PUNK ROCK DID nothing for me. Perhaps I was too old. I completely understood its counter-revolutionary appeal against the musical excesses of the seventies and, if dislike of Emerson, Lake and bloody Palmer had been the required qualification, I’d have been a punk. I hated the sheer pretentiousness and self-indulgence of the prog-rockers (although, paradoxically, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon has always been a favourite album) but punk seemed to go to other extreme, being almost anti-melody as well as claiming to be anti-establishment.
I would sooner have purchased one of those Max Bygraves sing-along albums popular with the older generation at the time than a Sex Pistols LP. All that cod anarchy stuff, contrived to suggest that this was kids doing it for themselves against the odds, was rather spoiled by the fact that the genesis of the movement was in Vivienne Westwood’s exclusive fashion emporium in the poshest part of Chelsea.
I only ever saw one punk on the Britwell estate. His name was Richard and he was the seventeen-year-old son of one of our neighbours. Richard suddenly emerged one day wearing lots of studs (including one through his nose), chains hanging off his leather jacket and a pink cockatoo hairstyle. Too well brought up to spit in the street, he would stand self-consciously at the bus stop in front of our house and help old ladies aboard when the bus arrived. Richard never managed to shock anybody and struggled to demonstrate the synthetic outrage expected of him. After a while the chains vanished and he became a New Romantic.
Punk was about as much of a threat to society as Richard was. If it inspired young girls and boys to pick up a guitar, just as skiffle, Elvis and the emergence of the Beatles had done in previous decades, then I suppose it would have had a value but, as the late Mark E. Smith of the Fall once said, ‘The great thing about rock ’n’ roll is, any idiot can play it. The bad thing about rock ’n’ roll is, any idiot can play it.’
As the reign of punk rock was beginning, another was ending. On 17 August, rising early for work, I turned on the radio in the kitchen at 4.30am as usual, to hear the BBC World Service report that Elvis Presley was dead. It was the kind of shocking headline that roots the memory in the spot where the news was heard. It took me a long time to pour the water that had just boiled on to the teabag waiting in my mug as I tried to absorb this information.
Elvis was forty-two, the same age as my mother had been when she died. Linda and I had always felt ambivalent about ‘the King’ and his music and he had never been prominent in our musical development. Linda was a bigger fan of his British imitators, Cliff Richard and Billy Fury, than of the man himself. But as we reflected over the phone on his demise, we realised that Elvis had always been there in the background. There was the Old Shep EP that had brought tears to our eyes as children; his time as a GI, which was always in the news as a backcloth to our formative years; the hit record ‘She’s Not You’ that the teenage Linda had bought for our collection while I was on holiday in Denmark.
Of all Presley’s many recordings, there was only one that established itself in my musical subconscious. ‘I Feel So Bad’ was, I think, released in the UK as a double ‘A’ side with ‘Wild in the Country’ in 1961. I suspect that this roaring three minutes of classic rock ’n’ roll contained the magic spark that made Presley what he was – a spark that almost vanished in what he became.
When I first heard that saxophone instrumental with Elvis whooping away in the background, it thrilled me to the core. I would have been about eleven or twelve. I played the record over and over again until I was able to transcribe the lyrics. I can remember being totally bemused by some of the vocabulary. I had no idea what a a ‘rain check’ was, or how a ‘grip’ could be packed.
Of course, Elvis didn’t write that or any of the other songs he sang. That placed him at a disadvantage when the era of Dylan, Brian Wilson and Lennon/McCartney came along. At the time I was being enthralled by the early Beatles stuff, Elvis was having all the excitement managed out of him as ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker signed him up to a string of awful movies, which improved his bank balance but damaged his credibility.
As I soon discovered, there was now another Elvis on the scene. On hearing ‘(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes’ on the radio, I initially assumed Elvis Costello was American. Such was the impact it had on me that I hotfooted it to my favourite record shop in the Farnham Road to buy it. The only problem was that I didn’t know the title of the song or the name of the artist. Either I hadn’t managed to catch it on the radio or it had been played by one of those infuriating DJs who failed to name the record they’d just aired because they were too busy projecting their own ‘personality’ (the cachet of the early Radio 1 DJs had faded for me by now).
