First, let it be known that young Elvis Costello is no shrinking violet when it comes to arm-wrestling manfully with the chilly tentacles of controversy. Why, even the National Front have been trying to cast their long unpleasant shadow across his path ever since the release of his debut single ‘Less Than Zero’, the song itself being a tacitly fanciful depiction of the landed gentry’s fave black sheep boy of the Isherwood era, Oswald Mosley. Our El croons about Mosley’s swastika tattoo before pointing out in a ream of impressive if often fairly hard-to-grasp couplets, the innate British hypocrisy afoot in the double-moral standard twists that forbid your favourite new-wave band, say, from polluting the main media outlets while some gnarled pathetic self-confessed anti-Semite like the senile Mosley can blithely saunter into the BBC studios and run off at the mouth for forty-five riveting minutes over his sordid reminiscences. The marchings, the beatings, the black shirts, the foul sub-Nietzschean rhetoric – the nation ‘tut-tutted’ at the time but now it’s OK ’cos the old fool’s past it and virtually everything in this scum-pit that is England gets a benevolent white-washed canonization as time goes by.
It’s OK for everyone except for one feisty young computer operator married with one child and living in Whitton near Twickenham whose brain has somehow been left unparalysed by the sickly rays of television and who is moreover downright offended by having this slimy old fascist drooling away in his living-room and who, instead of penning a barbed missive to his local MP, sits down and writes a sly little song full of jaundiced spleen.
We’re in a pub just round the corner from Island Records’ St Peter’s Square building, the man who would be king and I, talking about the subject matter of ‘Less Than Zero’, when his garrulous speed-freak Jerry Lee Lewis wanna-be of a manager Jake Riviera suddenly pipes up with the information that all the Yanks who’ve heard it think it’s about Lee Harvey Oswald. ‘Yeah right,’ Costello’s terse, gruff voice breaks in. ‘In fact’ – he’s quite animated now – ‘just for the States, I’m going to write a new set of lyrics to that song about . . . a guy, yeah, this guy’s watching the box when he suddenly sees his girlfriend right behind Lee Harvey Oswald just at the moment when Jack Ruby shoots him. And the screen . . . the shot freezes, y’know . . .’
He sits back with a self-satisfied smirk, savouring this perverse little morsel while even Riviera, whose job it is to deal with all the little weirdnesses spurting from his client’s lively mind, is temporarily rendered speechless by this information: no mean feat. Costello is temporarily fulfilled though. He looks pleased with himself, pleased enough that maybe he’ll actually go ahead and toss just that very plot-line into a song tonight when he takes the train back to Whitton.
That’s how these songs of his seem to come to him anyway. They start from simple everyday occurrences the composer finds himself running into on the tube, say, or maybe on his way down to the off licence. And then they blossom into raging chunks of perfectly matched melody and savage eloquence. Like even I am in an Elvis Costello song. Costello reckons he saw me one night on a tube bound for Osterley and ‘you were obviously pretty “out of it” ’cos you didn’t even notice all the other people in the compartment staring at you. I was just amazed that one person could draw that much reaction from others. After I saw you there, I came up with “Waiting for the World to End”. You’re the guy in the opening verse.’
I touch my forelock at the imparting of this factoid. After all, being in a Costello song is a deal more prestigious than being a name in this little black book he carries around with him, full of the names of folk who have crossed him up, so to speak, who have hindered the unravelling of his true manifest destiny these past years. Maybe they were responsible for not signing him to their label (prior to the Stiff inking this is) or maybe they referred to him as another guitar-strumming Van Morrison sound-alike just like all those other squat, nervy types with short hair and glasses with whom such parallels appear obligatory in today’s music press. Whatever the cause, they’re all marked men, cdws before the slaughter, names and livelihoods about to come under the daunting thunder of the raging spleen of Elvis Costello.
‘The only two things that matter to me, the only motivation points for me writing all these songs,’ opines Costello with a perverse leer, ‘are revenge and guilt. Those are the only emotions I know about, that I know I can feel. Love? I dunno what it means, really, and it doesn’t exist in my songs. Like’ – he’s into this discourse now – ‘when I played earlier in front of all those reps or whatever they’re called – all those guys working for Island – did you hear me introducing “Lipservice”? “This song is called ‘Lipservice’ and that’s all you’re gonna get from me.” That was straight from the heart, that, ’cos last year I actually went to Island with my demo tape and none of them wanted to know. Back then they wouldn’t give me the time of day. But now. . .’
