Testing Elvis Costello's Music Knowledge

the reason you're here is this the new version which is pretty much my last word on this subject let's start with this song nick would be proud that that was kind of the volume that we used to play everything was why everything sounded super exciting because that's so it goes first release by on stiff records i've known nick since 1972 when the group he was in brindisi schwartz came to play the cavern the original cavern which was still in existence yeah i was i was just finishing school and he was my favorite songwriter that i could you know i thought i could actually meet all the other people were just names on record sleeves you know and um he was great you know i offered to buy him a drink now if you ask nick he says he bought me a drink but it wasn't i bought him a pint of guinness and you know i asked him a bunch of stupid questions about songs and because i was in a little group there were just two of us in the group but we were trying to play these songs and then i go back to london the next year and start trying to you know make my way playing initially solo then i put a little band together that didn't head anywhere then i went back to playing solo and suddenly this record is announced and uh i said okay that's the place maybe i'll get a hearing here at the cavern and then i'll go back to london and i'll go back to the cavern and i'll go back to here at the cavern and i'll go back to the cavern and i'll go back to the cavern and i'll go back to least i know the guy who made this record don't know him very well i don't have his phone number but if i turn up maybe they'll remember me from the he's that annoying guy that hangs around and ask nick questions you know and uh so i did you know and it and it kind of worked it was just a a little demo reel that i'd made in my bedroom and some of the songs were songs that appeared on my mystery and somewhere in its style that was completely different musically yeah so um they sort something in this one song another one that was quite indebted to nick i think in a way it had this swinging sort of feel this one called radio sweet home play one more for my radio sweetheart hide your love hide your love no we are so far apart we got to hide your love we were put into the studio to cut them and when i say you know it sounds grand it's it's a a little room not bigger than this room maybe smaller than this room down a kind of alleyway off of you know anonymous street in north london and this little eight track board and i would say from me to you is the width of the board and the speakers are directly above it not as they usually are set back a little bit so when you did do something exciting like that it really sounded like something you know and of course one of the reasons it sounded so good was that because we weren't trying to make very shiny polished records with lots of layers they were about presence and that room all the mics were open so the drum sound is kind of the sound they didn't need to add reverb or anything to anything because it was the sound of the drums going on to all the other mics in the room the ones in front of the guitars the the the drums going on to all the other mics in the room the ones in front of the guitars the the drums going on to all the other mics in the room the the ones in front of the guitars the the the the bass was probably de-eyed i was pinned against the wall like a fly you know like a butterfly like with my guitar barely enough room to move and my amp next to me so everything and of course this was pretty much unknown to me i'd been inside a couple of studios before my father was a singer so i'd sung on a on a tv jingle on a advertising jingle with him and that studio was way more sophisticated than pathway this this you know was very very basic kind of like all the studios that we you know that around which legends build whether it be studio one or hitsville in detroit if you go to hitsville motown studio tamela as we call it you know first time i went there i just couldn't believe how small the room was i thought these records that i'd loved as a teenager were made in a cathedral they sounded so you know it wasn't that they were grand they just sounded like levi stubbs singing bernadette or something like that he had to be singing in this big space but it wasn't it was just everything was right there and in that sense there's nowhere to hide is this so i mean the song has got to be okay what was the sound that you were sort of getting at or was there i don't want to say genre but was there a type of sound that you were going for with these songs because it wasn't necessarily what you were listening to or grow up listening to the odd thing about it and i try to make this concise is that you know there was no rock and roll in my house yeah my dad was originally a bebop trumpet player i mean that's what he wanted to be came out of the ref and he already played the trumpet then he heard dizzy gillespie and he won that's what he wanted to do that music sounded very strange to people who even people that like jazz that knew lewis armstrong and such music you know come out of new orleans there was all these different harmonies and he literally got into fights over it you know uh so at some point you went to london my mother and he both went to london to pursue their careers she sold records so she actually had more success than me and i got to work in a big department store in london my dad still going around the clubs and at some point they you know they got married i came along and he had to he had to take a job that was more reliable for income and he took a he could sing so he took a job as a trumpet vocalist and gradually became a just vocalist so i heard pop music sort of filtered through his work he would come home with a stack of records and we'd have to memorize it and he would come home with a stack of records and he would have to and because they were playing. It was a strange thing where these dance bands were kind of being overtaken by rock and roll and particularly by the beat boom in the early 60s. And he would have to learn, you know, Please, Please, Please by the Beatles was the first one that I really remember. Please, please, please, won't you have it like I did you? And I went into the front room and asked him for the record. I said, when you're done learning that, can I have it? And he gave it to me and changed everything, you know. And then I realized I had access to a stack of records every week or every two weeks he'd be given another stack to learn so that they could do these peculiar arrangements of such songs on the BBC, a BBC radio show. What was he doing learning? When you say he's like, he's just listening to it over again. Well, he had sheet music and he had to memorize these songs because he had like five days to learn five songs. So he's singing these songs in the kitchen somewhere. He's not singing from sheet music on the stage. It was a live. No, but in your house when you see him like practicing. He's singing along with the record. Yeah. And he'd arranged, he had rigged up, you know, those record players that drop the singles down. He'd rigged up a device by which instead of dropping another record, the arm would just come back on. So he automated the system so he'd keep playing the record repeatedly. So he'd play it until he'd memorized it. Now, these songs were not complex, many of them. But, you know, think about memorizing five songs a week. So that you can go on a radio show where there's still a lot, there's a live audience, you know. It