Becoming Elvis Costello: The Legend Goes In-Depth on His New ‘My Aim Is True’ Boxed Set, Origins of the Iconic Name and Glasses, and Finding a Sound and Persona That Transformed Rock Forever

Oh, it’s so funny to be seeing you after so long, “My Aim Is True”… but not so very peculiar to have Elvis Costello‘s 1977 debut brought back to mind, because, well, talk about an aim that’s been unswerving in its impact for 50 years. Or make that almost 50, since the title of the new boxed set we’re here to discuss with Costello is “My Aim Is True (49th Anniversary Edition).”

The fact that his landmark is being celebrated with an expansive and exhaustive five-CD collection one year shy of its golden-jubilee mark has at least a little with Costello being too mischievous to commemorate anything so painfully obvious as a big round number. But it’s also because the set isn’t just about ’77. It’s about the huge wealth of demos he was recording in 1976 (and even before that)… as well as the unforgettable live shows he and the Attractions were doing behind the album in ’77 and ’78 that put a nervous turbo charge into the material. Whatever number he or you want to place on it, this set represents several years’ worth of Costello’s origin story and seemingly near-immediate transformation into one of rock ‘n’ roll’s all-time greats.

We sat down with EC — as he is best known to many of his friends, as he affirms in our conversation — as he made a recent visit to Universal Music’s L.A. offices to film some promotion for the “My Aim Is True” set. Costello fans well know there has been no shortage of reissues and boxed sets over the decades, but this one gets so personal, and so into his semi-brutal youth, that it might count as more of a labor of love than any that have preceded it. The singer still professes to have little interest in nostalgia, yet that’s not how he sees this set, which includes so much fresh-sounding unreleased material, he insists issuing it all has more to do with “now” than then.

Following our Q&A (which has been condensed and edited for clarity), you’ll learn where the iconic glasses came from (literally); why his handlers suggested the “Elvis” name and then panicked almost to the point of dropping it like a hot potato; why his early demos have a lot more to do with Springsteen and Van Morrison than anything resembling “new wave”; what changed from when he recorded “MAIT” with the California band Clover to the formation of the Attractions; and how he is still able to get a legitimate charge out of performing “Alison,” “Watching the Detectives” and other classics after nearly half a century.

How would you describe where you were at in finding your own voice at the time of making “My Aim Is True”?

Some of the songs on that record were kind of written in haste to fit in with the kind of type of record we were making once we got rolling. Because we recorded “My Aim Is True” in episodes; we didn’t record it all in one session. So it was a little bit like working on a weekly television show, where you get to say, “Oh, you mean the housekeeper character’s really popular with the viewers. Let’s give her a few more lines!” It was like, “OK, you like those sort of angry songs? Well, here’s some more!” I’m making light of it, but there was a little bit of that. Because by the time we finished “My Aim Is True,” I could sense which way the wind was blowing, and the wind was not blowing in the direction of “Poison Moon” or “I Turn Around” [quieter, unreleased songs heard as demos in the boxed set]. It was going away from that kind of more introspective music, towards something else — and I found I could do the other thing, as well. I could speak up. Even though I’d sung in a band before, I didn’t really know what voice I would sing in for myself until we did “My Aim Is True.”

Do you remember any specific moment of working on “My Aim Is True” where you realized that there was something that grabbed people about you being a little surlier than you had been up to that point?

It’s funny to look at this group of songs written over a period of time, because it’s very easy to subscribe to the kind of thumbnail sketch version of who I was — which I totally contributed to, with all the very quotable things I said around ’78. All the “revenge and guilt” stuff, that was kind of grandstanding a little bit. I think I sort of wanted people away from me so I could do what I was doing, and I knew if I created a… what do they call it?… a cordon sanitaire [a French term for a quarantine barrier, or point of political separation]… if I created a kind of zone around myself with those remarks, that some people wouldn’t come into that circle, and then I could get on with what I was doing, which was writing.

You feel like some of the early work was a little bit misunderstood, though you acknowledge you may have contributed some to that?

I think that the perspective in some of these songs that are on “My Aim is True,” people misread them. They misread “Allison,” even — they think it’s about murder. It’s not really about murder, is it? Neither is “Watching the Detectives.” It’s about television. It’s about somebody being more fascinated with an imaginary reality than the real reality. I mean, I’m not trying to overanalyze my own songs, but that’s just the truth of it. So I think there’s some very curious points of view in these songs. And I think the thumbnail sketch of “Mr. Angry” or “Mr. Revenge and Guilt” doesn’t lead to… There’s two lines in “Red Shoes” that line up with that, but what about the rest of the song? What’s that about? It’s about a sense of time running out. Which is a lot of the panic I certainly recall feeling, like things are getting away from me at that age.

