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Elvis Costello is back with the Attractions... sort of.
The Attractions play on his new album Brutal Youth, and will be on tour with him later this year.
But, for the moment, it is not a permanent reunion, and the album, out tomorrow, is credited only to Costello.
He said: "At the moment there are no plans to work together once the tour ends later this year."
A series of coincidences reunited the Attractions for Brutal Youth, and fans will be delighted with the rough, raw, but tuneful results.
Costello stressed. however: "This new record is simply what it is, not some sort of nostalgia trip.
"I am not trying to recapture my youth, or anything like that. This set of songs seemed to want to be recorded this way — there's no desire to sound like a rehash of the records we did first time around."
Nonetheless, it marks a return to what Costello does best — sharp, often angry songs that bellow and shout while lodging their hooks firmly in your brain.
His previous two solo albums, Spike and Mighty Like A Rose, were experimental, dense, often impenetrable records, while his collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet, The Juliet Letters left most people cold.
Costello said: "I knew the Brodsky Quartet as friends and when the chance to work with them came up I just took it.
"It actually sold amazingly well around the world, and without that experience, and the Spike and Mighty Like A Rose albums, the songs on the new album wouldn't have turned out the way they did.
"All they were were some new hybrids of sounds, and rock has always thrived on that sort of juxtapositioning of sounds and ideas."
Costello can trace his great grandfather's roots to Tyrone, and currently lives just outside Dublin with wife Cait O'Riordan (once of the Pogues).
"It's not some sort of rural idyll." he said, "but I find it an ideal place to work.
"We haven't got traffic rumbling past our front door all the time. which means that if a piece of work needs quiet and concentration — as some of my recent film and theatre work has — there are few distractions.
"And with no neighbours. if I want to turn the guitar up loud I can do that as well."
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