Before Stephen Colbert’s Late Show settled on Jon Batiste as its first bandleader in 2015, it turns out another possibility for the house band came up: Elvis Costello and the Impostors. “It was an impulsive thing to put myself forward,” Costello reveals
on the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, where he also discusses his new box set, My Aim Is True (49th Anniversary Edition). “Steve asked my advice about that role. … I said, ‘What about me?’ And I think he thought I was joking, and I said, ‘No, I’m not joking.'” For a while, he says, there were serious discussions about the possibility for the now-defunct show. (A spokesperson for Colbert didn’t immediately return a request for comment.)
“I’d watched what happened with the Roots,” says Costello, who recorded with The Tonight Show‘s own house band on 2013’s Wise Up Ghost. “I saw what the Roots had achieved across town, you know, that they had saved their own lives, and those of their family around them, by coming off the road. I thought maybe that would be good for us. … It hadn’t inhibited them [from] making more records and working on things, and it put them at a center.” (To hear the whole episode, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.)
Costello also felt he had history on his side. “Branford Marsalis was the band leader of The Tonight Show,” Costello says. “Lots of really great people have done that gig. … And don’t forget, my dad was a radio dance band singer who appeared a lot on the BBC. So I had continuity with the idea.”
Reality set in quickly. “I started to think about how much it asked of my bandmates, that they would all have to relocate,” Costello says. “I was the only one who lived in New York, so it would have never worked.” Impostors keyboardist Steve Nieve lives in France. “I don’t see how that would’ve worked, really, with Steve living in Paris,” he continues. “We would’ve been asking an awful lot, and the money involved and everything would’ve been unbelievable … to relocate three band members to New York.”
Batiste, Costello adds, was a perfect fit for the job: “It would have never worked for a whole number of reasons, but it was nice to put my name in it, and I don’t think it exactly did any harm to the conversation and the search for somebody who was truly suited to it, and, of course, took it on to such a wonderful career outside of television.”
Even if Costello had gotten the gig, he’s now convinced it wouldn’t have worked. “I would’ve got fired in about three weeks,” he says. “Not by [Colbert], but probably by the network. … I would’ve said or done the wrong thing for sure. … It was like a dream I had for a minute.”
Costello did make it onto the final episode of the show, which went off the air earlier this year. On the May 21 finale, Colbert sang the Costello deep cut “Jump Up” with Costello, Batiste, and Louis Cato, Batiste’s successor as bandleader. “It was his idea to do that song as a quartet, which was an extraordinary thing to me,” Costello says. “It was a compliment, but it was also a beautiful arrangement that Louis Cato conceived with Jon Batiste and everything, and the three band leaders, as we joked about, ’cause I had briefly been in the frame. Stephen sang great. And it was funny to hear this song, which I think I’ve performed maybe four times in public since ’77, certainly.”
“We had a conference call about it,” Costello adds, “and I said, ‘Look, this seems like a very downbeat sort of number to end the show on.’ And I said, ‘You know, if on the day of the final broadcast you get a call from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé that they’re prepared to come on and play table tennis against one another live on air, you can cut the number and I won’t be offended.’ … But of course, what I didn’t know is they had a whole other card to play, which was Paul McCartney. And then I got to be part of that band as well, which was terrific fun. It was kind of weird. You think about Paul’s history with that theater. … I don’t think he appeared in it as many times as me, but it was a lot more significant when he did. So it was kinda something to stand side-stage before we were going on, and there’s Paul McCartney with his Hofner bass, and we’re going on to sing a Beatles song. It was thrilling.”
It was also Costello’s final TV appearance, he says. “It’s very, very different now. It’s being squeezed by all sorts of forces, commercial forces, corporate forces, political forces. It’s not something I could be involved in. I retired that night. That’s a great thing. Take a good look at this picture here, ’cause you won’t ever see me on television again, that’s for sure. I’m done. I thought, ‘Well, I can’t possibly beat that. It just ain’t for me.’ It’s time for other people to do it, you know. I feel that pretty much about everything in this business.”
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