Elvis Costello | Paul Holdengräber
October 16, 2015
LIVE from the New York Public Library
www.nypl.org/live
Celeste Bartos Forum
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: My name is Paul Holdengräber. I’m the Director of Public
Programs here at the New York Public Library. As all of you know, my goal at the Library is to
make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and when successful to make it levitate. I
would like to say a big thank-you to the Ford Foundation for their fantastic support of LIVE
from the New York Public Library’s tenth anniversary. To celebrate, the Ford Foundation will
match your contribution to LIVE dollar for dollar when you give tonight and will engage New
Yorkers in these public conversations. So fill out your pledge cards that are on your seats and
leave them filled out at the container at the door.
Additionally I would like to thank the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos and Mahnaz and
Adam Bartos.
After our conversation, which will last about as long as a psychoanalytical session when your
shrink is generous, (laughter) Elvis Costello will happily sign his just-released memoir,
Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. I would like to thank our bookseller, 192 Books, our
independent bookseller, for always being on hand. If you enjoy tonight I encourage you to check
out our archives with our other musicians I’ve spoken to or hosted over the years, be it Keith
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Richards, Jay Z, Jessye Norman, Brian Eno, Nico Muhly, Van Cliburn, Lou Reed, Alfred
Brendel, Pete Townshend, Harry Belafonte or just last week Patti Smith and music producers
such as Chris Blackwell and Rick Rubin.
Over the last seven or eight years, I’ve had the pleasure of asking my guests to give me a
biography of themselves in seven words, seven words that might define them, a haiku of sorts or
if you’re very modern, a tweet. At first I must admit that Elvis Costello gave me six words and I
begged and he gave me a seventh. “Sinful. Smoldering. Scintillating. Sprightly. Really. Awful.
Liar.” (laughter/applause)
But before I bring Elvis Costello on stage, to create a little bit more of anticipation, hopefully
joyous anticipation, let’s watch together “Watching the Detectives.”
[Video of “Watching the Detectives” plays]
(applause)
ELVIS COSTELLO: What an unpleasant young man.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Oh, him.
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ELVIS COSTELLO: No, sorry, not you.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, no, no, I just all of a sudden took it personally but then I
figured young was wrong.
ELVIS COSTELLO: I would have said beautiful. I love this clip.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You do?
ELVIS COSTELLO: Very musical part of the front.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: In your book Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, you write,
“For a few split seconds each night, as the smoke and the heat of lights made it hard to breathe,
I’d get the feeling I was outside my body observing the scene. I could see everyone bouncing up
and down singing the chorus. I had the uneasy feeling that the words became meaningless after a
while, if they ever mattered in the first place.” Is this is how you feel?
ELVIS COSTELLO: Not in that moment, I think I was too drunk, actually. (laughter) I know I
was in Cologne I think and we weren’t feeling any pain. Certainly early on, you know, you’re
very righteous if not self-righteous and then after a while, you get a little attention and then you
start to feel entitled and then mysteriously something that you made up in your bedroom
becomes a big success and it belongs to other people and they don’t necessarily want to do with
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that thing that you’d written what you had in mind. They might be just happy to bounce up and
down. I was only referring to one brief moment where I started to feel a bit detached.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What was that moment?
ELVIS COSTELLO: Well, I think it was that moment in that airless room, and if you’ve ever
experienced oxygen deprivation, you can feel very strange, and some of these venues we were
playing in England at that time, they weren’t big on ventilation and they were big on gin and
tonics.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I want to go backwards.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Good move. (laughter) That’s the way I felt, I wanted to go backwards,
too.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I know, in writing this memoir. I want to come up with kind of an
organized web of obsessions and trace your enthusiasms as much as possible and I think truly
enthusiasms, nearly in the etymological sense of the word as something entheos, you’re
transported nearly by the gods. Your enthusiasms in this book come out so much, your debts to
musicians come out so much. But first of all your debt to your father. I’d like to—for you to talk
a little bit to us about your father and the Joe Loss Orchestra, and maybe, I know you have some
wonderful clips of it, maybe show something from that moment, because I think there’s one in
particular I think we have in mind together.
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ELVIS COSTELLO: Yeah, I’ll show you two pictures.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Okay.
ELVIS COSTELLO: I have these if you don’t mind a little. My father was a son of a trumpet
player, his father before him was a man who ended up in uniform. He was orphaned and was sent
away two hundred miles from his hometown of Birkenhead, where my father was born and he
ended up in uniform in the First World War in the Royal Irish Regiment and was quite badly
wounded and then after the First World War went away on the ocean liners and traveled to New
York throughout the twenties, and so the idea of traveling to play music was really started by my
grandfather, not by my father.
And seeing as he was a military-trained, classically trained musician, when my father came back
from his national service in 1947 talking about bebop and Dizzy Gillespie and things they fell
out about this and my father looked like this around that time. He was quite a handsome fellow
cradling his trumpet. And, you know, this floppy tie that he had on there was a style that some of
you may know was made popular by Frank Sinatra when he was singing with Harry James and
Tommy Dorsey. And he also sang and in the early fifties, he had ambitions to be Birkenhead,
that is the town that is opposite Liverpool on the Mersey. He wanted to be Birkenhead’s leading
bebop player. There wasn’t a lot of competition, I have to say. (laughter) I can show you this
one little memento that really I find delightful. I don’t know whether you can read it at the back
there, but it says “British Legion Hall Park Road East Birkenhead. Tonight at 7:30 Ross
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McManus and his quintet direct from their success in London and Paris.” At this point they
hadn’t played at Liverpool across the Mersey, but it was a nice dream.
And then, you know, in the early fifties after he had met my mother and they had courted across
the counter of a record shop, my mother having left school at fourteen and learned all about the
mysteries of jazz and dance band music and developed a reputation around Liverpool as the girl
who worked in Bennett’s and knew about jazz. They went off and they tell me lived in separate
addresses in London, I don’t know whether that’s strictly true but I believe it is. In those days
you didn’t live together, and my mother sold records while my father tried to make his way in
jazz. But as I showed you before he had a certain charm and he could sing and therefore he got a
job with a number of dance bands and the year after I was born he got a job with the Joe Loss
Orchestra, which was probably the most successful dance band of its day.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Can we hear him singing?
ELVIS COSTELLO: We can hear him singing.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That one moment.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Do you want to see—those of you who watched the television may have
seen him singing.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But that’s all right. They can watch it again. It’s so extraordinary.
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ELVIS COSTELLO: Well, there’s a little story behind this particular little clip we’re going to
see. You got to understand the bands of the 1950s were well suited to play the music of the day,
it was Frankie Laine and Johnny Ray. When beat music and rock and roll came in they weren’t
so suited to it so they had to find work for the saxophone players and the trombone players.
While the singers could be quite adaptable, they were having to cover records out of the charts
that were not necessarily that suitable for this lineup and then I suppose this happened.
[Video plays: “If I Had a Hammer”]
(applause)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Certainly there is a slight family resemblance.
(laughter)
ELVIS COSTELLO: Only around the eyes, not around the feet. (laughter) So the wonderful
thing I will tell you. This clip was made in 1964 after the band made probably their biggest
appearance at that time on a variety show called The Royal Command Performance. Which was
an annual variety show, benefit concert for the Entertainment Artistes’ Benevolent Fund,
founded by I think Edward VIII and the bill was sensational every year. They would have the
singing sensations of the days, excerpts of West End musicals would be the equivalent of
Broadway, the corps of the Royal Ballet, Paraguayan folk singers. In this particular year they had
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what you might think of as the Justin Bieber or the One Direction of that year, a group from
Liverpool called The Beatles.