Now, Elvis Costello is gloating because after years of playing pub rock with country overtones as D.P. Costello, lead singer of a bluegrass group called Flip City, suddenly he’s one of the new breed golden boys, already a name to be bandied about, with two excellent singles under his belt and a much raved over album finally in the shops after a couple of months collecting dust in the warehouse while Stiff and Island rejigged terms of distribution.
‘’Course nobody wanted to know back then,’ he continues acidly. ‘None of yer rock hacks were around then! And neither were you! I remember the time you came down to the Marquee when we were supporting Dr Feelgood and you spent all your time in the dressing-room talking to Wilko Johnson. You didn’t even bother to check us out. Oh no! And I really resented you for that, y’know. For a time, anyway. You were almost down there on my list.’
Costello always seems to double back to this unhealthy infatuation of his with wreaking vengeance on his self-proclaimed wrong-doers. He absolutely relishes the fact that literally every record company he approached with his demo tape turned him down, and admits that the years of bottling up the vast frustrations of being a nonentity out in the cold looking for a foot in the door have conversely granted him the basic ego drive with which he intends to bring the whole music scene to its feet right now.
But let us return for a moment to the mystique building up around the Costello past. Facts he cares to own up to are these: born in the London area, spent most of his formative years in Liverpool, the only town in the world he still looks upon with any kind of affection, where his father was a professional singer for big bands and his mother worked as a part-time usherette for the Liverpool Philharmonic. He was also raised as a Catholic – ‘I had to be either Catholic or Jewish now, didn’t I’ – and got married when he was in his late teens. He refuses to talk about his wife Mary and one child, a boy named Matthew, or the nature of his relationship with them at all, slyly noting, ‘I’m very, very “country music” in my attitude to talking about my marriage.’
Musically speaking, Elvis Costello’s career commenced in 1976 when he sent a home-made tape in answer to an advertisement placed by Jake Riviera, who was searching for acts to release through his label, Stiff. Riviera himself takes up the story from here. ‘Elvis’s tape was actually the very first tape we received at Stiff. It was so weird because I immediately put it on and thought, “God, this is good” – but at the same time I was hesitating because after all it was the first tape and I wanted to get a better perspective. So I phoned up Elvis and said, “Listen, I’ve listened to your tape, it sounds really good and I’m interested, but could you give me a week in which to check out a bunch of other tapes and I’ll get back to you?” Elvis said “Fine” and so I waited a week, received a load of real dross in the mail and immediately got back in touch.’ Costello himself has less exalted views on the music he recorded on that tape: ‘I just grabbed at the chance and did fifteen songs in that hour, often just making stuff up in my head as I went along.’
Anyway, the interview is going along quite amicably, if a little on the stilted and impersonal side, in the garden of this pub, when all of a sudden a delegation from Island Records corp. descends upon the scene. Costello eyes them all suspiciously as they file past, before resuming the thread of our chat. Then one of the delegation chooses to seat herself at our table. At first she just sits there, causing Costello and me to look at each other uneasily. Then she opens her mouth. I cower back, but Elvis seems in the mood for a bit of retaliation. This, after all, is just the sort of person he loves to hate: a bourgeois glamour victim who thinks she’s the cat’s pyjamas. Her approximate stereotype has been set up to be ripped apart in numerous Costello songs: she’s the classic ‘Natasha who looks like Elsie’ out of El’s brutal ‘I Don’t Want to Go to Chelsea’, a prime exponent of’Lipstick Vogue’ chic.
Anyway, she makes her point. She says she’s very interested in Elvis. She wants to know just what ‘makes him tick’.
‘Oh, I’m thoroughly despicable,’ retorts Costello with a disturbing grin on his face.
‘But don’t you have any friends?’ she enquires.
‘Absolutely none,’ comes the reply.
Elvis goes on to inform her that success means nothing to him, going to America means nothing to him (’I’d rather go back to Liverpool’), that everything – in a nutshell, all conventional desires – means less than zero to her sudden object of fascination.
