Speaking in the latest issue of MOJO, on sale now, Elvis Costello has revealed details of an upcoming boxset focused on his 1977 debut album My Aim Is True. Due this autumn, the 5-disc set will reflect, says Costello, “the curious nature and the compression of events between ’76 and the middle of ’78”. Alongside a remaster of the album nestle a bounty of unheard demos from 1975 that he stresses “nobody’s ever heard”.
Disc 1 will be the said My Aim Is True remaster – recorded in North London with the US country rock band Clover 50 years ago and showcasing what Costello calls “that great Pathway Studio sound”. He also promises “US readers will find Watching The Detectives added to the end of Side One, just where they expect to find it.” That song – Costello’s fourth single – remains a tribute to its interim rhythm section: drummer Steve Golding and bassist Andrew Bodnar from The Rumour. “‘Bertie’ Bodnar sadly left us not so long ago,” notes Costello, “but I am glad that I got to tell him that his bassline is still in all versions of the song played today.”
Disc 2 is entitled The Blue Print: “a record of 17 acoustic songs recorded in 1975 and 1976,” Costello explains. “Ten of which have never been published or issued before.
“You will find a version of Radio Soul here,” he adds, “which turned into [1978 single] Radio Radio – but there are eight or nine of these songs that contain themes, individual lines, lyric couplets or entire verses and choruses that are found on Armed Forces, Get Happy!! or Trust, set to entirely different music. It’s a kind of editing in reverse and why this record is called The Blue Print.”
Five of the songs are solo recordings taped in Costello’s bedroom. “These songs were my view from the outskirts of town in ’76, away from ‘where it was happening’,” says Costello. “I had to find an entirely different way of speaking about these feelings and so the songs sound as if I might have been writing them for ‘Whispering’ Jack Smith or Al Bowlly not some odd-looking eejit in hornrims.”
Disc 3, The Stranger In The House, comprises demos and outtakes that in Costello’s mind illuminate the parallel career path that might have opened up for him as a songsmith-for-hire, possibly in Nashville.
“This disc opens with Radio Sweetheart – the first song I recorded for Stiff Records,” he reveals. “As you will hear, it has little or nothing to do with the musical allegiances of 1976 or 1977. It has a pedal-steel guitar on it for heaven’s sake. By early 1976, I was completely convinced I was really a backroom songwriter for other singers and tried to get signed on that for assignments all over town. Only Stiff Records thought differently. They put me in the studio with Nick Lowe and members of Clover.
“This sounds like a boast but Bruce Springsteen once asked me, ‘How did you get that sound on My Aim Is True?’ I told him honestly: No money.”
Compiled in the style of a radio documentary, Becoming The Attractions is Disc 4 and focuses on the period between the summers of 1977 and 1978 when Costello, keyboard player Steve Nieve, drummer Pete Thomas and bassist Bruce Thomas got hold of the My Aim Is True songs and began to enthusiastically remodel them.
“Clover tried to play really sensibly, y’know, like in the right tempo and everything and sort of swung in,” Costello tells MOJO. “When it comes to tempo, there’s a certain kind of song, particularly anything with a bit of a swing to it, if you play it too fast, it loses that. So, it was very noticeable that the songs from My Aim Is True that disappeared from [The Attractions’] live set were Pay It Back, Sneaky Feelings and Blame It On Cain. They kind of went away because they were a different kind of music.”
Covered In Clover, the final disc, is a live performance with Clover from 2007 – the one and only time the Marin County group performed the songs they recorded for My Aim Is True.
“Mickey Shine, the drummer, had become a painter by then, so we had to enlist Pete Thomas,” says Costello. “If you want to hear a happy drummer, you want to listen to this record. You’ve never heard anybody having such a great time being in his favourite band. He knew Clover before Stiff, before we started. Pete was living in California, and he got to know them, and he was the one who introduced Clover to my manager [Jake Riviera], and hence they were brought to England… supposedly to make their fortunes.”
The 2007 show was a benefit for sufferers of a rare genetic disorder, Prader-Willi Syndrome, a condition that eventually requires residential care. Richard de Lone – the son of Eggs Over Easy pianist and co-founder Austin, a former bandmate of Costello’s – is a sufferer‚ and the inspirer of subsequent benefit events including Nick Sings Elvis – Costello Sings Lowe in which Nick Lowe and Costello performed one another’s songs, and most recently, in 2022, Costello Sings Hunter/Garcia with The All-American Beauties led by Larry Campbell.
Austin de Lone passed early in 2025. “This disc is dedicated to him,” says Costello, “and all the people, both family and friends, who have seen many of the objectives of what has now become The Prader-Willi Homes Of California fulfilled.” You can find out more HERE.
“As we came off the stage, Dylan said, You sing loud - we should do a record of Johnnie and Jack songs…”
As Elvis Costello gets ready to return to the UK in June, playing a revelatory selection of early songs. Wilco renaissance man and Costello fan Jeff Tweedy quizzes his hero exclusively for MOJO. On the agenda: star signs, record shops, tour buses, “backwards orchestration” and, naturally, Bob Dylan. More info and to order a copy HERE!
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