They were seventh on the bill, and the Joe Loss Orchestra was actually twelfth on the bill, they
were actually further up the bill, and the second half they always had a big singing star from the
United States or from elsewhere, and that year it was Marlene Dietrich and her accompanist was
a songwriter from Kansas City called Burt Bacharach. That’s a curious coincidence, for those of
you who know who I’ve collaborated with over the years. (applause) No? I see nothing destined
about this at all.
My father was told, he wore that same suit on the show, this off-white suit, it wasn’t his style to
wear that, and the director from the television broadcast instructed him after rehearsals to go out
and buy long underwear because they claimed that the royal family could detect his manhood
under the suit (laughter) and it was transparent in the light, so it was very nearly—this idea of
getting into trouble in our family started quite a long time ago.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And then—
ELVIS COSTELLO: And then—
(laughter)
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PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And then your father went through a very difference phase, a
phase of becoming kind of a hippie.
ELVIS COSTELLO: You’re skipping out really the bit that really makes me—gives me the
inside track on the 1960s really because as you heard they were singing a straight transcription of
the Trini Lopez version of “If I Had a Hammer,” and I don’t know what those poor guys going
round on that circular, (laughter) they must have given them Dramamine or something to do
that. I came name most of the people in that band, they were like my uncles, you know, when I
was a kid.
But throughout the sixties my dad brought home records, a big stack of them every week, A
Labels, acetate dubs sent by the publishers to get just a little bit of money on these song titles that
were already in the hit parade. That was the way the business was done in England. We didn’t
have twelve-hour, twenty-four-hour radio as we believed you did in the United States. We had
five hours of recorded music a day due to various agreements that had been struck between the
musicians’ union, the Performing Rights Society, and the BBC, and that was spread over all
music, and so the rarity of the song you wanted to hear was very great, and as a consequence
bands such as the Joe Loss Orchestra would interpret the hits of the day however square they
were.
Graham Nash, who I met when I was ten and then met again when I was about twenty-five, told
me, “Well, we used to call him Dead Loss,” referring to Joe Loss. Nobody thought that he was
particularly groovy, but that was the way a lot of people in England heard the pop music of the
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day, interpreted by people who were already edging into middle age, and I, my dad was thirtythree or something in this clip, you know, and I got the benefit of this because my windfall every
week or every fortnight was a stack of forty-fives. Meanwhile, my friends’ parents didn’t even
want that music in the house. My dad brought it in because he had to learn it. He was sitting in
the front room playing “Please Please Me” over and over again so he could memorize it and then
perform it on the radio.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s listen to track 2 if we could.
[“Please Please Me” plays]
ELVIS COSTELLO: That wasn’t my dad, by the way, that was the Beatles. (laughter) He was
a good mimic but not quite that good.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But that’s how you got your musical education, in part, through all
these records that were brought to you.
ELVIS COSTELLO: I did. I sang along with the records after he gave them to me. I didn’t
realize there was anything to being able to sing both parts, but I learned how to do that and in
those days I could sing as high as Paul McCartney because I was only eleven. I couldn’t do it
after my voice broke. But I learned, I suppose I learned harmony, I didn’t know I was doing that,
and I could sing the saxophone solos from all the records. And so on and so forth. I was an only
child, so I was just alone with my thoughts and my misery.
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PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And that misery.
ELVIS COSTELLO: No, I’m kidding. (Sings)
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And that misery was it in part brought about that change that I was
talking about, your father becoming a hippie. Do you think you in some way—
ELVIS COSTELLO: Rebelled?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yeah.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Well, you remember the way my dad looked earlier in that picture.
Obviously that was a picture of him where they try to make him handsome by stealing his
glasses. They tried this with me about 1984. Didn’t work then. (laughter) And then later on he
did, he did indeed sort of—he sort of grew his hair and throughout the sixties I had this
experience of seeing my dad on the television and hearing him on the radio.
I would sometimes go to the radio broadcast at BBC Radio Theatre and I would watch the
members of the band rehearse songs like “If I Had a Hammer,” and groups would come in, they
would come in, they would drive 150, 200 miles overnight so they could get to play their new
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release on the air. That was the way they got heard, so one morning it was the Hollies walking in
in scruffy old clothes that they’d slept in in the band down from Huddersfield or somewhere in
Northern England carrying their own equipment, setting it up, and then sometime around one
o’clock, the show would go on the air and the band would strike up “In the Mood” and my dad
would be asked to sing something from the hit parade and then the announcer would announce
the Hollies and they would bounce out in shiny little collarless suits like everybody wore and
magically turn into the group that I’d seen the week before on the pop show.And that was a
lesson. That more than the music in a way was the lesson, this transformation from the mundane
into the magical.
And then as the sixties wore on, my dad had been with this band for sixteen years and he had
some different ideas, he wanted to sing some different songs, he started to sing about peace and
love and tolerance, and he started to appear like this. (laughter) And this was pretty good when I
was at school and they were telling me to cut my hair because it was over my collar, you know,
he came and told off the headmaster, and it was spectacular, you know.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So I was wondering if the, you know, the angry ironic, sarcastic
Elvis Costello we sometimes know was brought about by that transformation in some way or
another.
ELVIS COSTELLO: You haven’t met my mother.
(laughter)
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PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I didn’t expect that answer. Okay, tell me.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Well, let’s put it this way. Her father—I write a lot in the book about my
father and obviously I can tell the stories, I have done, those of you who have seen me play, I’ve
told a story about my father before on stage, and I can tell you in a comedic way or I can tell you
the truth about it. He wasn’t really much good as a dad. You know, he left—he was always
around, I never felt an absence of his love, so I couldn’t blame anything that I’ve ever done on
that, but undoubtedly there was unhappiness between them. My mother came from a very
hardworking background in Liverpool 8.
My grandfather—Her father was a man who didn’t say many words. He believed that because I
was brought up in the south of England I would immediately be a softy as he would say,
probably not as polite he would say word as that, and my only memory of him really is him
standing in front of me, this is like in 1963 or something and he’s standing there with his hands
out like this, which were workingman’s hands and wanting me to punch them so that I learned
how to box, and that’s about the only example that he ever gave me. He wasn’t a cruel man, but
that’s how he sorted out his problems. So if the confrontational side, if the dreamy side comes
from this feller over here, which you can probably guess it did, the confrontational side comes
from my Protestant grandfather. It’s true.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You know we’ll leave your—
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ELVIS COSTELLO: I’m a lover, not a fighter, I have to say. I abhor violence.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We’ll leave your father. I know this is a bit of a difficult moment.
But I’d love to play track number 1, of Clifford Brown, maybe you want to say something about
“Yesterdays.”
ELVIS COSTELLO: This is an example of how music, you know, we’re switching from the
frivolous very long time ahead. My dad had this career driving around England playing to
workingmen’s clubs and miners’ clubs and social clubs of football teams, singing the songs that
he wanted to sing, looking like this. Can you imagine you turn up at a miners’ club looking like
this? (laughter) Now, bear in mind that these miners’ clubs are not professional organizations.
They are organized by—there are men, who are detailed, called concert secretaries, who book
the comedians and the singing acts for hardworking people to come at the end of the week to see
a little bit of entertainment.
One in particular that my father used to talk about, he went by the name Sid the Bastard, and you
can imagine that Sid the Bastard was very impressed by a man of my dad’s years turning up like
this and wanting to sing “Everything Is Beautiful,” but he genuinely believed these things. But
after a long career and even after I was a professional musician and had a few hit records, our
paths would cross. They discovered this secret identity I had, that I wasn’t actually Mr. and Mrs.
