When someone thought it would be a jolly good jape to unite the best of contemporary talent with the sort of cool cats who roamed around the hit parade in the 1960s for the soundtrack to the film Grace of My Heart (loosely based on the life and chimes of Carole King), it was perhaps intended as an ironically correct musical project along the lines of Joe Dolan "doing" Blur songs. The only team, however, to walk away from the wreckage of the culture crash comprised Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello, whose God Give Me Strength song stole the show, the scene it was used in and the obligatory soundtrack album.
Two years on and they have extended the one-off project into one of the most underrated but richly rewarding albums of the year. Painted From Memory, a 12-track song cycle is not, as was theorised when the album was mooted, a case of two songwriters meeting each other half-way, with the accent on compromise. It's an inspired coalition with each partner playing off the other's respective strengths.
There has always been a lot of Bacharach in Costello, it's just that it needs to be spelt out to you. "Back when I was touring around with the Stiff people (his first record label) and it was all `new wave' stuff, I used to do a cover of Burt's I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself," says Costello. "I had grown up hearing all of his classic songs coming through and hearing all the different versions of them, whether they be by Dionne Warwick or Cilla Black or Dusty, so I didn't have to make that retrospective adjustment that many people made to say he was `hip'. There were all those resonant images in all those soulful songs. Burt Bacharach was never unhip to me."
Was he more influence or inspiration when you were starting out? "Well, there were things like I once wrote a song for Dusty Springfield in imitation of Burt's style (Losing You) and one of my songs, Accidents Will Happen, was modelled on his style. You can't really hear his influence in that song though, it's quite subtle, but it's still there," he says.
Over a 25-year career, Elvis Costello, 44 and now resident in Dublin, has released more than 17 albums (many, such as Armed Forces and Get Happy, are musical benchmarks), produced acts such as The Pogues, Squeeze and The Specials and has won two Ivor Novello awards and a Grammy. Even though his previous musical collaborations were with acts such as Tony Bennett, The Brodsky Quartet and Paul McCartney, you get the sense that the Bacharach project was A Big Deal.
Although latterly Bacharach has been re-invented in a kitschy sort of "easy listening" way by contemporary clubbers as "chill out" music, his contribution to the musical canon has been immense. Alongside Brian Wilson and Lennon /McCartney, he remains one of the best melody writers in popular music and songs such as Say A Little Prayer, Anyone Who Had a Heart and Trains and Boats and Planes simply haven't been equalled by any amount of today's familiar front-cover faces. By never establishing himself in the "rock" genre, he was unfortunately consigned to languish in hotel-lobby hell by the guardians of music's "hip" swingometer.
"I was aware that collaborating with someone of Burt's stature might be a problem for a lot of posey English journalists in a Late Review sort of way in the sense that maybe some people thought I'm not really qualified to be doing something like this," Elvis says, "and at times it was mad to think I was working with him, especially the time when because of time constraints we ended up writing a bridge to one of the songs on the album down a phone line . . . But then I'm a professional musician and I just thought this wouldn't be happening unless I was good at what I do. There was also the risk of it, and with previous collaborations whether that be with Ronnie Drew or the Jazz Passengers, I've always wanted to go to a new place.
"The collaborations have never been calculated, I don't prepare for them and I went into this in that frame of mind. I love working with other people, it's an education in that you get a different outlook. Like when I worked with The Brodsky Quartet I learned how to read music. I always had a mental block about it, a type of musical dyslexia and it was all down to one small thing - when I was younger and trying to learn I had a thing about the treble and bass clef. I just couldn't logically understand the difference there and it wasn't until I was 38 and somebody explained the difference to me that I could learn. It was very strange."
What did Bacharach know of your work, was he a fan? "I don't think he was aware of stuff like Pump It Up but he had heard of the various collaborations I had done," he says. On that note, how does working with someone like Bacharach differ from say, Paul McCartney? "With Paul McCartney, writing the songs together was great, but when we went to record them we just couldn't agree on the production aesthetic, we couldn't agree on how they should sound, so that sort of ran aground in the studio."
Just as somehow people imagined he would fill the "John Lennon" role when working with McCartney, there was a similar idea that he would fill the "Hal David" role (Bacharach's long-time lyricist) on this album. "No, this is what people think, that Burt did the music and I did the lyrics. I actually wrote a good half of the music alongside all the lyrics and that was the way it was intended, it was always going to be a natural dialogue between two musicians so that musically you can't see the join. I don't know where the assumption comes from that the words and music are split. If it was the case that Burt was going to do all the music and I would do the lyrics, then he could have got Neil Diamond or Carole Bayer Sager instead."
He's particularly proud of the way he sings like he's never sung before on the album: "I think I delivered some very challenging vocal performances and necessarily so because of the ways the songs were arranged. There were times doing the vocals where I thought to myself that I really shouldn't be going up there, up to the upper register, because I was really on the edge with the vocals and there was no tightrope there - you know, I'm not Luther Vandross."
Although Bacharach has usually employed pristine female voices to interpret his work, Elvis Costello's voice dovetails perfectly with the mid-paced, shot-through-with-sadness songs on the album. "I describe the songs as romantic ballads that are full of sentiment but not sentimental - but there are some real gloomy moments on there."
The two have played the songs live with concerts in the US and Britain earlier this year - "we'd really love to bring the show to Dublin some time next year" - and Elvis has been particularly warmed by the audience's reactions: "It's when people come up to you and say how the songs express just how they feel or how they think that a certain song was written about them - it's then you know you've made the connection. It's heartening because, believe me, these songs were very rigorously written."
Painted From Memory by Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach is on the Mercury label. A documentary, Because It's a Lonely World, about the making of the album, is on Channel 4, St Stephen's Day at 11.40 p.m.
`There were all those resonant images in all those soulful songs. Burt Bacharach was never unhip to me'