wasn't like they're in the studio that could do a retake. So I saw that and I could hear the physical force of his voice. It would shake. Then we had a glass panel in the front room window. And I can remember standing outside and putting my hand up to it because it vibrated when he really sang, you know, the high notes. And that was, it's not my first memory of music, but it's the first memory of performance. And then I would occasionally get to go to the broadcasts on my school holidays because they were like a lunchtime show. So we'd have to go there at eight in the morning and I'd watch the band rehearse. And then the big excitement would be there'd be a guest artist from the hip parade. And of course, sometimes that would be somebody whose records I already had. The time that I most remember is the Hollies coming in. And, you know, years, years later, when I had a record out, Graham Nash came to my show in Manchester when he was visiting his family, came backstage. And he said, I'm very pleased to meet you. And I said, well, you've met me before, but I was wearing short trousers, so you won't remember I was 10. And he very, very patiently saw my autograph book, him and Alan Clark and the rest of the band. And they were really lovely to me. You know, my dad had introduced me, obviously. And so I would sit quietly and watch all this thing going on. So in some ways, I knew how music worked and I knew how it could be created. But then you find your own way into playing. And, you know, I heard Peter Green's Man of the World, an early Fleetwood Mac, the real Fleetwood Mac, as I call him. For some reason, that song spoke to me so much, I had to learn how to play it. I didn't learn a three-chord song. I learned, like, a really complex song. It took me about three months to master it, you know? You're going to put it on now, I know. Just a little. This song moves me so much. I know. You can imagine that I was about. 15 when this came out. And all this, you know, I need a woman. You know, I go. I could barely talk to girls, much less a woman, you know? But the song really kind of spoke to me, you know? It's how emotional that playing is. Yeah, he. Do you hear that thing that was right before that? That's called Silence. Which we don't hear on records ever now, you know? It's like, it's a very patient song. Yeah. And it sort of takes its time being established. It's about somebody who, you know, they say I'm a man of the world, but, you know, you don't understand, like, he's hiding something. And I suppose that's why as a teenager, I like lots of exuberant records too, but this one was the one that I was moved to pick up an instrument for. So if you listen to that and how many chords it moves through, in the course of learning how to play that song, I didn't really understand the musical connection between the shapes. There was a lad who played the guitar at my school, and he had learned this song. He was a couple of years older than me. Gave me this sheet of paper with all the little chord symbols, and I, very painstakingly, having had a guitar for a number of years that had been bought as a souvenir of a trip to Spain, I'd learned how to play it. And from there, because I learned so many chords in order to learn it, other songs seemed, oh, this is easy now. This one only has three or four chords. It's just so very satisfying to be able to play. And I learned, you know, I had books of, they were called Simplified or something like that, song copies of Beatles songs. They were special editions for beginners. And after a short while, I realized that the chords were wrong. And I would go into the music shop that my mother had worked in part-time, and I would sneak a look at the real expensive records. And I'd go, oh, that's a diminished chord, you know, and that's how I learned harmony. I never studied music formally, but I learned it by an accumulation of hearing and then wanting to know how to render that. And little by little, the different things that took my interest, I would learn some way of replicating that. Now, you've got to say, as a teenager, my public life, as it were, like shared life with other people. I'm an only child, so I don't. I'm an only child, so I don't have any brothers or sisters to play me stuff, is going to teenage parties like everybody. And pretty much all the music was Tamla or Trojan rocksteady and reggae. Yeah. Like pre-Bob Marley, you know, sort of. A lot of it very, I now know, influenced by their impressions. So we listened to all that. That was the West London suburban music. At home, I was into singer-songwriters. At home, private. In my bedroom, I'm listening to Joni Mitchell, David Ackles, and then later on, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and James Taylor. And these people, you know, a lot of people from the West Coast. A little bit of West Coast psychedelic music. I had a couple of those records when I lived in Liverpool. And they all gave me little bits and pieces of information about music. Some I couldn't possibly, you know, imitate in any way. Two records that I got in about 1971. 1971. I think really made me more ambitious to change the rhythms away from rock and roll or R&B rhythms were Randy Newman's first records and Dr. John's Gumbo. Because Dr. John's Gumbo was like a starter kit for New Orleans music from the 50s or even earlier. And I heard rhythms that I'd never heard before. I had no access to those records in living in England. They weren't hits. And what I did hear was a lot of piano music. And I could pick out a tune on the piano, but I could never play the syncopated music on a guitar. I sort of could mimic it in some way. And that's how I ended up writing these songs that don't sound anything like My Home is True. Even though they were written in the year before My Home is True. You know, recently you may have seen the very last late show with Stephen Colbert. They said they wanted me to be on the last show. They didn't really tell me what the finale was, but initially. And I said, well, what are we going to sing? And I suggested, why don't you sing Woody Guthrie's song, It's Been Good to Know You, and I'll write new words. So long, it's been good to know you. This dusty old dust is getting my home and I've got to be drifting along. No, that's too sad. And he said he wanted to sing this song called Jump Up. And I said, Jump Up. I remember that 51 years ago. I've played it twice on stage. You're going to put it on television? Yeah. You know, and I was actually very flattered on the one hand. You know, it was a big compliment to choose such a song. And he knew all the words. Jump up, hold on tight. Can't trust a promise or a guarantee. Cause the man round the curve says that he's never heard of you or me. I thought, well, this song, which was. It was just written in my bedroom and never really got any further than that. I would play this song in a folk club when I was a solo act and people just talk all over it. I couldn't get people to pay attention with that kind of song. So guess what? I had to write those songs so I could command attention. And then you can go back later. Yeah, I never did go back. I mean, we did issue a couple of those songs. There's more of them on this record in this more intimate style. And of course, what you hear in contemporary songwriters now is the it's because a lot of people begin their careers making YouTubes in their bedroom. That's the same as I was doing, except we didn't have cameras. They are making very direct communications and you'll see things which are very affecting emotionally where people