Stamping Ground's Jens Christensen interviews Elvis Costello

In october 2000, I was invited to the press conference of the play 'A midsummer Night's Dream' to which Elvis Costello has written the orchestral score. A few days later I was lucky to meet him in person for a 40 minute exclusive interview in the studies of a great Italian music show called HELP hosted by Red Ronnie at Roxybar.

The interview was printed in UNCUT Jan. 2000 as a five page feature.

Has it changed your understanding of music, working with such different artists as Paul McCartney, Bill Frisell, Brodsky Quartet, Richard Harvey, Burt Bacharach….just to mention a few?

I think everything that you do… and I mean this most of all (Costello says, showing the huge score book of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’).
Everything that you do gives you a bit more experience. You learn and you adapt what you know to what they play. I used to work with a band and especially within the last ten years there has been many more collaborations, and you learn from each one and you take something into the next collaboration.

Do you have an inner drive that forces you to explore different musical directions?

No I don’t think so, it just sort of happens and I am very lucky with the opportunities. They often come through friendships, you know. I mean, with the Brodsky Quartet I was a fan of theirs before I worked with them. The same with Ann Sofie von Otter, whose record I have just produced, which won’t be out until next year.

She didn’t know that I was coming to her concerts. Then we were introduced and we became friendly. I wrote songs for her and the Brodsky Quartet and little by little you reach a point where you understand one another and then you can actually talk about a serious collaboration. We have just made a beautiful record with her in Stockholm, which I think will be such a pleasant surprise to so many people. People don’t expect people from a classical background of singing to be able to sing songs that come from popular music, without it being very awkward, but she has such a natural gift as a singer. We chose the songs together and we chose them very carefully and through that you get to know people and it is just a very, very natural process. It is not as intense as people would like to imagine, you know, it is not unhealthy at all. It is very healthy, it comes out of friendship, understanding and appreciation of other artists and if you are fortunate you become friendly with them and through that you are able to work together.

No I don’t think so. I have just had a long term collaboration with Burt Bacharach, which took about three years from the time we first started writing together to the making and release of ‘Painted From Memory’ and then I spent all of last year touring with Steve Naïve, which was very exciting, and in that way I got to learn, not just about how to sing those songs, but also which songs of my own from the last 20 years I really enjoyed singing. We made a different program every night, and we had the freedom to go everywhere…we played everywhere. We played in Australia twice…we played in Japan twice...we played in America twice. It was the most touring I have done since the early days, even though it didn’t have the same…you know…anxiety and edge that it obviously has when you are touring with a rock’n’roll band.
But it doesn’t mean that I will never do that again, but I certainly won’t tour with The Attractions again, that’s definitely disbanded permanently…I always hope there’s an opportunity to work with Pete Thomas again and my relationship with Steve Naïve is very good, you know, I was in New York to sing in his opera in the summer and he is coming to see the premiere of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. He is a great friend and he was in Stockholm, playing on Ann Sofie von Otter’s record and he’s a terrific player and he is a great composer in his own right now. We spent so much time touring with The Attractions and he never had the opportunity to show what he could do and he has gained a lot of confidence in the last few years. While I have done my collaborations, he has done the similar thing in his own way. He’s worked in France with all sorts of artists, been touring in Mexico and places that I never got to play. He’s really on quite a journey of his own, which eventually will lead somewhere, I’m sure.

I was sort of waiting this year. I felt that I had done enough touring last year and this opportunity came up (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and the Ann Sofie von Otter record came up and a couple of other things that I was doing and I didn’t really wanna talk and I didn’t really wanna make a record. I have made one nearly every year for 20 years although I did have two years off in the late eighties and I was really ready to do something very special and ‘Spike’ was a very different record. The next record I will make…well…it has got to be special. I have made a lot and there’s no point in making a record just because the clock says it is time to make one. And I am a little suspicious of all the record labels buying one another…you know...it is a very unsettled time. I don’t want to sacrifice any more releases. I have had two or three releases getting caught in the middle of the cooperate nonsense. Particularly ‘Painted From Memory’ really suffered commercially because of that and it is too upsetting. I knew ‘Painted From Memory’ wasn’t gonna outsell Mariah Carey, because it is not that kind of record, but it should have done much better, particularly in America and it would have done better if we had not had a company that was falling apart…everyone was getting fired and everyone was afraid they were gonna get fired.
So I think it did remarkably well considering all those things and I’m waiting until they have decided that they have finished ‘changing’. The only thing that I am going to change is from ‘this’ form of expression (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) to a form of expression that might be more appropriate for a record, but it will still be ‘me’. But they haven’t decided who they are yet and when they have decided they can ring me up and tell me they are ready and then I’ll make a record.

But are you ready to wait for that?

I can wait 10 years..you know..it doesn’t make any difference to me…I mean…I am not ‘young’ so it makes no difference if I make a record when I am 46 or even when I am 50. You know, Bob Dylan took 9 years off and he made a great record when he came back. I am not saying I will take 9 years off, because I am too anxious to do things, but when I have got opportunities like this (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) I would turn down making records so that I could do something that is not even gonna be well received by the record companies…they are not gonna be ready for it. I am ready all the time. They can ring me up and tell me when they are ready and then I will make a record.

At the press conference of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ you mentioned that you are not even sure if this is ever going to be released as an album…

We don't know that. It seems like a crazy, rather arrogant attitude to take, but I know for certain that it will be so good, that I would want to commit it straight to record. Maybe not in its entirety because obviously some of the themes are reused to underline the reappearance of certain characters, but if you took the very best of the themes and recorded them as suites, that could be it.

