this is essentials on apple music elvis costello music's most influential artists and the stories behind their songs i'm so thrilled we're going to be able to just pick certain moments throughout this journey uh with music attached to be able to get some stories and find out how you get to an album like hey clock face you know something i really do think that when they when they write the kind of retrospective thing and they attach
these labels to my name from the particularly with regard to 1977-78 i don't actually think any of the good groups any of my contemporaries saw themselves as punk or new wave the clash thought they were the were the clash chrissy hein thought she was chrissy hind yeah i knew i was me i was also on an independent record label that almost went out of its way to sign people who didn't fit elsewhere they had me because i was different
to ian durie that i was different to nick lowe i was originally hired as a songwriter anyway not as a recording artist and then when they realized how many songs i was writing and the fact that nobody else could sing them because they're kind of tricky uh not not in it not in any way that you need to be an opera singer to sing them but but but they are quirky and they perhaps best best come out out of
this mouth you know yeah yeah for sure uh case in point allison you know this is a beautiful piece of music where we're gonna start i love allison i've told the story of that song many times and people know it not least of all because it was also the first song of mine covered by another artist and taken to an audience that was very different to mine linda ronstadt almost immediately covered that song watching the detectives was the first
record i made was that was the first that's when i knew i was making records my first album was a group of really great songs and i was super lucky to have the players that i had but when i made watching the detectives that's when i discovered making records the thing that really blows my mind about this song in particular is that for such a for an artist stepping out on his own for the first time as an artist not just
as a songwriter to have made a body of work which as i said fell more in line with with a band like the clash not willing to be categorized the way that the music press wanted you to what prompted you to want to make a song with a rhythm like this to to to make something that felt so authentic in a space that many artists many of your peers would never have dead to be really honest it was listening to the first clash record for
when i first got it for a whole night that was a jolt you know that was the first long player by a group that that came out of 77 that that really made me sit up i i had been into the studio and i'd recorded i i may have even had a single out by then i don't really recall i bear in mind my records came came out as singles first alison was a was my second single and was it was a bomb it didn't it nobody played it at all and it's odd
to say that it's a song that people you know so i had lesson zero out you know a couple of people noticed allison few more people notice then you know i watching the detectives was written in the summer of 77 so there was a lot going on if you're taking a song like pump it up i love a story about that because to me it's just another example of something i'd never heard before i'd never heard anybody make a record
that sounded like that i'm immediately enthralled and i'm listening to this a few years after it's come out because i'm probably about six seven years old when i'm hearing it for the first time so it's probably the start of the 80s but i'm already just going i don't know like for me you were from another planet the music you were making didn't sound like any of the music that my parents were playing in and around it it stood out why pump
it up how did that get made really in the last days of our first kind of package tour which was an all-star package tour the same as when jimi hendrix opened for the monkeys or something you know they used to have those weird combinations stiff wanted to imitate like the stax vault review or something they wanted to have all their acts on one bill first pop concert i ever went to were all bands that were managed by brian
epstein who managed the beatles but not the beatles it was the other groups from liverpool that he set out so that tradition of the package tour it sort of died out by the like late 70s but stiff decided to revive it we did this and there was a lot of shall we say shenanigans you know that word and uh a lot a little bit of scampery maybe in the night you know and i think i just i came out of it with a sort of like well
you know repeating the same sins all the time that that isn't gonna do it and i wrote this song in a rhythm that i borrowed from i guess from bob dylan who borrowed it from chuck berry you know and we we played it one night it sounded good and that was near the end of the tour i played it the last night of the tour three days later we went to the studio and you know we knew how it went it wasn't complicated we just i think it
was the first take that was it i feel like when armed forces came out you became a very reflective writer you started looking outside your window and and also attributing it to what you were feeling inside so to me it was a combination of self-reflection and and a greater awareness looking outside the window became the thing i did because it was a bus window for the next two years and you know that's i don't want that to
sound like any kind of bad thing america was passing by at speed and once we got onto a tour bus and we could watch movies um while we were traveling those movies got into our attitudes to things you know we'd watch the same movies over and over again until we could recite them both day and night lots of things passing by seemed like the beginning of a song a chance encounter you know some sort of romantic escapade in the small hours you
know some sort of misadventure that i that i you know some of which i reflected on as you know they get you get conflicted feelings you know about that when you you've pledged to somebody and then you lose your bearings you you as the old gospel song country song says drifting too far from shore and that was certainly true and that's probably what ended up in a song like accidents will happen you know by the time we got to
armed forces i was i was trying to make some sort of not a equivalency but some sort of connection i said it once in a short hand between the wall room and the bedroom you know and simple as that you know there were carnal things in those songs and then there were outward looking things about the waves of the world represented by all of his army represented by peace love and understanding which was nick lowe's song