are just singing their new song. And then a record company comes along and totally fucks it up. By trying to dress them, put them in a dressing that's going to get them to a broader audience. And that's the beauty of that simple thing. Is there sort of any or much oversight when you're working on this? Or what is the collaborative process like with these songs? The oversight, I think, is twofold. There was, I mean, first of all, I should mention the very first session I go to, there's just two other musicians, me and Nick Lowe, and John McPhee from Clover and Micky Shine, the drummer from Clover. And this is a group that we're working with. It was in the early 70s that I picked up in a second-hand bin. And I couldn't believe I was even meeting them. I said, John McPhee, he played on Tupela Honey by Van Morrison. He's like a real serious musician. I had a little band, but we were just a group of guys that met and turned out to all like the same music. The fact that we didn't have any ability to play it didn't get in our ambition to be a band. Suddenly I'm in the room with two musicians, and Nick, who sort of was my hero and still is. And he played bass, and we put down Mystery Dance as a trio. I may have played a bit of rhythm guitar, but it was all about McPhee. And then we said, this could use piano, but we didn't have a piano player. So while I can hammer out three chords, it's only three chords. And Nick stood at the end of the piano, the little upright piano with a drumstick. And when it came to, you know, the piano entering in the chorus, he ran the drumstick down the keys so I didn't have to rip my thumb open trying to be Jerry Lee Lewis, you know. And so everything was kind of that kind of homemade. And the oversight, as you say, was really, you know, Nick just enthusing and making you feel like you were doing great. And we cut these two songs. The other one, Radio Sweetheart, was a swinging sort of pop tune. And it had a pedal steel guitar on it, which is not really something you would admit to even knowing the name of in London at that time. You know, if you wanted to be hip. But I didn't want to be hip. I still thought like an outsider because I had no idea of an audience. I had no identity as a performer. I had no, you know, as they say, M.O., you know, nothing. Is that what this means? My aim is true? It's a line from Alison. So, I mean, it was that song is a very emotional song with the conflict of being in love with somebody and knowing you're likely to betray them. Alison, I know this world is killing you, oh, Alison. So, it gets like, you know, simultaneously an expression of dedication and the idea that you may, that the world may kill you. You know, the world, in other words, the protagonist in this story. It may kill that love, though, may compromise it or betray it. I mean, it's a kind of a sad and complicated song for 21, 22. I had one go at writing that song before, you know, with a different title, a different, the same idea, but that's expressed a different way. So, it wasn't like I didn't know what I was doing with words. And then it was just a question of finding the musical framework. And, of course, what happened was that that first recording session was listened to. And I don't think there was any definite plan to issue those recordings. There was even the suggestion that I might be a sort of backroom songwriter, kind of because of the way I looked. You know, it didn't seem like I should be in a pop group. But they thought well enough to send me to Headley Grange, which was a slightly kicked in sort of country house on the edge of, outside of London. To me, in the deep country, it really wasn't, but it felt like a long way because I was a suburban kid. And I would get to meet all of Clover, who were living in the house, which was very much the style of the early 70s. The groups all lived together. And they had been persuaded to come over. I think a couple of them had their wives with them. You know, they were living in this house and Led Zeppelin and Bad Company had worked in this room. It was kind of like a rehearsal space. And what had been the sort of dining hall of this, in my mind's eye, it's a baronial kind of, you know, mansion. I don't think it really was that grand. But it had this room big enough to set the band up in. And that's where we rehearsed. And I would go on a day off down to, and now I was using my holidays, my holiday allowance. And I would go down and rehearse all afternoon into the evening, sleep on the couch in the rec room, where they were set up, and then go up to London and record. And we did, I think, I can't remember if it was four six-hour sessions or six four-hour sessions. I know there was some arithmetic like that. I think it was only four sessions that did the rest of the record. And so, you know, I'd be in there and we'd be learning, waiting for the end. And they didn't have anything like the same reference points as I did for music. Being on West Coast, guys, they knew, between them had a lot of experience of music. But I don't think they'd ever heard any East Coast music. So, in my mind, Waiting for the End of the World was like a Velvet Underground song. In my head, I'm Not Angry was like Blue Oyster Cult's, you know, Don't Fear the Reaper. You know, the chord sequence was that kind of gothic chord sequence. But I never mentioned any of that to them, because I thought it would put them at odds with. It was enough that they were willing to back me up. And then one day, Johnny Shambodi, the bass player, said, "Can we do that one that sounds like the birds?" And he meant Red Shoes. And I went, "Okay. Well, it must sound all right then." Because if it sounds like the birds, it's pretty good, you know. And that's kind of the way we cut it with the jangly guitar. I mean, you can, you know, when I first had R.E.M., they had something. When I first had Tom Petty, they had something. He had something of the birds in his, in the, you know, the DNA. So, that was just like a thrilling moment, you know. Each night, I would come home from Highbury and Islington to the other side of town, as it were, down in West London, where I was living. I'd come away with this little tape with seven and a half inch, you know, per minute, per second, whatever it is, you know. Most tapes go around at 15 IPS, inches per second. I had the seven and a half, so half as good quality. And I would come home with like two songs or three songs, rough mixes, put them on my tape recorder at home, and they sound like shit. But you know that, you know why that was? Because I'd inherited that tape recorder from my father, and I'd never cleaned their heads. I didn't know, I knew so little about technical things that I had no idea you had to do that. And I couldn't understand why this thing that had sounded thrilling, suddenly sounded muffled. And I thought we were blowing it, you know. I'd go back, "I don't know if that's any good," and then he'd play it again in the studio, it'd be fabulous, you know. And you hear that the sound of Pathway is very present. So, those were some dirty, you know, machine heads, as they call them. We talked about your dad a little bit, but what about your mom? Did her influence on you, as someone who was selling records, was there an awareness of like, "Oh, this is a hit, and this is not a hit." Not some, well, she did have that in her history, but she was 14 when she left school and went for a job as a record sales assistant, as they officially called it. And her mother took her to Rushworth and Draper for the interview, and she was hired, and she