Elvis Costello: "The rock business brought a rigidity and piousness worthy of the Catholic Church"

Thursday, February 2.

Declan Patrick MacManus, aka Elvis Costello, turns on his computer camera from his Los Angeles hotel, clears his throat, and waves.

Smile.

Sip of coffee.

Then a silence of six and a half seconds that I break by evoking a day in 1998, when Costello greeted me with Burt Bacharach from the cover of the November issue of Route

magazine .

I try to explain to my interlocutor the fact that a publication that embodied a kind of

essentialism included him on its cover along with someone who for decades was considered the epitome of commercialism, even of so-called

.

That day in 1998 something changed forever in popular music.

Almost three decades of boring musical conventions die with that cover and with

, the album it promoted: a collection of songs that Bacharach composed for Costello's laboriously broken voice and that, contained in a chest that in its most complete version containing 30 tracks of studio music (most of it unreleased) and 15 more live, it arrives this month under the title

.

Didn't you feel that paradigm shift? I ask Costello, even though

wasn't his first play on the edge.

He had already flirted with light song,

and even classical music, with varying degrees of artistic and commercial success;

he had been called

, his letter of authenticity always questioned from the orthodoxy of punk and rock.

But he forges an alliance with one of the most controversial figures in popular music and it turns out that this unnatural pact no longer raises eyebrows.

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"You are aware that this orthodoxy was nothing but youthful ignorance, right?" He replies without a hair of animosity.

Are you referring to a certain fundamentalism?

"Exact.

rock'n'roll

it was born from an accidental alchemy rather than from any revolutionary vocation.

The germ of it is in heterodoxy.

But that same rock that embodied the desire for freedom of the time also became a business overnight, and with the business came rigidity of vision, devoutness, an absence of imagination worthy of the Catholic Church, of the dogmas bequeathed to us by the same sinister characters who still wield their holy book like a weapon.

You can still listen to the Stooges today and realize that that promise of freedom is still there, in their music.

You can hear the promise of freedom in Kendrick Lamar, or in Stravinsky.

Just like it goes on in Albert Ayler.

And you can clearly hear the promise of freedom in the compositional imagination and the immense scope of the work of someone like Burt Bacharach.

When you have written the bridge of

[who composed for the 1966 film], you no longer need to apologize or argue to defend your music.

The problem, if any, is with the others”.

Singer Elvis Costello believes in rock, but downplays it.

jack bool

Are "the others" the same ones who put sticks in Costello's wheels during the most fruitful years of his career?

"I suppose.

They were just a bunch of dogmatic critics.

I never even got to know them, unless one of them interviewed me.

Add to that some record executives, guys who considered me a product and trembled at the prospect of their product changing ingredients without consulting them.

Of course, the formula had to change, and with it the results, and those executives had no choice but to step up with me and pray that I knew what I was doing.

I didn't know, what was I to know, but I was dying to see where those blind sticks would take me.

Working with Burt Bacharach has been all of that and more,” he states.

And he storms against all the commonplaces that the rock

have thrown at Bacharach: “There is so much to learn from him!

It is enough to scratch the surface of trivialities related to

,

or any of the stupidities that have been associated with his music and peer into it as before pure compositions.

Listen to Bill Evans perform

And tell me if that's elevator music.

Tell it to Bill Evans himself, see what he answers you.

The way I see it, Evans put the same respect into Bacharach's piece that he used to adapt Debussy.

And it doesn't surprise me.

Bacharach is an extremist, I have used that word many times to refer to him and it seems to arouse a certain astonishment.

But I can't think of any other way to describe the uniqueness of his language."

Syncopated, regal, irresistible without compromising an inch of his budget, capable of turning his perfect

for a divorce or a cruise into immortal music, Burt Bacharach defined the sixties more than any other composer.

He did it with an almost endless list of massive hits that, in the most disparate voices, continued to sound inevitably like him:

… The conversation with Costello runs on this common premise, absent the fact that Bacharach would leave us only six days later, on February 8th.

But let's go back to the happy span of time when Burt was not only alive, but busy and exhilarated at 94, and what his duet with Costello meant.

Let no one dare, in front of Elvis Costello, describe Burt Bacharach's music as "elevator".

jack bool

“Before our collaboration I had already pushed my limits with the Brodsky Quartet and had written a dozen and a half songs with Paul McCartney,” Costello continues in Los Angeles.

“It's intimidating to work with someone whose music was with you growing up.

Those songs, particularly Burt's, go from being strange and impenetrable to moving you deeply as an adult.

I grew up surrounded by music, my mother selling records and my father singing on the radio and in dance bands.

Back in the day, bands were like

andantes

In fact, the BBC barely dedicated space to pop music, there was only one channel.

And there were all these different versions of the songs on the charts, some not very good, it's true.

But that's indicative of how much the songs mattered.

Pop did not revolve around the image and identity of the artists, but rather the compositions.

And that's how Burt Bacharach became so popular in England.

