Testing Elvis Costello's Music Knowledge

The Track Star Podcast

Elvis Costello joins the Track Star Podcast to mark the 49th anniversary of his debut album, My Aim Is True, reflecting on how his musical upbringing and limited resources shaped his songwriting. He traces his

Key takeaways

• Costello met Nick Lowe in 1972 at The Cavern after buying him a pint of Guinness, a connection that later facilitated their studio collaboration on My Aim Is True.
• The debut album was recorded in a cramped North London room called Pathway with open microphones and no overdubs, prioritizing raw acoustic presence over polished production.

Main topics

• Musical upbringing & parental influence
• Recording My Aim Is True at Pathway Studios

Notable quotes

"I bought him a pint of Guinness."

Conclusion

The episode provides a grounded, technical look at how financial constraints and

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) The reason you're here is this. The new version. Which is pretty Speaker 2 (0:02) much my last word on this subject. Let's start with this song. Speaker 2 (0:11) Nick would be proud. That was kind of the volume that we used to play everything. That's why everything sounded super exciting because that's so it goes. First release on Stiff Records. I'd known Nick since 1972 when the group he was in, Brensley Schwartz, came to play The Cavern, the original Cavern, which was still in existence then. Speaker 1 (0:32) I Speaker 2 (0:33) was just finishing school. and he was my favorite songwriter that I thought I could actually meet. All the other people were just names on record sleeves. And he was great. I offered to buy him a drink. Now, if you ask Nick, he says he bought me a drink, but it wasn't. I bought him a pint of Guinness. And I asked him a bunch of stupid questions about songs, because I was in a little group. There were just two of us in the group. We were trying to play these songs. And then I go back to London. the next year. And start trying to, you know, make my way, playing initially solo. Then I put a little band together that didn't head anywhere. Then I went back to playing solo. And suddenly this record is announced. And I said, okay, that's the place. Maybe I'll get a hearing here. At least I know the guy who made this record. Don't know him very well. I don't have his phone number. But if I turn up, maybe they'll remember me. He's that annoying guy that hangs around and asks Nick questions. So I did, and it kind of worked. It was just a little demo reel that I'd made in my bedroom, and some of the songs were songs that had appeared on My Miss True, and some were in a style that was completely different musically. So they saw something in this one song. I want to know about the mystery dance I Speaker 1 (1:56) want to know about the mystery dance Why don't you show me? Because I tried and I tried and I still miss the fight. I can't do it anymore and I'm not satisfied. Speaker 2 (2:04) Another one that was quite indebted to Nick, I think, in a way. It had this swinging sort of feel. This one called Radio Sweetheart. Speaker 1 (2:11) Play one more for my radio sweetheart. Hi. hide your love. No, we are so far apart. We got to hide. Speaker 2 (2:23) People put into the studio to cut them. And when I say, you know, it sounds grand, it's a little room, not bigger than this room, maybe smaller than this room, down a kind of alleyway off of, you know, Anonymous Street in North London, and this little eight-track board. And I would say from me to you is the width of the board and the speakers are directly above it, not as they usually are set back a little bit. So when you did do something exciting like that, it really sounded like something, you know? And of course, one of the reasons it sounded so good was that because we weren't trying to make very shiny, polished records with lots of layers, they were about presence. And that room, all the mics were open, so the drum sound is kind of the sound... They didn't need to add reverb or anything to anything because it was the sound of the drums going on to all the other mics in the room. the ones in front of the guitars, the bass was probably de-eyed. I was pinned against the wall like a fly, you know, like a butterfly. Like with my guitar, barely enough room to move and my amp next to me. So everything, and of course this was pretty much unknown to me. I'd been inside a couple of studios before. My father was a singer, so I'd sung on a TV jingle, on an advertising jingle with him. And that studio was way more sophisticated than Pathway. This, you know, was very, very basic. Kind of like all the studios that we, you know, around which legends build, whether it be Studio One or Hitsville in Detroit. If you go to Hitsville, Motown's studio. Tamler, as we called it. The first time I went there, I just couldn't believe how small the room was. I thought these records that I'd loved as a teenager were made in a cathedral. They sounded so... It wasn't that they were grand. They just sounded like Levi Stubbs singing Bernadette or something like that. You had to be singing in this big space. But it wasn't. It was just everything was right there. And in that sense, there's nowhere to hide, is there? So, I mean, the song has got to be okay. Speaker 3 (4:30) What was the sound that you were sort of... getting at or was there i don't want to say genre but was there a type of sound that you were going for with these songs because it wasn't necessarily what you were listening to