‘Oh, all you people are the same,’ she retaliates, her initial disappointment now growing into rabid aggression. ‘You’re all so boring.’
‘Oh, yes, that’s it. I’m absolutely despicably boring. You’re so totally right.’
Getting nowhere with her enquiries, the girl finally gets up from her seat, feigning extreme boredom with a low farting noise issuing derisively from her lips to register full disgust. As she retreats back to her noisy friends well away from our table, Costello’s face has a menacing glow to it. He’s now close to being fairly drunk – after one amiable Islander innocently asked him what he was drinking and consequently had to foot the bill for a triple Pernod. He leans over to me in a confidential gesture: ‘I was just waiting for her to bring that macho boyfriend of hers over. That would have really been a rackin’ confrontation! I’d have either smashed my glass and gone for him that way or . . .’
The words trail off into a pause so pregnant I thought of alerting a midwife. His eyes stare coldly out from behind the horn-rims and our El quietly digs his hand into one of his four jacket pockets to produce an enormous bent steel nail, something ideal for pinning whole limbs to crosses at a crucifixion. This, he is stating wordlessly, is his chosen weapon of defence. It glistens menacingly against the glasses strewn over our table.
Somehow, this sordid little contretemps has afforded us a neutral terrain, common ground on which to consummate an easier intimacy well away from the usual rigid mode of communication common to such interview encounters. Costello’s already well pissed and I’ve started throwing the booze back just to keep up, so that all of a sudden it’s like we’re two opinionated old geezers hunched around a spittoon who’ve known each other all their lives. Costello’s nervy abruptness has simmered down to be replaced by the style of a man totally coldly, calculatingly confident. The real Elvis Costello finally seems ready to express himself.
‘Yeah, Gram Parsons, he had it all sussed. He didn’t stick around. He made his best work and then he died. That’s the way I want to do it. I’m never ever going to stick around long enough to churn out a load of mediocre crap like all those guys from the sixties ended up doing. I’d rather kill myself. I mean, Parsons’s exit was perfect.’
So you’re basically saying you want to snuff it about four years from now, OD’d on morphine on the floor of some cheesy motel in the desert with ice-cubes up your arse and some moron groupie giving you a hand-job?
He considers this for a moment. ‘Well, not exactly like that, I suppose. I see my exit as being something more like being run over by a bus. But . . . you think I’m joking, right. I’m deadly serious about this. I’m not going to be around to witness my artistic decline.’
That should take a while. You told me you had at least four hundred songs under wraps . . .
‘Well by four hundred, I mean songs that aren’t finished. A lot of them are just ideas – songs I won’t use – but lines and couplets that I’ll take and add to new things. So, saying I’ve got four hundred . . . I mean, that number means absolutely nothing, OK. But what you’re asking, no I’m not into stock-piling material for “if” and “when” I dry up. I’m not into doing a Robbie Robertson.’
OK, but this Gram Parsons fetish (G.P. is El’s very favourite album, by the way), I mean, he was a champion drug abuser and you don’t look the type who’d be into that at all.
‘Yeah, right. I don’t take drugs. I mean, I can’t even be in the same room as other people doing cocaine because just being in contact with them, I get three times as wired as them just being there. [Pause.] But . . . but I do know what it’s like being out of control. I know all about alcohol, for example, because well, let’s say I went through my phase of drinking heavily. Really heavily. But, ah you’re not going to . . . I mean, that’s a bit too obvious isn’t it, making a good quote out of me being miserable and unhappy working with these fuckin’ computers and being a secret after-hours drinker [laughs]. No, I’m not going to fall for that one.’
Costello’s not over-anxious to go into details concerning those years of clouded anonymity cloistered among the computers, just as he adamantly fends off queries concerning his wife and child. It’s only some weeks later that I’m informed by another source that the exact nature of his job was a computer operator for the firm run by ‘beauty consultant’ Elizabeth Arden (thus the autobiographical snippet about working for the ‘Vanity factory’ on, I think, ‘I’m Not Angry’ for the Aim album). He claims that he was viewed as a factory ‘freak’ – an object of mild affection and ridicule even though he looked as pastily anonymous as he does now (he’s worn the same hairstyle, clothes and bifocals for years now, or so he claims).
