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A very short history of "punk" rock might go something like this: born as a reaction to "paunch rock" — pop fare soft in the middle and silky smooth at the edges — punk's aim was to return rock 'n' roll to its gritty working-class roots. The idea was imaginative, even inspiring. The angry stance of groups such as the Sex Pistols attracted extraordinary press attention. But the music, primitively played, proved to be largely one-dimensional. Punk petered out.
Well, not quite. There is the case of Britain's 23-year-old Elvis Costello. What he shares with punk rockers is feisty anger, an authentic passion for his music. What he has added are lyrics with genuine bite and wit, set to tunes you might whistle in the shower and sung in a staccato voice that is both gruff and guttural. Rock's passion, pop's fashion and punk's posture are blended to gripping effect. Costello is difficult to classify and that suits him fine. His message is getting across anyway.
In less than a year, Costello has delivered two albums containing 24 of his original tunes. The first, My Aim Is True, recorded in a tiny London studio in less than a week, was named one of Rolling Stone's Albums of the Year. The second, wryly tided This Year's Model, is a tighter, better-recorded album that sacrifices none of the crackling urgency of the first. Aim has sold more than 300,000 copies, remarkable for a first album, and Model has sold nearly that many in the month since its release. Right now Costello is in the midst of a seven-week U.S. tour. Along with his producer, Nick Lowe, who opens the show and recently released his own album, Costello is serving up the most energetic rock 'n' roll since the coming of Bruce Springsteen three years ago.
Direct as his music is, Costello himself has remained mysterious. He rarely gives interviews and takes pleasure in donning coy masks when he does. Defying expectations is his business. He dresses in loose-fitting, thrift-shop suit jackets and thin ties, wears horn-rimmed glasses and looks just faintly like a nerd. In fact, he's exceedingly articulate, and his appearance is a calculated attack on the tyranny of fashion that he alludes to in "This Year's Girl":
See her picture in a thousand places
'Cause she's this year's girl ...
All this, but no surprises
For this year's girl.
Costello's love songs are scarcely sentimental — they're full of the fumbling and frustration that surface in lines like "I don't wanna be your lover, / I just wanna be your victim" and "I said, 'I'm so happy I could die.' / She said, 'Drop dead,' / Then left with another guy." But there's something bittersweet about the plaint in the song "No Action":
I don't want to kiss you
I don't want to touch
I don't want to see you
'Cause I don't miss you that much.
Costello is in fact married and has a 3-year-old child, but chooses not to elaborate. Nor does talking about the past much interest him. He answers a few questions, but as he says in one song, "Lip service is all you'll ever get from me." Born Declan Patrick MacManus in London, where his father was a successful musician, he harbored no fantasies of becoming a rock star until his late teens, when he took up the guitar. It was after high school that he began churning out his own songs and trying to peddle them to record companies.
No one showed any interest until he dropped off a cassette of his songs at Stiff Records, a tiny independent label. That visit led to Costello's first album, and the adoption of a pseudonym borrowed from the other Elvis and a family name. Then, last summer, as a ploy to get the attention of CBS Records executives, in London for a convention, he took his guitar into the street outside their hotel and zipped through a string of songs when they were passing by. He was arrested for causing a public disturbance but eventually got a contract.
That break has not diluted the venom he feels for the corporate music world. In "Radio, Radio," Costello screams dead on: "I wanna bite the hand that feeds me... I wanna make them wish they'd never seen me." "You can become too heroic in your own eyes," he explains, "but I'm chipping away at a certain attitude that has a stranglehold on music. I'm a menace. I'm not even sure what I want, but that's not the point — it's that I want it now. I'm up for a fight. I'm saying, 'What are you gonna do? Deal with us? Try to stamp us out, or just sit there and vegetate?' I'm here to corrupt American youth, but my visa will probably run out before I get to do it."
The flip side of being dismissed is to be taken too seriously — a prospect that appalls him. "If people are too serious, they're boring," he says. "Too much seriousness takes away the chance for any spontaneity and fun. I want to keep it simple. There is an art to brief, fleeting forms of expression — they're direct. That's why my songs are all about three minutes long. Any longer and I'd be bored listening. You have to be ruthless about cutting them down. It's a discipline." To maintain his lean, spare sound, Costello plays with just three backup musicians — a guitarist, a keyboard player and a drummer, blandly billed as the Attractions. In Costello's view, more is less: "When you can't maintain the danger of what you're doing, you either retreat into being an 'artist,' which means you're allowed to be sloppy and self-indulgent in the name of Art, or you go showbiz, where your softness and slickness are excused by the fact that you don't want to be offensive. That's the way 90 per cent of American acts go."
What characterizes Costello's favorite artists — he admires albums by performers ranging from Joni Mitchell to David Bowie — is their willingness to take chances. "That's why I liked the Sex Pistols," he says. "I think 'God Save the Queen' is the best rock 'n' roll record ever made. But with the punk bands, their egos got too big. They ran out of ideas and energy, and later groups were just exploiting the original idea. It got boring. Or take a band like Boston. They may sell 9 million records, but they're about as exciting as a plate of tripe. Rock 'n' roll is about sex, and they might as well be eunuchs. They're just a wet dream for an accountant.
"What infuriates me," he concludes, "is lack of imagination, of individuality, small-mindedness in any area." One thing Elvis Costello intends not to be is just "this year's model."
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