The audience will spin a wheel to pick the songs the singer will perform at his upcoming Irish show. It's a trick he used in the 1980s – but now he has more than 25 albums and 35 years of hits to choose from, writes TONY CLAYTON-LEA
IT’S A SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS and a man for whom no musical style is out of bounds. After 35 years he’s one of the most familiar, and versatile, men in music. But call Elvis Costello a polymath and he might bristle; offer him a matey “How are you?” and he might pretty much ignore you. Costello doesn’t do cheery chat very well, and he can seem to have so little time for small talk that you almost gird yourself for an onslaught.
He is doing some media interviews, nonetheless – not for a new album, one of which pops up with unforced regularity, but for his show at the O2 in Dublin in May, featuring the Spectacular Spinning Songbook. Think of an illuminated lottery wheel but with the names of songs by Costello in place of numbers; somebody in the audience gives it a spin, and wherever the pointer lands is the next song.
The Revolver tour isn’t the first occasion on which Costello has brought this kind of show to Ireland; we recall a slimmer version of it, and a thigh-slapping Costello, at the Olympia in the mid-1980s. Should we expect the same this time? “We thought we had a lot of songs back in 1986,” says Costello of the original blueprint. Chit-chat swatted away, he’s in strict interview mode. “We had had quite a few albums by then, but, of course, this time around there’s a tremendous amount of material. We don’t put every song we have written on the wheel, or even a representative of every type of record I’ve made, but it’s a pretty big selection.”
Dublin is the beginning of the European tour; according to Costello, “We’ll start with something that we loosely call the overture – about five or six songs that are fairly fast paced. The nature of the show is that it could stop and start too much if we’re not careful. That’s a given when you consider the randomness of the wheel choices.”
The nature of the song selection is an issue that could, in less astute hands, bring the show at first to a shudder and then to a halt. Surely not even the most avid Costello fan could withstand I Want You six times in a row. “You don’t go along to this show with the idea that it’s going to go smoothly from song to song. That said, in the way we have come to understand it now I don’t detect that the process we use creates a problem. You can get some shocks, of course. You can get what most people think might be the finale number to come up early in the show, or you can have a dark ballad up as the first song of the evening.
“Once in a while I’ll open the show with a most unexpected song, just to see what happens. I don’t have any particular fear about that; half the fun of it is that as the songs go around there’ll be a little bit of oohing and aahing going on as a particularly well-known song comes up near the top of the wheel, only to spin by and land on something not so well known. That then puts it on us to play that not-so-well-known song as if it’s the best one I’ve ever written. Usually, the way things work out, it’s never all one thing – never all hits or never all obscure. Now and again, though, you do get a run. Some things happen that can change the dynamic of the show – and that’s the real trick.”
You can see why such an ever-changing dynamic would appeal to a songwriter who has refused to allow traditional structures to tie him down to any one writing style. From punk rock to ballads, classical to opera, country to crooning, Tin Pan Alley to Desolation Boulevard and back, Costello has aimed to master them all.
Not everything he does might be to everyone’s tastes – and more than once he has been accused of dabbling where he’s not necessarily welcome – but no other figure in contemporary music has managed to go from one musical style to another while firmly holding on to his dignity.
The Spectacular Spinning Songbook displays the range of Costello’s music. “Well, yes, but I’m not making any statement with that display,” he says. “Out of that, of course, it comes up that certain shows lean this or that way, musically. Other people are doing things that address their back catalogue, such as performing entire albums; we’ve thought of that, but it just didn’t come together.
“What we’re doing here is a lot more fun, to be honest. It has the potential to go all over the place, but that’s fine, because there is no artistic statement being made. The songs themselves have their own integrity as compositions, and if you play them well then sometimes they’ll surprise you. They sneak up on you – or you sneak up on them. I’m not sure which way.”
Costello, who is closing in on his 60th year, has a back catalogue of more than 25 studio albums. What effect does the length of time he has been writing and performing have on him? “It certainly provides me with a lot of songs to consider,” he deadpans, “as well as giving me the pleasure of seeing people like Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas still play with me. Indeed, as time has passed that’s become more remarkable and valuable to me; that’s not a sentimental remark, either. I just genuinely think they’re great musicians, and there’s still a lot of fire in the way they play; they’re still trying to get better in many ways.”
We know from experience that it’s often pointless to refer Costello back to his angry-young-man days of 1977-8, yet he himself brings up the topic of bandmates through the decades. He points out that his current band, The Imposters, has existed longer than The Attractions, which in its original state also featured Nieve and Thomas. They bucked the punk-rock trend by being older, smarter and more aware of music beyond The Stooges and Velvet Underground.
“Those shows we played back then were great,” he says. “I’m not so sure of the fuss made about some of the early records, though: we think differently about music now, and it’s neither inferior nor superior; it’s just different.
“It’s the same way regarding the different ensembles I’ve played with over the years, or the different types of songs one writes. I mean, why on earth would songs on the album This Year’s Model sound like the songs on, for example, the album Painted from Memory?”
So snaps the man on the wrong side of 50. “You mean the right side of 60, surely.”
Elvis Costello The Imposters are at the O2 in Dublin on May 9th
Wheel of fortune Back-catalogue gems
You know Oliver’s Army, Accidents Will Happen, Pump It Up and Watching the Detectives. Here are some of the best Elvis Costello songs you might never have heard of.
Green Shirt(from Armed Forces, 1979) "Somewhere in the quisling clinic there's a shorthand typist taking seconds over minutes . . ." A staccato backdrop, a spidery keyboard motif and a clipped, spooky vocal equal quality postpunk/pop.
Secondary Modern(from Get Happy!!, 1980) "It won't be a problem till the girls go home . . ." Costello's Stax-referencing album features 20 soul/pop gems. This is the zinger of them all.
Just a Memory(from New Amsterdam EP, 1980) "Losing you is just a memory memories don't mean that much to me . . ." An arpeggio piano intro builds up to one of Costello's classic slow songs that fuses regret and bitterness with tears.
Different Finger(from Trust, 1981) "I don't want to hear your whole life story, or about my strange resemblance to some old flame. All I want is one night of glory – I don't even know your second name . . ." Costello goes so old-time country you could be listening to Hank Williams.
Boy With a Problem(from Imperial Bedroom, 1982) "It's the last thing I want to do, pull the curtains on me and you, pull the carpet from under love, pull out like young lovers do . . ." One of Costello's most beautifully resonant ballads from arguably his best album of the 1980s.
Jacksons, Monk & Rowe(from The Juliet Letters, 1993) "They're looking for you high and low, now there's nowhere for you to go . . ." Costello collaborates with The Brodsky Quartet and quietly comes up trumps with an acutely executed string-driven pop song.
Let Me Tell You About Her(from North, 2003) "Hush, now, I've said too much – there's something indescribable I can't quite catch . . ." One of Costello's best yet most underrated albums channels one-for-the-road Sinatra with cool, collected smoky-jazz calm.
