Elvis Costello: 'I developed an unreasonable hatred of folk music'

'We played our songs anywhere they would have us... even a Catholic girl’s school called Mary Help Of Christians'

By Elvis Costello

When I moved to Liverpool with my mother in the middle of 1970, I had just turned sixteen and knew no one other than my relations.

I stayed for a while with my uncle and my auntie Pat, was a beautiful woman of Irish descent with dark hair and a sharp tongue. She was almost in show business. She worked part-time as a receptionist at the Wookey Hollow, a vaguely notorious Anfield nightclub at which middle-aged women swooned to the operatic voice of the American singer Lovelace Watkins.

Every evening, I’d scan the Liverpool Echo, trying to find somewhere to play. Most of the folk club adverts specified “Traditional Folk Night.”

I quickly found out that they’d show you the door if you sang your own songs, while a flush-faced fellow in an itchy sweater, who’d never been farther out to sea than the ferryboat to New Brighton, would go off to great acclaim if he sang “The Holy Ground” or some endless whaling song.

I developed an unreasonable hatred of folk music. 

A young Elvis Costello plays with his band in Liverpool

My Dad, meanwhile, moved back into our old family home in Twickenham and was toying with forming a group of his own, a poetic enterprise involving a harp and a flute that went under the name The Hand-Embroidered Lemon-Peel. I was never really sure if this group really existed or if it was just an excuse for him to seduce hippie girls.

As 1970 turned into 1971, a lad from Walton named Allan Mayes invited me to join his new group, “Rusty”. We had a bass player and a feller called Dave, who owned a microphone and tambourine and was nominally our lead singer but as is often the case, the conflict of ambitions soon took care of the balance of power. Within a few weeks, the singer had sold his microphone and we were a trio

We played our songs anywhere they would have us; pubs, clubs, even a Catholic girl’s school called “Mary Help Of Christians”, which was known locally as, “Mary Feed The Pigeons”. 

A ledger of our gigs, preserved in Allan’s old school notebook, reveals that we were paid “Nil” for that appearance but I suppose we might have imagined other rewards for playing there, even if none were forthcoming. 

For a short while, our Friday night gig was at The Crow’s Nest pub in Widnes, a short drive in Allan’s Ford Anglia along the north bank of the Mersey into rugby league territory and where the accent tips to the sort of flat Lancastrian dialect that sounds as if the speaker has just been hit with a plank of wood.

The few bored-looking girls, nursing Babycham, sat puzzled through a few of our more esoteric songs and then ventured out of their corner to make a sarcastic-sounding request, 

“Do you know any Slade?”  

None of our songs bore any resemblance to “Cum On Feel the Noize,” so we gave up on Widnes, or maybe Widnes gave up on us.