EC at the Roundhouse, London August 1996 issue, on page 2 Sean French I don’t want to go to Chelsea, or any other Elvis Costello gig, if it makes me think about Philip Larkin An old college friend suggested we go to see Elvis Costello at the Roundhouse in north London. It was a sentimental journey because the last time we had been to a Costello concert together was in 1979. Between the two concerts, we had become middle aged and so, it seemed had the rest of the audience. Philip Larkin once wrote that when he was young jazz had been a fugitive, subversive interest, but then it became respectable: “There are scholarly books on it, and adult education courses; it’s the kind of interest that might well be mentioned on a university entrance form.” The same with rock music. The whole point of going to a rock concert when you are 37 is to moan about how young everybody looks; the shock at the Roundhouse was how old and respectable we all were. I know that I’ve always been personally tame but when I go to hear loud music I want at least an imitation of danger. Instead, it was all Gap shorts, car keys in the pocket and a babysitter at home. And the Roundhouse has been humbled with the rest of us. During the sixties it was a venue for people to look at light shows, sniff at exotic plumes of smoke, watch naked women on stage and feel miserable about missing out on the sex that everybody was supposed to be enjoying. I was too young for the sixties and my own misery about missing out on sex occupied me for the seventies, during which time I also went to the Roundhouse and saw some nudity and pogoed tentatively to the strains of The Damned. But the venue was punished in the eighties by being given to a dance company, which never staged a single show. The building didn’t fit the trains for which it was designed has failed ever since. Which brings me to Costello. Older readers may recall that there was a masterplan in the late seventies, according to which Costello was going to become the biggest rock star in the world. This was ruined for ever when he got drunk one night and started ranting in an American bar about how Ray Charles was a stupid untalented nigger. Was it some perverse attempt at irony? Was it deliberate self-sabotage? Costello’s three-hour show last Saturday was brilliant, but it also showed why he could never have been a really big star. The show was full of ironic touches, showing how similar one of his songs is to another, or to a famous song by somebody else. His famous sexual angst has become the sourness of middle-aged failure, expressed in gibes at his own record company, other performers and Andrew Lloyd-Webber. During some of his duller material, my mind wandered and I began to think of him as in the tradition of artists whose corrosive intelligence actually limits their achievement. People such as Herman Mankiewicz (who wrote Citizen Kane) who expended much of his talent in offending the powerful, as when he drunkenly vomited at the dinner table of the famous gourmet and producer Arthur Hornblow. Mankiewicz looked up and said: “Don’t worry, Arthur, the white wine came up with the fish.” As Berlioz said of Saint-Saëns, the most extraordinary musical prodigy who has ever lived: “He knows everything but he lacks inexperience.” An artist can do with some prudence and doggedness as well as talent. During the eighties and nineties, while the likes of Phil Collins and Eric Clapton plodded on, Costello has recorded country music, folk music, with an orchestra and a string quartet, written with Paul McCartney, grown an absurd beard and shaved it off, performed under a series of different names. He has challenged his audience and the audience has reacted, as challenged audiences generally do, by not buying the records ¾ just as his record company is likely to respond to the jokes at their expense by reconsidering his contract. The Roundhouse concert was packed with the crowd who bought his earlier albums and has been keeping up with diminishing enthusiasm ever since. That was why I enjoyed the evening so much. Great music, and I was able to think maudlin thoughts about ageing and decline. It reminded me of another Larkin story, told by an early girlfriend who asked him (then aged 21) at a quiet moment on a date what he was thinking: “I’ve just thought what it would be like to be old and have no- one to look after me.” Do I know how to have a good time on a Saturday night, or what?