Elvis Costello's teenage obsessions: 'I had a massive crush on Judi Dench in 1966'
Talking to a Stranger
My view of the world was coloured by the fact that my parents separated, and I used to go to the movies – the pictures as we called them – with my mother. I saw a lot of A-rated [adultadvisory] films, such as Alfie. Nothing too scandalous, but I felt like a teenager by the age of 11. TV at the time was all Z-Cars, Randall and Hopkirk and The Dustbinmen. Really bad television, but once in a while, you would get something that was as well-written and super-intense as the films.
Talking to a Stranger was a fourpart television series written by John Hopkins for the BBC, about a late-teenage college student who had killed herself, and how the family didn’t speak to each other. I found it dark and upsetting, and it went in very deep, but somewhere during it I fell in love with Judi Dench, who starred in it. She wasn’t a pinup-type beauty. She was unusuallooking, with this little haircut. Something about her made me feel funny in ways I didn’t understand. Years later, I met her and told her I’d had a massive crush on her in 1966. It was the fulfilment of a dream.
Man of the World
1969 was the year Fleetwood Mac’s Man of the World came out, and the year I first picked up an instrument. I had a guitar that had been bought as a souvenir from a holiday in Spain that had been gathering dust in a corner. I was 14 and, for whatever reason, Man of the World became my signature tune in my head. I felt like the doomed romantic in the song. I became so obsessed that I got the chords from someone at school and worked on it for three months. I’m so grateful to Peter Green because that song is like going to university on chords. Usually for your first song you’d learn She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain or Kumbaya, My Lord or whatever, but this had lots of minor chords and a really strange harmonic pattern. I still love the song and it still makes me very emotional. It opened the door. Once I could play that, I realised that with four chords I was able to play any song I liked, and I started writing my own as well.
Motown Chartbusters Vol 3 & Tighten Up Vol 2
Until I was 12, it was all about the Beatles and the Small Faces, but once I was a teenager and romance came in, it was Fleetwood Mac and Motown. There was a difference between music I played in public and music that I played in secret and didn’t tell anyone about in case they thought I was stupid. I had two albums I would take to house parties in Hounslow, where if we were flush we might have had a Watneys Party Seven and a bottle of advocaat and lemonade. It wasn’t a bacchanalian orgy. It was a bunch of kids dancing around to music. Anyone who has seen my videos will know I can’t dance, so I was sort of watching from the edge. Motown Chartbusters Vol 3 mixed new and old. So [Diana Ross & the Supremes and the Temptations’] I’m Gonna Make You Love Me, which was just about my favourite song then, would be next to [Marvin Gaye’s] I Heard it Through the Grapevine or [Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’] The Tracks of My Tears. Right there, you’ve got every type of romantic torture for a 14-year-old.
The other record, [Trojan records collection] Tighten Up Vol 2, had stuff like [the Pioneers’] Long Shot Kick de Bucket and Return of Django by the Upsetters. The album title was written in lipstick on the stomach of a woman in a bikini. That was pretty thrilling. When I was 16, we moved to Liverpool, where nobody listened to that music. They were into all this awful prog rock and thought I was out of my mind.
The Clangers
There was a Labour government when I was in my teens, so the secondary modern kids were given a reading list of working-class literature: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Billy Liar, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, alongside an occasional Emily Brontë and a Shakespeare. I wrote my essays off the film versions of those books. They were revolutionary because it wasn’t polite society stuff, it was raw and tough. This was that moment when you’re letting go of childhood, but the one thing I really loved was The Clangers. It was a kids’ TV series but, like The Magic Roundabout, older people watched it because it was a bit psychedelic. The characters lived on the moon and used a slide whistle to speak. Vernon Elliott’s music was fantastic. I didn’t listen to classical, but this sounded like Benjamin Britten or something: really wild brass and chamber music. It had so much imagination in it, and was like a dream, and stayed with me.
