‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’: the only pop song Elvis Costello couldn’t live without
It’s a safe assumption that the listening preferences of a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer gradually evolve later in life just as they do for anybody else, so it might be unfair to put too much stock into Elvis Costello‘s 1992 appearance on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs.
That said, Costello’s eight song selections on that episode, which came at an interesting transitional point in the then 38-year-old’s career, do suggest he was already an old soul to begin with; largely uninterested in spending his island solitude listening to the sorts of guitar-driven pop records he and his mates were best known for.
As Costello explained to the show’s host, Sue Lawley, he approached his song selection with the true conceit of the program in mind: ‘What records would you want with you if you were stranded on a deserted island?’ This is a very different question from ‘What are your eight favourite records?’ The latter list, Costello said, “changes minute to minute” anyway, and would probably consist mostly of sad bastard music, leading to “such a depressing experience that perhaps I wouldn’t be so resilient.”
Costello fans, even in the early 1990s, knew that Elvis’s tastes ventured well beyond his own singer/songwriter and New Wave pop roots. His 1981 album Almost Blue was a covers record of old country tunes by the likes of Hank Williams, George Jones, and Gram Parsons. A surprising curveball from an artist at the height of his popularity, but a good indication that Costello shouldn’t be pigeon-holed going forward.
A few years after his Desert Island Discs appearance, Costello recorded a collaboration record with the great lounge-pop songsmith Burt Bacharach, another surprise pairing that worked to great effect, as the two wrote a slate of new material that harked back to Bacharach’s ‘60s heyday.
The majority of Costello’s Desert Island picks actually angled their lens even further into the past, including some nods to obscure dead dudes named Beethoven (‘String Quartet No 16 in F major, Op 135’), Mozart (‘The Marriage of Figaro, Act 1, Scene 5, No 6’), Purcell (‘Dido’s Lament’), and Schubert (‘Sonata In B Flat, D 960: I Molto moderato’).
Of his remaining four choices, Elvis went with three names from the world of mid-century melodic jazz, deciding to seek out life-affirming vibes from Duke Ellington (‘Blood Count’), the Joe Loss Orchestra (‘At Last’), and Frank Sinatra (‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’).
This left just one meagre spot for an actual rock and roll band, and Costello decided to stick with the nostalgic theme, travelling back to memories of the first record he ever owned, 1963’s With The Beatles. The song he chose, though, wasn’t a Lennon-McCartney original, but a cover of Smokey Robinson’s ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’. This worked as a sort of “compromise,” as Elvis explained it, in that he could represent some of his love for the Motown R&B of the early 1960s, as well.
As Lawley noted in the interview, Costello had recently worked with Paul McCartney, as the two collaborated on Paul’s Flowers in the Dirt record and Elvis’s Spike. At the time, McCartney had casually mentioned to a reporter that Costello was the closest he’d come to rediscovering the sort of songwriting partnership he’d had with John Lennon.
“I think he lived to regret saying that,” Costello told Lawley, “because people really made a thing of it. There was obviously no replacing John Lennon. They’d grown up together, and that wasn’t the aim. But it was a very nice compliment, and I think I know what we meant by it. Because basically, we didn’t agree all the time. We never had any really bad arguments, but there was enough difference in approach… that it wouldn’t naturally glue together. But I do think we’ve written two or three really good songs.”
Just maybe not desert island-worthy songs.