Also, his job, he reckons, could have been performed by any unskilled peon off the block and he’s basically overjoyed at having seen the last of the miserable building since he left that place of employment something like three months ago. (Interestingly enough, Jake Riviera recently attempted to get BBCl interested in filming a documentary on Costello’s progress from the computer factory out into the big, bad world of rock’n’roll. Predictably enough, no one expressed any interest in the idea.)
Immediately prior to his going ‘professional’ Costello’s forays into music business-land were kept down to hyper-anonymous trips to Highbury’s Pathways Studios where the Aim album was recorded with Nick Lowe producing (Lowe and Costello had actually first met some years before this, making backstage at Eric’s in Liverpool after a Brinsley Schwarz gig). Or there was the occasional trip to the Stiff offices, where Costello would sit almost hiding behind a newspaper, just waiting, biding his time until his secret weapon was unveiled and all the biz would swoop down eagerly to chew on his toe-nail clippings.
Now, of course, he claims he knew all along about the massive shake-up his talents would cause the music business, that all the drool-soaked rave reviews and budding cult acceptance would surge in and wash over his ego like water off a duck’s arse. Cults, thinks El – who needs ’em? He’d far rather be scowling out often million TV screens on Thursday night with Jimmy Savile’s bazooka cigar and the usual posse of silly disco-dollies milling around. The album itself – well, he read all the reviews, of course. Didn’t agree with any of them.
‘I mean, that. . . “masochist” accusation I keep getting is only relevant for two or three tracks. On “I’m Not Angry” it’s there, plus “Miracle Man” – but it’s an interesting point because, as far as I can see, those are the only songs in the rock idiom where a guy is admitting absolute defeat – taking all this sexual abuse, say – without either doing the old James Taylor self-pity bit or coming on all macho with the whole revenge bit. . .’
Hold on a minute. What about . . . well take John Lennon’s Jealous Guy’.
‘Ah, but with that one, Lennon’s saying sorry that I made you cry. That’s the key line because he’s already got her back. He’s triumphed. So all that self-confessed “I’m so weak” stuff is stated from a position of strength. No, I’m talking about being a complete loser. That’s something totally new to the rock idiom, which by its very nature is immature and totally macho-orientated in its basic attitude. Only in country music can you find a guy singing about that kind of deprivation honestly.’
Finally, if they ever do another Rock Dreams book, Elvis Costello will surely be there along with the rest. He’ll be the mousy figure, all insect anonymity, seated in a tube train carriage in his insurance clerk suit and misty bifocals mostly hidden by a copy of the Evening Standard with Elvis Presley’s death announced in grandstand type alongside the latest tales of National Front marches and King’s Road Punks–Teds confrontations. Only his hands will be prominent – all shot through with cold-blue veins bulging as they form clenched fists, the knuckles of which scream forth with two blood red tattoos. The left fist reads ‘Revenge’. The right reads ‘Guilt’. The main headline will read: ‘A WALKING TIME-BOMB – THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING’. Watch him closely.
‘When we met up in that pub opposite Island Records and I got really drunk on Pernod and said all these really exaggerated things which you wrote up so dramatically,’ Elvis Costello is reminding me some fifteen years after the event, ‘it set me in good store, y’know. It didn’t do anybody any harm. That was pretty potent stuff. Y’know, and a lot of it – your imagery mixed in with the iconography of the first two albums – you’ve got to accept it was consciously very hip. It’s just a very hip image. It’s like James Dean. But after three or four years it started to become a complete bloody millstone because people without imagination only wanted you to reconfirm that preconception over and over again . . . Nowadays, of course, I don’t get so involved in all that side.’
So, did you really believe that line about ‘revenge’ and ‘guilt’ being the only emotions that inspired you to write your songs?
‘I probably did mean that, yes. I was probably exaggerating more than a little bit. But I was shrewder than most people realize because I knew there was only going to be one chance to get my foot in the door. And if I didn’t make a really strong impression then I wouldn’t buy myself the time and space to do other stuff. Because, as you know, there was a whole other bunch of stuff I couldVe done even back then. However, I tailored my songs and style very purposefully because I knew which way the wind of prevailing trends was blowing and that it would also steam-roller anyone who happened to be going against it.