And I didn’t know how to say that in a way that was a pop song. So I wrote “Poison Moon” and “Jump Up” about that [two of the songs included as demos in the boxed set], about the feeling that my life was beyond my control because I had modest circumstances, and things in the world were affecting all of us, but I didn’t have any other solution to propose about it. And I think that that kind of writing is still in “My Aim Is True.” And, for that matter, even in (the demo of) “Radio Soul,” which later became “Radio Radio” (with different lyrics). That’s talking about your actual heart and soul. And I knew that if I said that stuff out loud back then, people would just find that ludicrous. And maybe it is still ludicrous, but I don’t fucking care. I stand by that approach to songwriting and what those songs were about.

And then some of the other songs are something different. You know, “Waiting For the End of the World” and things like that, they’re more like what’s happening right now by the window, just like everything that came to be on “This Year’s Model” and “Armed Forces” — the acceleration of life and experience.

Is there any truth to the rumor that you tried recutting the “My Aim Is True” album with the Attractions, after that band came togther following the recording of the debut?

There never was an Attractions version of ‘My Aim Is True,” which was a rumor that went around in ’77. People go, “Ah, maybe they went and re-recorded it,” because our versions within a few months were so different [from the album to the concerts]. We did go into the studio as the Attractions just after we rehearsed for our first show, but I found that tape and it’s terrible. Terrible! We didn’t do the whole album, just a few songs from our repertoire. We did some of the songs from “My Aim Is True” and some of the songs that became “This Year’s Model,” but everything sounded amazingly cautious, because we just didn’t have that vibe that we had at Pathway, or anywhere else we ended up recording, and we didn’t have Nick (Lowe). We came in to listen to it and went, “Oh, no, that’s terrible. We’ve got work to do yet,” and that work was doing those first shows. We actually learnt very quickly.

I tell you where we learnt what we had to do. It was the next night, when we opened for Wayne County and the Electric Chairs. We had to step up in our degree of showmanship, which was definitely in Jayne’s persona. I needed to speak up for myself a little bit more, and the band likewise did. So we quickly learnt how to put the songs over, and once we started playing on the bill with other people, then we got competitive. It’s only natural — we’re just showing off, you know?

And you were accelerating the pace to the point where you were doing some concerts where the relatively quick length of the show was not indicative of how many songs you were actually getting in.

Well, the shows were over pretty quick, particularly when we started to speed the songs up. Most of the songs were two minutes or three minutes to start with. I think I had a clause in my contract when I re-signed that the songs had to be over two minutes. Beause there’s two songs on “My Aim Is True” that are under that. “Welcome to the Working Week” is a minute and 20 seconds long, and I think “Mystery Dance” is 1:30, and that’s the whole form of the song with a solo. And it’s not even like we’re playing it too fast! It’s a decent tempo, but it’s not as fast as it did get played just a little while later. But it wasn’t about which was faster and which was louder. It was about the way we felt it at that moment — and it still is. If we do any of those songs now, it’s gotta be the way you feel about it right there and then; otherwise you’re cheating people.

Did Stiff Records realize what it had with you, from the start?

Stiff was a record company that was founded on about 1,000 pounds and everything was done in an improvised fashion, including what order the songs came out from different artists. I was the first artist signed, but I was the 11th single released, because other people’s story, including the Damned’s, seemed more urgent. There was a sense that if you didn’t get that record out, it would be too late, whereas my record didn’t have that feeling. They didn’t know what I was. So then we put some singles out and nobody reacted. You know, we got a couple of mentions, couple of plays on the radio… disappeared. “Alison” came out as a second single; did nothing. People think that was a hit. No, it was a failed single in England. Even “Red Shoes” didn’t really (succeed). It just got us on the BBC and that was about it.

It was “Detectives” that did it, because that is a very unusual piece of music. One of the great things that Nick did was get that sound. He encouraged that approach, from the engineers, to get it to really come in like that (in the introduction), and then it’s actually quite restrained after that. The song isn’t played furiously. The song is kind of in a pocket with me telling the story. But the drama of those big drum fills and everything was just something that that room gave us. Most of the records we love have something to do with a funny room, or a funny, quirky sound, or how they got that funny reverb —whatever it was, in all those things that we celebrate now, where you can buy a plug0in to put in your ProTools that’s imitating Abbey Road or imitating, you name it, every studio in the world, where people are working out scientifically how to recreate a sound.

With “Watching the Detectives,” you’ve said you don’t necessarily think of that as really part of the album, because it was recorded later and only on the U.S. edition, and it’s really kind of a transitional song, with only one of the Attractions (keyboardist Steve Nieve) coming in to make his first appearance on record.

Yeah. I can understand why Columbia (wanted it on the American edition). It was in our set when they first saw us, so they knew it was a big, but the album had come out without it in England, and they wanted to add it because they knew it had an impact. When we did the reunion show with Clover in 2007 to celebrate the 30th anniversary [which makes up the fifth CD in the boxed set], we didn’t play it where it is in the (U.S. album) sequence. We played it as an encore, because to me it’s not part of the album, it’s a separate piece of music.

