02.20.2020
WHEN KEYBOARD WORLDS COLLIDE: STEVE NIEVE & BENMONT TENCH IN CONVERSATION
Variety: Chris Willman: February 17th 2020
The Rock and Roll Hall of Famers from Elvis Costello’s and Tom Petty’s bands discuss their respective styles and mutual admiration society.
It’s only natural that the two greatest band keyboard players in the annals of rock would have formed a mutual admiration society. These would be Steve Nieve, of Elvis Costello & the Attractions and later the Imposters, and Benmont Tench, of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers fame.
There are other contenders for the aforementioned accolade, of course — other non-slouches include the Band’s Garth Hudson, who’s one of Tench’s oft-mentioned heroes, and the two E Street Band keyboardists, for starters — but Tench and Nieve really have very little competition when it comes to players with a signature style in Rock & Roll Hall of Fame groups who also, incidentally, proved capable of playing just about anything and everything outside of those bands.
In what counted as a historic musical summit meeting, Nieve and Tench recently performed together publicly for the first time, doing “four-handed piano” at a gig by the former at L.A.’s Largo club. The occasion was a local stop on one of his very occasional “Steve Nieve Plays Elvis Costello” tours (another leg of which will hit the States later this year), in which it turns out the songs by his frontman of nearly 45 years can be just as magnifique when Nieve, who now resides in Paris, returns here to play them sans band. But the Imposters, sans Costello, did sit in for part of the Largo gig, and it wasn’t just Elvis’ material being played — it was a mixture of both their boss/muses’ work, with “American Girl” and “Learning to Fly” sitting in the set alongside “Oliver’s Army” and a piano-driven “Pump It Up.”
Both are Hall of Famers, but Nieve just joined the Grammy owners’ club for the first time, as Elvis Costello and the Imposters’ “Look Now” got him his first of those trophies. Says Nieve, “Burt Bacharach, Anne Sophie Von Otter, Squeeze, Madness, Vanessa Paradis, Sting, Bowie, Elvis — working with all these artists is so f—ing special, and helps me to receive happily this award without feeling I’m an Imposter.”
Variety sat down with Nieve and Tench before their Largo gig recently to commemorate the meeting of minds and fingertips.