a song called "The Death Of Magic Thinking." Then "Mistook Me For A Friend" is about being in somewhere like New York or London — it could be Grimsby — it's three o'clock in the morning and everybody's in love with the wrong person for five minutes. It's where you go somewhere and everything seems OK, but all the allegiances and all the alliances and romances are all insincere or transitory. "Paint The Red Rose Blue" is, I hope, a compassionate story about a bereaved couple. There's a song about Halloween, in which real monsters appear in among the fake monsters. There's a song about an exile scoundrel, "Mr. Crescent."
Are any of these songs autobiographical?
"Penelope Halfpenny" shares one name with a teacher I had when I was about that age. I think she'd stumbled into the life of education from a career in espionage. She said she'd been a Scotland Yard crime reporter at one point. She'd talk quite a lot about her life. "I was at this party in Knightsbridge..." Knightsbridge! I never met anybody who went to a party in Knightsbridge. She sat on the edge of the desk in a short skirt, flicking her hair. She had a hand on the door to a world we hadn't yet entered. She offered the sense of a freer life that we were not being trained for. Bear in mind, I went to secondary modern school. I was never going to university. When I took my A-levels I was told, "You're too old to learn a trade. So if you're lucky, you'll get to a polytechnic and get a dodgy degree and be a secondary school teacher." That's no disrespect to secondary school teachers, that's just the way they thought then. So I joined the bank and I learned how to work a computer. That kept me in job until I could make money making music. That was lucky.
 How have your writing methods changed over the years?
I wrote "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes" in 10 minutes between Runcorn and Lime Street. But the comical part of it wasn't the fact that I had a visitation of this melody, or that most of the lyrical came to me at once — it was the necessity to remember it until I could get to my mother's house, where I knew I had a guitar. I didn't even have a tape recorder at my mother's house, so I just played it and played it and played it until I knew it was drilled in. The next morning, I had to keep it in my head until I got back home to put it on the tape recorder. That would be totally different now, wouldn't it? You would just reach for the phone. I've got dozens of half tunes, sometimes recorded on planes where you can hear the engine in the background while I'm mumbling something or singing some bassline or something. I've made whole records on GarageBand in mid-air. It's ridiculous, the things that you do. But we have that ability to do it, so things are captured.
You've recently had your past quite close behind in your rear-view mirror: the Armed Forces box set and Spanish Model. Does having 1978/79 going on in the background impact on what you're doing in the present day?
It's interesting, more than anything. Listening to the live stuff Sebastian [Krys] mixed on Armed Forces, already by the Pinkpop festival we were playing songs from Get Happy. We were always half a record on. That was one of the advantages of starting a career with an album already recorded, by a band I couldn't tour with because they weren't even legal — I don't believe Clover had work permits when they made My Aim Is True. They weren't even billed, partly because they were Marin County hippies and Jake Riviera didn't think that suited my newly crafted image. Then the Attractions formed and we made This Year's Model. That's a pretty great first statement.
Spanish Model reminds us of how tight the Attractions were in their pomp. What could we have expected if we'd seen you live in full cry in 1978/79?
We didn't know enough to fuck it up, is the truth.
Do you still recognise yourself as that callow youth in his mid-twenties?
I'm not without anger about certain things. It's just not all-purpose, one-size-fits-all anger. That never happened. Certain journalists made it into a legend back then. To some degree, there's a little bit of connivance. "Oh, yeah. That works, doesn't it? I'll do a bit more of that." Up to a point. When you realise that there's something else you want to do, you don't want to be boxed in by one opinion that you held 40 years ago. It's like always wearing the same shoes. Eventually they're not going to fit.
You wore a lot of shoes, early on in your career. You produced The Specials and Squeeze — but you also duetted with George Jones and worked with T Bone Burnett.
But the purists refer to those things as if they were dilettantish excursions or a genre exercise. You don't stand in the studio with Johnny Cash or George Jones — or go on the stage and make a fool of yourself singing with the Count Basie Orchestra because you've lost your voice — as a genre exercise. People don't have the first fucking idea what they're talking about.
Surely that's changed, though? You said you felt "welcomed" on the last tour.
I left England a long time ago. I forget which paper it was, made a big fuss of me. I was high as a kite — not literally high but high from the stage — and somebody said, "What do you think of this?" I've just played to 10,000 people, opening for Bob Dylan in South Carolina, first night of the tour. "See that reaction? I don't get that in England." I was on my own with a guitar between Amos Lee and Bob Dylan. Fucking killed. I sound like an old vaudeville guy — "I fucking killed!" But I did! And I knew it. Anyway, I say this thing, it gets put in a black box and then the next thing "He hates England" and it's in the Daily Mail. Fuck those motherfuckers.
