Elvis Costello

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety two, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a musician. Widely regarded as one of the best British songwriters of recent years, he comes from a musical family. Both his grandfather and father were trumpeters. He taught himself to play the guitar, left school at eighteen and went to work for the Midland Bank. Eventually in 1976 he signed up with a record company and first alone and then with his band The Attractions had a series of hits including Watching the Detectives, This Year's Model and Oliver's Army.

Presenter0:59

His brush with Pop Stardom, he says, has not proved fatal, and he continues to be successful, working with Paul McCartney and co writing the music for Alan Bleasdale's television series GB H, among other things. He is Declan McManus, otherwise known as Elvis Costello.

Presenter1:15

Shall we deal with the name first? What happened to Declan McManus in all this?

Elvis Costello1:19

Well, as you just illustrated, it's a rather difficult name to say, particularly over the telephone.

Elvis Costello1:24

All the way through school I ha I was tortured by teachers imitating

Elvis Costello1:28

the sound of uh somebody twanging elastic bands when saying my name. It found uh it proved equally difficult over the phone when dealing with record company people when I was trying to get my tapes listened to. And so I adopted my great grandmother's name, Costello, as you would say in in Ireland, or Costello.

Elvis Costello1:44

as people there said it here. And uh somewhere along the way the gentleman who became my manager, and still is, Jack Riviera, just announced one day I was going to be Elvis, and it seemed

Elvis Costello1:54

In the time that it was 76, 77, just the kind of crazy thing that would probably d keep people's attention.

Elvis Costello2:02

And we had no idea how long that attention might be.

Presenter2:04

Didn't you feel a bit daft suddenly at the age of twenty three asking people to call you Elvis?

Elvis Costello2:09

There was a sort of dare element to it, you know. It there was a form of bravado in c in suddenly expecting that and it was somewhat shocking to s in some people's minds. And also then Elvis unfortunately died at that time and it became a little bit controversial for a while and it gave me a very good estimation of how serious the the music industry and the media could be in that, you know, within a couple of days of Elvis passing away.

Elvis Costello2:33

We had American T V companies trying to get me on the station when they had no idea of my music, simply to prolong the story of his death a little bit longer by having this novelty idea. So it it it it heightened my sense of contempt for elements of the media which was already in the background.

Presenter2:48

So, here we go. We're casting you away to this remote and deserted island. What do you think your chances of surviving are?

Elvis Costello2:54

Well, I'd like to think that the island would maybe be off Archangel or somewhere like that. I'm not very keen on the hot weather, but then I'd be faced with the prospect of having to kill animals for their skin, and I wouldn't really relish that. So I suppose I'll have to settle for maybe a temperate island.

Elvis Costello3:10

Beyond that I think I I'd do her right.

Presenter3:12

Were you constantly on your own you wouldn't sink into the depths of despair.

Elvis Costello3:15

Yes, but I don't think that's unhealthy. I do that anyway, even now.

Presenter3:19

Has that influenced then your choice of your eight records?

Elvis Costello3:22

Yeah, I think that it influenced the choice, particularly in the records that I didn't choose, because the if I had chosen what would actually be, say, my favorite eight songs, if such a list could even exist, because it changes minute to minute, uh it would be such a depressing experience that perhaps I I wouldn't be so resilient.

Presenter3:40

And the first one is

Elvis Costello3:41

The first one is the scherzo from the last Beethoven Quartet.

Elvis Costello3:45

The whole piece contains a whole variety of music. It's a very seems to to my mind to be

Elvis Costello3:51

The beginning of a very personal expression in music that perhaps wasn't there to the same degree before this piece. And this particular movement is full of.

Elvis Costello4:01

vitality and and humour, and I think you could put this on and run around in the sand uh or skate around on the ice to it.

Presenter5:04

Part of the scherzo from Beethoven's String Quartet, Opus A Hundred and Thirty Five, played by the Brodsky Quartet.

Presenter5:10

So it was nineteen seventy six. You were twenty three. You'd become Elvis Costello, and you released your first single, Less Than Zero, which was about Oswald Moseley, the leader of the British Fascists. Why did you choose him for a theme?

Elvis Costello5:23

I saw him on T V, uh, you know, in his last ugly days and

Elvis Costello5:28

It just made me annoyed the way it was handled. It wasn't so much him. I mean, his the danger of him, I think, had been passed a fairly certainly long before I was born.