The announcer or the band's vocalist would announce: 'And now, a new song by Burt Bacharach.'

That was probably the first name of a composer that I heard in my life”.

Costello lights up evoking those crucial years for his learning.

“In the UK, his songs became hits in the voices of British artists.

Zoot Money did

, Billy J. Kramer did

, of course The Beatles did

.

I am sure that it happened in a similar way in Spain and France.

In addition, there was that peculiarity of their rhythms that made them irresistible in all latitudes.

They had an unmistakable Latin flavor, of Colombia, Mexico, the Antilles, but you couldn't inscribe them in a specific tradition.

The Brazilian influence had already reached him through jazz and Getz and Jobim records, but you couldn't say that it was bossa, or cumbia, or joropo.

On the other hand, I have often asked him if his songs from the early 60s did not have a very marked influence from the

.

For example: you don't need to sing it in French, just sing it with a French accent and you'll understand what I'm saying.

They have that sense of drama of the first Becaud or of the great reciters and troubadours of the

such as Aznavour or Prevert.

Burt worked as Marlene Dietrich's arranger for years, so he had time to absorb that sort of dramatic pulse brought into the song.

La Dietrich was far from being a technical performer of the Dionne Warwick type, but instead she became an extraordinary storyteller on stage.

She was hypnotic… ”.

When Burt Bacharach visited Spain for the second time, in 2009, to give two unique and unforgettable concerts in Malaga and Madrid, half a century had passed since the first, in July 1960, accompanying Marlene Dietrich.

He then had time to talk briefly with a few lucky ones —among whom I was— about the undeniable scenic virtues of the German star.

He was much more discreet, yes, when commenting on her alleged romance with her or the legends about the incendiary character of her diva.

Dietrich herself, for her part, spared no praise for the figure of Bacharach, “the man who made me a singer.

I never got over his game.

With him I lost my support, my director, my teacher”.

In 1998, Costello's career was at a sweet spot.

He had known massive success in the 1980s, survived perfect storms (a series of

, subtly alluding to his late-1970s and periodically resurrected racial controversies), and now could afford to play on the fringes with credit.

“It continues to amaze me that Burt was open and willing to have a musical collaboration.

He was the age I am now when we first worked together.

For my part, I had to learn very quickly.

It is true that there are moments in my previous works that can foreshadow that something like this could be possible, but I still feel lucky that they thought of both for that film.

It refers to

(Allison Anders, 1996), whose soundtrack includes

, the first and perhaps still today the most popular of their joint compositions.

“It's like the baseball cards on cigarettes.

Anyone would say that my sticker and Burt's sticker could never appear on the same pack of cigarettes, right?

And yet the producers saw it, they understood that we could work together.

After that, it would have been crazy to stop there…”.

Elvis Costello poses for ICON in Los Angeles.

jack bool

Costello actually met Bacharach a few years earlier in Hollywood, by chance, while he was recording his

album .

“It was a real charm.

He listened to me and paid attention to some fragments with which I felt stuck, despite the fact that there was an ocean between his compositions and mine.

I found a way to get along with him.

My affection dates from then."

Now a quarter of a century has passed, but the songs are still there.

“

is one of the most remembered, but I adore

.

And, in particular, the version of

included in

”.

Costello is referring to the second disc of the reissue, a painstaking reconstruction of Chuck Lorre and Steven Sater's failed Broadway musical project based on the couple's compositions and featuring contributions from Cassandra Wilson, Bill Frisell, Don Byron and Jenni Muldaur, among others.

“

is also a good example of what we did together.

Barbra Streisand told me that for a time she considered recording it.

You imagine?

It's like when they told me that David Bowie was considering recording

[Robert Wyatt's 1982 hit whose lyrics Costello signed].

Knowing it is enough for me, I don't need more, I can hear them in my head with their voices.

I was blessed with a good imagination.”

What is the real Costello?

The humble songwriter, moved by the prospect of two stars like Streisand and Bowie recording his creations?

Is it the awkward and foul-mouthed character or the likeable

with horn-rimmed glasses and a

hat ?

Is the audacious composer, the vitriolic writer, the character on

, owning his own animated doll from the series?

“Well, they are not things that one can plan.

And they don't come from infused science either, sometimes they are the result of a lot of work.

Others, from mere clumsiness”.

Returns to Bacharach: “In September 2021 we were back together in the studio to record the remaining pieces of

.

We had arrangers and a conductor, but the man in charge was definitely Burt.

He wouldn't let one pass.

There is something in his melodies, you think you have heard a note, logic also tells you that it is that note, but it is not, it is another.

And Burt missed no opportunity to point it out to me.

It became a running joke.

The band loved to see how I put myself in my place.

A good part of the takes were recorded live in the studio, as if we were in 1963, with very few additions, perhaps a few choirs or a flourish of guitar.

And there we were, Burt at the piano and the Imposters, the same musicians who recorded Lipstick Vogue with me, sharing that moment.

I guess that's what it's all about."

Elvis Costello's tour

will

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