Costello’s little boy Elvis, but I had another name, you know, and my dad sang until I think the
early nineties and then just before the turn of the millennium, he developed Parkinson’s, and as
anybody who knows the way that goes in later years, a very funny, if eccentric, man was erased
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before our eyes within, you know, a few years. He had never had ill health, so it was very hard
for him, and in the last stages, as it is with that, you know, it was very tough. The last part of it
he was in a nursing home when it wasn’t possible for him to live in his house anymore. And I
always insisted that music be played.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I thought this was extraordinary, you said this to me. “Never turn
it off.”
ELVIS COSTELLO: Never turn it off, because it had been his livelihood, it had got him into
trouble, it had introduced him to royalty, it had put me through school, he had met Sid the
Bastard, (laughter) he had had lots of great experiences. There are very few records of him
singing because he was contracted to sing on the radio, but he used to without the knowledge of
his employer get up in the morning and go and record cover records for cash, under names like
Frank Bacon and the Baconeers, and Hal Prince and the Layabouts, and these were sold at a local
store, not at in record shop.
And so after this very unusual colorful career, there he is with music as his last accompaniment.
Couldn’t really taste the Bushmills anymore, didn’t eat any food, couldn’t sleep without terrors.
All the things you know the way it goes. And when it came to his last moments on the earth, and
then he passed before us, my wife and I held his hand, I noticed that this song was playing.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s play it for a minute.
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ELVIS COSTELLO: Yeah.
[“Yesterdays” by Clifford Brown plays]
ELVIS COSTELLO: It was an extraordinary coincidence to be accompanied by your favorite
trumpet player playing your favorite composition as you leave us. I felt vindicated that I’d never
left him alone in silence. You know, it’s this funny deal you make when you discover you have a
vocation, whether it is possible for it to be your occupation. So many people are not fortunate
enough to do that. I have four half brothers that all played music, that presently only one of them
is playing it full time, and yet they’re twenty years younger than me. So it doesn’t come to
everybody to make that breakthrough. My father didn’t have a sort of hit parade career, but he
had these great adventures. When I told the story of his life at his memorial, at his funeral, I
couldn’t tell it like a sorrowful story, it was a fantastic life—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: A full life.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Yeah, a full life and he had made a lot of mistakes, and, you know, had
not been true to my mother and perhaps given his second wife cause for concern when he was a
younger man but here he was defenseless and only accompanied by the thing that had sustained
him all the way through, that had sustained two generations and his son and all of his sons and
grandchildren. Well, I will put my trust in music over gunrunners and robber barons any day,
that’s just the way it seems to me.
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PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We will come back to the passion for jazz in a moment. I want to
talk about the notion of originality and pilfering really. (laughter) How surprising, no? In the
book, you write, “Back then, in pop music you started out trying to copy something exactly and
accidentally came up with your own sound while getting it completely wrong. Vain and deluded
people called it inspiration. I just called it work.”
ELVIS COSTELLO: Work is the Protestant side of my nature, I guess. They say Protestant
work ethic. I’ve never heard of Catholic work ethic. I don’t say we don’t work hard, but there
was a mystical side to the mass when I was a little child, a young boy and an older boy so I
suppose this idea that you worked at something and waited for the lightning to strike was true. I
mean, I was—I’ve been fortunate, I’ve never been out of work in my life, I’ve worked every day
since I was seventeen.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What’s this notion of pilfering?
ELVIS COSTELLO: Yeah, you know, the classical composers wrote variations, jazz musicians
do improvisations. We just straight-out steal, we’re not dressing it up. I had started out—I had
always imitated the things I love when I was learning to play the guitar, I was about fourteen or
something, thirteen or fourteen when I really picked up the guitar. Within mastering a few chords
I started to write my own songs, and they were all imitations. Everything I wrote up until, right
up until last week really, (laughter) was an imitation of something.
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No, in your mind, it might come out as sounding like your voice, but I could tell you the singers
that I was dreaming of when I wrote various songs, and you would in some cases say, “Oh, yeah,
I can sort of get that, because it’s an approximation of their style. Others wouldn’t sound like
them at all, but by pondering their style and the things that I loved about them, something else
would tumble out, and that’s true. And it began, bear in mind it began with this identity thing. I
learned to speak up for myself around the time I was given this secret identity of “put on these
glasses because heaven knows you’re never going to make it in the Robert Plant stakes. We’re
going to change your name—”
Can I read something? I feel like I want to—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Of course you can!
ELVIS COSTELLO: There’s a little scene that comes from a little later, I want to read you this
if I may, and you’re going to see something that you may not have seen before now. My reading
glasses. (laughter) I feel just like Dickens now.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We saw that, just a moment ago.
ELVIS COSTELLO: So this is a little scene that explains something about how I got—
something about—it’s from a chapter called “Identity Parade.”
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Mama Mae Axton walked me to the end of the gymnasium locker room linking her arm through
mine. The writer of “Heartbreak Hotel” turned the powdered cheek of her most confidential face
to me with a scent of magnolia and peppermints. “When you first came to America the King put
on a disguise and came to see you play. He wanted to check you out.” If I broke eye contact at all
it was to glance over Mae’s shoulder in an appeal to my band at the time. They were billed as
Elvis Costello and his Confederates, among them James Burton and Jerry Scheff, who had
actually played with Elvis Presley. Ten years earlier, when I’d first arrived in America, Elvis
Presley had already been dead for three months. (laughter)
So if the King had put on a disguise to attend my show it truly would have been an exceptional
occurrence. It wasn’t very easy to know how to react to this statement. May obviously intended
to pay me a compliment and I wasn’t about to be disrespectful and correct her on the history so I
nodded gravely without asking the obvious question: “What did he think of the show?”
(laughter)
The night before Elvis Presley died, we had played Swindon, that’s a little town in the west of
England that’s not very rock and roll at all. Within a couple of days the phone was ringing off the
hook at Stiff Records’ office. The awful news had traveled around the world a little slower then,
but it didn’t take long for the television stations to go looking for ways to extend the life of the
story. “Hey, there’s this guy in England called Elvis. Let’s go do a story on him.” The decision to
adopt the Elvis name had always seemed like a mad dare, a stunt conceived by my managers to
grab people’s attention long enough for the songs to penetrate, as my good looks and animal
magnetism were certainly not going to do the job for me.
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There were certainly people on the scene then with more oxymoronic names than mine. Now
there was a man on the phone from America asking if I would agree to be interviewed about my
alias, offering a little free publicity if we helped them squeeze a little bit more novelty juice out
of a tale that was already out of genuine tears. The hapless research assistant was sent away with
a flea in his ear by my manager chastising him for selling souvenirs at the graveside.
For all the bravado in Stiff Records’ headquarters there was a brief moment of doubt as to
whether my flippant daredevil alias could actually survive while people were mounting
candlelight vigils. What would be the alternative? Adopt another taboo identity that sounded
similar when spoken at speed and didn’t mess too much with the typography? Otis? (laughter)
Jesus? (laughter) Well, obviously that would be a little bit loaded. It was too late to turn back
now and we had a show to play in Dudley.
(applause)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What made you want to read that passage?
ELVIS COSTELLO: Well, the absurdity of the name and this notion of originality. It had
nothing to do with the name or the label or the pose I was in. I said before that the cover of my
record became like a calling card. My first record I had this knock-kneed pose with my
Jazzmaster guitar to the point that I would get asked to imitate it. “If you’re him, do the funny
legs.” (laughter) And that became a catchphrase for my band. When people would doubt that we
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were really us. I don’t know whether they’d see you on the television and then not believe that
you’d walk into some little hotel in their town.
But it was always about the songs. It wasn’t about the pose I was in. If you saw the contact sheet,
the other frames of that particular photo session, every other frame I’m laughing out loud.