worked in that and several other record shops in that area. And in that time, she became known as the girl who knew a little bit about a dance band and jazz, because the managers of the shop tended to lean towards light music and even classical music. So, they had to learn about classical music, too. So, she had much wider knowledge of music than my father, because he was engaged with first playing jazz. They shared the love of jazz and the singers of that time. I saw one record up there that I still own, a different cover, but Ella Fitzgerald, songbook record on Verve. We had that record, and Frank Sinatra's Songs for Singing Lovers was the first record that I, my mother tells me, I personally requested, and I was not yet fully verbal. I was obsessed with this, I've got you under my skin. When I say obsessed, I don't know how obsessed a two-year-old is, but, you know, they can be pretty obsessed. Yeah, yeah. So, that music was all familiar, which is why I didn't know who Elvis Presley was, because he, his career began the year I was born, and all of his success before going in the army was invisible to my parents. You know, he may have had hit records, but they didn't listen to them, and the radio was, I don't remember the radio being featured, him ever jumping out at me, everybody talks about that time and how it was a revolution. It obviously was for older people. When I say older people, when I say older people that were two, four, five years older than me, yes, caught that full on, just as I did with the Beatles, but for me, I knew the names of jazz musicians before I ever heard rock and roll, I knew the name of Coleman Hawkins, I knew who Charles Mingus was, I knew about Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, and the singers that I mentioned, Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Hardaway, Peggy Lee, Nat Cole, you know, who was both things. A brilliant piano player and a wonderful singer. So that was the music that was played for pleasure, of which my mother knew a lot, because she had to. There was no computer to look up a title. If somebody came in, they might not even know the title of the song they wanted. They would come in and go, "Have you got this?" and start singing. And they wouldn't know the words of the song, they wouldn't know the title, they'd just know the tune. And my mother obviously had a pretty good ear, she'd go, "Oh yeah, that's such and such." Yeah, there's three versions of that, because in those days, there would be multiple interpretations of songs. And you can buy the sheet music over there, because the same shop sells sheet music and instruments. It was a very different way of listening. And between those two things, I think that's where I got my education. Instead of formal education in music, I don't remember anything significant happening in music lessons at school, except maybe singing Barbara Allen, you know, the old folk song. What's the jump from learning how to play "Man of the World" to actually trying to figure out your own tune? Well, the first song I wrote was also on a minor key. It was called "Winter," and it was in E minor. So it was pretty miserable sounding. It was, you know, it was like, it was, you know, I was a teenager and I was going through all those angsty things. And I went to the church basement in Richmond at the Hangin' Lamp Folk Club, and they had proper acts, you know. They had people like John Martin and Mike Oldfield. He played there with his sister one week. I remember seeing him when, he must have only been a year or two older than me. The first night I went there to play, and I got my name on the list, and they would let the, you know, like an open mic, as you call it here. Floor singers, they called it in that day. Ewan McColl was the lead act. He was the build artist on there. He's the guy that wrote the first time I ever saw your face and "Dirty Old Town." And he was sitting in the audience with, he was quite a grandiose guy sitting there like this, like thoughtful at first, and then a couple of people got up and they weren't very good, and I got up and I, and I, I looked up in the middle of the first verse and he was asleep. And it was so awful. It was so humiliating, you know, that he was, I maybe, you know, if it'd been more arrogant, I would have believed he was closing his eyes to concentrate on the brilliance of the composition, but he was just asleep. And that was so, you know, I, I didn't go back for a while until I gained confidence to get through and immediately forgot the next chord, you know, was distracted, but that's all learning. And that's what all of that process leading up to this record is in the notes for the, for the set. I say it's kind of like watching somebody walk through a shop full of hats and trying them on to see, and then look in and see whether they suit you, because there's eight songs in, in this collection on the second disc called "The Blueprint" that have never been heard because I kept them out of sight all this time because I thought they gave the game away. I thought they sounded so much like the people I, I was, you know, learning from or imitating that I, people would completely think I was a phony. Of course, when you listen to them now, you could sort of hear I'd heard Van Morrison, you could sort of hear I'd heard Bruce Springsteen even, you know, whose first record I'd just bought, but truthfully, they're just somebody learning how to do it, and I don't think there's anything wrong with putting that out. The songs I've written at 21, they sound confident about what they are, it was only later where I went, no, I can do better than that, you know, so I did. it was very painful for me this because i you know this story right now what i'm gonna say it was when mime is true i got myself arrested playing outside the cbs convention in park lane in the middle of 77 on the afternoon i was to make my london debut as alvis costello which i'd been given that name by then and that was on the record that was just coming out and that was to get me a contract in america i was greg galler who was my and our minor columbia persuaded the famous perhaps infamous walter yannickoff uh to sign sign me and uh we the record that we'd already made was then issued in america uh with the addition of watching the detectives which had been made during the process of uh of uh auditioning you members of the attractions that had a different band on it had graham parker's rhythm section andrew bodner the late andrew bodner and steve golding was in the mecons and myself and then steve naive who was newly recruited added the keyboards columbia obviously thought that record was good we agreed with them so let them put it on the album and uh and then it you know i guess it made some impression with in some circles in in america it wasn't a hit but um it it seemed to catch you know critics here and unfortunately i really remember this because i just being sort of this is not why i got in the business the record was used to criticize that album and randy was one of my heroes you know i couldn't believe it they were they were faulting randy's record and i could this has got great songs on it you know of course the records that came immediately before it were so intense and so focused sailor and i couldn't believe it they were they were faulting randy's record and i could this has got away particularly and then good old boys which is really really challenging to a lot of people yeah but i saw i'd seen randy play those songs in concert before they were on a record in london he'd come and play drury