Presenter5:36

It was a documentary about

Elvis Costello5:37

No, it was an interview with him and it seemed rather apologetic. Uh the fact that he was even on, you wouldn't have Hitler on to you know, I'm not saying he did anything as terrible as Hitler, but given the chance he may well have done.

Elvis Costello5:47

An M

Elvis Costello5:49

It it seemed like a good subject for a song, and maybe slightly unlikely, but

Elvis Costello5:53

That that was the whole point of wanting to start.

Elvis Costello5:56

to get my songs in front of people.

Presenter5:58

And obviously there have been many other political statements since shipbuilding was about the Falklands, and then there was that really very vicious personal attack on Mrs. Thatcher, wasn't there? Tramp the Dirt Down, and Pills and Soap, which is an attack on tabloid papers.

Presenter6:13

Really, the question is, how important are those issues to you? Do they go on being important or are they just an inspiration of a moment?

Elvis Costello6:21

I think they're the release valve.

Elvis Costello6:23

They're they're the expression of your frustration and the impotence that mo most everybody feels in the face of some of the more terrible things in life. And being able to write songs about them certainly provides a little bit of solace from the the darker feelings that you have, certainly in the view of Tramp the Dirt Down song.

Presenter6:41

But is there a danger in taking what you write about too literally? I mean, aren't you in a sense using subjects, as I say, for inspiration? And and they're they're useful in that moment, and they do mean something in that moment, but perhaps one shouldn't believe that they are

Presenter6:56

Very important to you.

Elvis Costello6:57

No, you should believe. They're very important. I mean everything I say.

Presenter7:01

So you are, as one critic has written to you, full of disgust, duplicity, revenge, and a kind of soiled tenderness.

Elvis Costello7:10

Well, I hadn't noticed. I'll check my clothes in case there's any of that soil tenderness here in my inside pocket. But you know.

Presenter7:15

But there you are. You see, you have a humor that perhaps doesn't always come over in those songs when you

Elvis Costello7:17

That perhaps doesn't always come.

Elvis Costello7:19

I think it's come over in other work and people obviously will try and pigeonhole you and it's very convenient to have a little tagline and in a way it proves the force with which you got your initial point over. But if you're going to be limited to that of course it it it would make for a very short career and it would make for a very dull life walking around in a funk, you know, like the old curmudgeon of the hills. So I find that I occasionally have to do things to upset those preconceptions a little bit.

Presenter7:48

Record number two.

Elvis Costello7:50

Record number two is um

Elvis Costello7:52

My Frank Sinatra, I've got you under my skin.

Elvis Costello7:55

This is probably the first song that I can remember, although really I think my memory has been prompted slightly by my mother, who tells me that I requested it before I could talk properly. I got the word skin from the title of I've Got You Under My Skin and insist on it being played. Now this sounds a little bit romantic, I know, but it's a record that I keep coming back to. I was at a party when I was in the first flush of success in pop music and some art student type came up to me and wanted a quotation from a song from me. And I think he imagined I would give him something by the Sex Pistols or something. It was in America and they imagined that we had the secret to everything. And I quoted the bridge of I've Got You Under My Skin, you know, wake up to reality, use your mentality. And he wouldn't believe me that it was Cole Porter. There you go. And I also think, from a musical point of view, that the note that Sinatra hits on Don't in Don't You Know Little Fool the Second Time He Comes In, is supernatural.

Speaker 48:53

But you know little fool, you never can win.

Speaker 48:59

Why not use your mentality? Step up, wake up to reality.

Speaker 49:07

But each time I do just the thought of you makes me stop just before I begin Cause I've got you

Speaker 49:19

Under my skin

Speaker 49:23

Yes, I

Presenter9:24

Frank Sinatra, and I've got you under my skin.

Presenter9:27

You write, Elvis Costello, pop songs, rock music, ballads, theme music, and so on, all sorts of contemporary music, which appears to have all different kinds of influences on it, whether it's soul or big band or flamenco or baroque. Have you always had such a varied, such an eclectic taste?

Elvis Costello9:44

Well, I don't know really. I I think it's mainly comes down to my parents' background. My my mother sold records from the time she left school.

Elvis Costello9:52

And she ran record departments. At a time when being a record salesperson was more akin to being a librarian than being a check-out person in a supermarket, you know, you had to know catalogue numbers, you had to know the comparative versions of different pieces of music, you had to take the 78 records into the audition booth and put them on for honoured clients, you know.

