Beloved entertainer and transatlantic troubadour: Elvis Costello in 2021
Photo by MARK SELIGER
I’VE got to deliver this at some point to rehearsals,” says Elvis Costello as he eases a much-loved Gibson acoustic out from its guitar case. As he explains, the instrument is destined to join the company of A Face In The Crowd – playwright Sarah Ruhl’s musical adaption of Elia Kazan’s 1957 film about a drifter turned demagogue for which Costello has written the songs. “I was up all night doing these,” he says, pointing to an intricate lattice of diamanté stickers decorating the Gibson’s strap. “Do you think I’ve gone too deep into this…?”
When Uncut meets Costello during late August at London’s Young Vic theatre, A Face In The Crowd is a few weeks away from opening. Three days previously, meanwhile, Costello turned 70, though he remains characteristically busy. As well as A Face In The Crowd, he is then about to head out on tour with his old compadre Steve Nieve, release a boxset bringing together his King Of America album with a weight of related material and revive The Coward Brothers, the duo that he and T Bone Burnett first created for a series of solo tours in 1984 and ’85. This latest evidence of Costello’s current creative streak was, he notes, barely disrupted by the pandemic, or “the emergency” as he calls it. “Like the way the People’s Republic referred to the Second World War, ‘the emergency’, that interruption to our continuity.” Costello counts off a run that includes multiple albums, EPs and a boxset. “It’s 10 releases in the same amount of time as Nick Lowe and I worked in, initially. In fact, the workrate is higher than it was in 1979. But then again, we couldn’t tour this time, so we had nothing to do but have fun.”