‘I mean, just look at the guys who backed me up on my first album [a San Francisco country-rock band called Clover]. They were a good musical band and one of them went on to become a huge pop star [Huey Lewis], but they had the gross misfortune to come to London in ’76. Forget it! All those qualities were the worst things they could have had going for them then. Now I could see that. I wasn’t a fool, though I was still pretty naive about a lot of things. But that wasn’t one of them. So I made sure I made enough of an impression, claimed enough space and cleared enough ground for a lift-off. Particularly with a very aggressive group and a very, very aggressive manager and the whole thing guaranteed to get people unnerved, if not downright scared of you.
‘Like, all the problems over in America with my first record company . . . I’d been with Columbia for ten years, the first two and a half were great. Then things got very ugly . . . for a whole series of reasons, and by the end of it they were just releasing my records and burying them under a stone. Plus I owed them a million dollars. The simple fact is that anyone with any talent at Columbia was never given a chance. People would suddenly become invisible . . . almost non-human . . . if they transgressed certain codes. And I never wished to socialize with any of the heads of the company. I would never have my picture taken with them, in case it turned up as evidence in some FBI mafia investigation [laughs]. There’s always that possibility with those kind of people.
‘Mind you, I’m not particularly proud of some of our scare tactics because it often came down just to bullying people to get out of your way . . . I’m talking about people in the business, not musicians. And some of it comes back to haunt you . . . You learn to live with it. Fuck all that! Those things happen. But when youVe done all that, you say, “Well, what am I going to do with all this space?” Then you want to broaden out. You start to want to say tender things as well as aggressive stuff. So you’re not stuck with some one-dimensional image.’
To this end Elvis Costello has been attempting to slyly reinvent himself with virtually every album he’s ever made. First there were the confusing ‘genre’ exercises – the cut-price soul of Get Happy, the Nashville homage of Almost Blue, or an ersatz Sgt Pepper for the eighties in Imperial Bedroom. By the mid-eighties he’d started even changing his identity. For 1989’s Spike he was the Beloved Entertainer; before that, Napoleon Dynamite, the tormented alter ego of 1986’s Blood and Chocolate. To make matters even more complicated, earlier that same year he’d changed his name back to Declan McManus for King of America. The 1990s find him all grown up with long hair and beard dismissing contemporary pop in favour of classical music and determinedly romancing the ‘forty-something’ icons like Neil Young and Van Morrison, both of whom he performed live with, Paul McCartney and Tom Waits, who he’s writing songs with, as well as Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash, who he’s written songs for.
Meanwhile, his two most recent albums, Spike and Mighty as a Rose, have been full of wit and detail but lack an awful lot as well – memorable melodies certainly, ‘focus’ perhaps and the old ‘intensity’ definitely. But that’s probably the price to be paid for the degree of domestic contentment he claims to have achieved with his second wife of six years and some-time creative collaborator, the former Pogues bassist Cait O’Riordan. After all, as Costello freely admitted to me, he’s more of an observer than a willing participant in his own lyrics these days. (Still, in 1994 he reunited with the Attractions and recorded an album that can stand with his very best entitled Brutal Youth. However much he may get lost in diversification, it’s impossible to ever count him out as a relevant talent.)
When I last spoke to him, he was finishing two projects: more writing with Paul McCartney and his first-ever foray into classical music composition and performance with the Brodsky Quartet:
‘To even start to express yourself in classical music, you’ve got to do a hell of a lot of training. Some people might complain about the lack of spontaneity in classical music but that’s utter bullshit. That’s like saying Beethoven isn’t as good as Robert Johnson – just pure fuckin’ idiocy. One is really spontaneous and visceral and the other is probably also that way but it’s on a whole different level of musical complexity which still doesn’t prevent it from being primitive and transcendent. The poetry in the lyrics is arcane but no more so than Hank Williams is now. It still means something real.
