The New Yorker Radio Hour
From the Archive: Elvis Costello Talks with David Remnick
Wed, 18 Dec
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Elvis Costello’s thirty-first studio album, “Hey Clockface,” will be released this month. Recorded largely before the pandemic, it features an unusual combination of winds, cello, piano, and drums. David Remnick talks with Costello about the influence of his father’s career in jazz and about what it’s like to look back on his own early years. They also discuss “Fifty Songs for Fifty Days,” a new project leading up to the Presidential election—though Costello disputes that the songs are political. “I don’t have a manifesto and I don’t have a slogan,” he says. “I try to avoid the simplistic slogan nature of songs. I try to look for the angle that somebody else isn’t covering.” But he notes that “the things that we are so rightly enraged about, [that] we see as unjust . . . it’s all happened before. . . . I didn’t think I’d be talking with my thirteen-year-old son about a lynching. Those are the things I was hearing reported on the news at their age.” Costello spoke from outside his home in Vancouver, B.C., where a foghorn is audible in the background.This segment originally aired on October 16, 2020.
What is the significance of Elvis Costello's new album 'Hey Clockface'?
Well, we also dug up one of the earliest recordings of you, where you're singing backup vocals for your dad. It's the theme music for a soda company. I think it's called Secret Lemonade Drinker. It's wonderful, yeah. We're doing the background voices on it. It was my first paid recording session.
I'm a secret lemonade drinker. All right. That's not bad at all.
Well, here's the weird thing, isn't it, about the Elvis name is my dad is affecting this Elvis inflection. Exactly. He's a very good mimic and he could do comic mimicry like that. And that's why I had such a rich record collection, because every week you would get given a stack of hit parade singles because this dance band just played the hit parade.
It's hard for Americans to understand, but we didn't have the 24 hour pop radio that you all had. And everything was decoded through a series of other interpretations. So you would hear these very bizarre versions of The Four Tops or The Who played by a Glenn Miller-style swing band with a guy who was – A really elderly guy who was like 35. You know, my dad was about 35 when he was doing this.
You know, it seemed really weird, but that was the way I saw music first. I would go to the dance hall with him on a Saturday afternoon. I'd go to the radio broadcast when school schedule would allow it. which was get there at 8 in the morning and watch a bunch of musicians smoke cigarettes and scratch themselves until it was time to go on the BBC and play an hour-long show with guest singers.
And those guest singers could be anybody from the Hollies to Engelbert Humperdinck. But it was a glimpse, and it took away some of the mystique, but it also made me realize this strange exchange between the mundanity of the workaday job and the magic when the light went on.
Elvis, you've done a new project called 50 Songs for 50 Days. And these are political songs, a lot of them. What role does music play in politics for you?
I never think of it as political in the sense because I don't have a manifesto and I don't have a slogan other than I might have the title of the song, but I try to avoid the simplistic slogan nature in songs. I try to always look for the angle that somebody else isn't covering because there's other people doing the other thing really well. It's the same with the heartfelt love song.
The heartfelt love song is something that other people can carry off. From the get-go, I always thought, well, maybe that's not my job. I don't have the matinee idle looks to carry off that. So maybe I'll go the other way. And that's what I did. And with this, I think of it like an installation. That's the way I referred to it. Like you would do an art installation.
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