Steve Nieve

Steve Nieve served for years as keyboardist, pianist, and organist in Elvis Costello’s band the Attractions, where his broad training and adaptability suited the more expansive direction Costello took after the group’s initial run. Born Steven Nason, he studied at the Royal College of Music and joined the Attractions in 1977 after a successful audition at the age of nineteen. His first solo release came in 1980 with the EP Theme Music from Outline of a Hairdo on Jake Riviera’s F-Beat label, the same imprint to which Costello was then signed. Two full-length solo albums followed on the U.K. Demon label: Keyboard Jungle in 1983 and Playboy in 1987.

While Attractions commitments gradually diminished in the second half of the decade, Nieve contributed to sessions by numerous fellow new-wave artists such as Nick Lowe, Kirsty MacColl, Madness, the Damned, Tim Finn, Nick Heyward, Hothouse Flowers, Graham Parker, and Squeeze, for whom he also served as touring keyboardist in the early nineties. He and former Attractions drummer Pete Thomas formed the house band for Jonathan Ross’s BBC talk show. Throughout this period Nieve maintained a steadier association with Costello than most of the singer’s earlier collaborators. Their rapport reached a fresh peak in the latter half of the nineties through a series of well-received duo tours in which Costello surveyed his extensive catalog accompanied solely by Nieve’s refined and multicolored keyboard work.

Nieve occasionally presented his own solo concerts during those years, one of which was captured on the Knitting Factory live EP It’s Raining Somewhere, recorded in 1995 and issued in 1999. He also wrote two classical operas, Parasite and Welcome to the Voice; the former, created with French cinematographer Muriel Téodori, received its premiere in Paris, while the latter appeared at the 2000 Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival in New York with Costello and the Brodsky Quartet among the performers. His fifth solo album, Windows, arrived in 2004 and drew on impressions gathered across years of touring. A studio recording of Welcome to the Voice was released in 2007. Nieve resumed solo work in 2011 with Lazy Point, a set of piano variations, and followed it in 2013 with ToGetHer, an album of new songs and collaborations featuring an all-star roster that included Costello, Robert Wyatt, Laurie Anderson, Ron Sexsmith, Vanessa Paradis, and additional guests.