Elvis Costello may no longer be the angry young man he once was, but there’s
one phrase still guaranteed to raise his hackles. “A French friend asked me
once what is the main philosophical premise of the English,” he muses. “And
I said it’s ‘Who does he think he is?’ That defines our attitude to culture
and art. And it’s idiotic and self-defeating and offensive.”
Costello should know. It’s a question that has already been voiced by several
critics over his new album, North, a collection of jazzy ballads with
lush orchestrations. And they will no doubt use it again when they learn
that his next project is a 75-minute orchestral score to A Midsummer
Night’s Dream which he’s just recorded with the London Symphony
Orchestra.
After all, isn’t he supposed to be a rock singer, forged in the angry crucible
of late-1970s punk and New Wave? Why is he dabbling in all this high art
when three chords ought to do fine? We meet to discuss such questions over
mid-morning tea. He’s dressed in a sombre three-piece suit and a purple tie
and his trademark dark-rimmed spectacles give him a distinctly professorial
look. He’s very particular in every detail, including how he takes his tea.
He insists that the milk is poured first and appears mildly shocked when I
say I don’t mind which way it comes.
The dozen songs on North lay him open to criticisms that go far beyond
the crooning voice and the orchestral arrangements, for they constitute a
deeply revealing song-cycle that begins with the break-up of his 16-year
marriage to Cait O’Riordan, charts his subsequent desolation and then
celebrates his falling in love with the American jazz singer Diana Krall.
The album’s opening song finds him disconsolately lamenting to his former
lover, “you left me in the dark”. By the end he’s rapturously declaring to
the new woman in his life: “My darling you make everything seem right.”
Which is all very well when you’re a teenager. But it’s a bit undignified in
a middle-aged man, isn’t it?
“The morbid consideration of whether the record exactly details my life isn’t
important,” he says. “You can look ridiculous when you fall in love and
there’s a rapturous expression in some of the songs. But they are not
happy-go-lucky. They are more about arriving at some kind of peace. I hope
people will see something of their own lives reflected in it because it’s
not exactly unprecedented for people to move from a desolate place to a
happier state.”
Costello is at pains not to use names, but the identity of the participants
could not be plainer. Did he have no qualms about being so transparent?
“Sometimes in the past for reasons of diplomacy I’ve written about intense
experiences in a disguised fashion,” he says. “There’s an impulse to create
a little distance and a more impressionistic sense of emotional experience
by using irony and word games. But these songs came to me very quickly and
demandingly and there’s no avoiding their literal definition.”
Does it seem paradoxical to parade his emotions so nakedly in the songs and
then regard any further questions about his private life as an intrusion?
“Of course people will have that curiosity if they know anything about you,”
he responds. “But real life is a lot more complicated than songs can ever
be. No matter how good they are, songs can’t be a literal recitation of
life. They have to be crafted into coherence.”
Love or loathe the record, Costello has come a long way from the bitter and
vengeful young punk of the late 1970s. Only one of his past four albums,
last year’s When I Was Cruel, has been a collection of rock
songs. Before that came For the Stars — an album with the soprano
Anne Sofie von Otter — and Painted from Memory, with Burt
Bacharach.
So just who does Costello think he is? “I’m an artist. That’s what I do and it
makes you selfish and self-absorbed and I have absolutely no embarrassment
about that. People say I’m self-indulgent. Well of course. That’s because
I’m an artist.”
It’s easy to imagine the withering contempt with which the young Costello
would have treated anybody talking in such terms. But then, I suggest, he
was never really a punk anyway, and his songwriting skills would have
emerged in any era. New Wave was merely the vehicle of convenience at the
time.
He admits he tailored his early abrasive style to get himself heard, but
insists that punk’s impact has been considerably over-stated. “The cultural
annotators talk about the year of punk, but it was really the year of disco.
In London they might have all been down the Roxy, but in Wakefield they were
dancing around their handbags to the Bee Gees.”
As to his own current crooning style, he points out that even as early as Alison,
on his spiky debut album My Aim is True, many of his best-known songs
were ballads. “I always thought that I was a ballad singer who can sing
rock’n’roll. I love to make a noise and I’ve got a powerful kind of voice
that scares people to hell. But you can’t do that with the songs on this
album. They are very quiet and nonhistrionic and to use that other end of
the dynamic range was great.
“But I don’t see why you have to give up one in order to do the other.”
Finally, I wonder if Costello has been moved to write about the current
parlous state of the world. This, after all, is the man who in the 1980s
wrote the uncompromising Shipbuilding as a protest against the
Falklands conflict, and Tramp the Dirt Down, arguably the most
bilious anti-Thatcherite diatribe ever penned.
“People assume there’s an impulse or a responsibility to write a song in
response to every major event. But it isn’t true,” he says. While it was
easy to react against “demonic” regimes, such as those led by General
Pinochet and Margaret Thatcher, the “slipperiness” of Bush and Blair (who he
dismisses as “twerps”) makes it more difficult to express dissent.
“There will be something to be said in response. But I wasn’t moved to do it
right now because you have to start entering their grey world of advertising
gobbledygook.”
It’s good to know that something still makes Costello bristle, whoever he
thinks he is these days.
North is released by Deutsche Grammophon. Elvis Costello plays Glasgow Royal
Concert Hall on October 7, Newcastle Opera House (Oct 8), Manchester Bridgewater
Hall (Oct 10), London Festival Hall (Oct 11) and Birmingham Symphony Hall
(November 7)
FIVE OTHERS WHO WENT FOR BAROQUE’N’ROLL
PAUL McCARTNEY Yesterday may be the most covered song ever but the
great orchestras have not exactly been queuing up to record his Liverpool
Oratorio.
JONI MITCHELL
The ultimate blonde hippie-chick-with-acoustic-guitar went all classical last
year with Travelogue, a double album of 22 of her best songs, re-recorded
with a 60-piece orchestra.
ELTON JOHN
Among the ropier albums Elton has made his 1987 effort with the Melbourne
Symphony Orchestra takes some beating.
RANDY NEWMAN
He wrote classics for Gene Pitney and P.J. Proby but by 1995 he was employing
orchestras and choirs on Randy Newman’s Faust, his own setting of Goethe.
JOE JACKSON
Costello’s main rival among post-punk’s angry young men with such spiky hits
as Is She Really Going Out With Him? Then he signed to Sony Classics and
released his first symphony in 1999, to overwhelming indifference.
