Janice Long Show – 09/10/2003
E = Elvis
J = Janice “rough & ready” Long
J: It’s probably the poshest studio he’s ever been to and he’s just come off stage at the Opera House in Newcastle, it is the one, the only, the wonderful Elvis Costello. How are you?
E: How you doing Janice? It’s good to see you.
J: It’s lovely to see you again, and in fact there I was, just a couple of seats back from you at Sold on Song the other week at the Café de Paris in London, which I have to say was a magnificent evening. Normally I’m like Do your hits and get off, you know 40 minutes is enough…. two hours and I still wanted more.
E: Well we were trying to make a good radio show and we did a few things on the night that probably won’t get heard ‘cos we wanted to make it a good evening. And there was also talk in there as well, there was Mariella Frostrop asking me questions about song writing, that’s the whole point of the show. So we illustrated things, telling a plotted history of my writing, using the concert as part of it. Steve Nieve and myself did a bunch of songs and the Brodsky Quartet came up and we did some songs together and Steve joined them. So it was quite a night.
J: It was, it was brilliant and people don’t often…I mean they might see it in print, mightn’t they, you know how you approach song writing or whatever…. but to actually hear it from the horse’s mouth. Not many people get that opportunity, do they?
E: That end of a horse I’m glad you mentioned. (JL laughing)
J: But it was a fantastic evening, obviously we’ll be reminding you when that’s coming up on Radio 2 in the next couple of weeks. I think it’s October 15th if my memory serves me right (It doesn’t. The concert will be broadcast on October 18th). So what was it like at the Opera House, did you do North?
E: We did every song from North. You know we don’t do it as one piece ‘cos it’s a lot of new songs and not everybody’s bought the record yet. We try to make a framework where it’s going to work for people…. in fact, when they gave me a vinyl copy of the record I realised I’d actually made a vinyl album for the first time in a number of years. I mean it’s a short album North, it’s only about 40 minutes, 45 minutes long and the first five songs do kind of run quite well together…they sort of tell one part of the story and then later on we come back, do the songs from North and do a couple of others, but the in-between times we’re playing songs from all over the place, from right back to the beginning of my career, other more recent things. People are surprised when they come and see Steve and I because as you know from the Sold on Song night, there’s plenty of energy in it, people think it’s gonna be just ballads and the great thing about the North songs is that they’ve extended the dynamic range towards pianissimo as you would say, towards quiet, like by about 50%. They are 50% quieter than the quietest song I’ve ever done before so people really seemed to want to listen to them, and we’ve done now seven concerts, two in New York, three in Japan and we were in Glasgow last night then Newcastle tonight. People’s attention to the songs… you can hear the songs sinking in and a lot of people are hearing them for the first time and the applause rolls up after them; we have quite a hard time actually starting the next song which is great because people are really sort of inside it, so that’s very, very encouraging.
J: It’s wonderful to hear, but it’s absolutely fascinating to watch as well you doing tracks from that album. And Steve on the piano… I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
E: Obviously the record is one thing and people get confused sometimes when they hear strings, it says certain things to some people and they can’t hear past it, they can’t hear the music anymore. Strings steal guitars, they sort of bring out a reaction in some people, but that’s not to say that I regret putting the strings and the horns on the record. I mean it’s a very spare use of the strings and horns but to strip the songs to the way they were written is something entirely different, it’s something we did with the Painted From Memory record to great effect. The songs get more edge, you find the more expressive parts; for live performance maybe they’re less pretty but there’s a rawer feeling to them and that’s what people seem to respond to. I encourage people to sit forward in their chairs ‘cos it’s like it’s not gonna get louder, it’s going to be as quiet as we intend it to be, because if you compromise that you lose a lot of what the songs have, the value – and they are songs, they don’t have hooks…
J: No they don’t, no…
E: …there are no repeated things, mainly because they are really a monologue and when you talk to somebody, or even if you’re in conversation, you say a number of things and then you might make a point at the end of a paragraph which would be like the title of one of these songs, but you don’t repeat it fifteen times which is…
J: Unless you’re drunk…
E: …unless you’re drunk… which is what you do in a pop song with a hook. So you know, it needs a little and that’s what’s happening now, as the record rolls out people have had it for a little while and are starting to understand it ‘cos it’s shaped very differently to the other songs I’ve written. I believe these are some of the best melodies I’ve written but they’re shaped so unusually, people’s first reaction can be “Where are the tunes?”