Because it was ridiculous, and I was being goaded from beyond the camera by my manager and
the photographer who was using one of these little devices to and he was looking at me going,
“More, give it more, more knock-kneed, pull that face,” and I couldn’t do it for laughing. I think
we had maybe two frames that were usable. The rest of the time it was about being in the
bedroom with my guitar, which wasn’t even electric, hearing the band in my head and singing in
this kind of furious whisper. (sings in furious whisper) And I was hearing the band all in my
head but if I sang it any louder, I’d wake up my infant son in the next room. So I had to dream it
before I ever got in a room with any musicians that could play it and by the time I was out in
public, I already had one record. I’d made my whole first record while I was still working in an
office.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: In an incredible office job you had at that time.
ELVIS COSTELLO: A lucky office job I think. I mean, when I first left school I went for just
any job that would take me, and I got a job as a computer operator. If anybody had ever seen my
abilities in mathematics, they would know that it was just laughable that I had anything to do
with numbers. I worked for a while in a bank and I’m not that trustworthy, (laughter) I could
have risen to the top of course in that, (laughter) but the computer job that I ended up with, I
LIVECostello_10.16Transcript
21
worked for Elizabeth Arden, the cosmetics company, and they gave me an air-conditioned
cubicle to work in, a small computer that probably could do less than your iPhone can do, even
your BlackBerry, and I sat in there pretending that I knew what to do and writing songs in my
head and in some cases writing songs with my guitar after hours when they asked me to work
late.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Some of your most famous songs were written right there.
ELVIS COSTELLO: “I Don’t Want to Go to Chelsea” and “Lipstick Vogue” and these songs
were written while printing out invoices which detailed who had had a waxing.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s listen to a little bit of track number 3.
[“I Don’t Want to Go to Chelsea” plays]
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You know, I just to—
ELVIS COSTELLO: You have to tell them you didn’t know I was going to do that.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I was about to say none of this is rehearsed.
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22
ELVIS COSTELLO: You’re reading my mind now, that’s what I love about you, Paul. This is
as close as I’ll ever get to a blue plaque or a knighthood in England. It’s for some reason they put
this up outside the factory building where I used to work. Oh, mother, tell your children not to do
as I have done, I think is—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s talk about some of your early loves, and play track number 4
if we could.
[“Caledonia Mission” by The Band]
ELVIS COSTELLO: That’s an early picture of The Band you’ve not seen—no, that’s me in my
schoolroom. That’s the sort of music I was listening to when I was about that age, about sixteen,
seventeen.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Rick Danko.
ELVIS COSTELLO: And I couldn’t even imagine what room that was happening in. I couldn’t
imagine who those people were, what age they were, even what century they were playing in.
It’s The Band, right? I honestly do think it sounds like it was made in the nineteenth century but
somehow they had electric guitars.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You mentioned yesterday that you had some footage that has
never been seen of you at seventeen.
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23
ELVIS COSTELLO: I don’t know that I—I was listening to some records. I had a duo with a
lad that I met at a New Year’s Eve party and invited me to join his group and he was a young
fellow called Allan Mayes, who was a year older than me, and as you do when you’re that age,
we would say, “What song do you know?” “Well, I know how to play ‘Heart of Gold.’” “Okay,
do you know how to play ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’ by the Byrds?” “Yes.” “Do you know the
Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by the Band?” So we decided that we were going to be a
group and we were going to conquer the world. We had a bass player. We had a fellow called
Dave who owned a microphone and had a tambourine so he was our lead singer for three weeks
and then I got rid of him and we carried on until the summer when the bass player went to
university.
It’s not an exceptional story and we played just about everywhere that we could. We played in
bars where we ran our own music nights. We played at poetry evenings and we played. And
Allan kept everything, he kept a record of everything. And he was good enough to give me a few
of his notes. Look at this—this is our gig at John Lennon’s old school, Quarry Bank, and I
thought we had really made it. We were playing that day.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I like “played nil.”
ELVIS COSTELLO: “Played nil.” We just did it for the honor of playing at John Lennon’s old
school. And we played “Bless the Weather” by John Martyn and “Wooden Ships” by Crosby
Stills and Nash. And I think we thought that we could be Crosby, Stills, and Nash. If we couldn’t
LIVECostello_10.16Transcript
24
be that we knew the horse that they’d rode in it. And this—there we are there. That’s me in the
stripy sweater. And Allan played—he kept a tape recording of us when I was seventeen, he was
maybe eighteen, and we sent it off to the record companies and at the end of it I said, “well, if
you liked any of those songs, and I recited his address faithfully and of course we never got the
call. Otherwise I would have known David Geffen by now. Do you want to hear that, do you
want to hear one of the songs? We’ll only play a couple of seconds, it’s not very good quality but
you know.
[Music plays]
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: When you listen to this, what comes to your mind here on this
stage now at this moment?
ELVIS COSTELLO: What comes to my mind is I don’t know why we didn’t clean the heads
on the tape recorder. (laughter) It sounds like a Charley Patton record from 1927, you know.
(laughter) I mean, it was the same length of tape I’d been using to record my demos on for about
as long as I’d been able to play the guitar. I didn’t know that tape wore out. I didn’t know how to
tune a guitar, even. I didn’t know anything technical whatsoever. And Allan, you know, he was.
That’s me singing at the top of it. You can barely recognize me, I know. But we did harmonize
quite well, and we had these songs and we believed in them and they were earnest. And if you
see these people, they’re riveted, aren’t they, these people in this picture? (laughter) I think that
woman in the front there is my particular favorite. But actually the woman who is sitting
between them they were very kind people. They were poets. And you shouldn’t mock it, it was
LIVECostello_10.16Transcript
25
the opportunity to play in public. It didn’t matter whether we got paid. Every little thing we did
we learned from.
When it came to the end of 1972 I said to Allan, “I think it’s time for us to go to London and try”
and—I’m going down there, I’ve got a cat and a handkerchief on a stick, like Dick Whittington.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’m going to go.
ELVIS COSTELLO: I’m going to go down there and go to see the queen. And he didn’t want
to come with me. He had a job that was maybe a little bit more secure.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And off you went.
ELVIS COSTELLO: And off I went. You know, I didn’t get discovered, of course, I wasn’t
ready for it. But it’s a nice thing to look back and realize that we believed it so much at that, it
mattered to play, we believed the songs to be good enough, even though, as you can hear, we
clearly weren’t ready for it. But I’ve got some records that were made in ’72 that aren’t as good
as that. You know, I think we all have. So it’s a matter of the luck of the draw and getting maybe
into the studio, getting to work your ideas. I wasn’t ready to do that yet.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Another early passion, if we could listen to track number 5.
[“The Last Time I Saw Richard” by Joni Mitchell]
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26
(applause)
ELVIS COSTELLO: That’s a beautiful song. Yeah. And then I remember taking the day off
school, sagging off as they said and going—shows didn’t come to Liverpool very often then. We
just had—the only place you could really go and see music, big tours, they would sometimes
come to the Empire Theatre, or they would come to the boxing stadium in Liverpool, which I
describe as not always having had the blood washed off the seats, so I was rather glad that we
had to go to Manchester, which was forty miles away, first to buy the tickets, because there was
no computers or anything then, I had to go first thing in the morning and be first in the queue to
buy the tickets to see Joni.
And four of us went, I went with my friend Tony Tremarco, and his girlfriend and later wife Ann
and her friend Geraldine, who I had a crush on, who just went to make up the numbers but
wouldn’t call it a date (laughter) and we came back just amazed. I don’t even think that Blue
was out and she sang these songs and it was more than I could ever imagine. For one thing I
didn’t really imagine that I would ever be involved in a life that generated that kind of feeling,
much less whether I could even imagine writing a song like that. It was beyond my imagining,
completely supernatural.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I saw you listening.
