Elvis Costello: ‘I didn’t expect to be discussing a televised lynching with my 12-year-old boys over dinner in 2020’

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Get our Now Hear This email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “The one in Belgium,” Elvis Costello recalls of one night at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels in 1978, when the crowd turned against New York support act Suicide, and he and his band The Attractions took the stage with an unholy vengeance, “we came on with the attitude of ‘f*** you for treating them like that’, played a furious, incoherent 20 minutes and that just tipped everybody right over the edge, then it was a full-on riot. “It’s very easy to draw a parallel,” Costello says, “but really what the story is about is what it summons out of the crowd. It only exists if you’re looking at it.” After his Helsinki sessions, Costello continued the album alongside long-term sidekick Steve Nieve and Le Quintette Saint Germain in Paris, “something I’d dreamed of doing”, he says. Combined with mournful paeans “What Is It That I Need That I Don’t Already Have?” and “The Last Confession of Vivian Whip”, the album begins to read like a battle against time.