lane and you can imagine when he when he played you know rednecks it was like shocking you know it's all real funny down here drink too much laugh too loud too dumb to make you know northern town we're keeping the neighbors singing wasn't true it was the way he was what the words he was using and um to be used to to create an unfavorable comparison with somebody i admired so much was i was mortified i i wanted nothing more to do for a minute i was i'm done if this is what's going to happen if i put out records and i i don't want to do this i felt that strongly about it you know that lasted about a minute and then i realized that i just had to get on with it because equally i'd turn the page and and you know you'd find something in a different paper where they say who let this guy in the studio and it would be me you know of course not everybody got it yeah don't forget like before miami's true came out we released three singles on stiff while i was still working in a day job so i had to watch my singles come out i had no way to promote them i didn't have a band lesson zero admittedly was a slightly odd choice lyrically for a first record second song was alison totally bombed you know in america not in america it was also released in america and totally bombed yeah so you know when people remember these songs as hits the reality is they caught people's ear that wrote about music but were not played on mainstream radio that much so what was happening were you aware of what was happening at the time in popular music compared to the stuff that you were making because it wasn't yeah that's part of it right it's like there's disco music that's dance music that's happening this is what i've always said is that because we all you know when you're trying to make your name the equivalent of the of being liked on instagram or any of those other platforms was whether you would even be mentioned in passing in the new musical express which was a weekly musical paper that had a very high opinion of itself it had excellent writers and some you know that i that i got to work with who didn't know about music but they had a really really they were the pitchfork of their time they were kind of up themselves you know as we say in england you know they had very grandiose ideas about their their judgments on things but you still courted it you know i mean pistols mentioned that publication sort of inadvertently in one of their songs so i think that the legend that grew up around that time which was then observed from america was that there was a kind of revolution in which punk dominated the music scene it didn't yeah it dominated the musical newspapers if you went around the country and as we did in 77 when the anarchy tour toured england the pistols the clash and the damned my manager was of course the dams manager that did cause ructions in each town it visited and we were actually forbidden to play glasgow believe it or not we were actually forbidden to play glasgow believe it or not a town with a fearsome reputation we were actually made to play in a suburban town when we first went there just a couple of months later because we were on stiff and regarded as punk the reality night to night was we would mostly play to bewildered looking people who should have been listening to status quo yeah you know that people had long hair and and kind of fair isles pullovers like early 70s style the girls were dancing around their handbags and they couldn't wait for the band to get off and they could then they could play gloria gainer or the bgs or joe tex i don't want to bump with no fat woman you know i mean these novelty hits as well as great records but we when we even when we first made the chance in early 78 in england we weren't competing so much with many other new wave or punk bands so only a couple that were making the upper reaches of the charts the few hits that we did have in england we were sharing that space with the bgs abba fleetwood mac rod stewart gloria gainer so you really felt like you were in pop music plus there were people like cliff richard who was still having hits who'd been a sort of the english elvis they tried to call him and then he went made a bunch of other things and one or two bands the stranglers had hits then then the buzzcocks had hits they were the ones that had pop style and then there was kind of then of course the big thing you know the the beauty of both debbie and blondie you know the pop star kind of she had she she was making they were making records that were had all the energy and everything but they had the presence of pop stars just visually sting kind of the same you know with the police very tightly composed pop songs you know that like the monkeys sounded great three months apart not so great when you listen to them all end on end they weren't that varied you know there wasn't a lot of like uh dramatic depth to when you put them in a line but if you heard them six months or three months apart they was they would always caught your ear you know i don't know where that i have something like two sevens clash by culture or something it's like he obviously listened to a lot of records that weren't in the charts you know and um he and bertie i mean that that's as good a rhythm track as you could hear and here you're here right at the top i mean i know nick came home from that session and played that off a reel to reel in his apartment until the neighbors were screaming for mercy because he just kept playing the first drum fill over and over again because i don't think you could believe he caught that you know and it's again it's the sound of the mics in the room being wide open you know i don't know the better sounding drum intro on a record recorded in i can think of a few recorded in jamaica but i can't think of many recorded in england that sound that good you know but when i come in then it all just goes to hell you know it becomes it becomes a totally different thing i could just you used to play this right what master blaster but that's much later yeah a few years later yeah you would sometimes play that you know that yeah wow you know that that's crazy i mean i just heard this song the other day and i was like i'm sure there are places where there's big jamaican communities where they were they were listening to all the emerging trends of of jamaican uh music from scar through to you know to to the to the bob marley or of a reggae but um in england that was concentrated a lot more because it's a smaller country and the presence of those uh communities meant the calypso became a thing in england in the in the early 50s then scar or blue beat as we called it yeah that was a label it was both the name of the music and the name of a label founded by chris blackwell to bring the music into the country he then became ireland and then proceeded to bring trojan records for like you know which were like jamaican records but they were pop records we had like hits in the charts next to motown next to disco early disco next to just mainstream pop music records, English artists, American artists, Frankie Valli. You would hear The Israelites or Itmec by Desmond Decker or Longshot Kick the Bucket or, you know, Liquidator, brilliant instrumental. These records were like just part of the mix and I never really sensed that American pop embraced it in quite the same way until Jimmy Cliff, you know, and then Jimmy Cliff, you know, was really the one who was supposed to be the international star. I think Blackwell kind of had that in mind when they did Heart of the Con and then Bob Marley became that