or grow up listening to the odd thing Speaker 2 (4:45) about it and i try to make this concise is that you know there was no rock and roll in my house yeah My dad was originally a bebop trumpet player. I mean, that's what he wanted to be. He came out of the RAF and he already played the trumpet. Then he heard Dizzy Gillespie and that's what he wanted to do. That music sounded very strange to people who, even people that like jazz that knew Louis Armstrong and such music, you know, come out of New Orleans. There was all these different harmonies and he literally got into fights over it, you know. So at some point you went to London, my mother and he both went to London to pursue their... She sold records. So she actually had more success than my dad originally. She got to work in a big department store in London. My dad still going around the clubs. And at some point, you know, they got married. I came along and he had to take a job that was more reliable for income. And he could sing. So he took a job as a trumpet vocalist and gradually became a just vocalist. So I heard pop music sort of filtered through. his work. He would come home with a stack of records and we'd have to memorize them because they were playing. It was a strange thing where these dance bands were kind of being overtaken by rock and roll and particularly by the beat boom in the early 60s. And he would have to learn, you know, Please Please Please by the Beatles was the first one that I really remember. Please please please won't you let me do it. Speaker 2 (6:16) And I went into the front room and asked him for the record. I said, when you're done learning that, can I have it? And he gave it to me and changed everything, you know. And then I realized I had access to a stack of records every week or every two weeks. He'd be given another stack to learn so that they could do these peculiar arrangements of such songs on the BBC, a BBC radio show. What was he doing Speaker 3 (6:39) learning when you say he's like... He's just listening to it over and over again. And Speaker 2 (6:44) he had to memorize these songs because he had like five days to learn five songs. So he's singing these songs in the kitchen somewhere. He's not singing from sheet music on the stage because it was a live. No, but Speaker 3 (6:53) in your house when you see him like practicing. He's Speaker 2 (6:55) singing Speaker 3 (6:55) along with the Speaker 2 (6:55) record. Speaker 3 (6:56) Yeah. He's singing along with the record. Speaker 2 (6:57) And he'd arranged, he had rigged up. You know those record players that drop the singles down he'd rigged up a device by which Instead of dropping another record the arm would just come back on so he met he automated the system So we keep playing the record repeatedly so it play it until he'd memorized it. Now these songs were not complex many of them But you know think about memorizing five songs a week so that you can go on a radio show where there's still a lot There's a live audience, you know, it wasn't like they're in the studio. They could do a retake So I saw that and I could hear the physical force of his voice. It would shake. Then we had a glass panel in the front room window and I can remember standing outside and putting my hand up to it because it vibrated when he really sang the high notes. And that was, it's not my first memory of music, but it's the first memory of performance. Speaker 1 (7:48) And Speaker 2 (7:48) then I would occasionally get to go to the broadcasts. uh on my school holidays because they were like a lunchtime show so we'd have to go there at eight in the morning and i'd watch the band rehearse and then and then the big excitement would be they'd be a guest artist from the hip parade and of course sometimes that would be somebody whose records i already had the time that i most remember is the hollies coming in and and you know years years later when i had a record out graham nash came to my show in manchester when he was visiting his family came backstage and he said, I'm very pleased to meet you. And I said, well, you've met me before, but I was wearing short trousers, so you won't remember I was 10. And he very, very patiently saw my autograph book, him and Alan Clark and the rest of the band. And they were really lovely to me. You know, my dad had introduced me, obviously. So I would sit quietly and watch all this thing going on. So in some ways, I knew how music worked and I knew how it could be created. But then you find your own way into playing. And, you know, I heard Peter Green's Man of the World, an early Fleetwood Mac, the real Fleetwood Mac, as I call them. For some reason, that song spoke to me so much, I had to learn how to play it. I didn't learn a three-chord song. I learned, like, a really complex song. It took me about three months to master it, you know? You're going to put it on now, I know. Speaker 2 (9:16) Just a little. This song moves me so much. I know. You can imagine that I was about 15 when this came out. And all this, you know, I Speaker 1 (9:26) need a woman. Speaker 2 (9:28) I could barely talk to girls, much less a woman. But the song really kind of spoke to me. Speaker 1 (9:35) It's how Speaker 2 (9:36) emotional that playing is. Speaker 2 (9:42) Do you hear that thing that was right before that? That's called Silence, which we don't hear on records ever now. It's a very patient song. Yeah. And it sort of takes its time Speaker 3 (9:53) being established. Speaker 2 (9:54) They say I'm a man of