ELVIS COSTELLO MY AIM IS TRUE

Costello’s first recordings were so striking, Stiff signed their songwriter as an artist in his own right ELVIS COSTELLO: Rehearsed in a rat-infested country house and recorded in a cardboard box in Islington [Pathway Studios] in a total of 24 hours’ studio time, on sick days and holidays from my office job as a computer operator. Having only heard my voice, mumbling under a bare bulb, club stage or on a borrowed reel-to-reel in my bedroom, I never imagined I would be in that studio with a band as good as Clover, a Marin County outfit whose Fantasy albums I’d had to hunt down in secondhand shops. They spoke in code about the songs – “Red Shoes” was “The One That Sounds Like The Byrds”. I didn’t mention that “Waiting For The End Of The World” was supposed to sound like “I’m Waiting For The Man”. I don’t think they had ever heard The Velvet Underground, and perhaps that was for the best. You can listen to a new take on “Mr Moon” from Clover’s recent Homestead Redemption (on which they revisit their ’70s songs and I deputise for vocalist Alex Call on an alternate take) and hear John McFee quote his own guitar part from “Alison”. Time is going backwards. I liked the sound of Pathway so much that I went back there with just me and Pete Thomas to cut “Kinder Murder” for Brutal Youth, and The

Gwendolyn Letters, demos of the 12 songs that I wrote for Wendy James over one weekend in the ’90s.