Steve Nieve (born Steven Nason, 19
February 1958,
in London,
England)
is a keyboardist,
best known for his work with Elvis Costello.
Career
The Royal College of Music
student joined Costello's backing band The Attractions in 1977. He
played on most of Costello's projects over the next ten years,
including the albums
This Year's Model
(1978), Imperial Bedroom
(1982), and Blood & Chocolate
(1986). He wrote the material on The Attractions' Costello-less album, Mad
About The Wrong Boy, under the name Norman Brain, in
collaboration with his wife, Fay Hart. (The back of Trust's faux movie
poster has Nieve "as Steve Hart".)
In the mid 1980s,
Costello began to work less frequently with The Attractions and stopped
working with them entirely between 1987 and 1993. During this period,
Nieve focused on session work for other artists (The
Neville Brothers, Hothouse Flowers, Graham
Parker, Squeeze, Tim Finn, Kirsty
MacColl, Madness) and led the house
band on Jonathan Ross'
UK TV series The Last Resort.
Costello reunited The Attractions for 1994's album Brutal
Youth. Although the reunion was relatively
short-lived (they split again in 1996), the Costello/Nieve
collaborations never stopped. They have toured as a duo, and Nieve has
contributed keyboards to all of Costello's albums since the mid-1990s, including
1998's Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted
From Memory, 2001's Anne-Sofie
von Otter collaboration For The Stars, and 2003's North.
In 2001, Costello formed a new backing band consisting of Nieve,
Attractions drummer Pete Thomas, and bassist Davey
Faragher.
The band was subsequently dubbed The Imposters. Elvis Costello
& The Imposters have toured extensively and released the albums
When I Was Cruel
(2002), Cruel Smile
(2003) The Delivery Man
(2004), and The River In Reverse (2006) with Allen
Toussaint.
In addition to his work with Costello, Nieve has released
several solo
albums, including Keyboard Jungle (1983), Playboy
(1987), It's Raining Somewhere (1996), Mumu
(2001), and Windows (2004).
In 2003 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame as a member of Elvis Costello & The Attractions.
Nieve's opera,
Welcome To The Voice, a collaboration with Muriel Téodori, is released on
Deutsche Grammophon in May 2007. Welcome To The Voice is a multifaceted
piece that welcomes voices from different musical worlds. It lives on
the juxtaposition of men who have rough, untrained voices, coming from
jazz or rock (Robert Wyatt, Elvis Costello, Sting), with women who have
classically trained voices (Barbara Bonney, Amanda Roocroft, Nathalie
Manfrino, Sara Fulgoni). The score has been composed for the Brodsky
Quartet while Marc Ribot, Ned Rothenberg, and Steve Nieve himself
improvise with a jazz feeling.
In recent years Nieve has lived in France with Téodori.
External link
