Elvis Costello Marks Year 49 With 52 Unreleased Recordings

Elvis Costello found the prospect of a 50th-anniversary edition of My Aim Is True so conventional that, in his phrase, it made his teeth itch. The box therefore arrives on 2 October, in year 49 of his 1977 debut. The record business likes round numbers. Archives have never shown much respect for them.

Across five discs, the set includes a fresh remaster of the original 12-track album from the analogue tapes and 52 previously unreleased recordings: demos, studio outtakes and live performances. Handwritten lyrics sit alongside essays by Nick Lowe, Rosanne Cash, Peter Wolf, Jim James and others.

The useful measure is not volume but sequence. Bedroom recordings and Hope & Anchor studio sketches lead into Pathway Studios versions. Songs including “Mystery Dance”, “Pay It Back” and “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” recur at different stages, allowing a private notation to turn, one decision at a time, into a record.

Disc four follows Costello’s move from solitary songwriter to leader of the Attractions through television appearances, soundchecks, interviews and 1977 concerts. The fifth jumps to San Francisco in 2007, where he performed the debut again in full. Thirty years sit between the first draft and the reprise, with the same songbook still open on the desk.

The first preview is a live “Watching the Detectives”. It is an apt key to the collection: less a memorial to an album than an inquiry into what a song becomes in a bedroom, a studio and onstage. The 50th anniversary will arrive next year. At least nobody will need to empty the same drawer again.