‘I’d rather go and see Brahms’s Goethe than check out the new Happy Mondays record. At least, it stands some chance of genuinely touching my soul a little bit. By that I’m not claiming that classical music is better. It all depends on how it’s being performed . . . Still, I knew we were in deep, deep shit when Manchester suddenly became the centre of the musical universe. I thought, “Now, pop music’s really fucked.” Jesus Christ! “I’m really hard and I take drugs . . .” So what! Go fuck off and write some songs then.
‘Working with Paul McCartney is a big thrill for me too. It’s funny – you take an opinion poll on Paul McCartney and you’ll find that almost all music critics dislike him and almost all music fans think he’s great. I mean, compared to who is Paul McCartney not any good? Compared to the Inspiral fuckin’ Carpets? I don’t go in for all this “knocking” him. He’s who he wants to be. Paul McCartney survived being one of the most famous people ever in the world – and this was back when being famous actually meant something. Nowadays any fuckin’ clown can get on international satellite TV and become famous simply by shooting someone or releasing some inane fucking song. Of course, fuckin’ Madonna is fuckin’ famous – she’s on TV every fifteen fuckin’ minutes!’
Don’t you think you’ve often been guilty of being too diverse and too wilfully obscure for your listeners?
‘Yes, I do feel I’ve been too wilfully obscure for my audience at times. But then it depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If I’m trying to sincerely follow my own feelings about music, then I’m right to do records like Almost Blue. If I’m thinking about being ever so famous for a long, long time, then obviously I was completely wrong. I always find myself starting to lose interest in the limited areas of music I operate in. But everything I’ve done on record – good or bad – I’ve done with all my heart. And I stand by every record I’ve done, even records that I don’t think nowadays have any virtue. I’ve made bad records but I’ve never made a dishonest record, let’s put it that way.
‘One in particular – Goodbye Cruel World – has to be the worst. That was a really fucked-up record. That’s the worst one, really, because I had all the arrangements arse-backwards, picked the wrong producers, then asked them to do an impossible job . . . My marriage was breaking up. It all sounds like a fuckin’ sob story now but it probably was the worst period of my life. Like one of the songs on that album The Comedians, I rewrote it for Roy Orbison partly because he really likes stories in his lyrics but mostly because the original lyrics are so fuckin’ enigmatic I’ve forgotten what they actually meant!’
Does this happen a lot to you with your old songs?
‘Yeah, with some of them. The thing is . . . to be blunt about it, the trouble with being an adulterer and a songwriter is that you always write songs in code. You know, when I started I swore to myself I’d always try to avoid writing songs about hotel rooms. But then inevitably many of my most lurid experiences in the past have taken place in hotel rooms so [laughs] that’s just part of the job. I mean, I’m not glorying in that. And I’m still not at all happy about all the pain it caused my ex-wife . . . But it’s a fact and I’m not going to try and hide from it. It’s just life. You get over it. And that’s why most of my early songs are more obscure than my more contemporary material, where I express myself a lot more openly. See, I’m not chasing loads of women around nowadays . . . I’m pretty calm and stable these days and I think it actually makes me a better writer in a way because . . .’
You’ve got a lot more time . . . ?
‘True. [Laughs] And lower phone bills. But also because now I’m synthesizing personal experience with observation. As opposed to just projecting feelings on to someone you barely know or chasing some illusion. Now, I’m more into observing illusions taking their toll on other people. I feel pretty good about life these days. I’m practically forty and I don’t want to be like some ageing starlet who’s still trying to look young and cute when she’s in her bloody forties. Staying young, looking young . . . I don’t care about that. No one ever bought one of my records because of my looks . . .’
Yeah, you and Van Morrison both . . .
‘Well, I don’t feel I look quite as rough and ancient-looking as poor old Van . . . But, um, I know what you mean. Looks have never mattered to either of our careers, that’s what you’re saying. But I sure added to the problem by subverting a stereotype – which is what I did with the “Elvis” name and the big glasses and putting that to the fore. I could’ve gone without the glasses, worn contacts and tried to look handsome . . . But actually my early image ended up looking kind of sexy. Who would have thought it? It’s idiotic as far as I’m concerned. But it worked. Personally I think it’s my big nose. [Laughs.] It’s not the glasses or the silly walk. Forget the long hair and beard. It’s the big nose every time.’