I told the helpful assistant that the song was by an American band and tried to reproduce the ‘hey, hey’ clapping bits, which were what I remembered best about it. Somehow the genius behind the counter, despite having been given misleading information, identified the new Elvis – the one whose forebears hailed from the Wirral peninsula rather than the Mississippi Delta. The debut album from which ‘Red Shoes’ was taken, My Aim Is True, was located and purchased on the spot. And that was the start of my closest and longest affinity with any recording artist.
I suppose that Elvis C. and the other ‘new wave’ artists I liked, such as Joe Jackson, the La’s, Echobelly and Tom Robinson, can be said to have emerged from the punk phenomenon in the sense that punk created the climate that allowed ‘independents’ to thrive by breaking the command and control of the major record labels.
Costello’s label, Stiff Records, promoted many other talented bands that would otherwise have struggled to find an outlet. By contrast, the Sex Pistols, who I would not describe as a talented band, were with EMI, a pillar of the record industry establishment they professed to despise.
I’ve followed Elvis through everything he’s done – the different genres, various backing bands and numerous collaborations. I’ve seen him live at every location from the London Palladium to the Sands Leisure Centre in Carlisle and, in forty years of listening to his records and watching him on stage, I have never once been disappointed. If Lonnie Donegan was the musical hero of my childhood, the Beatles of my teens and Bowie of my twenties, Elvis Costello gets the lifetime achievement award. Only four years younger than I am, he seems to have experienced the same kind of musical development, crediting the Beatles as his permanent inspiration.
There is a YouTube video of Costello performing ‘Penny Lane’ in front of Barack Obama and guests at the White House during the Obama presidency that is the incarnation of this inspiration. Its fruits are also evident in his collaboration with Paul McCartney on two albums, one of his and one of Paul’s.
There are other spurious links between Elvis Costello and me besides our mutual adoration of the Fab Four. We were both born in west London and had mothers from Liverpool called Lilian. And I grew up listening to his dad on the radio. Costello’s father, Ross MacManus, was a trumpeter and a featured vocalist with the Joe Loss Orchestra, who used to play on those BBC Light Programme music shows, as well as being the resident band at the Hammersmith Palais when I was a kid.
Late in 1977, Elvis Costello released a single that hadn’t been on the album. ‘Watching the Detectives’ remains one of my all-time favourite songs. With its moody Duane Eddy introduction, reggae beat and a lyric that could be better described as a potted film noir screenplay (‘She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake’), this was the song that cemented our unilateral relationship.
For my family and me, the whole of 1977 was shrouded in a veil of sadness after the death of my brother-in-law Mike in March. He was thirty-four years old and killed himself, taking a rope into the basement of Henry’s Radios, where he’d worked since leaving school.
He had apparently been an alcoholic since his early teens, as my sister had only recently discovered; a ‘functioning alcoholic’, we’d describe someone with the condition today. Mike was a functioning alcoholic when he came into my life, arriving for a date with Linda at Walmer Road with a Bob Dylan album under his arm; a functioning alcoholic as he enthused me with his love of history, the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley and the books of Ray Bradbury.
A functioning alcoholic when he built me my first amplifier, engineered that weird metal harmonica-holder, bought the tickets for me to see Chuck Berry, paid for a rose tree to be planted at Kensal Rise cemetery to mark the spot where my mother’s ashes had been scattered. A functioning alcoholic throughout the entire time we’d known and loved him. A functioning alcoholic until it was too late to escape the demons that tormented him. If he couldn’t stop being an alcoholic, he could at least stop functioning. So he did.
Music could offer no solace to Linda, or to me. Nothing could. Kind, gentle, blue-eyed Mike was gone, and for a long while it felt as if all the pleasure in our lives had gone with him.