Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm delighted now to be joined by the music legend that is Elvis Costello. Welcome to the show, Elvis. How are you?
Hello, Brendan. How are you doing?
I'm great, thank you. Elvis, you're bringing your Radio Soul tour to the Ivy Gardens in Dublin on July 5th with The Impostors and Charlie Sexton. And on this tour, you're playing mostly your early songs.
Chapter 2: What can fans expect from Elvis Costello's upcoming concert in Dublin?
Tell me a bit about what people can expect from the show.
Well, a real mixture of well-known tunes and a few that have come up shining from the pile. You know, that's always the thing to be able to spring a surprise or two, a song people never imagined they would hear us play. Or maybe I put aside not realizing, hey, that's a better song than I thought it was, you know, and suddenly we're playing it and it turned into something.
So by the time we get to the Ivy Gardens, we will have shuffled all of the pieces around and thrown it all up in the air like confetti.
And you will be as tight as you were back in the day, I'm sure.
You point out that three of the people... Probably a little bit, probably, certainly closer to the microphone than I was at the Stella Cinema in Rathmines, where I got such an electrical belt off the microphone that I sang the whole show from about two feet away from the microphone to get electrocuted. I don't know.
You point out that three of the people who first recorded those songs will be playing them on this tour. It's quite something, isn't it? Even that you're still speaking nearly 50 years on.
Yeah, well, you know, you notice there's not four of us. You know, there's... Yeah, I keep reminding Pete Thomas, who's like... I never stop telling him he's three weeks older than me. He's got the same amount of years in one of my bands as Harry Carney had with Hugh Gallington. You know, it's rare for people to play together for so long. Completely uninterrupted.
But both Pete and Steve have appeared on... all but one or two records each of everything I've recorded.
But you have decided a bit, obviously, to go back to those early songs. And so when you play those songs, do you reconnect with that young you in some way?
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Chapter 3: How does Elvis Costello reconnect with his early songs during performances?
Well, he became a musician before the First War. He was actually, he was an orphan. So he was, at some point between 1906 and 1912, he was given a bugle.
and he played you know bugle and trumpet in the sort of marching band of the i guess the school band and was good at it so he was sent to the military school of music and then when war came seconded into the royal irish regiment so he was in an irish regiment albeit in the british army
It's funny then when you think of it, the way jazz came out of a lot of guys who came back from the Civil War who had their marching band instruments. Wasn't it like that's where a lot of New Orleans came from?
It's even stranger than that, Brendan. So my grandfather was without a job and all he'd ever known was institutions. And so he signed up for another job that involved uniforms and playing the trumpet, which was as a ship's musician. And so he was actually the first person in my family to come to America. But he didn't stay. He just would go back and forward on the White Star Line.
So he never really played jazz. It was my dad that came home from his service in the RAF in 1947. And he wanted to play jazz.
And so after the grandfather and the dad, were you always going to be a musician? Was that kind of destined for you, do you think?
I think I was definitely not going to be a musician really yeah at one point I think when I was a teenager I was uh you know my folks split up when I was quite young so and I think I saw the the life of music not the music itself but the life of a musician traveling as being part of that and my so you know my feeling was well maybe that's not for me you know and uh I kept
music in a very special place and and like you often are when you're a teenager you're pretty a little bit earnest even a little bit pious you know about it so precious to me that i didn't want to do anything I remember being in school and being a careers teacher, asking me what I was going to do. Was I going to go and train to be a teacher or something or join the army?
And I said, well, I'm definitely not doing the latter. So I sort of toyed with the idea of being a teacher, but I had no idea or aptitude for it. And I told him I wanted to write songs and he just laughed at me. He just thought it was a fantasist idea, that it was something he'd only do as a pastime.
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Chapter 4: What was Elvis Costello's experience like during the punk and new wave era?
But he hadn't been asked to turn up as a 10-year-old boy, had I been. I was asked to turn up as a 32-year-old guy that knew something, you know.
And how does it work? I'm curious. How does it start? Does one of you start something, yeah?
Here's the thing that I think we both of us didn't –
want there to be silence uh so we both came with half finished songs okay that's the other one to complete it so that's how we got rolling the first song that of mine of my instigation was veronica so that was a pretty good starting point and the second one that we wrote yeah and the second one was my brave face both of those were top 20 american hits
So we really thought that we were like, bloody hell, this is, you know, we're going to be like actually writing hits here because you could tell right away those were really, you know, good songs. Then we wrote a bunch more. And then we tried recording them and I had a lot of fun doing that. It was great.
You know, I got to sometimes... Elvis, is there a hierarchy there when you're in the room sitting opposite Paul McCartney? Are you honest to him about his ideas and everything?
That's okay, yeah? I saw him recently and I was saying, you know, I remember when we were trying to record some other tracks and we had a disagreement about something and I got in a bit of a snit about it and I said, I better go for a walk. And when I came back, he was singing something else that we'd written. And he was singing it so unbelievably well that I just went, okay, whatever you want.
You have it your way. I can't fight that. You know, it was just so amazing. And so we had a real time. I'm really proud of those songs.
And then you've also produced other people. You produced the Specials first album, interestingly enough. But later on, then you produced the Pogues masterpiece, I would say, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.
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