All of “My Aim Is True” had been recorded and some of the songs were released on singles, and they were preparing the release of the album. When they scheduled the album, they said, “Now you have to turn professional, and we need to get you a band.” We already had Pete (Thomas) marked down as the drummer, and we held auditions for the other guys. But in the process of auditioning all the other candidates who weren’t Bruce (Thomas, the Attractions’ soon-to-be bassist) or Steve (Nieve), I got bored playing the same three songs. Stephen Goulding and Andrew Bodnar from Graham Parker’s band, the Rumour, had learned three songs from the album [to help Costello hold auditions], and we were playing the same three songs through good, bad, and indifferent attempts by different people to play them. After a while, I couldn’t tell whether it was the players or I was just bored with the song. So I said, “Do you mind if I show you something else?,” while we were waiting for somebody who was late. I taught them “Detectives.” And fortunately, Nick came to check out the process of the auditions, heard Steve and Bertie Bodner and I playing it, and said, “We gotta record that.”

If you want to annoy Pete Thomas, you just tell him his drumming on “Watching the Detectives” is good, Because he’s had people praising him for that, but it’s an honest mistake… Anybody who has checked into my story for any length of time knows that Clover played on the first album. But that’s obviously not Clover playing on “Watching the Detectives.” But it’s also not the Attractions, except for Steve Nieve. I didn’t know that was Steve’s first-ever recording session. Child prodigy. Because he was at the Royal College, I figured he must have been in a recording studio before, because they have them in music colleges — but maybe not so much then. It was more book-learned, written-down music that he was studying. So, thank goodness, because he played such great parts on that, his very first thing. You should’ve been able to predict what it was gonna be from that.

To this day, at most shows you’ll do “Allison” and “Detectives,” and you might also do “Mystery Dance” or certain other songs. If you had told yourself 49 or 50 years ago that you were going to be performing these a half-century later…

To be honest, this might be a slightly retrospective observation. But when I got a little bit away from those first songs, particularly around the time of “Imperial Bedroom,” when I was trying to sort of make a bridge (between styles)… I hadn’t gone back to the kind of ragtimey kind of music that’s in that group of songs in the middle of “The Blueprint,” but I was definitely trying to make a link between pre-rock ‘n’ roll songwriting and what I was doing. Hence the attempt to get Sammy Cahn to write the lyrics for “Long Honeymoon” (which failed), and the fact that “Almost Blue” is very obviously written on the model of a song from the ’30s like Brown and Henderson’s “The Thrill is Gone” — not the B.B. King “Thrill is Gone,” but the ballad that Chet Baker recorded. They’re quite similar, allthough I don’t think derivatively.

I think that at that time, I was thinking, “Well, if songs are gonna stick around, it will be if other people (record them).” Don’t forget, “Alison” was on a big-selling record — Linda Ronstadt’s version. I don’t know how many copies “Living in the U.S.A.” sold, but it was in the multi-millions. I hadn’t had a hit of my own’ I didn’t have any top 20 hit until “Veronica.” So people’s memory of these songs being famous is partly influenced by their ubiquity on certain types of FM radio. It’s true that some stations did play our records, but it was a fact that people who had never heard me perform knew “Alison” because they knew Linda’s version. You know, it’s like “Peace, Love and Understanding” being in “The Bodyguard,” right? It’s not my version, it’s Curtis Stiger’s. We wouldn’t be talking now if that had been my version, because I’d be on my own private island.

What I think about it now is, if you wrote a song and there was any call for it to be heard again 50 years later, you’ve achieved something. Because if you go back 50 years before 1977, you get to songs like “My Blue Heaven” and “Where or When” by Rodgers and Hart, which were about the same year, ’27, ’28 — very good years for songwriting, those. That’s what you call standards. Those songs have been recorded by multiple artists; very few of my songs have been covered multiple times. Probably there’s four or five covers of “Alison” and quite a few of “Pump It Up,” and they’re good, bad and indifferent. But there’s really not a lot of curiosity about the rest of the catalog, because I think there’s too many ideas within the lyrics for most people to conjure with.

So it’s down to me to tell those stories, and that’s fine. I wanted to be a country songwriter on one hand (in the mid-’70s), but I don’t know whether I would have kept going with that; after a while I would have wanted to do something else, just like I did. So, (having those early classics in the setlist) doesn’t feel in any way forced. I think the thing that I really feel strongly about is that I must earn the right to sing the songs. Whatever arrangement they’re in, whatever season we’re in, however great the venue is, however great I feel on any one night, I hope to get to songs that people have valued for a while in an honest way and not just read them from a script. Because you do see acts where you could feel like, OK, well it’s got to that point, they’re gonna do that song for sure. That’s why sometimes we’ll open with a song that you’re expecting us to close with, because it just makes you play it different. It’s a good thing.

When I saw you last year in San Diego, I was sitting next to a long-married couple who had a binder they were hoping to get backstage to show you, about their daughter, whom they had proudly named Alison. And I’m like, that’s understandable on one hand, if you think about the lyrics of the song, it’s a little bit of a strange song to name your daughter after.

