Costello makes ‘Spectacle’ of U2
Music fans fantasize that all the biggest rock stars know each other. And they live together in a big house.
“Like the Monkees,” Elvis Costello said enthusiastically.
“Or Help!” added Costello, referring to the Beatles movie. “We live in a row of terrace houses, and they’re connecting inside.”
That Help! house was so damn cool, we always wanted to live there.
“Yeah, me too,” Costello said. “With the sunken bed … there are plenty of people who have lived that out.”
The fact is, there are some fellow titans of rock that Elvis Costello knows very well, and others that are mere acquaintances, if that. Costello’s experience hosting Spectacle — the second season of which gets under way Friday on CTV, with Bono and the Edge from U2 — has taught Costello that good friends don’t automatically make good interviews.
“Only a couple of them are people I know really well,” Costello said of the second-season guest list, which includes the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Nick Lowe, Sheryl Crow, Levon Helm and Ron Sexsmith.
CTV is airing the U2 episode of Spectacle — which sees Costello talking to, and performing with, Bono and the Edge — as a pre-Christmas treat. The rest of the second season will air sometime in 2010, although filming has been completed already.
“We did two in Toronto at the Masonic Temple (MTV headquarters) and the rest in New York at the Apollo again,” Costello said. “This second season has a different personality in that it’s based more on songs rather than on the careers of individuals. We concentrated on framing things very tightly in the musical fashion.”
Costello introduces Bono and the Edge with a rap about how U2 has joined the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Who and Led Zeppelin in the rock pantheon, as unlikely as that might have seemed when U2 formed in Ireland in the late 1970s.
“You have to be happy if you open the series with Bono and Edge,” Costello said. “And they’re coming along to the Masonic Temple — it’s hard to imagine Led Zeppelin ever played there (but they did, in 1969). When you’ve got television production in there, you’ve got 700 people, maybe less. And U2 is playing to 40,000 people the next day at the Rogers Centre.
“It came home to me halfway through the show, around the time Bono started thanking everybody on the show from the stage, I thought, ‘What incredible generosity it was for them to let themselves take part in this.’ They didn’t know what I was going to ask them. It’s not all scripted. There’s no collusion.”
We asked Costello if he’d ever fantasized about having Spectacle travel back in time so he could interview and jam with some of the dearly departed titans of rock — people such as Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, John Lennon, etc.
“I haven’t actually had that imagining,” Costello said. “But now that you say it, you could go on forever.”
And then you all could move in together. Like The Monkees. Or Help!
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