Presenter10:14

So did she bring lots of records home for you to hear?

Elvis Costello10:16

Well, um she has very eclectic taste and there were there were just a lot of records, different kinds of records around. My father has a broad interest in music, Irish music, South American music.

Elvis Costello10:27

Classical music like the Bach passion, Matthew Passion he would play.

Presenter10:30

He was a trumpeter with Joe Loss.

Elvis Costello10:31

With Jolos. Yeah, initially he was a trumpet player in Birkenhead. And when my parents came south, he was like a modern jazz bebop player. But inevitably, there wasn't too much money in that. When I came along, he took a big band job and gradually went from being a trumpet vocalist to being a vocalist. And as long as I could remember as a child, the music in the house was divided between the music that was listened to for pleasure and songs, not all of which he probably would have chosen himself, which he was obliged to sing as one of the featured vocalists in the Jolos Orchestra.

Presenter11:02

Music was your passion. Did you imagine it would be your life?

Elvis Costello11:06

Not always. I think when I was a kid, I think because I saw all the things that my dad had to do, it sometimes seemed like quite a job, not necessarily so romantic. There were times when it was incredibly exciting. He appeared as one of the singers with Joe Loss in, I think, the 64 Royal Command performance the year the Beatles were on. And that was a sort of confirmation to me that my dad was really in a serious job. He was on with my heroes. I knew it before then, of course, but that was very exciting. Other times I'd go along with him and you could see it was a slog. You could see that it wasn't all glamour. There was the orchestra in the old woolies, nine in the morning at the Playhouse Theatre. So in a way, it was very exciting, but it also took away some of the mystery.

Presenter11:30

I'll be the

Presenter11:34

Yeah.

Presenter11:51

Some more music.

Elvis Costello11:53

Well this is a recording of my father singing. It was a record that Jolos made of Glenn Miller music. The sound of the Jolos Orchestra was very much modelled on Miller and they did this record and I thought it would be very nice to have a recording of my father singing. There aren't that many records of him singing. I think they do him justice, but I think this does. This is At Last.

Speaker 412:22

As

Speaker 412:24

My love has come along

Speaker 412:31

My lonely days are over.

Speaker 412:37

And life is like a song

Presenter12:44

Ross McManus singing At Last with Joe Loss and his orchestra.

Elvis Costello12:49

Yes, he does, yes. He still sings.

Elvis Costello12:52

Still, you know, still works harder than me.

Presenter12:53

Film works hard.

Presenter12:54

Have you seen it?

Elvis Costello12:54

And people still come up to me and tell me these are better singing than me, and I and I agree.

Presenter12:58

So how come if you were so enamoured with all this world of show business as you say you were, how come you ended up working in a bank?

Elvis Costello13:04

Yeah.

Elvis Costello13:06

Well, I I stayed in school. I had picked up the guitar. I learnt I taught myself to play. You know, I I got the song book out and worked my way through Beatles songs and so forth, learning more and more chords and playing to my own satisfaction and then started to write. But it's a big jump from that to actually being able to go and start the times. I was living with my mother in Liverpool by then. It was early 70s. Liverpool's music scene was non-existent at that point. They'd had all the excitement in the sixties with the Beatles and all the other Mersey groups. There wasn't a lot happening. It was very hard to just jump in.

Presenter13:38

So the bank was a means to an end. How did you get on that?

Elvis Costello13:40

I just left school. I just got in I worked in a computer place for a while, you know, nothing very glamorous, just putting up tapes on those big machines like the Billion Dollar Brain, one of those places, a huge big computer center. And then I transferred back I came back to India to live in London and I live with my father again. And I worked in branch banking, which I was a total disaster in that. It was still quite Dickenzie and computers hadn't really taken hold in the branches and everything was done by hand and ledgers had to be filled and you had to go down into the bowels of the bank in Putney and with all these dusty ledgers and fill in books and little old ladies come in every week to see how much money they're interested accrued and

Elvis Costello14:19

so forth and I was asked to stand outside the branch with a whistle when they delivered the bullion in case of a robbery, you know, and I used to th I got to thinking that, hang on, you know, if there's a robbery, uh they're not going to shoot the the person with the money, they shoot the guy with the whistle first, you know, nearly every time. And uh so I realized that wasn't for me and by then I'd started to make some sort of roads into semi-professional playing.