person that kind of introduced so many other people that just literally never heard any of this music. I knew when the Island Records came out with Lively Up Yourself, I already had the Trojan version of it, you know, which was kind of a deeper groove in a way. But that's typical music snob stuff that you get that with people like, oh, well, you think that that's cool, but you don't have that mix, you know. I mean, it's just what hits you when it hits you, you know. There's an openness like in the UK to importing different sounds and styles that's much more part of the musical culture. I think it's probably because everything came on a record. You know, my other hero from my early, you know, learning. About music from about 10 or 11 years old was Georgie Fame. And Georgie was a C3 organ player, led his own combo. And they did, he tended to lean not so much towards Ray Charles, which so many of the other English R&B singers aspired to be. He leant towards Mos Allison, John Hendricks, the jazz singer. And he introduced a wide range of music to young years like mine. And I remember going to see him with my eldest son in Ronnie Scott's, not, you know, 15 years ago, maybe. Still sounded like incredible. And he talked while he was playing, like, about how when he was already playing in the clubs in Soho in London, that there was one DJ who had all these records, just one. There was no access to it. And I think that's what made those messages from overseas so precious. And I think that's really true, especially of. The things that didn't fit into the pop radio mainstream, but were really like word-of-mouth records, or you had to go to a club to hear them. And this phenomenon like Northern Soul, where there were particular types of records out of Chicago that people danced to in specific clubs in the north of England. And all these strange little subdivisions all had their fans, but it was all because they heard the mysterious voice from abroad, whether it was New Orleans, Memphis, Detroit, Kingston. It didn't matter. You didn't have access to see those people. You didn't see them. People would come over, and then it would be different when you could actually see the artists. Later on, people started to tour. But early on, most everything was off a record, which meant that local bands had a chance to take those songs and make them hits for themselves, which they did. And sometimes the same song would be a hit by. An English act. And then five weeks later, the American version would appear and go, ah, that's how it's supposed to go. So when did the sort of transition happen as this process is going on from, oh, I have a job, and I've released a couple singles, and okay, now we're going to get signed. They're going to release the record in the States. Is there a turning point for you in this process? I think the turning point, not to me, but for other people that were hopefully our audience or to be our audience. When Dave Robinson and Jake Rivera told me to come to the office and they wanted to tell me something, I wasn't entirely certain that they were just not going to say, well, we've given it a go with a couple of these sessions, but I can't see how we're going to sort of package this or promote it. And they said, we've got this idea. And, you know, they didn't say this, we're going to call you Elvis. And I thought it was a joke. But I fortunately didn't laugh because they were serious. And I thought about it for a minute. And, you know, I'd already had two goes at changing my name. So I didn't care. I kept the Costello family name. And I thought, well, people will never buy that, you know. But that decision must have been made before the first release, which I think was in March of 77. Up until then, I was still playing, you know, the occasional club show as DP Costello. And then suddenly I was this guy. And of course, the minute it was said out loud, people scoffed. People said, this is a joke. Is this an impersonator? All of those things were all of that. And then Elvis died. No sooner had we hit the road with the attractions, you know, that process kind of went over the first part of 77. They got within range of the release of the album, decided to go ahead with a full album release. Said, you have to quit your day job, have to put a band together. We had Pete Thomas fly back from California. I knew him already. I didn't know him personally, but I knew his playing. And we found Thomas and Steve and I threw auditions and were sent away to rehearse and we did a handful of gigs our first gig was opening for Wayne County later Jane County and the electric chairs in a tiny little club in the very far west of England where we were sent to kind of hone our sound and then we came to London I got myself arrested busking outside the CBS convention they got me out of the police station in time to do the gig we did a handful of other gigs like you know and and then we were due to go to France to make our debut there in a punk festival in Marseille and Elvis died and everything stopped and the gig was cancelled I guess out of respect and people were very emotional and they called me back to the office and said we're going to have to change your name again I said what to? sort of like it was at that point it's like what do they say go big or go home you know it was like how are you gonna what other name could you be you know and I said I think we just gotta you know I think every we talked about whether they could change it again having released three records and having this album out and then I think that was just it would have looked like timid and there was never any disrespect intended with the Elvis name. Do you want to know the real truth? I wasn't an Elvis fan at that time I I didn't have any of the Sun records when I made My Name Is True I knew Elvis as somebody that other people said was great like John Lennon and just because although I am chronologically old enough to have heard his first records as I explained my parents listened to something entirely different and when you're a little kid you don't control the radio dial you don't control the choice of records but when you're a little kid you don't control the choice of records. Elvis just never came across my radar till a neighbor played me It's an Hour Never. Now I was eight can you imagine what it sounded like I thought it was Puccini or something you know what I later came to understand as opera it was really like it was emotional but it wasn't a kind of emotional that appealed to a kid and I heard some of the other records in passing like Hound Dog and things like that but the Beatles when they arrived that they were the ones that said these people are the reason why we play Chuck Berry Little Richard and Elvis Gene Vincent Buddy Holly the Everly Brothers I learned who they were and really truthfully Little Richard was my far my favorite he was just back recording rock and roll records he recorded Bammel Alabama Lou which was just as great as the specialty sides. So I could have been little Costello but I mean I don't think it would have don't think it would have flown you know if I had my choice screaming Costello no it wouldn't have worked you know I mean the Elvis thing by then you know and then we got like a call from one of the you know an affiliate of ABC or somebody like that called the office and wanted to interview me and I think it was at that point we realized that Americans had heard of me. But only because of the novelty of my name and we rejected the request for the interview I'm so glad we did that we weren't really that polite about