Elvis Costello has never been afraid to step outside his musical comfort zone - album collaborations with everyone from Burt Bacharach to The Roots are testament to that - but you might expect a night in the company of rowdy electronic music makers Justice to be a step too far.
Not so, it turns out; in fact, Costello describes the performance he witnessed as “one of the great shows I've ever been to.”
After admitting that he doesn’t listen to a great deal of contemporary rock bands, Costello tells Vanity Fair that he was introduced to Justice by his son, as they’re his favourite band.
“They’re French,” says Costello, correctly. “I would say it's a kind of techno prog band. We went to see them in Brooklyn. 24 hours after I played Wolf Trap, I was in a warehouse in Brooklyn watching Justice. And it was fucking great. One of the great shows I've ever been to. It was thrilling.”
Justice certainly have some of the punk energy that typified Costello’s earlier work, so perhaps his enjoyment of them isn’t as unlikely as it might initially seem. We suspect that a collaboration could be a stylistic pivot too sudden for both artists, but who knows?
Elsewhere in the interview, Costello doubles down on his decision not to make an issue of the fact that Olivia Rodrigo’s Brutal, the opening track on her 2021 debut album, Sour, features a guitar riff that sounds more than a little similar to the one he used in his 1978 hit, Pump It Up.
Having explained at the time that he was fine with it, arguing that “it’s how rock and roll works,” Costello now says: “I did not find any reason to go after them legally for that, because I think it would be ludicrous. It’s a shared language of music. Other people clearly felt differently about other songs on that record. But if there were no quotations, there’d be no Bach. There’d be no Mozart. There’d be no Sonny Rollins. So we can’t start worrying about that.”
Those “other people” possibly included representatives of Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff, who ended up being credited on Deja Vu after it was suggested that the song bears similarities to Swift’s 2019 song, Cruel Summer, for which St Vincent (Annie Clark) also has a writing credit.
Rodrigo had previously been open about the fact that she interpolated Swift’s New Year’s Day on 1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back, another Sour cut, and she gave writing credits to Swift and Antonoff on this song from the get-go.
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