THE ONE-TIME ATTRACTION WAS DETERMINED NOT TO BE STAR-STRUCK BY THE ONE-TIME BEATLE, AND THIS LIVERPUDLIAN PAIRING EXPOSED A RICH SEAM OF NEW SONGS…

IAN WADE

Elvis Costello: “I’ve seen quite eminent people completely lose their mind in hs company”

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Paul McCartney was enjoying a very mixed Eighties. He was still capable of topping the charts with Pipes Of Peace and Ebony And Ivory with Stevie Wonder, he’d worked with Michael Jackson on what was becoming one of the biggest albums of all time… but there were also the slight mis-steps of The Frog Chorus and Give My Regards To Broad Street, which long-time fans feared were muddying his legacy.

So in a bid to regain his mojo, in 1986, Paul McCartney invited Elvis Costello to work with him on a few numbers. The two met at McCartney’s Hog Hill Mill Studio in East Sussex and worked on a handful of songs that emerged on each of their next albums. With Paul contributing to Costello’s 1987 album Spike (on the tracks Veronica and Pads, Paws And Claws), and Elvis contributing to 1989’s Flowers In The Dirt (My Brave Face, You Want Her Too, Don’t Be Careless Love and That Day Is Done) as well as 1993’s Off The Ground (Mistress And Maid and The Lovers That Never Were).

Various bootleg collections, and now MP3s, have been floating about ever since; the unofficial McCartney/McManus Collection was “released” in 1998, and featured covers of Step Inside Love and You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away. Officially, Flowers In The Dirt’s 2017 CD-DVD deluxe reissue comes with a disc of the demos for The Lovers That Never Were, Tommy’s Coming Home, Twenty Fine Fingers, So Like Candy, You Want Her Too, That Day Is Done, Don’t Be Careless Love, My Brave Face and Playboy To A Man.