J: I was going to say what are people’s reactions?
E: People are coming up to me and really saying I’d didn’t know whether I was going to like this after When I Was Cruel… you know in Scotland they’re really kinda forthright. A couple of guys stopped me outside and a couple grabbed me by the hand, they obviously found the thing emotional and a lot of people seemed to have found it emotional even more so in concert than on record. You can’t really account for what people will be like alone, you start to get people filtering through writing to you and so forth and it does seem as if there isn’t very much between loving it and hating it. But that’s certainly the case. The reaction we got in New York City was astounding, couple of days later we were in Tokyo and you always have to account for a much more reserved reaction - for one thing people are having to make a huge effort to really understand what you’re saying and even so, the North songs in particular had a different kind of intensity to everything else in the show. So I’m just looking forward to it. We’re going throughout Europe now… we’re on the charts now everywhere in Europe with this record; England is the place that’s slowest to kind of get it. We’re the number one jazz record in America at the moment… I don’t why we’re on the jazz chart but we are the number one billboard record for the second week in a row – it’s the first number one record of my career. Actually I was pretty thrilled about that particularly because my fiancé is at number three!
J: (laughing) So you’re on top!
E: Yeah, we’ve got Aaron Neville (sp?) in-between…
J: Oh really? Interesting! Play us a tune. What are you going to do? Something from North?
E: Yeah, I’ve got a little piano here that the young lady… what’s her name, she’s coming in?
J: She’s Beth – you know you’ve made her night…
E: This is Beth’s keyboard here that I’m gonna play, attempt to play. I’ve never played one of these before so let’s hope it sounds all right.
*EC plays “Let Me Tell You About Her” on a very dodgy sounding keyboard*
J: That was just wonderful. Let Me Tell You About Her, which is on the album North, and just to let you know Elvis turned up with a guitar you see and then spotted this keyboard and went, “I could’ve brought Steve!” Is Steve tucked up in bed now, watching Sky telly in his hotel room?
(laughing)
E: Probably not. He’s probably writing a symphony.
J: Oh is he?! Oh right, okay. The next day after Sold on Song, you went straight back to the States, and I know you did… was it Letterman or Leno, one of those big shows, and you had people ringing in with requests..
E: Oh no, that is a thing called Live By Request, it’s on A&E channel, one of the big cable channels over there.
J: How many people called in?
E: I have no idea.
J: 90 million, apparently.
E: What?!
J: Somebody told me 90 million!
E: Well 90 million is only slightly less than who voted in the last election, so I don’t know about that!
J: Maybe it was 19, but a heck of amount of people…
E: Yeah, no they get a big response on that show…
J: That must be such a buzz?
E: Well it’s strange because the way they work it is you give them a big long list, I mean we did this with myself, Steve and The Imposters, and we give them a list of maybe 40 or 50 songs that we can play which means that it could’ve been anything coming up next.
J: You’re like a human jukebox?
E: Yeah, I am like a bit of a human jukebox and obviously the aim on the part of the producers of the show is to satisfy… you’re playing the well-known tunes that people might recognise and also sort of playing a few songs that are unusual requests. I think the most unusual request was the funny-voiced person came on and said, (adopts mid-Atlantic pseudo-Burt Bacharach accent) “Hello, this is Burt from Canada and I’d just like to say I’m a songwriter too and I wonder whether if there’s any chance that we might work together?” and it turned out to be Burt Bacharach.
J: Noooo!? He’d set you up?
