From the Archive: Elvis Costello Talks with David Remnick
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When rock and roll emerged in the days of Little Richard and Chuck Berry, Elvis and the Beatles, no one thought about long careers, the way a musician's work might evolve over time. But that was then. Now there are careers that are 40, 50 years long.

Elvis Costello has been on the scene since the mid-70s, a leader of the new wave. But since then, he's led a vital and brilliant career of experiment and variation. And I've been following it all along. Costello's newest album, Hey Clockface, is out this month. And it was largely recorded before the pandemic.

I spoke with him as he sat outside his house near the harbor in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is why you might even hear a foghorn in the background. I wonder how you approach new music like that. If you feel that a new album must have either a new sound, a new thematic approach, how do you approach that idea of a new record?

Well, about 2010, I told people I was going to concentrate on live performance. I think that was coming to terms with the fact that the model that we had lived by for the previous years...

Wasn't no longer in existence that was you made a record and then you went out on the road and you played the music of that album folded into your general repertoire that sometime around then the maybe that was the way the record world itself was changing that stopped happening and so I put my work into first the revival of the spectacular spinning song book because it put all of my songs in play and left them to the you know left them to chance literally and

Then I was completing this book I'd been working on for a long time. I started to feel as if everything was about using what you had and adding into it. And you could change the focus. You were no longer worried about, oh, I've got to play the hit single, you know? Although, on the other hand, even the casual Elvis Costello listener, not the committed fan,

Has 34 albums that you can sample and move around in. No, you know what? I'm completely...

I'm completely at ease with the balance between the old and the new. There's another way of looking at streaming is it's radio with all the unpleasant talking taken out. Don't put me out of business here. And it's not an advertising man's idea of what the playlist should be. It's the listener's idea of what the playlist should be in the most cases. You've recorded a new album.

And you talk about the story of an album. How do you view the story of Hey Clockface? Hey Clockface, the title track is, you know, is deriving from Fats Waller. It's deriving from, you're nobody's nostalgist, but you're drawing on a musical history. You're writing about time, which seems to be a big theme in this record. Well, let me start at the top. I mean, it was distinctly an outlandish adventure one cannot imagine now. It began with me thinking

Leaving early for a tour in Britain and getting on a plane and flying. Do you remember that? Flying to Helsinki, somewhere where I literally don't know anybody. They don't know me so well. I found a little studio there that intrigued me. I went in there with...

The songs in my head, rather than in any kind of demo form, I knew the nature of those particular songs. They needed to be brought to life in a moment and not worked at. I couldn't rehearse them with my band. I just had to start playing. And that approach freed me. Like they literally came into existence in the moment I made them. And I had a young engineer who was very, very adepte.

at the modern era of digital editing, which allowed me to do things that, you know, would have been impossible. So I would disagree that you can't get music of feeling and drive out of this technology. I went from there, after three days, to Paris. And here's another unimaginable scene for you. 30 people gathered in an apartment in Paris, celebrating Steve Naive, my piano player of 43 years, you know, my colleague,

my friend, celebrating both his birthday and receiving his French passport. A group of people kissing each other and eating cake off each other's plate, raising their glasses and singing La Massellaise. I mean, can you imagine the danger we were in, you know? Is the idea to get the existing music that's in your head down on stage

unwaxed, as it were? Or is the idea to give them an idea and then go from there? No, I mean, I knew how these songs should feel. And obviously, I had no way of knowing that combination of instrumentalists would be quite as vivid as the recordings from Paris turned out to be. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba

We then went and did a tour of England, you know, with the Impostors. We opened up in Liverpool in the dance hall where my mother used to dance when she was a young woman in the late 40s. She was at the gig. She's 92. Hey, Clark Faye, keep your fingers on the dial. You stole those precious moments and the kisses from those smiles. And now I'm living in these hours where we were wild.

