HIS AIM IS STILL TRUE
He may be older now, but Elvis Costello still has the fire 33 albums later
On the inauspicious date of Friday, March 13, 2020, Elvis Costello was on stage at the Hammersmith Apollo with his band the Imposters, performing the encore to what would be the last big gig held in London before the first COVID lockdown. That morning's front pages had led with a government warning that “many more families are going to lose loved ones” and a smattering of empty seats in the venue testified to a growing sense of public unease. Costello's response? He launched into a storming rendition of his apocalyptic 1991 rocker Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over). Sample lyric: “Better make like a fly if you don't want to die.”
“Maybe it was in bad taste,” he concedes now, smiling. “But you've got to whistle past the graveyard sometimes.”
The next day, his live tour was cancelled and he flew to Vancouver, where he shares a home with his third wife, jazz pianist Diana Krall, and their twin teenage sons, Dexter and Frank. “So then I'm staring at the ocean thinking, `Do I just sit here watching the waves until it's all over? Or am I going to make a record?'” In fact, he made three.
By October 2020, Costello had completed Hey Clockface, a moody, experimental collection assembled long distance with various collaborators. Last year, he followed it with Spanish Model, a radical remix of This Year's Model, his classic 1978 album with the Attractions, this time featuring Spanish and Latin American pop stars. And here he is kicking off 2022 with The Boy Named If, a thundering set of fierce, wordy, melodic belters that fizz with the energy of his early new wave hits.
“You have a choice between hunkering down and doing minor-key, whey-faced ballads about isolation, or trying to kick a hole in the box you're in,” he says. “We're all gonna f---ing die, so we might as well enjoy it while we can!”
The album began as a two-way collaboration between Costello and his long-standing drummer Pete Thomas, who is based in Los Angeles. “I went out on the back porch and put down electric rhythm guitar and vocals and sent it to him. He went into his basement in L.A. and next thing the drum part would come back, just like in a rehearsal.”
Thomas really drives the album, playing the same drum kit that he used on This Year's Model 44 years ago. Bassist Davey Faragher — who replaced original Attractions bassist Bruce Thomas when the band effectively reassembled in 2002 — recorded his parts in California. Virtuoso keyboard player Steve Nieve filled out arrangements from his home in Paris, France.
When it came to the recording process, Costello insists: “I don't want to hear the words `lockdown.' `quarantine,' `remote.' There's nothing remote about recording when you have instantaneous communication. Normally, in the studio, you play with headphones on. So what difference does it make if (that track) comes from thousands of miles away? Engineers are constantly fighting for separation so they can get clarity in the final mix. Well, here we had all the separation you could want!”
While for Costello's older fans the new album will evoke the furious pop rock of the Attractions in their prime, he is bullishly insistent that this is no exercise in nostalgia. “It's not back to basics, 'cause there's nothing basic about this band. Steve Nieve wrote an opera, he can play any instrument that has keys on it and a few that don't. And now that Charlie Watts has gone, Pete's been promoted — he's the greatest living rock 'n' roll drummer.”
As for Costello himself, he is indisputably one of the world's pre-eminent singer-songwriters — up there with Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell — his densely intelligent lyricism matched by a dazzling musicality.
The son of big band singer Ross McManus (vocalist for the Joe Loss Band in the 1950s and '60s), he initially struggled for years on the folk pub circuit, performing solo as Declan McManus. He signed to Stiff Records in 1976, “still doing a country, ragtime thing.” And then punk exploded and Costello was repackaged as a new wave sensation. Nick Lowe was brought in as producer and his manager Jake Riviera suggested he change his name: “Elvis” chosen as a deliberate affront to rock traditionalists, plus “Costello,” a family name his father had once used as an alias. By then, Costello says, “I wasn't an angry young teenager. I was 22, married with a kid, working in a bank. Jake invented the image.”
During the next decade, Costello had one of the greatest hot streaks in British pop history, seven incredible albums in seven years, starting with My Aim Is True in 1977 and including his masterpiece, Imperial Bedroom, in 1982. After the hits started to dry up, the Attractions disintegrated in 1986.
Since then, music of all genres has poured out of Costello: 33 albums in total, including collaborations with songwriting maestro Burt Bacharach, New Orleans' Allen Toussaint, opera singer Anne Sofie von Otter and strings stars the Brodsky Quartet. And he has written songs with Paul McCartney and sung with Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and Tony Bennett.