Elvis Costello interview: ‘At this rate, I’ll soon be in Skegness doing Mother Goose’

The super busy septuagenarian on facing mortality, how he writes his songs, learning languages and the threat of artificial intelligence

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Elvis Costello turned 70 in August. “I didn’t panic,” says the newly septuagenarian punk. “As I get older, my main reaction is surprise that I’ve made it this far.”  Drummer Pete Thomas, who has played with Costello since 1977, turned 70 that same month. “Pete is three weeks older than me, and he was a little blue about it. I said, ‘Do you know what’s worse than having a birthday? Not having a birthday.’ Think about all the folks we’ve known who are not around, people we love, not just the parental generation but our generation. So how could you be anything other than pleased about another birthday, you know?”Costello is in typically loquacious form, peering at me through prescription sunglasses, words spilling a mile a minute, hands gesturing, head bobbing. He is speaking via Zoom from Vancouver, where he lives with jazz pianist wife Diana Krall and their twin 17-year-old sons. Costello had a health scare in 2018, undergoing an operation for a “cancerous malignancy” but made a full recovery. “You couldn’t do what I did if you were not in robust health. Take a look at my schedule. I mean, it would kill a horse, you know.”Costello has been busy. This year, he has toured with longstanding keyboard player Steve Nieve, premiered his first full theatrical musical A Face In The Crowd at the Young Vic in September, released an expansive box set of 1986 album King of America with 82 extra tracks and this week releases an album with US producer T Bone Burnett as The Coward Brothers, with 20 new songs. It is accompanied by a wackily amusing Audible series, The True Story of the Coward Brothers, scripted by and starring Costello. Just don’t call it a podcast. “I will not utter the dread P word. A radio play is what it is,” insists Costello. “But Audible don’t like that kind of language. So I call it a Wireless Address, and that’s where we’ve agreed to disagree.”Since his 1977 debut My Aim Is True, Costello has written hundreds of songs (670 are listed on Wikipedia, though the composer insists “I’ve never kept count!”), released 34 studio albums plus assorted soundtracks and collaborations (including a classical ballet and “half an opera”), whilst keeping up a vigorous touring schedule. “People think I live in a gated community with my pet iguana, but God damn, I work all the time because I have to. I’m lucky that it’s a job I enjoy, and I’ve got good cohorts.”
Costello first emerged as part of the punk generation, evincing a punchy new wave style that brought him a dozen hit singles but says “I’ve been out of the pop music business for 40 years. A lot of people think there’s nothing past Oliver’s Army (no 2 in 1979), or they just didn’t hear it.” He asserts indifference to his public standing. “I’m not sentimental, and I’m the least nostalgic person you’ll ever meet. I don’t want to go back. I lived it once, that was quite enough, thank you.” He insists the extent of his ambition is finding creative ways for his songs to exist, in shows and on records. “Evocation is different to nostalgia, and if that means turning songs inside out sometimes to find something new, that’s what I’ll do.”He remains prolific but is unsentimental about the process. He quotes the 1961 Tony Hancock film the Rebel, where the comedian has a delusion that he is a great artist (“something I share,” quips Costello). When critics ask how he mixes his paint, Hancock replies ‘in a bucket with a big stick.’ “I sort of feel the same way about songs. How do I write so many songs? In a bucket with a big stick! It’s not an intellectual exercise. You would have the wrong pigeon if you wanted intellectual, because I barely have any education. I left school at 17, I haven’t read many books, but I do know a lot of Louvin Brothers songs.”His vast lyrical vocabulary is something he ascribes to his father, big band singer Ross MacManus. “My mother really raised me, but my dad’s influence was to arrive periodically with his latest enthusiasm, whether it was a Charles Mingus record or a book of poetry by Yeats which he thought I should read, and I did. But I’m not complimented when people say ‘Oh, you’re very poetic.’ If I wanted to be a poet, I’d be a lot more disciplined.”
Conversation with Costello is entertainingly erratic. He has a tendency to ignore questions and careen down adjacent alleys, zigzagging through diverse subjects as if following a thread only he can detect. Talking about his love of language, he starts telling me about how he once tried to learn Italian. “I had quite a big vocabulary for a learner, but no grammar, and my pronunciation was terrible. I tried to introduce the song Rocking Horse Road in Italian, and confidently said ‘the name of this song is the Swinging Cabbage,’ because the words for horse and cabbage are only a syllable away. So much from my suave European chanteur image.”Costello says his songs are personal but not confessional. “Everything I do is governed by emotion, and if other people can’t sense that, then maybe It’s my reluctance to make it more obvious. I find some confessional music indulgent. It has a misplaced confidence in how interesting it is to hear about people’s rawest experiences in real time. The most confessionally impressive songwriters” (his examples include John Lennon, Joni Mitchell, Taylor Swift and “the Bob Dylan of Blood on the Tracks”) “have a degree of craftsmanship that informs their account of emotional events. They don’t just assume that unedited emotion is enough, because it frankly isn’t.”
At 70, he has seen a lot of changes in how music is made and consumed. If he was starting out now, I wonder what kind of musician he might become? “Strictly speaking, I don’t think I’m a musician now, after all these years,” he guffaws. “That’s not false modesty. I wouldn’t get hired to be in anybody else’s band, put it that way. I’m a writer who uses music as the carriage to get the things over. If I was starting now, perhaps I would be less encouraged.”He thinks the age of streaming has made it harder to spot original talent. “You have to be a sharp needle in a big haystack. That’s the problem with endless amounts of tracks, endless options, endless mixes, endless releases. As far as I can tell, major companies have got rid of all the creative people and just literally attend to the mechanics of how to release things.”There has been controversy about AI programs composing lyrics and music, but Costello is cheerfully dismissive of notions that they could impact his own songcraft. “Nobody wants to be me anyway, so I don’t see them conceiving of an algorithm that’s specifically trying to track me down. That ain’t gonna happen. There’s no money in it! Trust me on that. I live in a different universe to AI. So they can get on with that whole fantasy – get on your rocket ship and don’t f—ing come back!”He contributed songs to Conor McPherson’s play Cold War at the Almeida Theatre in 2023 and saw his own musical debut at the Young Vic this year. “One of the ways to make songs coherent for people is to have some sort of narrative,” he suggests. “Who knows what the future holds? I’d like to do a musical version of (John Osborne’s) The Entertainer. I’m old enough now, I could play Archie. I could actually play his dad! But I don’t know how much deeper I want to get into the English theatre world. Heaven knows, I might be in a pantomime by next Christmas. At this rate, I’ll be in Skegness doing Mother Goose!”
The Coward Brothers is released by New West Records tomorrow. The True Story of the Coward Brothers premieres on Audible the same day. King of America & Other Realms is out now.  
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