Oh, when people name their children…? Oh, I don’t mind about that. I mean, obviously I have met sisters who were Alison and Veronica, which is a pretty big compliment, isn’t it? It doesn’t bother me at all.. That’s part of it, that that can happen, and people are showing their affection for the song to do something so momentous as that. I think I should just be gracious about that. It doesn’t really matter what the song is about, then. It becomes just about the name and that title. It isn’t about the narrative of the song… which people have told me, oh, they love that song, going, “It’s so romantic.” And I’m going, “It’s romantic? Are you sure?” Because they’ve interpreted it another way. They’ve interpreted it as having a different meaning, which is real to them, and who am I to tell them that’s wrong?

I mean, the songs have changed in their emphasis to me over time, from what I intended. When you revisit emotional songs particularly, you have to find a way. That’s why I’m not nostalgic. Oddly enough, although we’ve got this 49th anniversary edition now, I’m not nostalgic and it’s like I don’t wanna go back. That (boxed set) is actually a real thing that’s happening now, and it has enough music that nobody’s heard before that it’s happening now. And anybody that discovers even the first record for the first time, that’s great. If they fall in love with one of the songs from one of the other discs, or the performance of those songs, that’s great too. And if they don’t like any of it, well, there’s other records you can listen to, you know? Some of them mine. I’ve got a few!

Let’s talk about what is “new” in this boxed set, because people who’ve gone through it are already responding to it with an enthusiasm you don’t always see for extensive collections like this anymore. Of the five CDs, the first is the remastered edition of the original album, which is also coming out separately on vinyl. The second disc is “The Blueprint,” with demos of so many early songs you either abandoned or reworked later into other songs. There is a third disc that explores a country music path not taken, including a couple of songs that were released as B-sides, “Radio Sweetheart” and “Stranger in the House.” The fourth disc has the Attractions playing these songs live, after the album was out, in increasingly furious fashion. And the fifth and final disc is the reunion show with Clover where you played it all the way through. Was there a master plan for this assemblage?

I did say, “I’m not having a 50th anniversary thing.” I thought, well, 49 is kind of (more interesting). It’s because of the way my career started. I was recording before I had my name. I didn’t have a record contract when we made the first recordings. I think there was still a sort of sense, as I say in the notes, that I was a songwriter for other people, because my face didn’t really fit any of the trends at that time. Some of the songs actually were written in ’74; a good deal of the unheard things are from ’75 into ’76… The second CD [“The Blueprint”] begins with five songs that sound nothing like the things that came to be played on the radio first, like “Wave a White Flag.” They don’t sound a lot like the things on “My Aim Is True,” which is why I’ve kept them to myself all these years. I used to think they sounded too much like the people I was listening to, but with benefit of hindsight, I don’t think that’s true. They do have a freshness from me being 21, and I didn’t know who I was, so I was trying out lots of different things — and I don’t think that’s an unattractive story. I think it’s a really good counterpoint to “My Aim Is True,” so that’s the best way I can describe it.

The story of the fourth record is of of the Attractions sort of taking hold of those songs and us just going berserk within six months. So I think there’s a good bunch of stories here. I think the final record is very joyful, with Clover finally playing those songs back in the tempo and approach that they were written in, with John McFee leading the way. I’d never had that experience, playing with them on stage until that night in 2007. So these are good things to share with people that are in any way interested. I mean, people will pick their way, and with the different ways people listen now, some people will get this set and read it like a book, and other people will just go through in the different (streaming) platforms and hear what they’re curious about. I don’t have any rule book about how you should listen. I never did.

To be honest, I know a lot of people will get this and jump right to the vintage live disc with the Attractions playing all the “My Aim Is True” stuff at accelerated tempos, then go check out everything else.

You hear like little snapshot of the Attractions really being very well-behaved at the (London pub called the) Nashville Rooms. Everybody’s playing the tempo of the record, and nobody’s doing that much that isn’t in the arrangement. And then, of course, you hear us rapidly abandon that approach. Even by the Stiff tour, we’re already starting to sound like a different group. By the time we get to the second and third tour of America, third tour of America, it was a totally different game. That’s like all young bands. We didn’t grow up together, so we didn’t have that bond of teenage years together. We were a group of people who were assembled to play “My Aim Is True” live. But I had half of the second record [“This Year’s Model”] already written, so, to be honest, at the time, I wanted to get on with that. That other record felt done. We’d had three singles in England, none of them hits, so I wondered whether it wasn’t the next group of songs that would get us in front of a larger audience, if that was the intention. And that is actually what happened, isn’t it? And although “Alison” and a couple of those other songs have stuck around, it was “Pump It Up” and “Watching the Detectives” that made (the impact) … and “Chelsea,” which was a top 10 record in England.

To talk about the unreleased demos that preceded recording “My Aim Is True”: You’ve spoken about how you were even influenced by early Bruce Springsteen, and of course Van Morrison.