And then, you know, the second week of the tour, you start to see those empty seats when we know that every ticket in the house is sold. And it was by the time we played London, I just had to admit that I'm putting my crew, most of all my crew, really, because they do all the close handling work.

my crew, my band and the audience in some kind of harm's way. This must be killing you. This must be killing you and your wife who are performing musicians who bring so much joy to people who are in the seats hearing things live. Well, you know, I... To be sitting on your porch. We came into the wings at the Hammersmith Apollo and I knew in my heart, I hadn't told anybody, but I knew in my heart there probably wasn't going to be another show on that tour.

I slept on that feeling and made the decision the next day because the Canadian border was about to be shut and I knew I had to get home to my family. But, you know, I came into the wings and said, OK, guys, you know, we better make this one count. We're going to end with peace, love and understanding, as we often do. But let's play Hurry Down Doomsday. The bugs are taken over, which we hardly ever play. By the switches, our sin is the purpose. In a team and a temple, I'll have a railroad kick.

And, you know, I could see people in the front row go, oh, yeah, you think you're very funny, don't you? You know, but they knew why we were doing it because at that point we were trying to chase away shadows. But I can't bring myself to love

You know, a week later, the prime minister was in the ICU, so it didn't sound so comical then, you know. But nobody knew those things. How do you feel about... How do you envision the future? When do you think that you're back? I mean, you don't have any more of a beat on the news than anybody else, but for a musician, it's got to be different. I suddenly realized that I hadn't spent... Now, at this point, I've never spent this amount of uninterrupted time with my 13-year-old sons since they were three months old. We are...

sharing every day. It's beautiful. I can't complain about that. But our work, our livelihood, does require us to go and play shows. So there is a wishful pencil mark in the diary of next year, and we'll see where we are when we get there. I've been left...

In the dark, shine a light right in my eyes. You'll never make me talk. Alibis, I must protect. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. I won't detect. I won't place the blame. I can't say a name.

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Elvis, some years ago, Nick Palmgarten spent a lot of time with you for a profile in The New Yorker. Yeah. And the subject came up of character, a character that a musician might play, especially in his or her youth. And you said this, even people who we take to be the real deal did it. They made up a character for themselves. And you had to have an act.

There's some artistry attributed to rock and roll where it's supposed to be more authentic than show business. I don't really hold to that. Now we all, those of us of a certain age, remember you, we're about the same age, as a certain kind of figure who exploded onto the music scene and both visually as well as musically and projected a certain character, a certain temperament as well as the music itself. How do you view that now?

Well, I was 22 when I made my first record, you know, so if that had been some changes made by now, there would be something badly wrong, you know. You also never ask a doctor, like, if you have something wrong with you, and you go, doctor, I've got this problem with my hip, like...

Before you put that, before you operate on me, can I just ask you how you felt about your vocation in medicine when you were a medical student? Whoever asked that of a doctor, they never ask it. They only ask it of artists to somehow, because there's this implication that you've betrayed some sacred trust. You know, things you say in interviews when you're 23 are not catechism that you have to repeat for the rest of your life. There's some things more often said,

to get somebody off your back. I've never had a master plan.

When I was a little kid, rock and roll was a new thing. There was no such thing as long careers in rock and roll. It was supposed to be this juvenile delinquent music. And frankly, I didn't know anything about rock and roll when I was a kid. Because my parents listened to Dizzy Gillespie and Frank Sinatra and Elle Fitzgerald and Nat Cole and Stan Kenton and heaven knows what else. Duke Ellington. They didn't care about rock and roll. That was kind of crude music.