In this new piece we have made subtle changes to the expression. This score isn’t definitive yet. Eventually I will have to take the conductor’s score and decide where I want the balance different or where the tempo has to be exact for the things that Mauro Bigonzetti (artistic director) wants and for the things that the dance is going to achieve. I have learned from watching them, I mean…it has been an amazing sight for me.
This was written very specifically. The dramatic outline was a distillation of everything in Shakespeare so I knew what I was supposed to represent and there were descriptions of what was supposed to be in the music, but then I put things in the music, which I hoped were gonna be useful for Mauro in his choreography…and then you see them…and then you think: “wow, how did he know that I meant that?”.
So it is like you develop a kind of understanding, a kind of telepathy which is very fascinating to me, because it was obviously impossible to collaborate on very part. We couldn’t sit down together all the time. I had to go away to compose and he had to go away and develop his ideas and then hope that his ideas could make use of what I wrote...and they have coincided more often in a favourable way than not. There’s nowhere in the score, where I can’t understand why he is using that music to do that. Every time it is kind of what I hoped, but much, much more.

But that’s also a way of communicating, I mean…there are no songs included in the score…

Yes, but here it’s not completely without another sense of meaning, because if it was purely orchestral music it would have to have still more substance. I think this is good music, I am proud of it.

I think that when I wrote with Burt Bacharach I said that the words were only there to underline the meaning in the compositions. They weren’t the same kind of words that I have written for myself.
In this case it is the opposite. The music is underlining the meaning that was in the dramatic outline and in the dance itself. Maybe at some future time I’ll write a piece that is purely orchestral, but this is it, I mean…this is something else. It’s an orchestral score, but it is an orchestral score for dance.
It might be pleasurable to listen to just as music, but it has really been written to accompany dance, so the sense of meaning, symbolism and the emotion comes through the movement and this sort of underlines the meaning.

I read your top 500 album list in Vanity Fair. I saw your interest in string quartets, but you seemed to have missed out on Dvorak.

“Dvorak didn’t make it into that list, strangely enough”, Costello says thoughtfully with a smile.

No you see, that’s the thing…there’s always somebody you forget, and I do love Dvorak. There’s a lot of people missing from the list. A list like that..hmm…it’s very frivolous and like a party game, but it’s also something you put quite a lot of feeling into, because it’s quite private, I mean...they are personal choices, though some of them are there like joke choices. This kind of list is completely biased, you know…there are 9 records by Miles Davis, 9 records by Bob Dylan and one by someone that somebody else thinks is a genius and none at all by The Doors and none at all by Led Zeppelin.

Yeah, then it would have been a different list. I did that list to kind of rest my brain from working on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and at the end of the evening I’d type a few in and I’d think of some things. I didn’t just want to put things in that were just, you know…a thought that would look good on the list. You know, it was quite a personal list.
I also put on some music that I don’t listen to every day, but whenever I hear it, it’s startling.

So it’s all the different ways music works in your life. I mean, obviously you don’t sit down and listen to a Luigi Nono piece every day, but I know that piece is great. You have to be in the time in your life…in the mood in your life to listen to it. It doesn’t work on every occasion. But there are certain types of music that always makes me happy to hear…’HELP’ by The Beatles or something like that, I can never get sick of hearing that record.

Other kinds of music require more of your effort, so you can’t listen to it every day.

I think the list tried to represent all of this and after all…it is only fun.

It was fun that Vanity Fair asked me to do the list and I thought it was an imaginative choice to ask me to do it. They could have done any number of people. But whether other people would have been as patient as to do 500… you know, when I got to 500 I said “Do you wanna make it a thousand?”, Costello says with a big laugh.

They know that I know a lot, yeah. I have been listening to music since I was a child and I have listened more than I have actually gone to see music. I remember reading that John Lennon said: “I like to listen to music on record rather than see people live.”
I have generally preferred people on record, although I regret that I didn’t make more effort to go and see Duke Ellington…I wish I had, but maybe I would have gone and seen a bad concert and then I would have had a different impression of him.

I saw you in Copenhagen in 1999. Why did you sing ‘Couldn’t Call it Unexpected #4’ without a microphone?

Well I love that song, I think it might be my favourite of all the songs I have written, along with ‘I Want to Vanish’. The rock’n’roll show that I used to do would always end with ‘Pump it up’ or something logical to end the excitement of a rock’n’roll show. But on that tour I wouldn’t want to give in to the impulse just to do something ‘rockish’ to end with. I wanted it to be as personal as possible, and it can’t get much more personal than giving up the one thing that separates you and the audience, which is the microphone…the fact that I am standing there singing. And I can sing loud enough to be heard in most venues. It seemed to work, because people seemed to be very affected by it.
Not only is it a beautiful song when it is sung correctly, but I find I sing it much better without the microphone..I think it’s a 19^th century melody or something.

Ehm..again it’s one of those things. I sang one of the songs at the Island Festival, Washington DC last summer with Emmy Lou Harris and it was kind of an idea of mine, that the original suite of songs that were just kind of sketchy, could be done in collaboration with other singers.

I have quite a lot of unfinished songs, but I have been so busy. I never liked to finish fast songs unless I know that they are gonna come out right away. You know, I wrote nearly all of ‘Brutal Youth’ in one day and I wrote all of the Wendy James record with my wife over a weekend. Fast songs are better when they are written quickly and then recorded and released right away. Then something like ‘The Delivery Man’ is something that you can work on at a later time…you can work on it for 10 years, try to get the right people and Emmy Lou said that she would sing with me if it came to that.

Please let me know if you enjoyed the interview: jc@elvis-costello.net