David Ackles
At the end of the 1960s, everybody started to go a bit groovy. My dad [the singer Ross McManus] grew his hair
long, had separated from my mother, had a girlfriend and was hanging out with younger people. He was doing his working-men’s-club act and was always looking for unusual songs to sing, and would give me records that he had listened to. One was David Ackles’ selftitled 1968 debut. I used to listen to this for hours on my own in the dark: I couldn’t share it with anybody. Ackles sounded like a man. He didn’t sound like Gary Puckett singing “young girl get out of my mind” or anything in the hit parade. He had the voice of experience. It was very melancholy. Down River was about this guy who came home from prison to find out that his wife had remarried. Ackles sang like he had been in prison.
Catholic mass
Dad also gave me books and magazines, and I would quote Frantz Fanon or Herbert Marcuse in essays. I got taken to the headteacher, who asked: “How come you’re reading these Marxists?!” Dad also gave me what turned out to be the underground press – International Times or Oz. So I was aware that there was another world out there beyond Richard Dimbleby reading the news. By 1969, people were saying things like: “Man, you need to read The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” but I was going to church with my dad. We would deliberately go to the Latin mass even though most churches had it in English by then. All my childhood I was singing litanies in a language I didn’t understand. Like a mantra.
That same year in the folk club in the basement of that same church I played music for the first time in public. The headliner, Ewan MacColl, was asleep in the front row. So I would look up and there is MacColl not listening to me, and I immediately forgot the next chord and the whole thing was a shambles. Welcome to showbiz! I got my revenge years later when I produced the Pogues’ Dirty Old Town, which of course became much better known than MacColl’s version of his own song. Ha.
• Elvis Costello’s album Hey Clockface is released on 30 October on Concord records
Xena Warrior Princess and a bowl of farina with googly eyes!” Meyers mocked.
“I’m sorry, you watched that debate and saw an apex predator and gladiator warrior fighter? Because he didn’t look like a predator to me,” Meyers added. “Most of the time he stood there with his head cocked like an old dog who just heard a twig snap. He held on to that podium like my grandma holds on to her walker when they’re reading the Powerball numbers.”
The debate “gave new meaning to the term ‘white noise’”, said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show, especially the “horrifying moment” when Trump refused to denounce white supremacists.
“Well, it seems like somebody in the White House started looking at the numbers and realized that siding with a violent hate group doesn’t poll well with suburban women,” said Colbert, pointing to Trump’s comments on Wednesday that he “didn’t know who the Proud Boys are” and “whoever they are they have to stand down, let law enforcement do their work”.
“Notice he didn’t actually denounce the Proud Boys,” Colbert responded. “So his walkback still had a hint of goose step.”
One reporter gave Trump another chance to clearly and definitively denounce white supremacy, and Trump “clearly and definitively took a pass”, said Colbert. Instead, Trump rambled about unsubstantiated violence in New York, and deflected from calling out white supremacy by name: “I’ve always denounced any form, any form of any of that,” he said.
Basically, Colbert explained, “he tried a variation on the ‘very fine people on both sides’ thing”.
Samantha Bee
And on Full Frontal, Samantha Bee returned to Wallace’s introduction of a question about race, during which the moderator assured Trump he could say anything he wanted in his allotted two minutes. “Do not tell Trump that he can say anything he wants about race!” Bee exclaimed. “Not only will it be wrong and deeply offensive, but Mark Burnett will have to spend hours erasing the tapes.”
As for Trump’s dog-whistling of the Proud Boys, “‘stand back and stand by’ is a horrifying thing to say to a group of white supremacists,” Bee said, “even more horrifying than when Trump yells it out to the Secret Service as he’s waging war on the Air Force One bathroom.
“It’s not fucking hard to condemn white supremacy,” she added. “All you have to do is say ‘I condemn white supremacy.’ That’s it! You can even tack something on the end like ‘check out my mixtape,’ or ‘go Sox!’ It doesn’t matter! Just condemn it.”
ing and shorter trips. But can ships make people feel safe from Covid-19, reduce their carbon footprint and significantly reduce their impact on local communities?
Sloane wonders. “Those folks from Key West have a real good point – that too many people can love a place to death, and then you lose the charm that was there,” said Sloane. Then, “all you have basically is a thing to sell, and photo ops”.