Presenter14:42

Record number four.

Elvis Costello14:43

Record number four is Mozart. This I suppose is uh just to tie up the the way in which music comes back from from the seed that's sown when you're very young. Um my mother particularly

Elvis Costello14:55

Not only does she sell records, but she also worked as a part-time usher at the Film I Call in Liverpool. And to this day I'll say I've oh, I've discovered some great old recording of Beethoven by Arthur Schnabel or something. She said, Oh, well I saw him, of course, you know Um and she took me to a concert, um, I th believe it was uh the Vrandenburg Concerto Park, when I was very little. Probably I was quite restive, you know, but but and sh she ha got me a few little records of

Elvis Costello15:19

some of the simpler pieces of classical music that you try and attract children with a and I I kept them and I went back to them. And over the years I I'd have particular curiosities about different classical composers, but did always imagine that

Elvis Costello15:32

as I the music that I made myself was so different to that that certain types of music were just closed to me, you know, that that it was a a stuffy world and all of the idiotic things that you might assume.

Elvis Costello15:43

And then a few years ago, I suppose, because of the sheer volume of music that I've listened to in a brief you know, I'm only thirty seven, it's not that long a life, I I got disenchanted particularly with live performance. I love records, I've I've never really liked live performance. And over the next couple of years, both my wife and I have discovered particular performers through whom

Elvis Costello16:03

The music has opened up and the particular singer that I'd like to play is a young Italian mazzo-soprano, Giucile Battoli, who's now becoming very celebrated. But we read about her somewhere, bought the record almost out of curiosity, and found that music like Rossini and particularly this Mozart piece just came to life and it's full of energy and all of the things that I'm sure were intended in the original composition. It's not under layers of dust. It's not in a glass case to be admired. It's there and it jumps out at you with the same excitement as a great record by Tony Bennett or a great record by Elvis Presley. And it's witty and it's sexy.

Speaker 416:44

And some of you got a soul goes a patch. When they don't think of all right, when they don't be falling, oh yeah.

Speaker 416:55

Even your money for the living

Speaker 417:00

Oh, it will be the money.

Speaker 417:11

This you, there's young bosses begins.

Speaker 417:29

Let me go, let me go, let me go.

Speaker 417:37

Yeah.

Elvis Costello17:39

I think that piece, you would probably need that piece on on the island anyway, but it does contain the lines, If I've none to hear me, I speak of love to myself, you know, so I think.

Presenter17:49

Uh

Presenter17:50

Yeah.

Elvis Costello17:50

It's it's very apt.

Presenter17:52

That was Titilia Bartoli singing part of the aria non so pu cosa son from Act one of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Daniel Barenbohm. How easily does it flow? Do you sit down and think, Right, I'm going to knock off a couple of songs now?

Elvis Costello18:06

Not really. I mean, I can do that. Uh uh it but only if people uh ask for them or something. Uh I'm very I'm pretty good at

Elvis Costello18:14

Writing to order, if the person who's asked for the song is inspiring. I mean, if it's somebody I really admire, like a Johnny Cash.

Elvis Costello18:21

He asked for a song, I wrote it the next day. Uh I have had a few quite well known people who probably, you know, if they'd recorded the songs would have made me quite a bit of money, and I've not managed to come up with anything for them before the deadline passed.

Presenter18:32

So you get an idea it's the words, then, first?

Elvis Costello18:35

Not always. Not always. More and more I write music. I write a lot of music without any thought of whether it'll even be songs, because in working in collaboration on GBH with Richard Harvey, I was able to draw on a lot of pieces of music which I had just come up with and just put to one side that didn't seem as if they led to songs. I I write a lot at the piano and very recently I decided that I would put aside the pretense of amateurism and actually learn to read music. So now I'm studying twice a week.

Elvis Costello19:05

with a teacher formal notation so that I'm able to convey my ideas to a greater variety of musicians.

Presenter19:10

But it's obviously a an impressive facility that you have. Do you worry that it might suddenly desert you?

Elvis Costello19:16

I was a little concerned when I first started to study that perhaps by formalizing everything uh uh some accidental superstitious feeling that it might suddenly vanish, but uh I don't think so. So far I'm very happy to go ahead the way I am because you can always just sit down, close your eyes and put your hands anywhere on the piano. Anybody can do that. And I honestly believe everybody has songs inside them. They just and th they ha everybody has a voice. They just haven't learned how to release it.

