Elvis Costello and Allan Mayes have reunited for their old musical project Rusty, and are releasing a new collection of music called The Resurrection Of Rust.
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Costello joined Mayes’ band Rusty on New Year’s Day in 1972 and while the band toured extensively for the next year, they didn’t make it into the recording studio.
Now, Costello and Mayes have reunited and have made newly recorded renditions of six songs drawn from the band’s set lists from 1972.
There are recordings of two Nick Lowe songs, “Surrender To The Rhythm” and “Don’t Lose Your Grip On Love”, as well as a version of Kentucky songwriter Jim Ford’s “I’m Ahead If I Can Quit While I’m Behind”.
There are also two originals, “Warm House” and “Maureen And Sam” together with an arrangement incorporating the Neil Young songs “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” and “Dance, Dance, Dance”, the latter of which sees Costello making his debut on the electric violin.
The Resurrection Of Rust will be on sale on CD at Costello’s in-person events and concerts. It will also be available on CD and digitally in the UK on June 10, and will later be followed by a vinyl release this summer.
In a statement, Costello said: “Allan Mayes has been a hard working musician for more than the fifty years since we met. So, when he asked me if I wanted to celebrate this anniversary by getting together to play a few songs that we used to know. I said, ‘Absolutely not!’
“Let’s make the record we would have cut when we were 18, if anyone had let us.’ And this is what you will hear on The Resurrection Of Rust.
He continued: “Most of our own early compositions from the Rusty days exist only in lyrical form, scrawled in our old notebooks, the tunes long forgotten but we did have a reel‐to‐reel demo of “Warm House”, a song which I began when I was 17 and which could be found in nearly all of our set lists and found here [on their new album] with full vocal and band arrangement driven by mandolin.
“Remarkably, Allan still has an old school exercise book in which he kept a record of all the venues we ever played. The Resurrection Of Rust record sleeve is decorated with a collage of flyers, posters, playbills and diary entries of the time along with some of our setlist from that exercise book which also acted as an accounts ledger for our rather modest earnings, hitting the heady heights of £17 ‐ our largest fee coming at our very final gig, opening up for Cockney Rebel ‐ but frequently amounting to no more than a couple of quid and with several dispiriting entries which read: ‘Paid: Nil’.
“…Allan and I quickly re‐discovered the vocal blend that convinced us that we might conquer the world (or at least Widnes) when we were teenagers but to bring Rusty into the 21st Century, I enlisted the talents of The Imposters and we were delighted to invite our old pal, Bob Andrews, to revisit his signature Hammond organ and piano parts on the Brinsley Schwarz showstopper, “Surrender To The Rhythm”.”
In other news, Elvis Costello & The Imposters are set to tour the UK next month in support of their new album.
The Boy Named If tour kicks off at the Brighton Dome on June 5, 2022 before wrapping up at London’s Hammersmith Eventim Apollo on June 23. Charlie Sexton will also join Costello and co. on the 13-date tour.
You can see those dates here:
JUNE
Sunday 05 – Brighton Dome
Tuesday 07 – Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Wednesday 08 – Newcastle O2 City Hall
Friday 10 – Liverpool Philharmonic
Saturday 11 – Manchester Opera House
Monday 13 – Birmingham Symphony Hall
Tuesday 14 – Leicester De Montfort Hall
Thursday 16 – Oxford New Theatre
Friday 17 – Bath The Forum
Sunday 19 – Portsmouth Guildhall
Monday 20 – Swansea Arena
Wednesday 22 – Ipswich Regent Theatre
Thursday 23 – London Eventim Apollo