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In February 2020, Elvis Costello kicked off his latest UK tour at the Liverpool Olympia in front of a sold-out crowd that included his mother, Lillian. "It was in the same dance hall she used to go to as a young woman, when it was known as the Locarno Ballroom," the singer, songwriter and distinguished musical man of letters tells Weekend.
"It's an old circus building, which actually used to be on my way home from school, except it had closed down by then. Anyway, they brought it back to life, and it was the opening night of the tour, and there's my 93-year-old mother singing along to 'Alison.' I couldn't have imagined anything better."
After the show, Lillian, who'd recently left hospital after a stroke, asked for her wheelchair to be pushed onto the floor where, seven decades earlier, she'd danced to the big band music of the 40s. It was, by all accounts, a good night.
Elvis and his band The Imposters then continued the tour, making it as far as the Hammersmith Apollo in London before the encroaching Covid-19 pandemic caught up with them. With the remaining dates cancelled, Elvis flew to spend the early months of lockdown in a cabin on Vancouver Island with his wife, Canadian jazz musician Diana Krall, and their teenage twins, Dexter and Frank "Given how confined many people were, that was very fortuitous," says the 67-year-old. "We went for walks in the woods and, as both mine and my wife's job often involves travelling to play music, it was no bad thing to have a good period of time together."
But even in splendid isolation, there was no escaping the anxiety and uncertainty of life during Covid. "I lost a few friends, you probably did, too," says Elvis. "I couldn't go to England, the border was closed. My eldest son [Matt, 45, from his first marriage to Mary Burgoyne], I didn't see for 18 months. My mother had had a series of crises, and the last few I couldn't respond to by travelling there to cheer her up.
"And in the end she passed, with little anticipation, and... you know, you have to have a virtual funeral. Can you think of anything more peculiar? Of course, I'm not alone — many people have said goodbye to loved ones in those circumstances, or have gone through a door in a hospital and never seen them again. Very strange." Music, perhaps inevitably, provided a therapeutic outlet. "You want to scream and shout and get something out," he says. "Diana was up on the second floor, mixing a record, and I'm out in the back garden, screaming my head off, so we're a good pair?'
Indeed, while the world slowed down, Elvis only seemed to become more prolific. Since the start of the pandemic, he's released a new album, 2020's Hey Clockface, re-recorded six of its tracks for a French-language EP, remade his entire 1978 album This Year's Model in Spanish, written and recorded an original audiobook, and curated a lavish boxset reissue of 1979's Armed Forces. And for an encore, he's now created a second new album of original material, The Boy Named If, for which he's also written an accompanying book of children's stories. Because of course he has.
The record, he says, is a series of snapshots, loosely themed around the end of innocence — "the moment when you're leaving the certainty and the magical imagination of childhood, and entering into the terror of desire and lust, and all the lies you tell yourself and other people". The 'If' of the title track, he explains, is a nickname for your imaginary friend — the 'secret self' you can conveniently blame for all your bad or hurtful decisions.
Not that the young Declan Patrick MacManus, who was born in Paddington and spent his early years in West London before moving to his mother's native Merseyside at 16, ever had an actual imaginary friend. "I didn't need one, because I'm a Catholic, so I was told I had a guardian angel," he says. "I'm also the person who confessed to adultery in my very first confession, because I thought I'd better have something on my rap sheet. I was quite an honest, fresh-faced boy, so I picked a sin where I didn't know what the word meant.
"The priest, of course, just sniggered. Though I think confessing in advance to adultery put me in good stead for the number of times I did actually commit that sin later in life," he notes drily. "And maybe I'll have less time in purgatory when I go there."
Though he talks in the accompanying press notes about
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