Presenter19:40

Record number five.

Elvis Costello19:41

Record number five is just that sort of thing, a perfect illustration. It's you really got a hold on me by the Beatles. Obviously th this was the ve comes from With the Beatles, the first album I ever owned. So it has a very sentimental

Elvis Costello19:54

Attraction to me.

Elvis Costello19:55

It's difficult because I could have picked any number of Beatles songs or any number of songs written throughout the period of growing up that.

Elvis Costello20:01

meant so much to you songs that you had a crush on somebody over, or all of those sort of things, but it's so hard to pick one. And there there are so many songs from particularly from R and B music and soul music that I really love. So I've made a compromise. I've got The Beatles singing You Really Got a Hold on Me, uh which was written by Smokey Robinson.

Speaker 420:20

You've really gotta hold on me really got

Speaker 420:34

Oh baby, I love you hello.

Speaker 420:39

All of you to do is just hold me, hold me, hold me, hold me.

Presenter20:49

The Beatles and you really got a hold on me. You ended up, of course, working with with Paul McCartney at Flowers in the Dirt a few years ago.

Elvis Costello20:54

Yeah.

Presenter20:56

Um that was the result of your collaboration with him. He said at the time, I think, that you were the nearest he'd come to finding a replacement for John Lennon.

Elvis Costello21:04

I think he lived to regret saying that, you know, because people then, you know, really made a thing of it and there was obviously no replacing John and they'd grown up together and that wasn't the aim. No, but he quite genuinely said it was a good idea. It was a very nice compliment and I think I know what he meant by it because basically because we didn't agree all the time, you know, we did no, we never had any really bad arguments, but there was enough difference in approach which would be apparent from just looking at his work and looking at mine that it wouldn't naturally glue together. But I do think we've written two or three really good songs which stand up with some of the better things that I've done. Certainly I I wouldn't go so far as to say they stand up with the best of the things that he wrote with Lennon.

Presenter21:13

No, but he quite genuinely said it was a matter of fact.

Presenter21:41

Tell me about performing. Tell me about being a pop star. Um you say that you've you've done that and it didn't prove fatal.

Elvis Costello21:47

Well, I only mean that because in about 79 we had this big hit record, Oliver's Army, and you know, we were in girly magazines and I don't mean girly magazines that were naked women in, but little teenage girl kind of magazines. And as unlikely as that may seem, the way we looked, we were kind of the ugliest band on earth at the time of that. And it was good fun, there were some good things about it, but it did feel a bit strange, a bit dislocating. And I was very keen that my career carried on. A lot of people, it is fatal to become a pop star.

Presenter22:17

Yeah.

Elvis Costello22:18

Because, well, you have your little five minutes and then it's somebody else's turn. And you can't sustain that kind of relationship unless you want to be a beloved entertainer, as a lot of people are happy to do. I I feel that a bit limiting. Uh I can't go the different ways I want to go. And uh while some people would say, oh, you know, his career h hit a peak at a certain point, I I think I've only just started and um you know I'm only just getting good.

Presenter22:42

So now you hide away on the outskirts of Dublin, beavering away every day, as you say, writing your songs. But what's the attraction of being out of it, out there? I mean, is it not a good idea?

Elvis Costello22:51

It's not in England.

Elvis Costello22:53

I don't really reg regard myself as wholly English or I don't particularly I'd identify as being Irish either. I have an English passport. I come from a mixed background. I like there to be a mix.

Presenter23:03

Your wife is Irish?

Elvis Costello23:04

Cheese, yeah.

Presenter23:05

She's an ex pogue.

Elvis Costello23:06

An expert.

Presenter23:07

And does she compose with you? Do you play with me?

Elvis Costello23:09

Yes, we've written songs together and she she's studying also. So uh you know there's music it's a similar sort of situation. You know, there's music in the house uh all the time.

Elvis Costello23:18

And uh my son from my first marriage is uh is playing as well. He he plays better guitar than I do. He should be on here. He's got better taste. I I don't know, maybe it'll lead to uh a third generation. Uh Mac Manisters were like the Barks, you know, I mean, they went on for for hundreds of years. There's no stopping us.

Presenter23:34

Record number six.