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27
ELVIS COSTELLO: My relationship with women was more like this at that point. (laughter)
That’s the way I got the girls.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Well, it’s a perfect moment to mention two words that are attached
to you in ways you don’t particularly care. “Revenge and guilt.” Do you regret characterizing?
ELVIS COSTELLO: No, I mean, I’ve expressed some impatience with—I’ve written about it
in the book trying to explain how idiotic the series of coincidences are that allowed these words
to be so defining. I have to say when I first started out, I thought I had two seconds to get
people’s attention, and the first interviews I went to I just said sharp things that, you know,
whether or not—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Could be remembered.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Could be remembered. And I can’t say I was putting on an act because I
didn’t know how to do that. I said some things and I thought, “Oh, they liked what I said, maybe
I should say a little bit more like that, maybe if I do that they’ll leave me alone and I can get on
with my songs.” I thought they were reading my mind, that’s been a problem all the way
through.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But you feel they misunderstood you. Who cares?
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28
ELVIS COSTELLO: Who cares if they misunderstood me? Yeah. The account of your life
now, now we have the cumulative accounts because there’s no cat litter trays anymore to put
your newspapers in or wrap your fish and chips in, they’re preserved on the Internet forever, so
there’s an accumulating picture of somebody so if you say something stupid it’ll haunt you
forever. If you say something wise it’ll get buried by the stupid things you said. If you say
something loving, or if you get sharp just one moment and shoot from the hip and of course we
live in a world that the minute anything appears anywhere now you have to have an opinion
about it, and it’s like you haven’t got your trousers on if you don’t have an opinion.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I want to read something that is actually quite smart about this
moment and I think Greil Marcus beautifully in an interview characterizes this moment of
“revenge and guilt.”
He said, “Elvis Costello was someone who you’d better not cross. He was someone who was as
he said in his first interview, and I really do believe this is the key to his career, he said the only
emotions he understood were revenge and guilt. People took that as really a great line, which it
is, but I think people tended to miss how deep it is. There are few emotions in life as bottomless
as revenge and guilt. They lead in both cases to acts of violence, perhaps against yourself,
perhaps against others. They have consequences, and those consequences can’t be stopped or
controlled, and Elvis Costello set out across the decades singing his songs of revenge and guilt,
his guilt at being able unable to change a world he hated, his desire to take revenge on that world
for not changing according to his desires and his wishes. And I think that’s a key to his career, I
LIVECostello_10.16Transcript
29
think it’s been from then to now whether or not he’s recording with the Brodsky Quartet as he
did on The Juliet Letters or whether he’s simply standing up and singing ‘Tramp the Dirt Down,’
which is a song about how he wants to dance on Thatcher’s grave. I think he has always looked
for the most effective way to make trouble.”
(laughter)
Do you think that’s true?
(laughter)
ELVIS COSTELLO: Which part of it?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Any part of it.
ELVIS COSTELLO: I think he gives me way too much credit. Of course it’s—Professor
Marcus’s—you know, it’s his job to create a thesis like that. That’s what he does. He writes very,
very long and intricate books explaining the connections between various political and cultural
movements and the vividness of that to him I won’t deny except that he’s covering a period of
about nearly thirty years, twenty-five years, and I was any number of people to myself. I mean, I
actually did this thing that’s here. I sort of didn’t know you were going to lead to this long
diatribe about revenge.
LIVECostello_10.16Transcript
30
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I didn’t either.
ELVIS COSTELLO: This was a poster for Armed Forces that took a picture that was shot of
me. In those days you could hire a replica machine gun like that. And Barney Bubbles made this
statement, which was clearly an antiwar statement. Helicopters like that were flying over West
Belfast at that time. And I’m pointing this machine gun at my own head and my head is replaced
by a hand grenade. And I mean if that were put up on a wall now people would assume it was
some sort of recruiting poster for a terrorist organization, but this was actually—this image was a
rejection of violence. The song “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,”
which you know as being the closing track of Armed Forces. I took a song which Nik Lowe
wrote ironically and tried to make it sound as if of course it isn’t all we need but we have to sing
it with this sort of force. And that’s the way I felt then. But to simplify it as I have to say he does,
even using so many words as this—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Maybe too many words.
ELVIS COSTELLO: I’m a man who’s written 670 pages, but if you do read, you have to
separate out the mistakes that you make privately and which are the songs that come out of that,
which are the songs where you look out at the world. You take the song “Tramp the Dirt Down,”
for example. It has several points of view within it. It isn’t actually a song that’s just one after
another demand for Margaret Thatcher’s head on a pike, as attractive as that thought is.
(laughter) It was a rejection of a philosophy but it was also questioning. In all the songs that I’ve
written that are called political, I’ve tried to put two or three points of view, my own arguments
LIVECostello_10.16Transcript
31
with myself about the very writing of them in some cases, so I know it’s very convenient to put
these labels like “punk” or “New Wave” or “angry” or “political,” but each song is a different
occasion for me, and there are different means and there are different motives and there are I
hope different results if you listen to them and on different days you can sing them with different
inflections.
I have sung words that are heard in “Tramp the Dirt Down,” I sang it on the night the miners’
strike collapsed in sketch form and at that time I would agree it was probably pretty aggressive.
And then the tune that I ended up using alludes to “Isn’t She Lovely?” It alludes to “Isn’t She
Lovely?”, Stevie Wonder’s melody. That was a joke. But that’s a joke carrying a song with all
these brutal and disappointed images of what that particular time let loose in people, that desire
to step on your fellow countrymen to get ahead, and I still feel that way, so I sang the song up
until a few years ago and people said, “You can’t sing it now, she’s dead.” I think, “I especially
have to sing it now she’s dead.” (laughter) Not because—no, she’s a human being. She actually
died in dementia, which I literally wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, but what she let loose in
the country I cannot forgive, so that’s my opinion and in a democracy I get to say what I feel and
I get to sing it as well, just as politicians do again and again and get paid to do so.
(applause)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I did like the fervor with which you responded to that long
quotation.
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32
ELVIS COSTELLO: Greil, I’ve known Greil since we met and he has written some really
wonderful books about music that celebrate but he also writes some books which I have read a
few which I may be among the smaller number of people who have read a couple of them. But
he has put his life into that and I won’t disrespect him in that way. I’ll say something cheeky
about it, but I won’t disrespect him.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Going back again and now going to a love we really share, which
is a love of both Claxton, the great photographer, and the man he photographed in an inimitable
way, which is Chet Baker. I want to play “Almost Blue,” Chet Baker’s version, and then follow
it with yours. So track 8 and then track 9.
[“Almost Blue” by Chet Baker plays]
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And now track 9.
[“Almost Blue” by Elvis Costello plays]
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: How do you hear yourself after hearing Chet?
ELVIS COSTELLO: I wouldn't have known how to get to that daredevil tempo that he was
taking the song out with, that’s the way he felt it. And we couldn’t have played like that—there
weren’t actual jazz musicians accompanying us. We were entering into a world when we made
this record. This was almost the last—this is really the last record the Attractions made with any
LIVECostello_10.16Transcript
33
kind of unity. We made lots of good individual tracks, but we probably never made a record as
good as that one again.
But we were adopting different styles, I was anyway, adopting different models for my songs
that I had used before, and then therefore, we were playing an imitation, we didn’t even have the
right instruments. I mean, we had electric bass where you would more naturally hear acoustic
bass. At that point I wanted to keep everything within the group, because this was just one song
contrasting with all sorts of different sounds and we were—hired a studio for twelve weeks to
experiment and this was just one of the experiments. You know, the others were “Man Out of
Time” and “Beyond Belief” and these other songs that were very contrasting. The record didn’t
exist in just one world of music.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Was this a way of going back to your father and to childhood?
