Hot Press, February 23, 1989

Bibliography   72 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 UK & Ireland weeklies UK & Ireland magazines UK & Ireland newspapers US newspapers US rock magazines US music magazines US magazines US alternative weeklies European magazines European newspapers Canada  •  Mexico  •  Asia Australia  •  New Zealand South America  •  Africa Blogs  •  Fanzines  •  Books Online publications — Elvis Unmasked Out from behind the grease-paint that adorns his face on the cover of Spike, Elvis Costello emerges to talk about the music that runs in his family from big-band to speed-metal, his much-touted Irish connection, working with Paul McCartney, his contempt for much of today's pop music, and the feelings that inspired his death wish for Margaret Thatcher. Neil McCormick CALL IT coincidence, call it synchronicity. Maybe we should settle for bad planning. I was in Heathrow Airport, waiting to board a delayed Aer Lingus flight from London to Dublin. It was a hastily arranged trip to interview Elvis Costello in the Gresham Hotel. I was skimming through some old Costello articles I had long had on file, not so much in-depth examinations as evasive skirmishes from a time when Elvis spoke to the press infrequently and, it seemed, reluctantly. "The press were looking for something to crucify me with, and I fed myself to the lions," said the singer in a rare 1982 Rolling Stone interview, referring to the petty, drunken argument with Bonnie Bramlett, when Elvis shot his mouth off about black music and then was forced to duck as American journalists returned fire. ELVIS COSTELLO REPENTS said the cover headline over a photo of a completely unpenitent pop-star, gazing suspiciously out through large, black-rimmed spectacles, as if irritated at having to break his self-imposed silence to explain off the unfortunate and unwarranted stigma of racism that was then still damaging his American career. I looked up from the page... and straight into the same face gazing vacantly back at me from across the departure lounge. The face was a little heavier maybe, slightly bearded, sporting small, rounded, dark glasses and with a black cap pulled low on the forehead as if making a half-hearted attempt at celebrity disguise, but it was him alright. Elvis Costello, in person, his wife Cait sitting to his right, a WEA International rep to his left. Carefully folding my clippings, I ambled over to introduce myself. Elvis saw me coming. Or rather, he saw someone making a bee-line for him, clutching Costello cut-out pictures. His eyes darted to the left and right, as if seeking a convenient escape route, but he was against the wall and far from any crowd. Realising he was trapped, he slumped in his seat and attempted a weak smile as he accepted my outstretched hand. Cait buried her face in a book, keen to avoid the homily of an ardent fan. "I'm from Hot Press," I said, "I thought you were supposed to be in Dublin!" "You're the one who's supposed to be in Dublin," countered Elvis, understandably mystified. "What's going on?" asked the bewildered WEA rep. The flight was announced as we gave our conflicting explanations of the communications complication that led to two people who lived in the same city flying all the way to another country to meet one another. "Bizarre!" laughed Elvis. "Why doesn't anybody ever tell me what's going on?" complained the rep. "Don't worry," says Elvis, "I've got some other things I've got to do over there." "All it takes is a phone call!" muttered the rep, despairingly. "See you in Dublin," smiled Elvis as we boarded. "Sorry about this," apologised the rep. "Don't worry," I replied, "you've just given me an intro for my article." Not that Elvis Costello really needs an introduction. Since the days of rock's re-birth in the baptism of fire that was punk rock, he has been a leading figure in the world of contemporary music. Britain's most critically acclaimed songwriter, with a world status and influence that far exceeds his (respectable} sales figures. From knock-kneed, angry young man snarling that the only human emotions he understood were guilt and revenge, to slightly portly, genial elder-statesman singing "All You Need Is Love" at Live Aid, his career has twisted and turned with more convolutions than his own punning lyrics, following an agenda clear to no one, probably not even himself. He has always seemed as much agent provocateur as pop star, never a pin-up even as a chart-topper, just too viciously anti-establishment to win the respect of the respectable. He is awesomely prolific and while there have been, inevitably, lows as well as highs in his output, the sheer intelligence, melodic invention emotional intensity of his writing and performing invests his least impressive work with redeeming features. Elvis Costello, as he told me himself during our conversation, is not God, but he's a class act, and I'll settle for that. After a turbulent flight across the Irish sea (when the stewardess kept reminding everyone to keep their