Elvis Costello’s journey from madman to national treasure
Elvis Costello almost gave up on his life in music before it had even begun. It wasn’t that he disapproved of the punk tsunami that had so completely upended the London music scene, but as a sole trader playing unreleased acoustic originals in club land, in the 1970s, he didn’t know whether or not he had a place in its grave new world. His songs had a bit of bite about them, for sure, especially live – onstage, in a dive bar, a curled lip and a fierce stare was one way of seizing the attention of drunken punters who were hollering for a bit of Rod Stewart – but none of them opened with the line “I am an antichrist”.
The matter was settled one evening in the flat in a tower block he shared with his young wife and their toddler son. Perched by the record player, Costello donned a pair of headphones and listened to the debut album by The Clash, over and again, until dawn broke over the suburban London sky.
A day job in the computer department at the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics factory, in North Acton, may have robbed him of the opportunity to catch any of the after-hours punk happenings in the centre of town, but a night in the company of Strummer and Jones in the comfort of his own home helped forge a direction in-keeping with the times. The next day, he wrote Watching The Detectives, his first hit single.
Elvis Costello celebrates his 70th birthday on August 25. On this significant occasion, the temptation to reflect on his long and fascinating career via the full scope of 33 genre-hopping albums is of course strong. But I reckon it can be done through the prism of a single song.
Across 47-years, in concert, Watching The Detectives has withstood any number of radical interpretations. On tour in America, in 1979, Costello and the Attractions, his original backing band, stretched the song almost to breaking point; on the road in support of the Spike album, a decade later, it had become an acoustic number; in 1991, the track was deconstructed in dazzling fashion with the help of guitarist Marc Ribot; bouncing into the 21st Century, in 2008, it was performed in the company of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Watching The Detectives has been served up with the American hip hop group The Roots, and, on an episode of Later… With Jools Holland, with “big band” jazz players. And on it goes.
In time, Elvis Costello came to regard the song as the best of his career’s spectacular opening throw. In 1977, though, it was merely the latest arrival on a frankly astonishing production line. That summer, in the space of just two or three weeks, he also wrote Alison, (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes, Welcome To The Working Week, Waiting For The End Of The World, I’m Not Angry, and more. No matter the occasion, songs just seem to explode out of him. In 1992, after receiving a letter from the former Transvision Vamp singer Wendy James requesting a new original, Costello wrote her entire debut solo LP over the course of a weekend. Two years later, he composed six blockbusting tracks for his own album, Brutal Youth, in just one day.
Just last year, when Costello’s residency at the Gramercy Theatre, in Midtown Manhattan, coincided with my own time in New York, I was lucky enough to see for myself what this most prolific of songwriters can do with so much material. Save for the closing number, (What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, And Understanding, over the course of 10 nights, he performed a set of entirely different songs at every concert.
On the evening for which I had a ticket, a mild Monday on the day after the Super Bowl, he unfurled Suit Of Lights and God’s Comic, two bangers from the 1980s. My only wish was that I could have gone every night to hear, I don’t know, All These Strangers, Motel Matches or Paint The Red Rose Blue. Take your pick, really.
In such an intimate setting, Elvis Costello cut a rather kindly figure; no one’s fool, to be sure, and certainly not a crowd-pleasing karaoke machine, but no longer was he the human rattlesnake of those early years. This geniality can sometimes come as a surprise, mind. Watching Elvis and The Imposters, his current backing band, from the 10th row of the Hammersmith Apollo mere days before Covid-19 imprisoned the nation, my wife – upon whom I’d foisted a crash course by playing his first four albums at thumping volume while fixing supper on Sunday nights – announced, “He seems nicer than I thought he’d be. I imagined him to be, I don’t know, more hostile.”
Certainly, he used to be. Correctly intuiting that the new world order of 1977 was an ecosystem in which nice guys finished last, Costello stepped onto the public stage with lacerating panache. The great American music writer Greil Marcus described his debut album, My Aim Is True, as “a punk point of view reduced to a dead stare”.
On tour, Elvis Costello & The Attractions would sprint onto the stage and smash their way through the night’s opening six numbers before the audience knew what was happening. In 1979, a promotional picture for the Armed Forces LP – working title: Emotional Fascism – saw him posing with a machine gun in his mouth beneath the words “PAY ATTENTION!”.