ELVIS COSTELLO: No. My mother liked Chet Baker, I think. She liked a lot of those ballad
singers. Ella Fitzgerald. She was the one that took me to see Tony Bennett when I was about
twelve and I sat all the way through the concert saying “Why is that drummer playing so much?”
And that drummer was Buddy Rich (laughter) and I thought he was just—I just thought he was
a big kind of showoff at that age. At twelve, I had no idea of his reputation. I was a singer’s son,
so I tended to think the guy that dragged the spotlight away from the singer was probably doing
something wrong.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Somebody else you recorded with is Ray Brown.
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34
ELVIS COSTELLO: Yeah, only one session, but it was a fantastic occasion. I mean, that was
sort of a couple of years later. By that point I’d met T Bone Burnett and I realized over a couple
of years that the solutions to being in the room with just these same four people were not going
to make great records, weren’t always making great concerts. I was hearing something different
and I went out on my own and played my songs alone and they seemed more alive to me than
they had done when I played them with the band, and we took a break from one another which
was very necessary.
And T Bone sat on a plane with me going to Japan for the first time. He had played there and
wrote in immaculate hand the names of the songs from the record that became King of America
and he wrote “Indoor Fireworks,” bass, Jerry Scheff, okay, guitar, James Burton. James Burton?
You can get James Burton to play on your record? The man who played with Rick—the man
who played with Elvis Presley? And he said, “Yeah, of course you can, you just ring him up, he
comes to the studio and plays.” (laughter) And then he wrote, “Poison Rose,” drums, Earl
Palmer. Now, I thought he was high now. I mean, Earl Palmer, he played on “Tutti Frutti,” he
played on the theme from The Flintstones. He’s played on so many records. I mean, he played on
“Daydream Believer.” He was one of the Wrecking Crew. And then he wrote down bass, Ray
Brown, and I thought he’d completely lost his mind.
I didn’t believe you could call these people up and have them play on your records. As you hear,
I’d been listening to records from another idiom when I wrote “Almost Blue,” and I listened to a
lot of Chet Baker and I listened to Miles Davis’s My Funny Valentine album over and over again.
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35
I listened to recordings of Billie Holiday with Teddy Wilson and Lester Young over and over
again. That’s all I listened to in 1980, ’81, I didn’t listen to any rock and roll records. And by the
time I had the opportunity to engage with musicians who actually came from that world, it was a
remarkable thing. And I had this song “Poison Rose,” which I felt was in my heard well maybe
Charlie Rich would sing this one, maybe Willie Nelson could sing it one day. If I don’t mess it
up too badly it’ll be okay, and then T Bone puts me in the room with Earl Palmer and Ray
Brown and I was absolutely petrified. And as T Bone said Okay, we’re going to take it now. And
Ray leant down, you know, he didn’t have a vocal mic obviously because he was playing bass
and he leant down into the big microphone for the bass and he said, “Nobody play any ideas,”
and that was such a brilliant direction, because ideas get in the way of music, you know, to let
yourself just play and that was the take and—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What a great line, huh.
ELVIS COSTELLO: What a great day, sort of something that comes from a wealth of
experience, a man who was married to Ella Fitzgerald, had played with Oscar Peterson and all of
the great jazz musicians from the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s and until you know this is 1985 or 6
when we did this session and was a mentor to my wife, you know, was a mentor to Diana, you
know, played on her first record. The last time I saw Ray was in Portland, Oregon, and he was
walking across. I’d seen him a couple of times after the session. I’d gone to see him down in
Ronnie Scott’s and I’d gone to Second House and he’d done a shout-out to me from the
bandstand. And all the jazz fans in the audience, “how does he know Elvis Costello?” The news
didn’t travel that I had played even one session with him. And there I’m talking about 2002, and
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36
Ray’s walking across the lobby of the Benson Hotel, with his bass, he’s carrying his own bass
and I stopped him and said, “We’ve got a friend in common, Diana Krall,” and he said, “How’s
Krall doing?” And I just knew right away, just the way he said it, anybody who calls you by your
second name like that, it was, it was—And I called her up and said, “I just met your friend,” and
we were just friends at that point.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s play a tiny little bit of Track 10.
[“Poison Rose” plays]
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That’s so great.
ELVIS COSTELLO: I had forgotten that Earl Canning, Tom Canning, didn’t come in until—I
had to do the whole first verse with Ray, that was pretty scary, you know. But it was a
wonderful—all of these experiences playing with musicians it doesn’t make you a better singer.
I’ve got to honestly say I think Nik Lowe sings the song better than me. He’s done a beautiful
rendition of this tune, but this was the moment that it was first heard by the public, you know,
this is my version, and sometimes—Cole Porter couldn’t sing a lick. He really couldn’t. If
you’ve ever heard him sing, he couldn’t sing at all, yet he wrote all those great tunes, but there’s
something really charming to hear him making a total hash of his songs, you know, vocally,
because he wrote them.
LIVECostello_10.16Transcript
37
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The book is so—I mean, I don’t mean this in in any flattering way,
but the book is so generous and so filled with appetite for all the discoveries you made and the
people who thanks to—
ELVIS COSTELLO: I can only say thank you if that’s the impression that you got.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, I know you didn’t write it so—
ELVIS COSTELLO: No, I didn’t write it, actually it’s the truth. (laughter) I’m a complete
fraud.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Well, whoever wrote it did a really good job.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Who is it now, who is it that wrote it, I don’t know.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We have to be careful because everything is being recorded, as
you know.
ELVIS COSTELLO: It’s really obvious that I didn’t write it when you read it.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: When did your love of country music begin?
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38
ELVIS COSTELLO: You know, it didn’t filter through the way jazz did because I didn’t grow
up in a house where there were any country records, and there were people who grew up hearing,
you know, American folk music that were older than me, but the kinds of records that were on
the charts in the sixties were like well, you know, country songs likes “The Green, Green Grass
of Home” by that well-known Welsh cowboy Tom Jones (laughter) and then Johnny Cash. I
remember “Ring of Fire” being on the radio and maybe “Walk the Line,” but only one or two of
his records really kind of hit big in the pop world even for people who follow that kind of music.
And then “A Boy Named Sue,” which I couldn’t even tell what kind of music that was,
(laughter) and then my uncle loved that record and he bought me the album that it came from,
which was Live at San Quentin, for Christmas. (laughter) A record recorded in a prison
(laughter) for Christmas, I’ll say that again, and you know then it went backwards into all of his
music and it was I got the inkling that there’s much more going on here than just a guy who sings
in a really deep voice and sings about this kind of tale aboot identity.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And there you are in a month from now speaking to Rosanne.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Yeah, we became friends some time—I mean, a series of curious
coincidences. You know, Rosanne has become a really good friend and her husband John
Leventhal and Kris Kristofferson and I wrote a song together a few years ago. I’ve sung on her
records. She’s recorded a song of mine before now. She’s a fantastic writer, so her example of
how to write about your life and family and she of anybody would understand the relationship
with the previous generation, you know, with a little bit more gravity and shadow-casting,
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39
certainly, with all due respect than my father did because he didn’t have that kind of public
career.
But I mean the way in which I actually met Johnny Cash was not through John’s side of the
family but his wife June. Her daughter Carlene Carter married my producer Nik Lowe and
Christmastime 1979 the in-laws came to stay and the in-laws were Johnny Cash and June Carter.
(laughter) It was extraordinary. Johnny would go wandering down and this is Shepherd’s Bush
if any of you know London it’s not a place that you would expect to find Johnny Cash wandering
out of the greengrocer’s having gone to buy a paper, you know, and we recorded a session in the
basement, or in a studio that Nik had in the house.