it either you know because I knew that what we were witnessing was the phony tears of you know they people have been shocked and it had been tragic and then they just wanted a way to make the story go on it was similar to that thing that happened upon the release of my image true and that unfavorable comparison was made with one of my heroes records. But only because of the novelty of my name and it had been tragic and then they just wanted a way to make the story go on it was similar to that thing that happened upon the release of my image true and that unfavorable comparison was made with one of my heroes records. So it's like I'm afraid to play anywhere you know we played on a double bill with talking heads in Atlanta our first time. time half an audience you know there was nobody there went up to chicago open for tom petty and the heartbreakers again recently i still work for the same promoter in chicago and i said we opened for tom and we didn't sell out and he said you did he said i've got the records and i said we'll show it to me and sure enough next day i was doing a four-night stand in park west and he came and said you're right you didn't sell out it was only a hundred tickets but it wasn't sold out and the riviera theater is not big but tom just had one record out we had one record out so we weren't you know he wasn't established on the path he was on so it's just like it's just enough it's enough to keep going and then the next thing and the next thing it's not like some moment it's just the next step to you becomes obvious okay write the next song okay write the release do write do watch and the detectives then watch how the detectives was done because nick came to the auditions yeah and what had happened over the course of the day or the auditions for to get the attractions members uh it became obvious that you know if you kept playing the same three songs i'd given bertie andrew bodner and steve like we'd given them a tape with three of the tracks from famous true playing those ran around i started to doubt the songs because we had to play them so many times because we had good bad and indifferent candidates for these job for these gig you know i said can i teach you a couple of new songs let's let's shake it up a bit so i taught them no action and and watching the texas are just written and nick lowe happened to come down to check out what was going on to see what my new band would sound like and the herders played detectives and and said we have to cut that and we did we went in the next week and cut it so we had this weird anomaly of the early attractions you know we we were sort of promoting if i want of a better word miam is true that's all the public knew and um we re-recorded red shoes before we went on the bbc for the first we were always given three hours to do supposedly and most people just copied the record and handed it to the bbc in a tape box that said they'd re-recorded it and know everybody looked the other way we actually went in and re-recorded the record because the attractions didn't want to be miming to clover's parts when they made their debut on the bbc while we were in america for the first time watching the texas became a hit became a top 20 hit again we came back and that time we were forced to mime to the parts because we didn't have time to re-record it and so there's pete thomas pretending to play steve golding's part and if you want to annoy him you you go up to him and tell him how great his drumming is on that record because he's lived with it for 50 years that it's not him he's played it many other times very well but not that time i'll play one more in here before we go outside all right it's so funny to be seeing you after so long girl i don't know how i couldn't hear it i was so possessive about my songs i was incredibly rude i don't like the accompaniment very much it sounds very muted it's a strange it's just an la sounding record and i'm friends with peter rasha now so we have a laugh about this and but at the time i couldn't hear it and i don't know what was the matter with me because linda didn't really write many songs maybe ron said didn't write many songs but she had such great taste i mean it's that it's that sax and i and i hate to say it but that's david sanborn i'm almost certain it's that it just made me go what are they doing to my song you know it was it was it was that obligato that just set me off and i know it was done sincerely and these are all great plays and i'm not going to lie to you i'm not going to lie to you i'm not going to lie to you i'm not going to lie to you i'm not going to lie to you i have records with all of those people that played on that record peter i've worked in the studio with him yeah he's a great fellow um linda i never got to meet in those days because i felt embarrassed once i'd said it out loud and i got quoted being kind of a brat about it but you know what it's that money that kept the boss on the road for the first year it just did it was a hit it was this was on a record that sold like four million copies so you're i just feel like you're also a fan of country music and sort of that sound i'm so sorry she didn't i don't hear that this isn't it no i'm saying that's what i'm saying it's not but it could have been because she did that so well she like the way that it's just listen to her voice voice is insane it's insanely beautiful and and she did songs you know she did smokey you know she did a hit she had a hit with a couple of smoky tunes but you know she you know she did lol george loved his songwriting warren zevon uh you know she had great taste i assumed those were people that you know she had people around her that wrote great songs um and i you know i did eventually very recently actually get to meet her the only time i've ever met with her i was on a um a wavy gravy as a saver uh guitar pull i was a special you know surprise guest on a you know what a guitar pull is right you know where it's a national tradition really where you sit when you pass the guitar you know kind of thing so they were doing this one in san francisco and it was steve earl and billy strings and emmy uh emilio harris and and linda was emmy's guest at the show she didn't play but i finally got to meet her and i i i guess i was wearing a daft hat like i am today and she didn't actually recognize her i don't know and i said it's elvis and i'm like oh my goodness and i want to apologize and i said i i've got to say that i have already done this apology and i did it on the stage of the hollywood bowl and i was playing at the hollywood bowl with the hollywood bowl orchestra when and steve naive kareem riggins and dennis crouch had a killer man it's around time with wise up ghost we were doing wise up ghost we're doing almost blue and we got to the end of the show and they said you've got five minutes and we had no more arrangements you have to do an encore and i went out and i i i apologized to linda and sang alice dedicated to her so you know and then i saw her film you know the film about her career and saw her singing with her family and she doesn't sing now because of the advance of i guess parkinson's which my father had so i found that film very moving because i saw what it is to lose control of this thing that's that beautiful and she isn't satisfied with it it still sounds beautiful in that film she still sings really beautifully but obviously not to the standard that she would have held herself to so i have only love and admiration for her now and gratitude as well because literally the attractions and i could not