10. Elvis CostelloThe Juliet Letters
I picked The Juliet Letters because Elvis won’t ever be typecast. The Juliet Letters was a really unusual take on Shakespearean sonnets, recorded with the Brodsky Quartet. He is a great singer – the fact that he can sing with a string quartet as effectively as with a rock band is testimony to that. Elvis is very funny, he has a theory that the reason his previous album Mighty Like A Rose got bad reviews was because he had a beard. I started to work with REM and Elvis around the same time, so when we set up MBC we took them with us. I’ve worked with Elvis for nearly 30 years now, and we’ve become really good friends. We’re both massive football fans, that’s our big bond – he’s Liverpool and I’m Chelsea. Football dominates our conversation and we text a lot during games.