So it was the day after Christmas. A little bit of drinking had gone on. They cut one of Nik’s
songs, “Without Love,” and I turned up late in the evening and there were members of the
Attractions and members of Rockpile and members of The Rumour all playing on this track and
this was the big scheme to get John to record in London, you know, we’d have a London session
with Johnny Cash. And my best memory of it really is not my own but later John was actually
interviewed about it, about this session, for a tribute to George Jones, because the song that he
and I sang was actually a George Jones song. Can I do it?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yeah.
ELVIS COSTELLO: I don’t know whether I can do it in John’s voice, but he sort of like, he’d
do it sort of like this. “Well, I was in London and I was with Elvis Costello and Nik Lowe and
LIVECostello_10.16Transcript
40
they’d been drinking,” (laughter) and he painted a picture of us like toasting the greatness of
country music because we knew all about it because we were from Shepherd’s Bush. (laughter)
But this is, you know, it’s true to say that some of the music that was really cherished and in
some cases almost rescued from obscurity was done so by people who heard records that arrived
in mystery packages, one way or another we got to the music whether it was country, rhythm and
blues, a lot of this music was lurking right under the noses of Americans and didn’t even seem to
see it. Like, you know, a bunch of blues artists turned up in the late sixties and it’s like they
invented it, haven’t you heard of Otis Rush and B. B. King, it’s right down the road, they’re
playing the Holiday Inn.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s hear a few chords of track 11.
[“Your Cheatin’ Heart” by Hank Williams]
ELVIS COSTELLO: Well, you know, you can’t write songs. The only other person I know
who can write songs as economical as Hank Williams is his great-granddaughter Lucinda
Williams. Just checking to see whether anyone believes that’s true. (laughter) No, I honestly
think that she does have that economy but Hank Williams I heard his songs done by other people
first. I mean, I heard Ray Charles singing “Take These Chains from My Heart,” and I heard Al
Green singing his songs and I found my way to his recordings that weren’t that easily available.
And it was a shocking thing to hear. This was like reading Shakespeare or something. He’s kind
of similar to Shakespeare, you know? People say he didn’t write these songs, like they don’t say
that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays. He was a working guy, he came from a poor background,
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so he couldn’t have had these incredible—although they’re very simple words, they’re indelible.
And it’s almost impossible to shut out the distractions and write as economically as that, very
few people can do it without just writing clichés.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I want to do a little experiment, which is and you speak about it in
your book. In some way discovering classical music much later on in life. It came to you—it hit
you at a certain moment.
ELVIS COSTELLO: It hit me—well, all of these musics that we’re talking about. This is not
like a musicological lecture, it’s emotionally driven.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What touches you at what moment.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Let me just say one thing. Classical music was something that was given
to me in little comprehensible doses by a friend of my mother’s she had worked in a record store
with. When I was child I had little EPs with fragments of classical music by Mozart and Grieg
and Beethoven. And I kept those records, they were precious to me because I’d had them as a
child the way you’d keep an old prayer book or one children’s book that you fondly remember
being read to. I had that and then I took a little pause from all the other adventures and
misadventures. The truth of it is, the musics, whether they be the cues that come from Chet
Baker or the cues that come from George Jones or Hank Williams, I found the use of them when
I needed to stop being so tricksy with words and get to the heart of the matter because where I
was in myself wasn’t served by lots of elaborate disguises or games and I gradually got to that
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point. With classical music I had a period where I just wanted to stop playing and listen for a
while.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And you did for a decade.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Well, I made all kinds of records in that decade. Some of them rock and
roll records, and I was recording simultaneously for Def Jam and Deutsche Grammophon at one
point. Def Jam Island, but they kept the Island part of it kind of quiet, you know? And but—I
did, I recorded simultaneously for both labels. But that doesn’t make you a classical musician. I
didn’t do the schooling. I did learn how to—I worked with my friends from Brodsky Quartet and
I did master musical notation, which had eluded me as a child because at that point I had reached
a point where I wanted to be able to communicate my ideas to people who only played music if
music was in front of them, which is what my grandfather did. I went back to the previous
generation. He went to the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall and I had to do it
from listening to records. He actually paid attention in class. I didn’t.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But the book is filled with these appetites. And one appetite is for
classical music and I’d like us to play track number 12 and listen a little bit to this together.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Sure. I’d love that.
[Music plays]
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ELVIS COSTELLO: Yeah.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Can I ask—
ELVIS COSTELLO: When you hear that thing, to me, you don’t have to be in any particular
posture, you don’t have to be within any society. That melody, that could be something that was
imagined halfway up a mountain in Appalachia. It’s refined. In the way he wrote it down it could
be from the mountains of Albania. It’s something very deep and dark and mysterious and the
recording I think is an old one. It’s Budapest?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It is. And you were quite—This is one of the only moments where
something was prepared. I mentioned to you yesterday that I wanted to play some classical
music, and you were very insistent—
ELVIS COSTELLO: Budapest—I wondered whether you’d got it.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: —on which interpretation.
ELVIS COSTELLO: I heard this particular movement, the last Beethoven quartet I then I got
obsessed with this piece of music. I have a particular love of the last piece that lots of my
favorite composers wrote.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The last phase.
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ELVIS COSTELLO: Everything that they had ever learned went into it. The last piano sonata
by Schubert. The last, the second-to-last particularly by Beethoven and this string quartet. And I
mean, it wasn’t just because I was listening to string quartet music and as I became acquainted
with the Brodsky quartet, I heard them, young people who were my generation play—“my
generation,” what a good idea for a song (laughter)—but they were they were my age or
approximately my age, just a little younger than me, maybe, and I heard them playing this music
and every time I saw them, whether it was Shostakovich or Bartók or Beethoven or Haydn they
would bring it to life and you would go and only that performance, that particular one only
happened at that moment.
Then I went and I listened to every recording of these particular favorite pieces. If you want to
know why the record business crashed it’s because I stopped buying CDs. (laughter) I would go
to HMV or Tower three or four times a day, it was close to something for which you needed
counseling. I just became fascinated with this Ninth Symphony, it would be one thing or another
and I have to hear how does that magic happen, does it happen every time they play those notes,
why is it that some performances move you in an incredible way. The big difference in this one
is this was recorded before there was tape. That’s people playing in a room and we’re seeing an
audio picture of these people reaching these particular agreements, putting themselves through
their instruments, which they’ve trained to express themselves through reaching through, well,
this is 1930s I think when they’re recording, they’re reaching back more than a hundred years to
when the music was written on the page by a man who couldn’t hear, who heard it theoretically
and that is not to add melodrama to it but because he couldn’t by that point. But they’re reaching
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back and they’re bringing it into the moment that that was captured, and tonight somebody’s
playing that piece of music somewhere and you cannot tell me that that isn’t as vivid as “Sister
Ray” or, you know, “Anarchy in the UK” or “Tutti-Frutti” or Lester Young. They’re all doing
that. That’s what’s so great, there’s the moment they’re reaching to the experience.
That’s what you hear when you hear Hank Williams, you know, you can’t even fathom where
that’s coming from. There’s hundreds of records that sound a little bit like Hank Williams but
none of them do the things that his records do and that recording, for me that one is the one that
really is extraordinary, because they took the chances that they took and yet when you listen it’s
a melody that we could all sing. We could be singing that tune in our head, maybe we will be
later tonight, I don’t know.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But, you know, what strikes me in what you just said is just the
passion of that arm stretching out. They are bringing it back a hundred years and all the other
references you gave from what might be considered high and low art and everything in between
but who cares about these labels? I mean, they’re labels that don’t help us.
ELVIS COSTELLO: If they move you. I’ve sat next to people in classical concert halls. I’m
sure if any of you go regularly you’ve had the experience of the people who are sitting there with
the pen and the score and they’re going, “that semiquaver doesn’t go there.” And they’re going
through the score and they’re oblivious to the fact that you’re sitting next to them and another
person the other side of me is weeping. That’s also true when we go to concerts together, isn’t it?
