Elvis Costello Downplays Minor Cancer Battle

Elvis Costello is still shying away from being called a cancer “survivor” after a minor 2018 bout with the disease. While promoting his newly released album, Hey Clockface, he addressed the situation, telling Britain's The Independent, “It was turned into a melodrama by The Sun and other people who couldn’t care less whether you live or die and have no empathy for anybody. It was not an insignificant problem but it was fortunately one that could be dealt with one-time-only.”

Costello went on to say, “I won’t subscribe to the description of myself as a survivor of anything, that sounds melodramatic and self-pitying and I never would’ve told anybody had I not had to give a credible reason for why I wasn’t going to be in Manchester on a given night playing with the Buzzcocks. Pardon me if I don’t have a lot of time for discussing my brush with mortality, but I didn’t have one.”

Elvis Costello was on tour with the Imposters when Covid forced the world indoors. He recalls performing at London's Hammersmith Apollo back in March and telling the audience, “we’ll keep playing as long as they let us” before launching into 1991's Mighty Like A Rose classic “Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over).”

Costello remembered, “I woke up the next morning and thought, 'the game’s up.' I saw the holes in the crowd in an apparently sold-out house in Manchester, and even at Hammersmith at the interval there was about half a house. We thought 'Wow, people have really taken this seriously'. . . Two weeks later I’m reunited with my family after two weeks of quarantine when I get home, I’m in a little cabin on Vancouver Island going, 'where did the world go?'”

Elvis Costello explained to us a while back that working on music for a proposed Broadway musical, dabbling in hip hop, or fully embracing the Americana genre, all eat up one's time and inspiration: “That's the thing is that if you do one thing for a while, you're liable to want to do something different. You don't want to eat vanilla ice cream or steak every day. I never want to eat steak. It's just the feeling that I had there. When I was given the opportunity to work with (Burt) Bacharach, Anne Sofie von Otter and many of the other things I'd been doing in the last few years, I would have been a fool to turn those chances down. Everything that I got from it and the songs we wrote or recorded together. And when it came time to do this record it seemed very natural to me.”