seat-bells fastened and star and journalist both considered whether it might have been wiser to have stayed and done the interview in the departure lounge) Elvis offered me a lift into town. The record company limo, with its polished black body and plush, red velvet interior, resembled nothing so much as a mobile brothel. Elvis sprawled on the back seat like a visiting dignitary, holding court as the Irish rep, the International rep and the journalist listened to a round of musical anecdotes. Cait, with the indifferent air of one who has heard it all before, remained buried in her book. Elvis recounted drinking in a club in Canada where the bar band played a version of his song "Mystery Dance". Much to the local musicians' surprise, Elvis and The Attractions got up on stage to join them but then found they couldn't keep in sync with a version copied direct from the record. "We were stopping and starting in all the wrong places," he laughed. "They were better at being us than we were!" He told how drummer Pete Thomas, formerly a notorious drinker (though now apparently reformed and "playing better than ever") got them a telling off from Top Of The Pops' producer Michael Hurt for miming drum solos on his head during a broadcast of "I Wanna Be Loved". "It's incredible," said Elvis. "They seem to really believe that people that watch Top Of The Pops think you're playing live. Someone should break it to them!" Although it was a dull, rainy day Elvis' dark glasses remained on throughout the journey, masking a hangover that had followed a night of carousing after a hard week promoting his new album. "I wanted to unwind a bit," he remarked. "I think I unwound a bit too much." Elvis has long since made his peace with the press and indeed, it seems, with the world. He is affable and easy to talk to, waxing eloquently on a wide range of musical topics. But the sense of privacy that drove him to keep journalists at arms length for so long remains, and he is evasive if the interview strays too far from his work. "I don't really see what this has got to do with music," he said at one point, signalling an end to a conversation about his family background. To be guarded about his private life and persona is, of course, his prerogative; to choose to probe it is mine. When we settled down to talk in a suite at the top of the Gresham, next door to the rooms he occupied for three months in '87, I wanted to try and find out something about who Elvis Costello really is. I think I found out a little, though an hour and a half was too short a time to talk to the only recording artist in the world whose every record I possess. Between 1977 and 1987 Elvis Costello released 11 albums, not including two compilations of obscurities and a Best Of. Throw in an impressive number of collaborations and production jobs and his itinerary for those ten years looks like the wet dream of a workaholic. The two year gap between Blood And Chocolate and his new album, Spike, is the longest of his career, but, as he explains, "I haven't exactly been holidaying." He toured sporadically with the loose collection of King Of America session men The Confederates, "a difficult band to get together in one place at one time." He did get them together in Europe, then later in the southern states of America, in Australia and Japan. "I wanted to play down south with those guys just to see what happened," he says. They played Honky Tonks in Tulsa, New Orleans and Nashville where, he confesses, "the audiences were completely bewildered because they have a force-fed diet of that kind of music, and R'n'B and country, and when I go down there they kind of want punk rock or something!" In '87 he also did a solo college tour in America and then came to Ireland and lived in The Gresham for three months while Cait was acting in the film The Courier. Elvis kept himself busy writing songs ("I must have written about half this album next door," he recalls) and got talked into doing the music for the film, which he found "quite therapeutic not having to worry about song structures." The Courier got released in '88 to quite an overwhelmingly negative reception -- Elvis thought that unfair: "It wasn't Citizen Kane but I don't think its makers thought it was." He did some work with Latin American star Reuben Blades, co-writing songs on his first English language album, played with a veritable galaxy of stars backing Roy Orbison for a special concert and, out of the blue, was asked if he would like to do some writing with Paul McCartney. They had met on a few occasions in studios and on benefit shows, but, as Elvis wryly observes, "He's not the sort of guy you go knocking on his door saying 'Can I write some songs with you?'" A huge Beatles fan, Elvis had never really disparaged McCartney's solo work as many of his punk contemporaries had. "Even at his most nursery rhymish, there was always something musically redeeming in his songs. I learned a tremendous amount from The Beatles and it's in my songs, it's in me, and he's one