Yeah, you can hear those things. I loved Bruce… I had Bruce’s first record. I picked up a second-hand copy in Liverpool. And of course, I could tell who he’d been listening to. I could hear Van in him. I could also hear Dylan in him. So in some degrees, it gave me the license to run with that kind of idea. I didn’t think I was imitating him. I definitely took heart from what he was doing, and the whole idea of “Radio Soul” [the early draft of “Radio Radio”] being a celebratory song was more in tune with his songs that celebrated music playing on the radio, rather than the song it turned into — which I think is the inferior song, frankly. I was a songwriter primarily then, and I didn’t really have a business plan. I just was doing what I was doing and we got these opportunities, and then you know where it led.

It led to all these other things, which is why the third record [in the boxed set] is kinda like the Zelig part of the story, where I could’ve been maybe not a country singer, but a country songwriter, maybe. Could’ve done that. But I think the coincidence of being invited to sing with George Jones on the basis of the “My Aim Is True” session version of “Stranger in the House,” if you think about it, that began a 40-year story of collaborations in that field of music. T Bone, Emmy, Lucinda, all these different collaborative things I’ve done, they all depart from (Columbia executive) Greg Geller’s decision to send “Stranger in the House” to Billy Sherrill. And I’m not even sure that Billy thought that was a great song. Don’t forget, he was a record producer (for Jones), but he was also the head of Columbia Nashville. So I don’t doubt that when they put out those duets records, they think about demographics. If you know that album (Jones’ 1979 “My Very Special Guests”), it’s Tammy, Loretta, Waylon, Willie, the Staples, Dr. Hook, Linda Ronstadt, and I’m the oddball. I’m the outside guy who has barely been in the business five minutes. I don’t think that was because Sherrill thought I was a great songwriter or a great singer. I think he thought, “Hey, that’s gonna get some of the young new wave kids in the door.” And George never expressed an opinion about it. He just came in and we sang the song together and that was the end of that, you know? It was great.

It’s great the third disc is kind of a country-oriented disc, and of course in the liner notes you explain where everything went from there in your occasional detours. But the average person was not listening to “My Aim Is True” saying, “I can hear a bunch of country in here,” unless they’ve also heard “Radio Sweetheart” and “Stranger in the House” as non-album tracks.

Well, if they don’t know “Radio Sweetheart,” then the only clue they’ve got is that the wild guitar on “Waiting for the End of the World” is actually a pedal steel through a fuzztone. People that knew the Burritos knew that that was possible from a pedal steel. McFee is such a great musician that I wanted to cut a couple of things with steel on it, even though I knew they wouldn’t be very fashionable in London at that time. And Jake Riviera (Costello’s first manager) definitely told me to keep “Stranger in the House” to myself, and we kept it under wraps for a couple of years until it came out as a B-side, because things were very factional in London and you’re either in or out. We needed to be in at that moment, and that was probably the right decision. I don’t think there’s a track on “My Aim Is True” that I would have left off to include “Stranger in the House.” It would have seemed like, “OK, what’s going on here? This doesn’t belong.” The rest of the stuff hangs together as making a record.

And of course the curious thing is that the other group of songs which I hadn’t even revealed — the ones that open “The Blueprint” — only Dave Robinson knew about those, and he’d never mentioned those songs to me after I recorded that tape. He’d never said, “Oh, whatever happened to that song ‘Losing You’?” I was moving so fast, I never looked back until we got the second record done, and then I’m going, “OK, now I’ve got to do a third record.” And we’re on the road all the time, and I started going through my notebooks, going, “Well, these lines in these other songs should have a life.” And the sentiment of “Accidents Will Happen,” the topic or the tone, is the same as “Leverman,” but it’s utterly different music. And the same with “I Can’t Turn It Off,” which became “Watch Your Step.” I just sort of made it more ruthless, you know? I suppose the earlier version is a bit more expansive and a little bit less focused on a hook. It was what we’d learnt from being in the flow of pop music then. I thought, “Well, you can have a lot of words and you can have a lot of storytelling, but you gotta hang it on something that people can remember.” These earlier songs were a little bit more diffuse, which is why they stayed where they were in a drawer for so long. But I don’t think they’re inferior.

And I think there’s a couple of songs on “My Aim Is True” that sound like they were written on autopilot. My opinion when I listen to them now is that they sound like I was writing the sort of songs I thought people would like to hear. But I’m not gonna say which ones they are, because that could be somebody’s favorite song, you know?

And then of course, if you look at the setlist that we played on our first shows, you’ll find half the songs on “This Year’s Model” and

Those swinging songs on the first record were more indebted, shall we say, to early Bruce or particularly to the Van Morrison of “His Band and the Street Choir.” McFee played on “Tupelo Honey,” so that was a thrill for me to have somebody that played on one of Van’s records that I loved. But when we were doing our first shows with the Attractions, I found that the faster we played, the less we could swing. So “Pay It Back” and “Sneaky Feelings” (dropped out), and the Winterland performance of “Blame It on Cain” is about the last stand of that song in our set. I mean, that’s a pretty maniacal version of that song. But we got to the point where we couldn’t hold back the horses of the Attractions thing to play those more swinging songs. We could stop and play a ballad, but after a while, we didn’t even do that. We didn’t play “Alison” on the second and third tour. I sort of was all about, “Oh, that’s too easy. Let’s keep going forward.”