which we cut actually not even on that album in my opinion no it was a b-side right it was a b-side for nick lowe and that was added to the american version of armed forces so to me it's it's always stood alone separate to that album but i know american listeners regarded as part of the album how does a song like oliver's army become what it is how does it become something that you play over and over again throughout your life find new ways
to interpret it i reviewed and reminded myself from watching the most recent glastonbury performance of 2013 that that you always looking for new ways to create arrangements to breathe life into songs to let the crowd connect in different ways and yet it started with its original structure and i wonder if you knew instantly when you finished oliver's army that it was going to be a song like that for you
no it very nearly didn't make the record i mean it was it was headed for a b-side and steve naive said give me a go i got a piano part and we let him go because as we had gone on over those first two records with the uh attractions we had let him play more and more piano because he was a classically trained musician he was actually an organ student so it was really something of a kind of holding him within margins
to give him a vox continental when he was actually supposed to be playing a church organ with all those pipes and everything but he also was a really very great really great pianist and he you know we all loved abba like crazy we used to really listen to like about we had about six cassettes that we could agree upon without a fight breaking out and they were the four they were the four berlin records uh you know the two iggy and the two
bowie berlin records so the idiot lost for life low in heroes those last two came out in 77. um kraftwerk's audubon which we were sort of listening to and because we heard those electronic things in the eno side of those records um and abba you know that's a lot of what we heard and we we love dabba so the minute steve played that crazy jangling piano part then it was then we knew it was kind of some kind of hit record you know
although i still thought that i still thought that the lyric would have a problem with the bbc i thought that that because of what it was speaking about but about sending working-class lads off to do other people's fighting for them i didn't think that would go down very well with with the bbc but they didn't even seem to notice what the song was saying it was it was the first time really that i realized nobody
listens to the words you know and uh and just have to live with it and uh and suddenly we're on top of the pops and you know in the in the in the pot papers like as if we're blondie or something you know we were you know at the same time as blondie were hitting with these we were actually you know heart of glass was hitting around the same time yeah so were the bg's so well abba suddenly we're in a chart with the people we were copying well it
goes on to inform you know your writing for from that point forward um and i've seen this time and time again with my favorite artist when you make a break like that as strange as it may seem to some it a lot of times time is very kind to those records for people who didn't understand them in the first place and and a way to get to that that point is that you you hear it you hear the influence of that process
in songs to come but it makes more sense and i think about a song like every day i write the book now that to me is about as close to an out-and-out smash textbook smash that you could present like on a silver platter to a label and say hey i've given you one and and they can't actually send it back and go if you just tweak it a little bit like it's it's done and i and i just think that that is you finally
as a fan i see you getting to a point where it's all coming into focus you know your your magpie innovation your desire to push the boundaries but also your desire for craft coming togeth together on that side but that record punch clock was made after what i thought was the most ambitious and successful example of of us using the studio to make a record like imperial bedroom which was very uh had probably the same degree of range as
as both look now and hey clock face to it was you know it had very intimate ballads and and wild sounding you know aggressive sounding things and it was orchestrated to some degree as look now was um but it wasn't very successful and i think there was still we were still in that world where you made a record and that's how you made your living you hope to sell some records but you most of all hope to book some tours
and if your record wasn't a success then the tour wouldn't be very successful so we went into the studio with our friend uh clive langer and his partner alan when stanley they had by that point made hit after hit after hit with madness uh later with dexter's midnight runners you know big big hits but they dominated uk radio at that point they dominated they were they were like you know the next team that had the same kind of success as uh
chin and chapman did in the 70s or mickey mouse it was like that they everything they did and clive knew what we liked but he also knew what we needed to do to get a record back on the radio and i have sometimes made it sound as if i don't like those records um because i think sometimes that process like disguises the feeling but we cut one of the single greatest performances the attractions ever played
which is the song shipbuilding for one thing is on that same record as every day i write the book but every day i write the book was a weird one because it made us almost like it it was like okay they're actually gonna have a hit they've been around for five or six years without any actual chart success and lots of people know but suddenly we were on solid gold you know we were actually in the pop mainstream it was i i just couldn't even
believe it you know because we it felt to me like haven't we already done this you know i i'm on it and i'm going along with the with the whole routine yeah we had got over being on top of the pups in england that that was kind of
old so that's where the road ended oh no yeah i thought that was the end of that being in pop music one song in america and that's a whole other road because it didn't go as far as it might have done it didn't really go on to be a
big big hit but it was it was a song that people who knew nothing else about us heard that one people have come up to me all sorts of different people from different forms of music i've heard that one if nothing else i can't wait till the next time we speak i can't i i'm gonna make sure this is the one and only time we talk because i've just there's so much more to talk about and i really appreciate you thank you elvis