“I was shrewder than most people realise because I knew there was only one chance to get my foot in the door,” Costello told the music journalist Nick Kent in 1994. “And if I didn’t make a really strong impression then I wouldn’t buy myself the time to do other stuff… I tailored my songs and style very purposefully because I knew the way the wind of prevailing trends was blowing and that it would also steam-roller anyone who happened to be going against it.”
Inevitably, with time, this Frankenstein’s monster began to overpower its creator. As the United States fell under the spell of his anti-charm, Elvis Costello & his Attractions toured North America no fewer than six times in 18 months. During one campaign, the group’s tour bus bore the legend “Camp Lejune”, a training facility for US marines in North Carolina. Likely he knew he was juggling with fire, but with the wind of a hyperbolic press in his sails, and with gold and platinum records to his name east and west of the Atlantic, the merry dance began to spin out of control. During a paralytic row in a hotel bar in Columbus, Ohio, in 1979, he was punched in the face by the singer Bonnie Bramlett.
“It was at that point that everything – whether it be my self-perpetrated venom – was about to engulf me,” he told Rolling Stone magazine, in 1982, in a cover story headlined (incorrectly, as it goes) Elvis Costello Repents. “I was, I think, rapidly becoming not a very nice person. I was losing track of what I was doing, why I was doing it, and my own control.”
It was an uncharacteristic loss of agency. As Captain Sensible, the bassist with Stiff Records label-mates The Damned, once noted, the only thing over which the young man born Declan Patrick McManus didn’t exercise full control was the decision, taken by future manager Jake Riviera, that he trade under the name Elvis Costello.
When it came to a tireless pursuit of excellence, his efforts even extended to preserving the purity of other people’s bands. On the subject of producing The Pogues’ second album, Rum Sodomy & The Lash, in 1985, he said, “I saw [that] my task was to capture them in all their dilapidated glory before some more professional producer f_____ them up”. In this, he was consistent. Six years earlier, Costello said much the same thing about his work on the first LP by The Specials.
Even amid the chaos of a workload that would cripple a pit pony, though, his own music kept coming. Projects were undertaken with fearlessness and energy. No matter the style – an album with the British string players the Brodsky Quartet here, a bevy of songs for the forthcoming New Vic production A Face In The Crowd there – Costello launches himself into his work as if he’s been fired out of a cannon.
I like to think that the fast and frenzied factory settings of Stiff Records, to whom he was signed for only a short time, helped formulate this approach. “I don’t know what’s so difficult about [this song],” in-house producer Nick Lowe used to tell him, “it’s just four chords.” Such was Stiff’s bash-em-out approach that My Aim Is True was recorded on the same magnetic tape as the debut LP from The Damned.
But he sure learned fast. “I don’t know why Elvis Costello kept asking me back, other than I was some kind of mascot,” Lowe once said. “Because Elvis had such a sense of direction with his own music. It started out where I was in charge – he was the kid and I was the experienced guy he looked up to. Then suddenly I found myself going into the studio one morning and saying, ‘Good morning Mr Costello, what would you like to do today?’”
The answer, then and now, was anything he damn well pleased. Over the decades, with his restless ear, Elvis Costello has merrily gambled with his own (still significant) popularity while sometimes displeasing the higher-ups at various record labels. Upon signing to Warner Bros., for 1989’s Spike album, he told the BBC programme Arena that what “the record companies kind of do now is shoot their artists and hang them up like a trophy in the boardroom”. If so, the label rather cooled on its quarry. In the 1990s, at Warners’ London headquarters on Kensington Church Street, one executive had the gall to tell him that his songs had too many chords.
I say gall because, if you hadn’t guessed, I remain committed to his cause. I’m fully paid up. As he told me to do, 35-years after first buying one of his albums, I still pay attention. I know that around the same time that a suit at a record label was doling out advice on how best to write songs, Costello issued the exquisitely judged London’s Brilliant Parade, from Brutal Youth, a track the English singer-songwriter Frank Turner was kind enough to play at my wedding. So, please, let there be no doubt about whose side I’m on.
In 1977, the letters adorning the black and white chequered squares on the front sleeve of My Aim Is True spelled out the words “Elvis Is King”. On the weekend of his 70th birthday, I happen to think he still is.