the world, but you don't understand. He's hiding something. And I suppose that's why, as a teenager, I like lots of exuberant records too. But this one was the one that I was moved to pick up an instrument for. So if you listen to that and how many... chords it moves through. In the course of learning how to play that song, I didn't really understand the musical connection between the shapes. There was a lad who played the guitar at my school and he had learned this song. He was a couple of years older than me. Gave me this sheet of paper with all the little chord symbols. And I very painstakingly, having had a guitar for a number of years that had been bought as a souvenir of a trip to Spain, I learned how to play it. from there because I learnt so many chords in order to that's a good place to start other songs see oh this is easy now this one only has three or four chords yeah it's just so very satisfying to be able to play and I learnt you know I had Speaker 2 (10:51) I had books of... They were called simplified or something like that, song copies of Beatles songs. They were special editions for beginners. And after a short while, I realized that the chords were wrong. And I would go into the music shop that my mother had worked in part-time and I would sneak a look at the real expensive book. I'd go, oh, that's a diminished chord. And that's how I learned harmony. I never studied music formally, but I learned it by an accumulation of hearing and then wanting to know how to render that. Speaker 1 (11:31) And Speaker 2 (11:31) little by little, the different things that took my interest Speaker 2 (11:37) I would learn some way of replicating that. Now, you've got to say, as a teenager, my public life, as it were, like shared life with other people, I'm an only child, so I don't have any brothers or sisters to play me stuff, Speaker 1 (11:50) is Speaker 2 (11:51) going to teenage parties like everybody. Speaker 1 (11:53) And Speaker 2 (11:54) pretty much all the music was Tamla or Trojan rocksteady and reggae. Yeah. Like pre-Bob Marley, you know, sort of. A lot of it very, I now know, influenced by their impressions. So we listened to all that. That was the West London suburban music. At home, I was into singer-songwriters. At home, privately in my bedroom, I'm listening to Joni Mitchell, David Ackles, and then Lacey Rolland, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and James Taylor, and these people, you know, a lot of people from the West Coast. A little bit of West Coast psychedelic music I had of a couple of those records when I lived in. Liverpool. And they all gave me little bits and pieces of information about music. Some I couldn't possibly, you know, imitate in any way. Speaker 1 (12:42) Two Speaker 2 (12:42) records that I got in about 1970, 71, I think really made me more ambitious to change the rhythms away from rock and roll or R &B rhythms were Randy Newman's first records and Dr. John's Gumbo. because Dr. John's Gumbo was like a starter kit for New Orleans music from the 50s or even earlier. And I heard rhythms that I'd never heard before. I had no access to those records living in England. They weren't hits. And what I did hear was a lot of piano music. And I could pick out a tune on the piano, but I could never play the syncopated music on a guitar. I sort of could mimic it in some way. And that's how I ended up writing these songs. don't sound anything like My Home is True, even though they were written in the year before My Home is True. You know, recently, you may have seen the very last late show with Stephen Colbert. They said they wanted me to be on the last show. They didn't really tell me what the finale was, but initially, they said, and I said, well, what are we going to sing? And I suggested, why don't you sing Woody Guthrie's song, It's Been Good to Know You, and I'll write new words. Speaker 1 (13:53) No long. Speaker 1 (14:05) No, Speaker 2 (14:10) that's too sad. And he said he wanted to sing this song called Jump Up. And I said, Jump Up? I remember that 51 years ago. I've played it twice on stage. You're going to put it on television? Speaker 1 (14:20) Yeah. You Speaker 2 (14:21) know, and I was actually very... Flattered on the one hand, you know, it was a big compliment to choose such a song. And he knew all the words. Speaker 1 (14:29) Jump up, hold on tight Can't trust a promise or a guarantee Cause the man round the curve says that he's never heard of you or me Speaker 2 (14:43) I thought, well, this song, which was just written in my bedroom and never really got any further than that. I would play this song in a folk club when I was a solo act and people just talk all over it. I couldn't get people to pay attention with that kind of song. So guess what? I had to write those songs so I could command attention. And then you can go back later. Yeah, I never did go back. I mean, we did issue a couple of those songs. There's more of them on this record in this more intimate style. And of course, what you hear in contemporary songwriters now is because a lot of people begin their careers... Speaker 2 (15:21) making YouTubes, you know, in their bedroom. That's the same as I was doing, except we didn't have cameras. Speaker 1 (15:26) You Speaker 2 (15:26) know, they are making very direct communications and you'll see things which are very affecting emotionally where people are just singing their new song. And then a record company comes along and totally fucks it up, you know, by trying to dress