And I'm kind of with him on some of that, apart from Little Richard. Your father was a singer. He was a trumpet player. And we've got a track from the group that he played with, Joe Lawson, the orchestra. And let's listen to him singing At Last in 1969. Oh, wow. At last my love has come along Only days are over And life is like a song

My dad started out, my mother ran clubs in that same almost evangelical way when there's a new style of music arriving from overseas on records, which were very scarce and expensive and difficult to get. My father went, and Mother Werworth went to London in the early 50s, and my dad played around the jazz scene. I guess when I came along, he did what a lot of jazz musicians realize is necessary. He got a job that paid better.

as a singer. So then he was in a commercial dance band and that's how he came to sing this song associated with Glenn Miller. Not that when he's singing at last there, it has no reference to Etta James. That was a cover of,

That is a note-for-note transcription of the Glenn Miller recording of that last one. Well, we also dug up one of the earliest recordings of you, where you're singing backup vocals for your dad. It's the theme music for a soda company. I think it's called Secret Lemonade Drinker. It's wonderful, yeah. We're doing the background voices on it. It was my first paid recording session. I'm a secret lemonade drinker. Shh, all right, sit down.

Always. I've been trying to keep it up, but it's one of those nights. Always.

That's not bad at all. Well, here's the weird thing, isn't it, about the Elvis name is my dad is affecting this Elvis inflection. Exactly. He's a very good mimic and he could do comic mimicry like that. And that's why I had such a rich...

record collection because every week you would get given a stack of hit parade singles because this dance band just played the hit parade. It's hard for Americans to understand, but we didn't have the 24-hour pop radio that you all had. And everything was decoded through a series of other interpretations. So you would hear these very bizarre versions of, you know, the Four Tops or The Who played by a Glenn Miller-style swing band with a guy who was, you know,

a really elderly guy who was like 35, you know, my dad was about 35 when he was doing this.

It seemed really weird, but that was the way I saw music first. I would go to the dance hall with them on a Saturday afternoon. I'd go to the radio broadcast when school schedule would allow it, which was get there at 8 in the morning and watch a bunch of musicians smoke cigarettes and scratch themselves until it was time to go on the BBC and play an hour-long show with guest singers. And those guest singers could be anybody from the Hollies to Engelbert Humperdinck.

But it was a glimpse and it took away some of the mystique, but it also made me realize this strange exchange between the mundanity of the workaday job and the magic when the light went on. Elvis, you've done a new project called 50 Songs for 50 Days. And these are political songs, a lot of them. What role does music play in politics for you?

I never think of it as political in the sense because I don't have a manifesto and I don't have a slogan.

other than I might have the title of the song, but I try to avoid the simplistic slogan nature, you know, in songs. I try to always look for the angle that somebody else isn't covering, because there's other people doing the other thing really well. It's the same with the heartfelt love song, you know? The heartfelt love song is something that other people can carry off. From the get-go, I always thought, well, maybe that's not my job. I don't have the matinee idol looks to carry off that, so...

Maybe I'll go the other way, and that's what I did. And with this, I think of it like an installation. That's the way I referred to it, like you would do an art installation. It's not supposed to do anything other, I said in the note that I put up with it, you know, console, amuse, or irritate. I'll take any of those reactions. But the simplest thing to say about it is the things that we are so rightly enraged about

We see as in just we see dividing as we see summoning up like almost like a madness of of passion. It's all happened before and here are the songs to prove it. Most of those examples of a lot of the same issues. Did you honestly think you'd be talking to I don't know, you know, I didn't think I'd be talking with my 13 year old sons about a lynching.

in 2020. Those are the same things that I was hearing reported on the news at their age in England, that very BBC, you know, terrible sort of outrage has happened in Mississippi today, you know, and sort of, I never thought I'd be any of that, but it isn't even sadly about that one event or what transpired since it's what, how do you get there and how do you keep getting there? And that's where songs come in because they remind you

We keep getting there, you know? And on this, say, this new record, there's a song called We're All Cowards Now. The name of the song is not You're All Cowards Now. The name of the song is We. I'm including myself in that because, you know, it takes, let's face it, it takes a lot more

to love than it does to hate. It just does. Elvis Costello, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you. It has been a pleasure talking with you, David, as always. You stay well and of good heart. You too. You too. And you give me so, so many years and so much pleasure and so, so many varieties. I just can't begin to tell you. Thank you. Thank you. Elvis Costello, his new record, Hey Clock Face, is out this month. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks so much for joining us today. See you next time.

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