half of the partnership that put it there in the first place." "My father sort of became a hippy when he was about forty. He grew his hair and he started listening to The Jefferson Airplane and things, and that was the only time we disagreed about music. He gave me loads of psychedelic records and I was into Tamla Motown by then." Two of the songs from the McCartney/MacManus partnership appear on Spike, another was a McCartney B-side and others will be on his next album. "On the face of it it doesn't look like a very likely collaboration but it worked out really good," he observes. "We were strangely compatible. You've got to remember that it's just a guy, you know? I'm at exactly the right age to be really intimidated by it and from time to time I'd look up and go 'God it's HIM!', but I had to put all those thoughts aside, particularly any thoughts like 'these are pretty big shoes to be trying to fill' because it's not Lennon and McCartney. He's Paul McCartney, he's been a solo artist much longer than he's been a Beatle and I'm sure it gets on his nerves to be constantly referred to in the past tense. Whether people find his music less exciting now than it was then, well, it's a pretty tall order to be more exciting! It's like being the King of The World for a few years then having to settle for being the ambassador or something. I shouldn't think it's that easy a job and he's a decent person I must say, very sane." Elvis made no effort to curb his penchant for Beatle-like licks just because he was working with a Beatle. "The ironic part is," he laughs, "if it sounds like he wrote it I probably did and vice versa. He wanted to do all the ones with lots of words and all on one note and I'm the one trying to work in the 'Please Please Me' harmony all over the place. It was really fun." Most of the rest of Elvis' time has been taken up with preparing and recording his new album. "There's thirty-two musicians on it and there was a lot of phone calls to make. I must have spent a month on the phone ringing people up trying to find out when they were free and make a schedule to accommodate everyone." This is possibly his most expensive album ever. "I didn't have any more money than I'd had on previous albums," he admits, "but this time I spent it all!" There was a lot of travelling and relocating as Elvis and his two co-producers T-Bone Burnett and Kevin Killen moved between Hollywood, New Orleans, Dublin and London "to get the best possible group to play each song." From the outset Elvis and T-Bone Burnett had wanted to do something different from previous albums, T-Bone encouraging him to approach the recording with a 'similar abandon' to his Courier soundtrack. They began to draw up a broad list of instruments, approaching each song as a separate entity. "There is almost different instrumentation on every song," says Elvis. The 32 musicians include such famous names as McCartney, Roger McGuinn and Chrissie Hynde, some of America's finest session players including drummers Jim Keltner and Jerry Marotta, an 8-piece brass band he saw while on holiday in New York with his jazz-loving mother ("she really dug them") and an impressive ensemble of Irish folkies including Christy Moore, Donal Lunny, Davy Spillane, Derek Bell, Frankie Gavin and Steve Wickham. "I think it was worth it if it has come out the way I heard it in my head," says Elvis. "So all these things add up to the sum of the two years since Blood And Chocolate. Which isn't a long time, it's only a long time for me," Elvis sums up, pointing out that, "The Pretenders have released five albums in the time I've released twelve." Spike encompasses music with its roots in '60s pop, swing, jazz and folk. As he has done before with musical influences from Tamla-soul to country and western, Elvis dovetails these diverse sources into his own identifiable brand of lyric-orientated songwriting with an astonishing versatility, rarely, if ever, sounding like a tourist or an impersonator. His astonishing range and almost instinctive comprehension for the subtleties of different styles can be seen as a legacy from a childhood surrounded by music. Both his parents were involved in music, his father, famously, as Ross MacManus, the singer in the Joe Loss Orchestra, a Glenn Miller style 14-piece big band. But his mother too had her influence. "My mother worked on record shops, she ran record departments," says Elvis. "She's very knowledgeable about music, because in those days you didn't just flicker down a page torn out of Music Week to find someone a record, you had to know which was the best recording of "The Song Of The Earth" or something, you actually had to know something about music. So there were always records around the house. My mother says the first record I ever really liked was Songs For Swingin' Lovers. Apparently when I couldn't even talk I liked that record, the sound must just have appealed to me. So from even before I can remember I've listened to music that swung! "Of course, up to a certain age you're not