Elvis Costello on His Early Days: The Birth of ‘My Aim Is True’

In our in-depth new interview, Costello digs deep into his origin story, the making of his debut, and the great music he hid away

Elvis Costello made his instant-classic debut, 1977’s My Aim Is True, in just over 24 hours, while he still had a day job as a computer operator. But as Costello discusses in the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, the music on the album only hinted at what he was up to in his earliest years as an artist — all of which is finally revealed on his just-released new box set, the five-disc My Aim Is True (49th Anniversary Edition). Alongside a remaster of the album, the set includes The Blue Print, acoustic recordings from 1975 and 1976; demos and outtakes, including the country songs he kept under wraps at the time; live recordings that trace the birth of the Attractions; and a 2007 San Francisco benefit concert where he’s backed by the musicians from the original sessions.

In the Rolling Stone Music Now interview, Costello breaks down the box’s long-buried early recordings, and goes deep on the making of My Aim Is True, including the real story behind “Alison,” and much more. To hear the whole episode, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above. Here are some highlights from the discussion:

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Costello started writing “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” on a train to his mother’s house, then ran upstairs to find a guitar before he could forget it. “I was on my way to visit my mother, and the song came into my head,” he says. “There were no tape recorders or anything like that that you carried around in your pocket, no phone, no way of memorizing it other than through repetition. So I had to make my way as swiftly as possible to my old house, and I said hello to my mum, kissed my mum on the cheek, and ran upstairs and found this old battered guitar that was on top of the wardrobe, and sat there for about an hour until I had it drilled into my brain and I wouldn’t lose it.” As for where the red shoes came from: “I have no clue. I just figured they were something that didn’t feature in my wardrobe, and those angels would definitely want them.”

Costello almost released his earliest recordings 35 years ago, then backed off. “I cannot for the life of me think why I felt they revealed too much, which is why they were never released until now,” Costello says of the 1975 and 1976 recordings on The Blue Print. “I was on the verge of releasing them like 35 years ago, and then I thought, ‘No, … everybody will see.’ It was like showing your pictures, you know, in clothes that you now know don’t suit you.” He hears them differently now. “They just sound like somebody learning, and there should be nothing to be embarrassed about that. Everybody has to start somewhere. I would be delighted if some younger writers listened to those songs and it gave them any confidence in what they were doing, because you can hear the ambition to do something, and it isn’t quite formed.”

When his label, Stiff Records, told Costello they were changing his name, he thought it was a prank. “They were the ones that held the cards,” he says. “It was a modest company, but I didn’t have any company except that one. So I went along with it.” The label’s photo shoots, he says, “kinda played up my ordinariness, you know, my unfashionable clothes, and the glasses became Superman glasses, you know, Clark Kent glasses or Buddy Holly or Phil Silvers.” 

Costello never bought the “new wave” label. “I never felt part of any gang,” he says. “I hated the whole new wave thing. It was completely made up. It was just journalists trying to explain bands that had energy and a little edge, but were something different than punk, which in itself was a term borrowed from another culture.” He also rejects what he calls “the big book of history version” of 1977, “that punk sort of swept everything in its path, and that just isn’t true.” “Most of the other great groups were struggling down there in the 30s and 40s,” he says, “because the charts were completely full of disco records or Fleetwood Mac or Rod Stewart singing a song from 10, 12 years ago already.” Once he and the Attractions started turning up on TV, the exposure didn’t always help. “When people got a look at us, the record usually went down the charts the next week,” he says. “I’m not being falsely modest. … That was the way it was.”

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Costello now regrets being rude about Linda Ronstadt’s hit cover of “Alison.” “It was on a very big hit record by Linda Ronstadt,” he says. “And not a version that I initially was very polite about. But that really wasn’t Linda’s singing. It was more the arrangement … seemed very, very much of its location, which was Los Angeles, and I was just allergic to that sound. And I really feel embarrassed now that I was ever so rude about it, ’cause … that I would be chosen in the company of Lowell George and Warren Zevon and Smokey Robinson … and Buddy Holly, all the people that Linda chose, was a tremendous compliment, and I just didn’t know how to take it gracefully, frankly.”

Asked whether he had more in common with the Ramones or the Muppets, Costello picks the latter. Around the time My Aim Is True came out, the Ramones and the Muppets were in the Top 20 at the same time. “It’s up to us to decide which is which,” Costello says. “The Ramones were just a thing. They were just fantastic. … But the Muppets are the Muppets, man. The Muppets had great songwriters, too. Paul Williams.” His own Muppet counterpart: “I was closer to Oscar the Grouch, actually, initially, and then I gradually was working towards Sam the Eagle as time went on. I tell you, I sang with Kermit, and it’s the most extraordinary thing.”
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