Song for song, line by line, blow for blow, Elvis Costello remains the most consistently fascinating songwriter Britain has produced in the past 50 years – an opinion which seems these days to be mostly confined to a smallish section of an ageing demographic.
Certainly, Costello’s music has, as far as I can tell, proved largely resistant to TikTokification, even if Olivia Rodrigo did ‘pay homage’ (nicked, with the author’s approval) to the riff to ‘Pump It Up’ for her song ‘Brutal’. Surveying the audience at the Theatre Royal on the opening night of a UK tour with his long-term foil Steve Nieve, these would appear to be mostly the same people who loved Costello from the start – albeit ‘She’, his Charles Aznavour cover from Notting Hill, brought in fresh blood in the late 1990s.
You can understand why Costello’s appeal might struggle to cross over to younger generations. His melodies twist and turn, almost compulsively, away from the obvious. His voice, though more versatile than is often recognised, is not always easy on the ear. His lyrics are emotionally confrontational, intellectually challenging and often labyrinthine in a way which doesn’t necessarily sit easily within today’s cultural mores. Costello dropped his biggest hit, ‘Oliver’s Army’, from his repertoire several years ago because of its (highly contextualised) use of the N-word. Tonight the song is returned to the repertoire, featuring new lyrics in the second verse, most of which I didn’t quite catch but none of which would get him cancelled.
Costello has just turned 70. When he recently saw archive footage of himself from 1977 broadcast on BBC4, he quips: ‘I had to check that I hadn’t died.’
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