Just as you'd expect, Elvis Costello has barely sat down before he sticks the knife into his own instrumental prowess. This, after all, is the man who once famously described his guitar style as "little hands of concrete." It's a fair bet, then, that the next forty-five minutes will contain no mention of tapped harmonics, little or nothing about string gauges and absolutely zilch about the mixolydian scale.
But Costello knows, and we know, that that's a good deal less than half the story. From the amphetamine howl of 1978's "Pump It Up" to the stunningly subtle chord shifts of 1998's Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted From Memory, whether pummelling seven shades of shit out of a bitterly complaining Fender or picking a delicate accompaniment on a vintage Martin, Costello is, above all, an effective musician, clued in to the bigger picture. Fancy fingerwork means little in this context — but when it comes to scything, Lennon-esque rhythm work or jabs of blazing distortion, you've come to the exactly the right man.
For despite all his protests, Costello's guitar work is monstrous. Off-target? Sometimes. But accidentals, if you like, will happen... and in intense, spur-of-the-moment flurries, even wrong notes can sound right. It's only rock 'n' roll, after all, and revved up, Costello can hit the kind of moments of truth that more mannered players will never find in a lifetime of accepted knowledge and taste.
Moreover, Costello is one of that rare breed — a guitarist who knows when it's time to step aside. And when he does, it's always to make room for a player with something to say. The inch-perfect country rock stylings of John McFee on My Aim Is True; the classic accompaniment of ex-Elvis Presley, Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons sideman James Burton on King Of America and Mighty Like A Rose; the jagged, jazzy R&B moves of Tom Waits' favourite oppo Marc Ribot on Spike. Costello knows guitar. And in a momentary respite from a world tour in which he is joined onstage only by longtime keyboard accomplice Steve Nieve, he sat down to talk about it...
First, of course, the influences question. What are yours?
Well, I think I would be foolish to call them influences, exactly, because I can't really play like anybody else. When I was starting out, my favourite guitar players were people like Robbie Robertson and Jerry Garcia and Richard Thompson, and I really, really wanted to be able to play like Amos Garrett. I'm basically attracted to people who play short, angular phrases. Eric Clapton and all those people never really did anything for me. I didn't even like Hendrix at all when I was a kid, apart from ballads like "The Wind Cries Mary": he played out of tune and I actually thought him a better singer than a guitar player. When I got older I appreciated him more, but it took a while. I think what I like more about the guitar is the rhythm aspect, the choppiness of it that's so obvious in so much great pop music, from great rhythm players like John Lennon and Keith Richards and Pete Townshend. When I was dying to start out playing, Robbie Robertson was the only one I ever thought I could play like. You can hear little bits and pieces of his style in some of my stuff. But I also like R&B kind of people, like Little Beaver, the guy who played on that Betty Wright record, "Clean-Up Woman" — I don't even know what his real name is (Willie "Little Beaver" Hale, born 1944 in Arkansas, played the classic guitar intro on Betty Wright's 1971 hit).
I also like the guitar players on a lot of reggae records from the late '60s. Some of the things I played on "(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea" and "Watching The Detectives" were like that — clicky half-rhythm, half-lead things. I always liked people who could put a guitar melody inside a song. When I was growing up I was really attracted to The Beatles and The Byrds and that idea of a "guitar figure" as opposed to a guitar solo — figures that were really crucial to the composition. I think that has got into some of my playing, although I don't play very well in that way. My thinking about the guitar is it should be playing a melody, rather than just a blues scale within something. I don't like to hear a blues scale played against automatic changes — I think it sounds really weird.
Your relationship with the guitar seems to have changed over the years. In The Attractions you played a lot of guitar, but through the '80s the core of the arrangements crept more towards keyboards — particularly around Punch The Clock and Goodbye Cruel World.
Yeah, that big ensemble stuff. But, you know, keyboard was always the dominant instrument of The Attractions on record — much more than the guitar. My guitar parts aren't very prominent on early Attractions records at all. On the first record I didn't play any of the solos; John McFee played them. I think I'm right in saying there are no guitar solos on the second one, Armed Forces. It's all rhythm guitar or figures, no solos. The guitar is either texture, or else it's just playing straight rhythm.