influenced by snobbery, you're just as likely to like a song that you heard Val Doonican singing as Frank Sinatra. I absorbed a lot of different kinds of music. When you're very small you can't tell the difference, you just like songs. You don't hear the bass on records, you just hear the whole record. If you listen to records you liked when you were 11, you suddenly hear what's happening on them now cause your ears are more attuned. In the same way, when I was a little boy I used to go with my dad to see the Joe Loss 0rchestra play, on Sundays and Saturdays, I s'pose to get someone in to clean out the house and not have me bloody running around! And although they were a dance band, I never really thought of them as a swing band, though that's where their sound was rooted. It was just like this big block of reed and brass sound." There was no musical rebellion or generation gap antagonism in the MacManus household. "I never thought of rock 'n' roll as being particularly rebellious," says Elvis. "The first pop music I really identified with was The Beatles when I was eight or nine and most everybody of all generations, could appreciate that the Beatles were good. Most of the time I was in agreement with my father, not about the songs he necessarily liked but about the songs that he sang. Back in 1963, you got like two hours a week when you heard pop music on the radio and the rest of the time it was light orchestra music, you know swing, dance band music. And the more hip dance bands started to play the modern music, doing modified arrangements. The publishers were putting out records as fast as they could, trying to get covers, cause that was the way people had hits -- it wasn't necessarily through the original artist, it was by people becoming familiar with the song. The song was still king. It was The Beatles that changed that, playing their own instruments. "So I had a big stack of A-label records, acetates of all kinds of stuff that my dad was obliged to learn. He's a very versatile singer and quite a good mimic and they had a tremendously imaginative arranger who somehow managed to score these pop records for this 14-piece orchestra. Now whether my father liked it or not I don't know. I'm sure some of the songs he hated, but he got lumbered with this, doing things like "Good Vibrations" and "Like A Rolling Stone". Elvis can only remember rebelling against his father's tastes in the late '60s, when MacManus senior was becoming a little too radical for his son. "My father sort of became like a hippy, when he was about 40. He grew his hair and he started listening to The Jefferson Airplane and things, and that was the only time we disagreed about music. I didn't like all that stuff. He gave me a load of psychedelic records and I was into Tamla Motown by then." It was a time when Elvis recalls his own tastes developing and changing. "As a teenager things change very quickly for you, sometimes yon feel brasher and I liked Tamla Motown and other times you get all angst-ridden and I liked Joni Mitchell or something. Then as you get older and you're writing yourself you become aware that this music isn't just something that is done to you, you can actually control it. Music stops being this magic thing that appears out of nowhere, you can dismantle it and find out how it works and use it as a language. Yet when it gels, it's still really magical. I wrote some quite sophisticated songs in my teens. "New Lace Sleeves," which turned up on Trust, I'd written that when I was 19. So you obviously incorporate a lot of things you've learned as a listener. And I know a lot of music. I've memorised it, I know more songs than most people I know. Ross MacManus still performs, and has been known to include an occasional Elvis Costello song in his set. "We've sung together," says Elvis, with obvious pride. "I was on a show, a celebration of the Joe Loss Orchestra and my dad was invited back to sing on the BBC. We did "Georgia" together." Digging deeper into the MacManus family background, Elvis reveals that his grandfather was 'a military trained classical player.' He also has four half-brothers from his father's second marriage "and they're mostly musical as well." He's not convinced it's a genetic thing, however. "I don't hold with those theories. The difference in musical experience between my father, my grandfather and myself is quite a lot. And my great grandfather was a coal merchant so I don't know what his input is!" Elvis has a son by his first marriage, who is now 14 and into speed-metal and rap. Elvis doesn't think it too likely he will be the successor in a musical dynasty. "It's less dominant in his life than it was in mine," he comments. "He's tinkered around with something musical. He hasn't shown me. He's kind of interested more in art." Hot Press, February, 23 1989 Neil McCormick interviews Elvis Costello. Bill Graham reviews Spike. Images Cover. File:1989-02-23 contents page blurb.jpg Contents page blurb.

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