From the Archive: Elvis Costello Talks with David Remnick

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. A 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 Costell 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.
Tell me how does it feel In the hour of deception In the moment of pretend 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 was 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 songbook because it put all of my songs in play and left them to the you know left them to chance literally 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 got to play the hit single know although on the other hand even the even the casual elvis costello listener not the the the committed fan has 34 albums that you can sample and move around yeah no i i you know what i'm completely i'm i'm completely at ease with the balance between the the old and the new there's another way of looking at streaming is it's um it's radio with all the unpleasant talking taken out you know and and it's not put me out of business 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 well when you you you've recorded a new album and you talk about the story of an album how do you view the story of hey clock face hey clock face the title track is you know is is deriving from fats waller it's deriving 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 it was distinctly an outlandish adventure one cannot imagine now it began with me leaving for leaving early for for a tour in britain and getting on a plane and flying you know do you remember that flying to 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 rehe 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 adept at the modern era of digital editing, which allowed me to do things that, you know, would have been impossible.
So I I would disagree that you can't get music of feeling and drive out of this technology um 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 piano 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 masalaise.
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 on wax as it were or is the idea to give them an idea and then go from there no i i mean i 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.

We then went and did a tour of England, you know, with the Impostors. We opened up in Liverpool in the dance hall where our mother used to dance when she was a young woman in the late 40s.
She was at the gig. She's 92.
who?

Hey, Clark face,

keep your fingers on the dial.

You stole those precious moments and the kiss. 92.
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 who 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 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 okay 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 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 they knew why we were doing it because at at that point we were trying to chase away shadows. 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 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 news than anybody else but for a musician it's got to be different i suddenly realized that that i hadn't spent you know this now at this point i've i've never spent this amount of uninterrupted time with my 13 13 year old sons since they were three months old we are sharing every day it's beautiful we you know i can't 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.
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Elvis, some years ago, Nick Pauhmgarten 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 there hadn't 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 like before you put that before you operate on me can i just ask you how you felt about your vocation in medicine before 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 but i think we when i was a little kid rock and roll was a new thing there was no such thing as long careers no well it was 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 i because my parents listened to dizzy gillespie and frank sinatra and l fitzgerald and nat cole and stan kenton and heaven knows what else you know duke ellington they didn't care about rock and roll that was that was kind crude. And I'm kind of with them 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. My lonely days are over.
And life is like a song. You know, my dad started out, here my mother ran clubs in that same, you know, 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 were both went to London in the early 50s, and my dad played dad played around the jazz scene and 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 that is a note for note transcription of the glenn miller recording of that last well we also dug up one of the earliest recordings of you where you're singing backup vocals for your dad it's the music for a soda company but i think it's called secret lemonade drinker it's wonderful yeah yeah we're doing the background voices on it was my first it was my first paid recording session yeah i'm a secret lemonade drinker always always i'm trying to keep it up it's one of those nights always always always lemonade i'm a secret lemonade drinker Always, always, always, always, always lemonade That's not bad at all. Well, here's the weird thing, isn't it, about the Elvis name? 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.
You know, it seemed really weird, but that was the way I saw music first. I would go to the dance hall with him on a Saturday afternoon.
and I'd go to the radio broadcast when school schedule would would allow it which was get there at eight 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 um it was a glimpse and it took away some of the mystique but it also it 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 um these are political songs a lot of them what role does music play in politics for? 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 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 a like an installation that's the way i referred to it like an like you would do an art installation it's not supposed to do anything other i said in the the note that i put up with it you know 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 unjust 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 outrageous 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 courage to love than it does to hate it just does elvis costello thank you so much it's been It's been a pleasure talking.
It has been a pleasure talking with you, David, as always. You stay well and have 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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