You mentioned your "newly crafted image." You've lived with Elvis Costello now for 40 odd years. How much demarcation is there these days between Declan MacManus and Elvis Costello?
At one point, I got so fed up being challenged at borders about the name that I changed my name by deed poll to Elvis Costello. I thought, 'That's ridiculous, you can't deny your family name.' So I changed it back — which pissed everybody off as it's expensive to do that. Then I went the other way and started crediting my songs "MacManus." But some people went, "I've never heard of this MacManus guy. Where's Elvis Costello?" Then, somewhere along the way, I just lost sight of it. The only thing I don't respond to is people I don't know calling me Declan. Sometimes in Ireland, that's OK, as there's a lot more Declans. Growing up, I didn't know any other Declans apart from the guy in The Bachelors.
Is Elvis Costello your "Boy Named If"?
I know about alter ego — or altered ego maybe more. I know about blaming that other person, absolving yourself of responsibilities, particularly as a young man. But I didn't ever have an imaginary friend. I was indoctrinated with the idea of guardian angel, which I wrote about before in "Distorted Angel" on All This Useless Beauty. "Distorted Angel" could almost be on this record; it's about that moment when you're told this angel is watching you commit a sin. It's probably something innocent. I'm sure somebody will pick out the line in "The Death Of Magic Thinking" — "She took my hand in an experiment / Put it where it shouldn't be / Put it underneath a dress and waited to see." That happened to me. I was too young to know what it meant. It was upsetting and thrilling at the same time. If somebody wants to take that up? Fine, do it. I don't care. I know my conscience is clean! I'm also the boy that confessed adultery when I was seven. I thought, "I'll be rumbled if I don't confess to something in confession." So I picked one, but I didn't know what it meant. I confessed to the sound of muffled laughter. I'm sure I wasn't the only child that did that. I mean, do you know anybody with oxen you could covet? No.
Do you feel in competition with your younger self? Do you ever think, "'Shipbuilding' was a higher bar, how do I top that?"
A high bar is not because the songs are of more consequence as music so much as what they've come to mean. The timing of "Shipbuilding" was particularly poignant. Bear in mind, I wrote it while the war was still going on. Robert Wyatt sang it first and Robert sang it better. But then our record is very beautiful as it has Chet Baker and David Bedford's arrangement, the band play great. I've sung the song probably better over the years. But I'm still proud of that record. You know David Bowie considered recording it? I wish he had, of course. Can you imagine that?
A few years ago, you compiled a list of 500 must-have albums for Vanity Fair. Which of your own albums would you have included?
North because it's from the heart. That was the first record I orchestrated, I'm very proud of that. This Year's Model because it's the beginning, really — "Watching The Detectives" is my first record. Imperial Bedroom because we got to be free from the things that could have been a trap for us. Get Happy!! for the madness of it, of just being so drunk and wired. King Of America is very emotional for me as there was a lot going on in my life at the time. Blood & Chocolate is a divorce record — but is it a divorce record from wives or is it a divorce record from the band? Bit of both, really. We never should have made another record. A lot of people like Brutal Youth. I don't think Pete thinks it's his best. Bruce plays great on "You Tripped At Every Step," but the swinging, rocking tracks are me and Nick [Lowe]. That's just the way it is, it isn't an Attractions record.
There's a lot going on, musically, on The Boy Named If, but it's underpinned by top-drawer rock 'n' roll. Considering how many different altars you've worshipped at, what is it about rock 'n' roll that keeps pulling you in?
Exactly! It's not rock. It's swinging rock 'n' roll. We re-recorded "Pump It Up" for the Royal Variety Show. It had a different swing because it's Davey and Pete. I recorded both my part and Mick Jones' Chuck Berry deal — the Keith part — at the same time on stage at Portsmouth Music Hall in New Hampshire with the song roaring through the monitors. Then before we played "Farewell, OK," Pete said, "Don't forget, we did the fast number. Then we tuck in." We've been playing it super fast sometimes, but I kind of forgot it swung. On the show, I lay back into the backbeat and it felt so free. We're pretty good at keeping the tempo controllable, but sometimes you just get overexcited as it's fun to play. When people say, "You've gone back to your roots," I say — no we haven't. We did this now. This is happening now.
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