have caused the little bit of mayhem that we did cause over the next couple of years had it not been for the success of that recording of alison not ours um and that was the difference that we had the i had the a little bit it's like kind of winning a minor win on the lottery it wasn't a huge amount of money but significant then because if you look in the in the kind of archive you'll find that we were playing for like 199 tickets we were not 119 like not 199 i'm talking about 1.99 a gig in portland you know uh somewhere like that and so in this box there is a record called becoming the attractions which in which the attractions faithfully play these arrangements like clover and within six months are transformed into something else where i barely recognize the four people doing it all the bloody songs and the same songs and there's a recording from winterland and various other places where the speed of with which we picked up and became that band that went on to do those first records is apparent you know but of course none of that would have been possible had we not have had that little bit of luck with that notwithstanding the saxophone part you know which i still don't like god bless his soul i think it's david samuel i hate saying that because he was so great you know you're just playing what they think is good at the time and that was the style to kind of make everything you know yeah yeah it's an amazing time to be to i guess in music um where there's so much so many different directions that people are going in and for you to record this album that just feels so true and it just feels i think it's a sound i like the way you got that in there i think you've got the title yeah yeah i think it's a sound that that to this day what people hear is they hear like you describe the sound of the room they hear where yeah these songs come from a real place not all this i mean i say that when we did spanish model you know which was a version of this year's model with with the thing that had been holding it back all these years my singing taken off and had a group of latin singers spanish argentine colombian puerto rican it was a fantastic wonderful thing to do the thing that sebastian chris who produced it and i discovered was how great the band sounded the attractions did on that second record and it was really the same as this record it's before we knew enough to it up and once you do know that you you can go beyond you know your your your reach can exceed your grasp or whatever they say your eyes are bigger than your stomach whatever those sayings are you know with music the That can be true. We all know that. Even favorite bands have made these records that are bewildering. And sometimes those changes of style are, of course, take a moment to take in. I can distinctly remember listening to Rubber Soul for the first time and going, oh, they've lost it now. And then two weeks later, I couldn't live without it. Same with Revolver, same with Sgt. Pepper. So even your favorite group could be out-distancing their audience. Okay, one more, because you just made me think of something that I grew up with. Well, I stood stone like at midnight. Just like purity. And then if you go and listen to Losing You from my Blueprint record, you can hear how much I listen to that record because I'm just copying Bruce totally. And if you can't hear it, then that's fine. But to me, I was so self-conscious about the fact I was really enamored. I can hear that he knew about Van Morrison. I could hear that he knew Dylan. But it was his own thing. And I love the way that he was able to make something romantic about what I later realized was not a very romantic landscape when I actually visited Astro Park in 77, the night before we appeared on what was then called Saturday Night. This was one of the infamous moments of my early career where we changed the number from less than zero, or a song from this record, to Radio Radio, which nobody had heard, and got chased out of the building the night before we played the Stone Pony in Astro Park. And I went for a walk and I went, This is it? This looks like New Brighton on the Mersey. This looks like where I went to the seaside. And I went, that's what I've been doing. Like if you listen to the songs on the Blueprint acoustic record, you'll hear the transposition of mundane things into attempts to make them, you know, beautiful or sort of, like I wrote about my perspective from the edge of town of not being involved in the music scene, having no career. I was also doing a day job because I was married with a child. And I, you know, I was, I couldn't afford to go to the clubs at night. I couldn't afford to buy new records. So I worked on what I knew by then. And I heard that in Bruce and that's, I remember, I remember buying that record. I know where I bought it. I bought it in Probe Records in Liverpool and, you know, learned it back to front. And I remember going to see Bruce do his Broadway show and he sang that song. And I thought, yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe in overtime, you get a little embarrassed by the purple passages of your writing. I think people do as they tend to sort of get down to more to the, to the nitty gritty, you know, the thing that I loved about that show he did was that he had respect of his own material and he was happy to sing in the voice of that younger man truthfully and let that song breathe, you know, cause it's a great song. It's a similar, I mean, that's maybe five years earlier, but it's a similar time period in music where it's sort of changing and the punk thing is coming up, but there's this sort of appreciation for like writing a song, like writing a great song. The first, the time I met Bruce was in Nashville when I was there to record with George Jones and George didn't actually show up to the first session. So it was kind of, I'd gone all the way there. My wife and I had gone there, my wife, Mary at the time and my son as well came with us Matt. And so Columbia, you know, sort of a little bit embarrassing, took us to a Bruce Springsteen concert who happened to be playing in Nashville then, and he was just about to release darkness at the edge of town and it, oh, it's open with promised land and I'll never ever forget it. It was like, my God, what's this? This is different again. You know this. And the audience, to be really honest was split because they didn't know that much about him. They only knew about born to run and they were a little bit like edgy and he took, he won them over of course, cause he knew how to do that and we were taken back and introduced. And the first thing he said to me is how did you get the sound on Miami's true? And I said, no money. And of course, he knew exactly what I was talking about because he had been through that process. You know, he had made, he had spent a long time making born to run and then even longer time working to partners at the edge of town, which was sort of like a record that didn't really use production. It was almost like he considered production and then got rid of it, you know, and to that sense it, it was the same approach as this except he did have money, but he acted like he didn't. So should we go outside? Let's go outside and see whether you can stump me. Trackstar podcast is a presentation of public opinion created by me, Jack Coyne, Kieran Coyne and Henry Cornaros produced by Haley Sobel edited by Simone Warren off theme and original composition by Kieran Coyne mixing by Devin Klein. Our agent is Joanna Orland at UTA. Thanks for listening. See you next Wednesday.