Elvis Costello23:35

This is um Schubert B. Flat Sonata, played by Alfred Brendel.

Elvis Costello23:39

It might sound a little bit frivolous, but wh after concerts when I was on tour, particularly last year for four months, I had uh hit this recording and another one by Arthur Schnabel that I would sometimes put on if I didn't if I was being a good boy and went to bed early, I would sometimes put it on.

Elvis Costello23:54

In in the bedroom and

Elvis Costello23:56

Sometimes I have to confess drift off to sleep to it. Other times of course I'd be in a nightclub like like you're supposed to in the pop music, but most of the time I'd be listening to this.

Presenter25:04

Alfred Brendel playing part of the first movement of Schubert's piano sonata in B flat.

Elvis Costello25:09

When I said that I that I would ma perhaps have been known to fall asleep to it in the nicest possible way, I mean not not through boredom, I mean music to dream on, as a friend of mine says.

Presenter25:19

Tell me about you on the island, then. You you think you might be able to survive. Are you at all handy? I couldn't

Elvis Costello25:24

Absolutely hopeless. I come from a long line of totally impractical people. I did reflect on this and I remembered something. You know, I know people that come onto this program nearly always have very distant memories of their childhood, and I've only mentioned them really with regard to music. But there's one I would maybe mention to illustrate. I remember playing on my grandmother's stairs when I was quite small and discovered that a stair rod was missing from one of the lower stairs and

Elvis Costello25:53

There was sellotape attached to the edge of the carpet and it the carpet was sellotaped to the stairs. And I asked her what it was and she said it had been a it had been a a repair job that my grandfather had done and this was several years after he died. So the chop had never been replaced. And I'm about at that level, I'm afraid to say. Twenty five. On an island if I'm going to agree that it's I'm not off Archangel and I'm you know I'd be uh on a temperate island. Well you don't need many clothes, you know, and I'd I'd do okay.

Presenter26:11

25 years old.

Presenter26:21

What would the next piece of music do for you?

Elvis Costello26:24

This one particular piece of music is obviously very tragic, but coincidentally.

Elvis Costello26:31

The piece in itself has one connotation. The performer, in this case a woman called Anne-Sophie von Otta, is a singer who I've seen probably more than anybody else in the last couple of years. As I explained before, I started to listen more and go to more concerts, and one of the pleasures was finding a few performers.

Elvis Costello26:52

Through whom different kinds of music opened up, and you discovered that if you took a chance on a recording or took a chance on a programme at one of the concert halls, that because you knew that there was something about that singing alone that would be pleasurable, that suddenly music that you thought was closed to you would come would be opened up. I have very happy memories of going to the concerts with my wife, who shared this interest in this kind of music. We discovered a lot of things together. And in the case of this woman's voice in particular,

Elvis Costello27:20

She doesn't have the veneer of the singer that so many classically trained singers have had in the past. It sounds like a human being singing this, so this is Dido's Lament, and I feel it has the same kind of tragedy as a Billie Holiday record, although you couldn't compare the vocal technique in any way.

Speaker 428:24

Yeah.

Presenter28:38

and Sophy von Otter singing Dido's Lament from Purcell's Dido Aeneas with the English Concert Orchestra conducted by Trevor Pinnock.

Presenter28:46

You sound to me as if you're in danger of being one of those very rare creatures which is some, you know, product of the pop world that is happy, actually happy with himself.

Elvis Costello28:55

Well no, you might have just got me on a good day and maybe because I picked all of these very sustaining, nourishing, spiritually nourishing records instead of Goodbye by Frank Sinatra, which might have you know or Angel Eyes which would have pushed me over the edge or maybe I could have picked Body and Soul by Billie Holiday or Gloomy Sunday by Billie Holiday or I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive by Hank Williams or Take Out Some Insurance on Me by Jimmy Reid and it might have been a whole different programme, you know, or Verdi's Requiem, you know.

Presenter29:24

But nevertheless

Presenter29:25

From everything that you say, you're very happy with what you do, and if other people like it, that's terrific. If they don't, well, that's fine.

Elvis Costello29:31

Don't listen, is what I say. When you say it like that, it tends to sound smug. But in fact, this is quite an aggressive attitude in it. Is that if you don't like it, don't listen. There's plenty of other records. One of the things that I would say about, say, The Last Choice, I was explaining how I've been led to a lot of music by liking this one particular woman's voice so much. In the same way as when I was a little kid, I learned who Chuck Berry was through The Beatles, and I learnt who Willie Dixon sadly died.

