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Elvis Costello remains something of an anti-hero. He still wears those spectacles, he is no Sting in the handsome stakes, he is defiantly different in approach and style, and he has a reputation for being "difficult."
Despite the fact that he has been a frequent visitor to these shores and now owns a house here with wife Cait O'Riordan (the former Pogues bassist), we have never met. Never even spoken. Now, when part of that is to be put right, we still end up on talking on the telephone, less than 10 miles apart.
For reasons which I could not quite fathom, I was apprehensive about this interview... something which seldom happens. Perhaps it had something to do with Costello's reputation as a musical "heavy"... or maybe the fact that he had to change his plans to ring me at lunchtime.
I needn't have worried. "Hello, this is Declan MacManus — how are you, Tony?" chirps the bright and breezy voice on the other end of the phone. This is the Elvis Costello of hard-bitten legend?
Over the next 35 minutes I manage to slip in little more than half a dozen questions. Declan/Elvis is raring to talk as he sits in his home near Enniskerry on a wet Saturday afternoon.
The most important topic of conversation, of course, is his long-awaited reunion with his old band. Elvis Costello and The Attractions will be playing their first Dublin show in eight years at the Point Depot on December 1.
"I started doing this most recent record, Brutal Youth, on my own, but with Pete Thomas playing drums, because that's one thing I can't do. And little by little, as songs developed, I brought the others in, including Nick Lowe who plays bass on several songs, and it just seemed the natural thing to do," he says.
But, he stresses, it did not start out as some grand plan to reform The Attractions and go out on the road. "It was certainly not planned, but the good thing is that because it all happened so informally, we can now go on the road and do other things without the big fuss there would have been had we announced in advance that The Attractions were reforming."
At this stage, Elvis, Pete Thomas, Bruce Thomas and Steve Nieve have been on the road for six months, touring America and Europe. Not only that, but there is likely to be a fully-fledged Elvis Costello and The Attractions album and possibly more live work.
"We are not planning ahead in any set way, but we are definitely going to try and make the next studio album together — but then again, our Dublin show might be the last we will ever play here or it might not, who knows?"
Whatever. He mentions that, between himself as a solo artist and with The Attractions, he will have something like five different albums on release next year. Some will be oldies remastered and re-released with new packaging and extra tracks, while there will be a new Best Of, along with a collection of unusual covers which he recorded five years ago in Eddie Grant's studio in Barbados.
Did he miss not being with his mates over all those years? After all, it was eight years together and eight years apart.
"I did not miss it at the time when I stopped working with The Attractions," he says, without any him of malice. "We did not break up for any one big reason: it was a gradual thing rather than a sudden decision to stop working together and, anyway, we had ambitions to do other things."
Those ambitions were mostly on Elvis's side. He went through a period (which he now refers to as "The Bearded Years") when he produced albums like Spike, Mighty Like a Rose and his work with the Brodsky Quartet. Some chose to write off one of popular music's finest wordsmiths as a spent force.
"People thought I was quite mad during that time," he admits. "My appearance gave people ammunition, and that spilled over into their reaction to the music and what I was doing as well."
In mitigation, he says: "Anyone who has a career as long as mine is due a time when what they do is not quite right. That was mine." Yet he steadfastly refuses to apologise or turn his back on it. "I had very definite ideas about all those records; they covered a lot of ground and I met a lot of people."
He stresses that it was necessary to try different things, all of which would have been impossible if he had still been with The Attractions, when the target would always have been the next album or the next tour.
There is a new freshness and appeal about all the old songs, even for the players. Devotees will be delighted to hear from the man himself that even early favourites like "(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea" and "Radio, Radio" have been dusted down and given a new shine.
"Coming back to it years after playing the old songs, they don't seem tired. We have stripped them back to their origins because when we were together and playing those songs so many times, we tended to embellish them."
Oddly enough, be cites his experience with the classical Brodsky Quartet as having rekindled the desire to play in a group again. The first chance an Irish audience got to see the fruits of that yearning was at this year's final Feile, an event which proved a peculiar one for Elvis, now 40.
"When we went on stage and I looked out, I could not see anyone who was born when my first record was released. It was great, because you can get lazy if you just go out and play to the adoring followers all the time." This time round, audiences at the shows span all age groups, he adds.
Elvis Costello is one of the finest songwriters rock has produced. His words are pointed, poignant, sometimes poetic, often savagely political. He wrote the deadly "Tramp the Dirt Down" — which, literally, sought the head of Margaret Thatcher — while the magnificent "Shipbuilding" ranks as one of the finest anti-war songs ever written.
"I have never tried to write sloganeering songs," he insists. "If there is a political angle, it's because political events or events happening to all of us have moved me to react in a certain way."
Among the songwriters he personally admires are Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. What, then, of his unlikely writing partnership with Paul McCartney?
"We talk from time to time and he came to see us recently at the Albert Hall, and we did a special version of 'Candy' (one of several Costello-McCartney compositions on Mighty Like a Rose) for him. I enjoyed working with him and the door is open to doing it again. There are a few we wrote that neither of us have recorded and which people have never heard," he says tantalisingly.
Even though Elvis Costello is enjoying working with The Attractions again, he still has one eye on other paths. "I wrote a song for Ronnie Drew recently which I think is going to be on his solo album, and I certainly have other things I want to do. A lot of people in this business seek out security and court complacency, but I am different — I don't want that."
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