So this is sort of a way of putting it all in a context, isn’t it? What are the things you really value? Well, the truth is: all of it. The opening statement; the summary of the songwriting compilation; the potential to have maybe gone a completely other way and gone towards country music, or some sort of country-rock music; and then where it ends up, which is people playing the songs live in their various different ways. It goes from the season in which we were trying to play them as aggressively as possible to the season where enough time had gone by that I didn’t feel uncomfortable going back to the Clover blueprint. In fact, I really enjoyed it.

If you’ve listened to that 2007 show, I don’t think Pete Thomas has ever sounded happier on a record. He’s having such a ball, because that’s all he wanted to do is play with a band like Clover. Pete met them first, after all, when he’d been living in California and working with the songwriter John Stewart for two years, before we brought him back to England to be in the Attractions.

But you have no regrets over you and the Attractions turning into racehorses at the time?

Well, it’s what the circumstances demanded, isn’t it? On the Stiff tour, I think, is when it starts to become more edgy. We were playing Wreckless Eric’s song on a night he didn’t make one of the shows, so we played “Whole Wide World,” but listen to the way we’re playing it. It sounds like we’re trying to sound like the Velvet Underground or something. I don’t know what the fuck kind of music that is. And then the next thing you hear is just an insane version of “Lip Service,” because I wanted one song to announce the personalities of the Attractions. You hear two versions of “Mystery Dance” — one at a sort of reasonable tempo, and one at a totally unreasonable tempo near the end of the record. But you have to give credit to that live version of “Lip Service.” I mean, Bruce Thomas is just soloing through the whole song, and that was part of what we did — he and Steve could play these counterpoint things. So, of course, that was very different to the American approach of playing kind of tucked in behind the singer. The way they played was pushing me, which was a good thing. For a while, anyway, it was a good thing.

When we talked about the “Armed Forces” boxed set a few years ago, that was vinyl-only, so you were obviously very pro-vinyl at that point. But the “My Aim Is True” set is CD-only, as physical formats go.

Well, I would have loved to have done this set on vinyl, but obviously, if you included vinyl in the box, it would probably have to be 10 vinyl records to get that amount of music on it. Nobody would be able to afford it. There’s be a vinyl edition of the remastered “My Aim Is True,” which I believe is definitive. I think that’s as close as I’ve heard it sound to the way I remember it sounding.

I know that some of the digital versions of it, particularly when it first went to CD, really sounded terrible. The virtues of CD were supposedly its indestructibility, which isn’t true, and its capacity, which allowed you to put a symphony on one CD. But unless you paid attention to the remastering for CD, records recorded in the analog era didn’t sound very good on CD because the extra frequencies that it supposedly revealed also brought in things like how you could hear the machine dropping in for punch-ins and things like that. They didn’t really do remastering at all; they just transferred them, or at least they did with “My Aim Is True.” And then people got into more of the season of audiophile versions. I don’t really think this is an audiophile record, though, is it? It’s an eight-track recording. It’s raw-sounding. So there’s other records of ours that obviously benefited from the greater care with mastering — “Imperial Bedroom” and “Painted From Memory” and things like that, where you’ve got beautiful sounds and wide dynamics. But this record, it’s gotta come at you, you know?

People that are want to be critical for the sake of being critical were saying, “Well, these have been available before.” There have been multiple editions of “My Aim Is True” available, and expanded editions, but they’ve been expanded to a different degree or in a different way. There’s also no obligation for you to buy any of these records. So you have to choose which one is right for you, and if you have, say, the Rhino version of this record, which might satisfy people’s curiosity about what else was there, that’s fine; then don’t buy this. I don’t care. But I see the care that obviously has gone into Coco Shinomiya’s layout, and Steve Berkowitz’s attention to the fine details of mastering and remastering and the sequencing of the compiling and the relative balances that he and his engineer worked hard at, so the records flow. I would defend that. In terms of what the storytelling is… They’re relatively limited-edition releases. They don’t make millions of these things. So they’re in circulation to be discussed and to make people curious, and if you’re curious enough, you’ll get one of them. Otherwise, it’s kind of like the big rock you throw into the the pond, and the ripples are literally the individual streams of individual songs. Or, you know, every time you release a record, somebody goes and downloads “She.”

I don’t have to justify or excuse doing something like this because there is no obligation to buy it. I hope people that buy it appreciate the work and the heartfelt care that’s been put into it. One of the things I was grateful for was the fact that I was able to get both Steve and Pete to write about some of their reflections on it. Greg Geller told the story from the American (label) perspective. Bill Flanagan solicited the interviews with various people, some of whom are friends or contemporaries, some of whom were not, like Jim James. So I think all of those little vignettes make up a story which is worth your time if you want to read it and listen to it.

