What sort of slight would it take to get someone annoyed with 65 million people? For Elvis Costello, it takes a poor Glastonbury set. Talking to Mojo, the singer, now resident in America, reveals that his show there two years ago has prompted him to sever links with Britain.

So, what happened? Well, I was there: it sounded brilliant, he looked happy and everyone said it was ace. But somewhere along the line, Costello got it into his head that it was “f***ing dreadful . . . That gig made up my mind I wouldn’t come back . . . [British audiences] don’t dig me.”

The clincher, apparently, came last year, when Costello returned to do a BBC show with the New Orleans songwriter Allen Toussaint. Instead of according Toussaint the same respect, Costello says that the BBC asked to speak to Costello alone. But then, that’s what doing telly is like: hurtful, off-the-cuff decisions are made by producers in too much of a hurry to realise how rude they’re being. And having done it for 30 years, Costello should know that.

Unlike America, Britain has no respect for older artists, he says. But Costello is a respected older artist – his status underscored by endless reissues that he himself sanctions. He has fans, too, who revere him enough to repurchase them and diversions such as North, the rhapsodic collaboration with his third wife, Diana Krall, and his Toussaint double-hander, The River in Reverse.

So, yes, it’s rubbish doing telly, and maybe Costello feels that he compromised his artistic integrity by doing a festival. Well, don’t do telly. Don’t do festivals. As for the country about which he so bitterly generalises – if the feeling is mutual, he won’t be missed. But he still has fans here. And if anyone ends up being punished by his weird strop, it’ll be them and no one else.

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