ELVIS COSTELLO is feeling just fine, thank you very much. Reports of a “battle with cancer” were wildly exaggerated, he says — earlier this year, doctors found an isolated malignancy that they removed without complications. He got the news three-quarters of the way into the recording of Look Now, his first album in five years, and, if anything, he just threw himself harder into the process. The album turned out to be his best-received work of this century, combining immaculate, expansively arranged pop compositions (Burt Bacharach and Carole King were collaborators) with the elegant savagery of his band, the Imposters — which is, of course, his original crew, the Attractions, with a new bass player, Davey Faragher. “This is a different group than the group I started out with,”…
