Why Elvis Costello didn’t care about Paul McCartney’s “bad preconceptions”
It was a partnership that seemed both perfect and strange: punk/new wave icon Elvis Costello would be writing songs with an honest-to-god Beatle, Paul McCartney. At the time, Costello was transitioning into a more elder statesman role in pop music while McCartney was on a cold streak following 1986’s Press to Play.
“I know some people have very bad preconceptions about Paul McCartney, but I’m involved to the extent that I’ve written a bunch of songs with him as well,” Costello observed at the time. “I know he’s a really good bass player, so I’m not too bothered about what anyone thinks about him playing on my record. I don’t think it reflects at all on my perception of myself as a songwriter.”
Together, McCartney and Costello helped each other out on their respective 1989 albums, Flowers in the Dirt and Spike. Costello observed that McCartney was spending most of the 1980s in the pop sphere, so he wasn’t quite sure what to expect when McCartney showed interest in collaborating.
“When I’d got the call to say Paul wanted me to write some songs with him for his next record, I didn’t know what to expect, but as his last co-written hit had been with Michael Jackson, I wondered whether I should be taking some dancing lessons,” Costello wrote in his autobiography Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. “I’d brought an early draft of ‘Veronica’ that you would have recognized, but we immediately got to work putting a better flow into the chorus and shifting the bridge into making that part of the song seem more like a dream.”
McCartney’s Flowers in the Dirt was a bigger success on the album charts, peaking at number one in the UK and number 21 in the US. However, it was Costello who managed to score the bigger hit single from their collaborations. ‘Veronica’, Costello’s lead single from Spike, gave him his highest charting single in the US when it peaked at number 19.
“As soon as you make a record, particularly if it becomes a big success, it doesn’t belong to you any more, it’s that ‘Wah Boo!’ situation,” Costello told NME in 1996. “A similar thing happened with ‘Veronica’ in America. I never liked it. And recently I did this show with Steve (Nieve, Attraction’s keyboardist), and I changed the key and the whole song changed completely.”
“Suddenly I didn’t have to think about the record. It went back to why I wrote it, how I wrote it about my grandmother and it really meant something to me, and I kind of regained it,” Costello observed. “I’d got my song back from the evil success that it had had.”
Check out ‘Veronica’ down below.