You know, we go, and some people are going, “Oh, great, when are you going to play your hit?”
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And somebody else is weeping or they’re laughing or everybody—all the people in the audience
are having different experiences.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: In closing, I want to ask you about interviewing.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Why’s that?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I just—
ELVIS COSTELLO: Can I just change the picture for a moment? It’s starting to disturb me.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Perfect for the subject.
ELVIS COSTELLO: That was actually the original outfit I was going to wear on Spectacle.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: On Spectacle, okay, so you’re reading my mind. What is it about
the format of an interview, a conversation, an exchange? I mean, I can—certainly it’s something
that interests me.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Well, I’ve only had brief experience of it. I interviewed Chet Baker in the
eighties. And then this opportunity. It was suggested from the late eighties that I do a television
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show and it was through the persuasion of Elton John and David Furnish that I got together with
an unbelievable team of people, particularly Alex Coletti and Bill Flanagan who were you know
and other people who worked towards making the set where the artists who came trusted me,
heaven knows why, but they did, they trusted me, and maybe because we did similar things, I
was able to have these conversations. We were incredibly lucky to get this roster of guests in a
very short period in two seasons and make twenty shows and then both the money and luck ran
out as things tend to. And can you imagine the awful fear of being on TV talking to people that
you hated. I mean, I would have gone into network television if I’d wanted to do that, you know.
I was—but it just—of course, you know, there are people who really have a mastery of seeming
at ease on any stage, and I’m not among them. Johnny Carson, Bing Crosby, they had that kind
of quality. I enjoyed it, but it was time to—then it was done.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You say in the book, “I wanted to put myself on the spot. Ask
myself those big English philosophical questions.” You wanted to interview yourself. “I would
liked to have seen how I’d have wriggled out of that kind of interrogation.”
ELVIS COSTELLO: You’re jumping a little bit. What happened is we ran out of money—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yes, you mentioned running out of money.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Yes, to film the episode where—in which I was going to be the guest. I
was going to be the subject. And we didn’t have anybody to—so I had seen a French interview
with the English actor Oliver Reed, who was known to occasionally be drunk on television
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(laughter) and may have taken a drink before doing this and he had been filmed in split screen in
France asking the most unbelievable questions of himself. (laughter) And I had seen this and he
would say things like, “When did you become a washed-up old bastard, then?” (laughter) And I
thought and then I was asked to do the show and somewhere it exists, I’m wearing a drawn-on
pencil moustache and I ask myself a bunch of totally impossible questions.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Like, “who do you think you are?”
ELVIS COSTELLO: I have French friends who ask me—I have a particular good friend who’s
French who said, “What is the great philosophical position of the Englishman?” And I go, “Who
does he think he is?” (laughter) Am I right? I mean, all of these, that’s right, I did.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You say, “Don’t you agree you’re a sellout, a hypocrite, a
charlatan, a dilettante, a bigot—”
ELVIS COSTELLO: You seemed so nice to begin with.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That was a trick. “—an elitist, a misogynist, a has-been, and a
talented egotist.”
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ELVIS COSTELLO: I’ll cop to the last one. (laughter) A talented or a talentless? Which was
it, I can’t remember.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Talentless.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Maybe not.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Elvis—yeah.
ELVIS COSTELLO: You know what we got, you know, in the end? I have to say, and I’m not
just saying this to wriggle out of it even though I am. In the end we were good enough to get the
rock and roll correspondent of Esquire magazine to interview me. It was the actress Mary-Louise
Parker, and she is given to rash statements about music like, “Imperial Bedroom makes me want
to go out and get drunk and fuck the wrong person,” so among many other wise things she says
about music, but she was actually very, very kind and came in and rescued me from the need of
asking myself those questions and we did indeed complete the season.
And I think that it was an opportunity—it wasn’t about self-examination of me, and the show
wasn’t about asking people to tell their darkest secrets. The thing that I feel luckiest to have had
the opportunity to do was to put some people on the stage who were incredibly well known and
only ask them about their particular passions in music, not necessarily get them to tell every
single thing they’d ever done, which is also the reason why this book is not written in
chronological sequence and doesn’t have an index. It’s not a reference book, it’s a story, and all
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we tried to do in that show was tell a story and sometimes we got to share the stage with people
who were not so much in the public eye. Incredibly to me, Jesse Winchester had never played in
Manhattan until after Spectacle. I mean it’s extraordinary that he had never played. I mean, this
is a man who had written beautiful songs, played elegant, just graceful performances whenever
he went on a stage and if I only had one moment from the two seasons it would be his
performance from the show. But we had a number and then it was time to stop and do something
else.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Elvis, before we stop, might I ask you to play something?
ELVIS COSTELLO: I don’t know. Do you want to hear?
(applause)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Leave us with some music.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Same physique. I don’t know what you want to hear. Do you want to hear
something?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I do.
ELVIS COSTELLO: What is it?
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PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I don’t know. Whatever inspires you.
ELVIS COSTELLO: Okay.
(applause)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Thank you all so much.
ELVIS COSTELLO: That’s enough of looking at that.
(applause)
ELVIS COSTELLO: The very final part of the book maybe I’ll just read you the preamble. I’ve
told this story many times on stage and some of you may have heard me say it before, but I will
just read the last lines of the book if I may because it goes back to I suppose the top, which is
usually the way to do it, isn’t it? And in this we—(laughter) this is from the very final pages. I
was describing, I was describing going with my father when I was about seventeen, and this is
what I wrote.
My father was playing up in Blackpool, which as many of you know is an English seaside town.
It’s kind of like the English Las Vegas, only without the sun or the sin. It is now a summer
evening in Blackpool. Up on the British Lancashire coast, there’s a telescope at the end of the
pier. Through it you may occasionally see the sea. Bingo is yet the only gambling allowed and
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coach parties still drive up to see the illuminations, dating from the time when electric light was a
real novelty. Most of the children are in bed, full of salt water, cream soda, candy floss, and
chips.
But tonight I’m not just carrying my father’s trumpet case, I’m sitting in with the band. I may not
be able to read music, but I can follow chord symbols, so my dad hands me a pile of sheet music
that I dutifully place on the music stand as I’ve seen musicians do since childhood. I’m huddled
with a skeptical band behind the lowered curtain, struggling to get my guitar in tune. Even
muffled by the drape, the patrons sound thirsty and irritable, having had a hard day pulling their
sunburned, fractious kids off the sands and out of the arcades.
I take a note from the organist, who has a face the color of wallpaper paste. He surely knows that
his organ will take a minute or two to reach full power and pitch. The compere finishes reading
out a list of Bingo numbers, coming attractions, and begins our introduction. My dad gives me a
final look of encouragement and checks that I have the right opening number. I know he’s happy
to have me there with him, but his urgency also says, “This isn’t a game. This is my work.”
Just as the spotlight hits us, I hear the seasick sound of the keyboard sliding up a semitone in
pitch, leaving me stranded like a stranger on the shore. I’m staring at a page of chord changes,
trying to adjust them in my head while moving my fingers just a fraction of an inch above the
fretboard. I roll off my volume and mime the entire show with a smile fixed on my face. It’s a
perfect introduction to my life in show business. Almost everything else since has been a similar
trick of the light.
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(applause)
And this is a song that I wrote there that I began writing with my friend Allan, actually, the first
draft of it when we were seventeen and then I took it away and worked on it some more and I
finished it tonight, so I’d like to play it for you. And it’s a remembrance of those clubs that I
went to with my dad and the whole strange dance of people being on stage who perhaps
shouldn’t be, in fact a few of them that shouldn’t be out of the house.
[Plays “Ghost Train”]
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Elvis Costello!
(applause)
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