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"You just have to laugh sometimes," Declan MacManus is telling me. "because sometimes there's nothing else you can do." Better known to the world as Elvis Costello, the snarling Buddy Holly lookalike with a sharp line in caustic angst. One British critic has greeted his latest opus, Mighty Like A Rose, his first in two years, with the phrase, "Farewell Beloved Entertainer; welcome back Mr. Bitter and Twisted."
Although it's hardly the first time Costello has been so drastically misunderstood, it continues to amaze, frustrate and bewilder him.
"I imagine as we talk now this may well be the last interview I ever do," he told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune just a week ago. "I'm 37 and I feel like I haven't even begun, because I'm finally headed towards what I do best, which is to write songs and perform and away from all that other stuff, which is why I say this very well could be my very last interview.
"The same off-the-peg biography-cum-capsule review is churned out every time I put out a record," Costello complained with, perhaps, some justification. "I'm not at school anymore. I know what I'm doing which is more than I can say for a lot of people in this business and the music press. I ask myself, is this really part of the job description? Because it doesn't seem that way to me."
Bearded, long-haired and silhouetted against the brilliant sunshine of a May lunchtime in Grand Canal Street's Kitty O'Shea's, Costello presents a slightly daunting interviewee, eyes lost in his sunglasses and facing me blinded by the midday light streaming through the glass behind him.
He lives in Ireland these days. Himself and his wife, Cait O'Riordan have brought a house in Shankill, Co. Dublin and Elvis has learned to drive.
In the past two years he has travelled the country when he has had the opportunity enthusiastically helping out Philip King and Nuala O'Connor in the making of their groundbreaking, Bringing It All Back Home TV series. For that he wrote a remarkable chamber music cum tongue-in-cheek folk song hybrid, "Mischievous Ghost," which he dueted with Mary Coughlan in the series.
He made Mighty Like A Rose and while he was at it, a studio album of old favourite cover songs which he plans to release, "some time in the future." He has written songs with Paul McCartney and for Johnny Cash and Roger McGuinn and performed and recorded a Grateful Dead song, "Ship Of Fools" for the Grateful Dead tribute album Deadicated.
It's a mighty body of work by any standards but Elvis doesn't see it thus. "I'm not all that prolific," he says, "it's everybody else that's lazy."
Mighty Like A Rose takes its name from a song he found on an obscure tape cassette collection of John McCormack songs found in a roadside filling station somewhere between Athlone and Dingle. A friend later found him a cover version of the same song by a New York doo wop group, The Carols, recorded in the '60s.
Each thought is savoured and explored. There is, as he says. nothing half-hearted about his records.
Mighty Like A Rose bristles with characters who are bitter and twisted, disillusioned and cheated, despairing and suicidal. But there are also the naive and innocent. the believers and the optimists.
"I think it's much more creative to create a character where the character personifies certain attitudes of negativity, stupidity, cynicism, inanity," he argues.
The album's opening tracks to paint a picture of rampant and wilful urban and social decay. Even the second song's title is "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)" while the opening track, a hilarious pisstake of the surf song genre, sends up both John Lennon and Pink Floyd.
"Invasion Hit Parade" is a savage indictment of media war coverage. "It is about a kind of hit parade, it's about the way in which the media, television specifically, deals with war. There was a particularly curious situation which is what the song is based on, when they had a choice of which revolution they would favour on the news, remember that? Are we going to have Tiananmen Square or maybe we'll have the Panamanian invasion?"
"People don't let him down," he says, "they let themselves down. Maybe sometime your ear gets taken by your first instinct about a song, Like 'Oh, it's putting somebody down' therefore you start to like that feeling.
"Like a song like 'All Grown Up' is really a sympathetic song. It's very critical of the person but it's very sympathetic. It's like 'Look at the person, you're still so young and then the weariness etc., it's kind of saying, get a grip on yourself, why are so old before your time'?
"There's one maybe totally damning song on the album but the songs at the front of the album like "Hurry Down Doomsday," even "Invasion Hit Parade" is funny. If you can't laugh at how idiotic things have become then we are really in trouble. This is a comedy record, all my records are comedy records."
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