Presenter29:40

Yeah.

Elvis Costello30:06

Through the Rolling Stones, and I learned who Merle Haggard was through the Beatles through the Birds. That was very exciting. It opened up worlds of music that were close to me because I grew up in England and we had two pop radio programs a week when I was a kid, which people younger than myself can't remember that, of course, when it was just Saturday Club and something else, you know, and hope that they maybe played the Beatles on family favourites, you know, on a Sunday. People can't conceive of that when everything is available all the time. There's almost too much music now, and in some cases, music doesn't seem to even have a place in the record industry's plans. But I think it does, and I'll go for that as my philosophy in business, if you say. And if people don't like it, don't listen. There's something else to listen to all the time, like this wonderful record we might play last.

Presenter30:51

Go on, then, what is it?

Elvis Costello30:52

Well this is um

Elvis Costello30:54

This is a beautiful piece of music written by Billy Strayhorn, who was Duke Allington's.

Elvis Costello31:01

Partner in music. It's the Duke Allington Orchestra and it features the the extraordinary

Elvis Costello31:08

Alto saxophone playing of Johnny Hodges. I've chosen this one because it represents all of the music in in jazz that that I love, like Charles Mingus and and Delonius Monk and well, what I would say are the the great composers of the late twentieth century are Stravinsky,

Elvis Costello31:25

Jo Gallington, Charles Mingerson, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis.

Elvis Costello31:31

Not some of the people that are so fetered, you know. That's my personal view, and obviously, music always would wildly disagree with it, but I believe them to be.

Elvis Costello31:39

Really serious composers and Strayhorners among them definitely. And he wrote this on his deathbed. Now you would think that's very that might be joining my melancholy self again here, but strangely enough I tried to imagine this is the only record I tried to imagine listening to in situ and I can imagine this wafting on a on a sort of mildly tropical breeze on the on the warmer days on the temperate island and I I think it would it would be okay. It's blood count.

Presenter32:56

Blood Count by Billy Strayhorn performed by the Duke Ellington Orchestra. So which record is the most important one of the eight elbows?

Elvis Costello33:04

I I think the one I would choose, if I had to choose one, would actually be the Beethoven, the first one. There are lots of uh records I could have taken and I wasn't sure whether you allowed unpublished recordings. I I would have very much liked uh a recording of my son Matthew playing the guitar. That would have cheered me up maybe in some ways, but maybe it made me very sad and I would have uh

Elvis Costello33:25

Really loved a recording of my wife Cott singing. Um there are some recordings of her singing, but not any that

Elvis Costello33:31

have the special significance of private recordings, but I I don't have any of those with me and they they come under the same category of some of the songs that might make me too desolate. So I think um I'll live with my memories in that case.

Presenter33:44

And your book, as well as the Bible and Shakespeare?

Elvis Costello33:46

Um

Elvis Costello33:48

I'd like a selected works of James Thurber, most especially for it it would have to contain well

Elvis Costello33:55

the the advice, Let Your Mind Alone, which I think would be very important on an island. And particularly the stories, uh The Dog That Bit People and uh most especially The Greatest Man in the World, which is is I think my favorite short story.

Presenter34:08

And your luxury.

Elvis Costello34:09

I'd settle for an upright piano.

Elvis Costello34:11

Um

Elvis Costello34:13

I'd like it decorated actually. Can I have it decorated? It's sort of cheating a little bit. If I can have it decorated.

Presenter34:17

This one

Elvis Costello34:19

On the front you see these decorated pianos. If I could have um an exact reproduction of the altarpiece of the Church of St. Barnabas by Botticelli.

Elvis Costello34:30

embossed on the front of the piano so I could look at it while I played the piano. I might eventually get inspiration to learn how to play the piano properly for one thing. Maybe eventually as it went out of tune over the years, provided I was there for a long time

Elvis Costello34:43

Eventually I could invent my own tonality completely and then then people would have to come and rescue me so they could hear the the entirely new music that I'd made up. And it would sort of drift over the breeze and people would hear it and be drawn to the island and I'd be rescued.

Presenter34:55

Elvis Costello, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island disc.

Elvis Costello34:58

Thank you.

Speaker 335:07

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.