Elvis Costello

85?

Even RTE had me on because I was on Self Aid as well.

Yeah.

I sang, for some reason, I decided to sing Many Rivers to Cross by Jimmy Cliff.

I just figured it was a good song that everybody could feel, yeah, we've got to do better, you know.

I mean, the reason I sang All You Need Is Love at Live Aid was because I didn't think any of my songs suited the occasion, you know.

And, well, they didn't, you know, couldn't get up there in his army or, you know, even peace, love and understanding.

There's been times, as you can imagine, recently where I've had occasion to sing that or even been asked to sing it on a show.

And I've thought, isn't it slightly in bad taste right now?

You know, because it's sort of self-evident that peace and love and understanding are, you know, as much as we wish they were what everybody wanted.

There's a lot of people that don't want it.

I mean, it's not the reason not to sing songs like that, but I've got lots of other songs as well.

That's the good thing about writing a lot of songs from a different point of view, that you don't get stuck with just one answer to the question.

You know, what do you feel about this?

Well, which version of it would you like?

You know, the version that's in the song Shipbuilding that I wrote for Robert Wyatt, that's about...

what conflict gives to a community it gives work but it gives you work to send your kids away to be shot at you know or shoot people yeah all of it i mean in a way it was about the same thing it's a repeated story and if you come from a background like mine where i have grandfathers who fought in the first war you know that that should have been enough lesson but it clearly wasn't

He was.

I would say he was in the sense that he was actually born in Birkenhead, but he was full-blooded Irish, yeah.

Well, he became a musician before the First War.