Could there be more sets along these lines?

As to whether it leads to any others, I literally don’t know. That’s not a question for me. It’s a question for this company (Universal Music). If they want to do more, there are other areas of what is a now pretty big catalog that you could compile in different ways. There are a couple of others I guess that people might wanna hear. I don’t know that there’s as many records that have as much hidden story as this one, because this came before everything. There is that pre-history of being in a group, recording some songs solo, being in my bedroom and trying to write songs that sounded like a Randy Newman song, and then suddenly writing “My Aim Is True” and I’m suddenly a pop star — that’s a pretty good narrative, you know?

The amount of detail you were able to recall for the liner notes, which run to tens of thousands of words, is so vast… and includes so much detail you didn’t get into either your memoir or any previous editions.

Well, one thing we didn’t have before is the appointments book for ’76, which my son, Matt, found. I never wrote a diary, like, “Dear diary, I’m feeling blue today,” not even as a child. So it kind of fascinated me to go through that book… There’s one page that lists three different appointments with publishers and record companies who didn’t show any interest in what I did, and then it does have the date that I went to Stiff, and it has the date when we did the first session with Nick Lowe… And then the day they sent me to get my glasses.

That seems a funny thing to say, but they sent me to quite a serious place to do that. They didn’t just go and get them at the local corner shop, but I was sent up to this Victorian kind of spectacles emporium, Curry & Paxton. These were the same glasses as Michael Caine wore in “The Ipcress File.” He’s my predecessor of people who are kind of almost better remembered for a while for wearing glasses than not wearing glasses, and then later on he didn’t wear them.

But I mean, I never thought about the whole thing. It was all so silly — the name changing and the cover of the first one, this pose, and I just went along with it all, as I didn’t know how long we would keep going or how much time we had. I had no concept. When they said “What about the Elvis name?,” I thought, “Well, that could backfire.” And then imagine what happened when early August came and then Elvis (Presley) dies. We literally did have a meeting about, “What are we gonna do about this? Can we carry on?” It sounds silly now, but at the time, it was totally serious: “Is it gonna be impossible for us to go to America? Are people gonna be so offended by the name that they won’t listen to us?” These were serious thoughts.

It’s interesting to consider quickly and casually a lot of these things came together that are iconic to us, whether it’s the name or the photo or the glasses …

They were circumstantial. I mean, I did wear glasses and I think what they realized was that I was kind of ill at ease, and therefore there was no way I was gonna be down the front with tight trousers on, doing the Robert Plant/Roger Daltrey thing. I was actually quite shy, and the name change and the whole thing was a kind of a disguise. I’ve said it before, that it was kind of like Superman in reverse. I could disappear behind that look.

And then some of the myth-making that Stiff indulged in — and then I started to join in, and it got over out of control after a while — it does take you over when you’re not being true to yourself, and you’re kind of saying things because they think they’re gonna make a good headline. I think we’ve all seen acts that have done that and have been eaten up by it. But whatever happened in the coming years — there were some pretty spectacular wrecks — the end of it is that I’m here doing this now, and I’ve made all these other records, and I’ve written, like, I don’t know, 500 songs. And that doesn’t make me 500 times better than anybody else, but it does make me hardworking.

And no regrets at not having a career being DP Costello? Since you talk about how you were using that as a professional performing name for a while.

Well, Declan… can you imagine how crushing it was to get your first-ever booking in London — I’d adopted Costello by then, but I was still Declan Costello for a while — and because it wasn’t a common name in England, and it still really isn’t, they misspell it? It was just a typo, but it was so crushing. So then after that, I went, “OK, I’m going with the initials now.” My dad always called me “DP,” so I just went with that until the Elvis thing. I mean, very few people call me Declan. I don’t respond to people who call me that in an attempt to be familiar. Only my family calls me Declan, or Dec, and some of my close friends. But hardly anybody calls me Elvis, either. Most everybody calls me EC. So I’m still with my dad’s idea of being by your initials, you know?

And Costello is a family name. It’s not Italian, it’s Irish. There is no Costello in Italy. Even Frank Costello, that wasn’t his real name. That was a name he adopted. It was an assimilating name. So my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Costello, is where I got it from. So that felt good to me; that was a way of keeping a family connection. Otherwise, instead of being Elvis, I could have been “Little,” you know, like Little Richard. And I could have taken my other grandmother’s name, and that would’ve been Little Much. So it kinda works, but it’s not as good, is it? It’s not as good.