The first time I played any solo on a record, I think, was on Get Happy, where we were trying to do an R&B thing. By then I'd switched to Telecaster and I was getting my ideas from people like Steve Cropper. I was playing much more conscious rhythm guitar parts, and I think there's one guitar solo on that record. The first guitar solo I ever actually recorded was in 1978, an acoustic solo on a song I recorded with George Jones ("Stranger In The House," on the '79 album My Very Special Guests). When I turned professional I was pretty certain I didn't want any solos on my records — or certainly if there were, — I wasn't going to play them.
Then later on, in the middle of the '80s, everything went more "ensemble." Even on Blood & Chocolate there are only two guitar solos on the record, I think I'm right in saying — on "Tokyo Storm Warning" and "I Want You." The rest of the time, the guitar is just like a noise. It's the same on Brutal Youth: there's a few solos — only two, I think — and the rest of it's the same; rhythm guitar and the occasional melodic figure, or a structural thing, sometimes playing with the keyboard. Most of the time, it's a very simple accompaniment. I'm usually playing very straightforward things, and sometimes using effects for certain sounds. Tremolo is a very good disguise for a lack of technique, because you can't hear how badly you're fretting!
We'd guess that the amount you play guitar is closely connected with how much you're writing on it.
Definitely. I don't actually regard the guitar as my main instrument anymore. But last summer I deliberately tried to pick it up more, because I didn't want to get out of practice and because I thought it would be good to write a few new songs on guitar. But some songs do totally revolve around the guitar and can only be accompanied fully on the guitar.
After working with the Brodsky Quartet, which obviously had no guitar at all, it's interesting that guitar felt so important when I came back with Brutal Youth. Since then, though, most of the songs I've written I've written on piano. I don't feel much like "a guitar player," really — it's just an instrument I play in the right song. I can muster up a reasonable accompaniment, and I'm probably more convincing on guitar than I am on the piano. But I'd never get a chance to play guitar with anybody else. I'm just not good enough.
Some people think that King Of America is the peak of your guitar playing on record.
Thank you. We couldn't really dub anything on that record because we did it live. Although we had all these great players — James Burton playing terrific guitar on a lot of things, and Dobro and slide — if my performance wasn't solid, then the record didn't really exist. Most of the songs have me playing guitar and singing at the same time. There's some quite decent accompaniment on there. It's some of the simplest stuff I've done, but some of the most effective.
You've always had great taste in guitarists. What inspires you about, say, T Bone Burnett?
T Bone is a really great guitar player. He has a very good gut feeling for the guitar, that Texas kind of stuff. He's also interested in tunings, unlike me, although I experimented as a teenager because I liked Joni Mitchell — and I just wrote my first-ever open-tuned song, on a guitar tuned to Em... but T Bone can solo effectively and he gets fantastic tones, but most of all he's a great rhythm player. For instance, when we were making Spike, there were no tracking sessions — everything was constructed instrument by instrument. There was a drum machine, but it never played back-beats — it just played off beats so we could choose when and where and how much back-beat appeared. There's no conventional drumming on the whole record, sometimes just half a drum kit, and that created problems. On the quirkier songs the arrangement worked very well, but on a comparatively conventional song like "Veronica" it probably would have been better to have a proper rhythm section tracked but we just weren't set up for it. In the end the song was absolutely glued together by T Bone's rhythm guitar. What he did on that track was excellent. It really is like threading a needle — really, really difficult. Nick Lowe and I used to play two acoustic rhythm parts together on some of the early records, and that worked because Nick's a bass player and has a very steady arm, and I can get in with a drummer on an overdub.
Has James Burton's playing worn off on you in any way?
Yeah, but in a really peculiar way. The first record I ever made with T Bone Burnett was under the name of The Coward Brothers, and on one solo I used a figure which James Burton used on "Cash On The Barrethead" by Gram Parsons — but of course with me playing, it sounds nothing like Burton. I remember playing it to James and he just looked at me. I said, "I'm playing your figure!" and he just laughed...