E: He’d set me up. And all the way through it I’m standing there on national television looking bewildered, thinking It sounds a bit like Burt, it’s just a coincidence but then he said something that gave the game away, he said maybe we can write by fax, which is the way Burt and I began to compose. And there were a couple of others; another guy called in from Canada to hear the song North, there’s a song which isn’t actually on the album but it refers to Canada so they wanted to hear that one. But we did a lot of different tunes, we did All This Useless Beauty, we did Pump It Up.
J: What was the most popular?
E: I don’t know, they didn’t tell you that. There was a request for Pump It Up from Argentina because the show is actually shown in North and South America so they had calls coming in from Mexico and other parts of Latin America. Obviously I’m not so well known down there so we probably didn’t get so many calls from South America.
J: What an experience. Didn’t you actually stand in for somebody doing a chat show over there?
E: I did, I stood in for David Letterman when he was sick, and they got a bunch of different people, comedians and actors. And I’ve done the show many, many different times. I’ve probably been on the show joint most-featured musical guest and I’ve been on it in lots of different cities. I’ve played on it with The Attractions, The Imposters, on my own, with Burt Bacharach, with the Jazz Passengers and Debra Harry so they know I can do lots of different things. But what I’ve not done much of on the show is talk, funnily enough, and anyway I went in and they said do it… it was great because they didn’t allow any extra time for me to prepare whatsoever so I had to rehearse my musical number and I also had to rehearse the monologue, and I had on Eddie Izzard…
J: The new Dr. Who!
E: Yeah, and Kim Cattrall were my two guests.
J: I went to school with Kim Cattrall.
E: You did?
J: Honestly. St. Edmonds College in Liverpool.
E: I mean, she seems like a well brought up girl.
J: Yeah, I used to stay at hers every Tuesday.
E: She said some very, very rude things… well not rude, naughty. But no, she was good value, so it was kind of relatively easy going. And I had a good monologue. I’ve got a few friends who write for television so they’d ring up with suggestions. I kind of cheated, I had some ringers in my scriptwriting thing and I had the writers from the Letterman show as well so it wasn’t all that hard. I just went out there and pretended to be Eric Morecambe…
J: What, moved the glasses over did you? (laughing)
E: I didn’t quite do that but I did a couple of his moves. They’ve never seen him over there so… It was fun though.
J: Just before you do the final tune, I just wanted to mention we’re in Newcastle of course and they didn’t get the City of Culture thing.
E: No…. no, we won’t brag about which city it is…
J: No, we won’t go on about where we’re from, but I was just reading today it seems that everybody who got involved with that, they’ve not stopped. And the city here are saying culture - catalyst for growth, it’s a regional economy boost and it’s given them an initiative to build. I went to meet the mayor today and there’re loads of music projects going on and they’re really investing in the music.
E: Actually I must say that when I came here, obviously I was rooting for Liverpool to get it, as we did, but when I came here last year to play with The Imposters I thought that Newcastle would get it because it seemed impressive, their presentation and everything, and they had the new bridge and the Baltic mills thing that they turned into art galleries. That looked pretty good but every city, particularly in the north of England has got these amazing buildings which were built during the big industrial boom, and there are some glorious buildings in Liverpool, some glorious buildings here and they can be turned to other uses, turned to the arts. So much better that than some things we could be doing with them.
J: It’s great. Alright… Thank you, thank you, thank you. It’s lovely to see you again and you’re going to do another tune, aren’t you?
E: Yeah, yeah. I’m gonna do this tune… the final one on North so it’ll be the final one here. Let’s see how it goes.
*EC plays I’m In The Mood Again on same dodgy keyboard*
J: Elvis, what can I say? Gorgeous, fantastic, I’m In The Mood Again from the album once again, North. Couple of things: Give our love to Diana.
E: I will absolutely.
J: And, when you’re finished with that hat, when you’re fed up with it, put it in a Jiffy bag and post it to us - it’s gorgeous.
E: Thanks. This is a gift from Mr. Nieve I’m sporting and it’s a Japanese porkpie hat.
J: It’s fabulous, really suits you. Nice one. Thank you very, very much indeed, Elvis Costello.
E: Thank you.
For those of you who don't know who Eric Morecambe is:
