Elvis Costello announced on Monday (May 30) that he’s reuniting with his old bandmate Allan Mayes to release, as he calls it, “the record we would have cut when we were 18, if anyone had let us.”
That album will be titled Rusty: The Resurrection of Rust, and will be based on songs the duo played 50 years ago as part of Rusty, the first band Costello was ever in. (Back then, he was known as D.P. McManus.)
The album will drop June 10 and feature six songs from the band’s 1972 set lists, including “Surrender to the Rhythm” and “Don’t Lose Your Grip on Love” by Nick Lowe; Jim Ford’s “I’m Ahead If I Can Quit While I’m Behind”; a mashup of Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” and “Dance, Dance, Dance; and two originals titled “Warm House” and “Maureen and Sam.”
“By the summer of ’72 we were playing up to five or six nights a week,” Costello reminisced in a lengthy letter posted to his official website. “I was still at school, supposedly studying for my A‐Levels. Once I got a job, we had to schedule our Rusty gigs around my shift work as a computer operator until early in 1973, when I decided to leave Liverpool looking for something and took to this long and crooked road.”
Five years later, the singer-songwriter would release his debut album, My Aim Is True, under his stage name, led by his debut single “Less Than Zero.” Nearly five decades later, Costello has most recently dropped his 32nd studio set, 2022’s The Boy Named If and signed a publishing deal for his entire catalog with BMG.