But Burton is just amazing. On some of my records he's played mind-bending things. On King Of America he played in the idiom we know him for — fast country picking, great ballad playing — which was all fantastic, but what I loved even more was when he plays with more variety. "Hurry Down Doomsday "from Mighty Like A Rose is the greatest solo I can think of on any record of mine. It's unbelievable. It sounds like he must have slowed the tape down, it's so fluent — yet he just played it live.
You never seem to worry much about guitar technicalities.
Well, the thing is, I'm attracted to the noise of the guitar — not so much to the complexity and modal thinking. I understand it, but my fingers don't relate to it. If you played a note on the guitar and asked me what it was, I'd have no idea. I've never played a scale on an instrument in my life. Honestly, never. My fingering is all completely wrong, and anything I do that's good comes from that. Paul McCartney is famous for not wanting to read music because he feels it would interfere with the natural flow of harmonic and melodic inspiration which makes him a better songwriter. I personally think that learning to read music, at least to be able to write it down, has helped me be able to communicate with musicians whose training is different to mine. My training is oral predominantly, and a lot of the musical ideas I'm using are instinctive rather than informed by musical training.
One thing that Marc Ribot says that I completely agree with is that it's important to keep a sort of 'creative amateur' somewhere in the makeup of yourself as a musician, and in my case it's on the guitar. I go at it like I'm wearing gloves. When I'm playing a break on a record I'll pick up the guitar and just start playing anything. That's what attracted me to Amos Garrett. I will literally pick up the guitar and, without looking, just start playing anywhere, with no thought of if I'm in the right key, and I'll try and make it work from that point. And when I find out a configuration that works, it's the same thing as detuning the guitar into a tuning so that none of the fingerings that you're used to work.
This is all connected to why I switched mainly to the piano as a composing instrument. On guitar you will tend to play in convenient guitar keys and you'll fall into very, very safe patterns of development harmonically. With the piano it's impossible, because you start to play and the whole world of options is ahead of you. Unless you are a thorough guitar player the guitar is a difficult composing instrument to develop in. I can write songs which use jazz chords and things, but they're very consciously used as a reference to the jazz idiom. They're not the same thing as the kind of harmonic development that's in the Juliet Letters or Painted From Memory. That could only have been written on the piano. Though funnily enough the song Painted From Memory itself was written on the guitar...
Over the last few years you've played solo, with Steve Nieve, with string quartets, with orchestras — what's next? Does working with a great rock band like The Attractions still appeal?
No. I know I've returned to the rock combo sound from time to time — Get Happy, Blood & Chocolate, Brutal Youth, that kind of sound — but I don't think there's any point in me returning to it any more. The band doesn't exist, and young people don't relate to it in the same way. They have their own generation of bands — playing a very bad version of music from the '70s, mostly, occasionally illuminated by a good hook line. And then you have creative bands like Radiohead and, in a different way, Blur, who are using the guitar in a brilliant way. Mind you, rhythmically all these bands are pretty dull. They've still got really ploddy rhythms — all derived from a sort of mis-hearing, I think, of The Beatles' White Album, which seems to be the most influential record currently in British pop music.
I think what I'm looking for right now is new rhythmic motivation. I've written a lot of ballads in the last few years, and some recent ones I'm very, very fond of and want to record sometime, but I think the next record will more likely have a rhythmic element. I'm looking to play something I haven't played for a while, a rhythmic base that moves me on. I've got this idea of an orchestra — a small one, maybe eight or nine people. It'll be a bit like an old-fashioned big band: it'll have horns, not like a horn section that plays in a rock band or a soul band, but a whole horn group, with a bottom end that's extremely heavy, as heavy as reggae or as heavy as R&B. Very deep bass, very heavy bass drums, and the guitar will be like the keyboard, that little bit of spice that brings that personality into it. I really enjoy that kind of experimenting with structure and arrangement. After all, it's only people whose feel for music is largely nostalgic who get uneasy with new ideas...
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