11.02.2020
ELVIS COSTELLO: ‘I DIDN’T EXPECT TO BE DISCUSSING A TELEVISED LYNCHING WITH MY 12-YEAR-OLD BOYS OVER DINNER IN 2020’
Independent: Mark Beaumont: 31st October 2020.
The beloved British raconteur is back with a new album exploring the current era of selfishness, self-righteousness and xenophobia. But where we are is nothing new, he tells Mark Beaumont
With an almost wistful lilt, the bon vivant of British post-punk reminisces fondly about the riots. “The one in Belgium,” Elvis Costello recalls of one night at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels in 1978, when the crowd turned against New York support act Suicide, and he and his band The Attractions took the stage with an unholy vengeance, “we came on with the attitude of ‘f*** you for treating them like that’, played a furious, incoherent 20 minutes and that just tipped everybody right over the edge, then it was a full-on riot. I give Alan [Vega, Suicide’s provocative singer] the credit. He lit the Molotov cocktail, I hurled it over the wall. One night we walked off and turned the whole PA into white noise to drive people out of the gig, no encore. We were just being young idiots.” He ponders this for a moment. “The Young Idiot – that’s gonna be the name of my next book.”
As new wave’s angriest young man, Costello rampaged through the late Seventies with a besuited bravado and sardonic sneer, lobbing arch lyrical bombs at Chelsea punk fashionistas, fascists and despotic, imperialist power figures. Four decades later, at 66, this Zelig-like elder statesman of literate, cultured rock, revered man of letters and dabbler in the higher arts – on the phone from his Canadian lockdown to discuss his 31st album Hey Clockface – no longer exudes the biting antagonism of his early days.
His live shows, though still often ferocious, barbed and untamed, can take on a more inclusive and intimate tone. Take his carnival-style Spectacular Spinning Songbook tours, at which audience members were invited onstage to spin a wheel marked with 40 Costello songs and timeless classics to decide the setlist. Or his nostalgic Evening With… style residency at the London Palladium in 2016, for which he played inside a giant 1950s TV and regaled audiences with tales of his roots in the plush northern dancehalls.