The complete track listing for “My Aim is True (49th Anniversary Edition) Box Set”:
** Denotes previously unreleased

CD1: My Aim Is True

1. Welcome To The Working Week – 2026 Remaster
2. Miracle Man – 2026 Remaster
3. No Dancing – 2026 Remaster
4. Blame It On Cain – 2026 Remaster
5. Alison – 2026 Remaster
6. Sneaky Feelings – 2026 Remaster
7. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes – 2026 Remaster
8. Less Than Zero – 2026 Remaster
9. Mystery Dance – 2026 Remaster
10. Pay It Back – 2026 Remaster
11. I’m Not Angry – 2026 Remaster
12. Waiting For The End Of The World – 2026 Remaster
13. Watching The Detectives – Single Version

CD2: The Blue Print

1. I Turn Around – Hope & Anchor Studio**
2. Losing You – Hope & Anchor Studio**
3. Leverman – Hope & Anchor Studio**
4. Citizen Junction – Hope & Anchor Studio**
5. I Hear A Melody – Pathway Studios
6. Poison Moon – Bedroom Recording
7. Wave A White Flag – Bedroom Recording
8. Mercury Wings – Ms. Dore’s Tape**
9. Jump Up – Hope & Anchor Studio**
10. No Star – Hope & Anchor Studio**
11. Walk On – Hope & Anchor Studio**
12. Radio Soul – Hope & Anchor Studio**
13. Clean Money – Hope & Anchor Studio**
14. Don’t Put A Levy On My Love – Hope & Anchor Studio**
15. Play It Safe – Hope & Anchor Studio**
16. Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver) – Hope & Anchor Studio**
17. I Can’t Turn It Off – Hope & Anchor Studio

CD3: The Stranger In The House

1. Radio Sweetheart – My Aim Is True Outtake
2. Cheap Reward – Bedroom Recording
3. Mystery Dance – Bedroom Recording
4. Stranger In The House – My Aim Is True Outtake
5. Running Out Of Angels – Hope & Anchor Studio**
6. Just Like A Jukebox – Hope & Anchor Studio**
7. I Don’t Want To Go Home – Pathway Studios
8. Blame It On Cain – Bedroom Recording
9. Blue Minute – Ms. Dore’s Tape**
10. Pay It Back – Bedroom Recording **
11. Exiles Road – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
12. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
13. Sweet Revival – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
14. Pay It Back – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
15. Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver) – Flip City – Hope & Anchor Studio**
16. Living In Paradise – Hope & Anchor Studio**
17. Welcome To The Working Week – Pathway Studios
18. Miracle Man – Bedroom Recording**
19. Miracle Man – Pathway Studios
20. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes – Ms. Dore’s Tape**
21. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes – Pathway Studios
22. Waiting For The End Of The World – Pathway Studios
23. Living In Paradise – My Aim Is True Outtake
24. Call On Me – Pathway Studios
25. Watching The Detectives – Pathway Studios Trio Version**
26. No Action – Pathway Studios Trio Version
27. Poison Moon – Ms. Dore’s Tape**
28. Stranger In The House – Ms. Dore’s Tape**

CD4: Becoming The Attractions

1. Alison – What’s On Granada Reports
2. Introduction By Dave Robinson – Live, The Nashville Room
3. Mystery Dance – Live, The Nashville Room
4. Pay It Back – Soundcheck, The Nashville Room
5. Radio Sweetheart – Soundcheck, The Nashville Room
6. Sneaky Feelings – Soundcheck, The Nashville Room
7. Crawling To The U.S.A. – Soundcheck, The Nashville Room
8. Lip Service – Pathway Studios**
9. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes- with Introduction Top Of The Pops**
10. Interview No. 1 – Good Afternoon with Mavis Nicholson
11. Watching The Detectives – Good Afternoon Broadcast**
12. Interview No. 2 – Good Afternoon with Mavis Nicholson
13. Hoover Factory – Good Afternoon Rehearsal**
14. I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself – Live Stiffs, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.
15. Whole Wide World – Live Stiffs, University Of Leicester, Leicester, U.K.**
16. KSAN Intro – Old Waldorf, San Francisco, CA
17. Pump It Up – Old Waldorf, San Francisco, CA**
18. Lip Service – Unknown Field Recording**
19. Mystery Dance – Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**
20. Blame It On Cain – Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**
21. Less Than Zero (Dallas Version) – Warner Theater, Washington D.C.
22. Waiting For The End Of The World – The Agora Ballroom, Cleveland, OH**
23. Miracle Man – Warner Theater, Washington D.C.
24. Watching The Detectives – Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**
25. I’m Not Angry – Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**

CD5: Covered In Clover

1. Welcome To The Working Week (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
2. Miracle Man (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
3. No Dancing (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
4. Intro To Blame It On Cain (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
5. Blame It On Cain (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
6. Alison (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
7. Intro To Sneaky Feelings (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
8. Sneaky Feelings (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
9. Intro To Red Shoes (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
10. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
11. Less Than Zero (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
12. Mystery Dance (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
13. Pay It Back (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
14. I’m Not Angry (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
15. Waiting For The End Of The World / Gloria (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
16. Watching The Detectives (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
17. Mr. Moon (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
18. Intro To The Love Trilogy (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
19. Love Has No Pride (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
20. Love Is Gone (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**
21. (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding (Live – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA – November 8, 2007)**