Playing Favourites

He’s billing his next visit to Australia, just five months since his last as part of Elvis Costello & The Imposters, as “an evening of solo piano drawing on over 30 years of performances with Elvis Costello”, which is a pretty ambitious exercise in anyone’s language, considering keyboardist Steve Nieve has played on 22 of the ridiculously prolific and versatile songwriter’s albums. So where do you start in selecting a setlist?

“Each day I sit down at the piano and just play what comes into my mind,” Nieve begins, “and certain things allow the piano to shine in a good way and other things are quite difficult to do on the piano, because you miss the rhythm section or you miss the melody. So I’m keeping a few of the difficult things but I’m for the most part trying to select things that really work as piano solo things.

“The idea originally came from my partner Muriel [Téodori], and the idea is to, eventually, create a sort of massive box set of piano music of different artists whose work I love, and it just seemed natural to begin with Elvis. I’ve been working on some of the other volumes and I’m hoping to do a volume of Lou Reed and one of Brian Eno… different people.

"Certain things allow the piano to shine in a good way and other things are quite difficult to do on the piano"

Nieve, born Steve Nason and given his stage name, pronounced ‘naïve’, by the late Ian Dury, hadn’t been remotely aware of rock as a 19-year-old student at the Royal College of Music, before getting the call from Costello to join his backing band.

“I think that Mr Costello’s musical… He was exposed to a greater variety of music than I was as a kid, and as soon as he got to know me he was constantly playing things in the car as we drove to different gigs. So it was like, finally, an interesting musical lesson compared to growing up and just receiving… Although, as a younger man, I did try to search out stuff, but it was kind of weirder stuff, the more experimental contemporary music of the time. I didn’t really have anyone in my family that was that keen on popular music, you know.

“Part of the thing is that I had to go through this period of classical training, which I had inside my mind from a very young age, whereas Elvis taught himself. You just receive all these rules of harmony and stuff that you’re supposed to follow, and people who receive that kind of information, they do all the things you’re not supposed to do, and that’s what we’ve discovered with music now, that it’s all possible. So I think that’s the difference between our compositional approaches. Mine is more to with the way I can sit at the piano and just improvise.”