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Who the hell is Elvis Costello?
Heaven or hell, Cool or smart businessman?
Two and a half years ago he told me he was just a regular data operator, married father who liked to watch TV and play rock.
Today, Elvis Costello does not say anything. Not to anyone.
But he is definitely not a regular data operator anymore.
First of all, Elvis Costello is of course a violently talented rock singer and songwriter. One of the best in the world. Then it was determined. So it is.
But Elvis is also something more. He is developing into a myth, a cult figure, mysterious, inaccessible, unattainable. Understand the difference now — he's not inaccessible. Unavailable like old fat hard rockers with cut Cadillacs and cocaine and young groupies. A bit more like Dylan.
I myself met him twice and made a couple of interviews with him. The first time I never forget.
It was in London at the end of February-March 1977. It was Elvis Costello's first interview. Me and the photographer Ulla Lemberg had been around for a week and met an incredible mass of punk rockers. Sex Pistols, Damned, Chelsea and many others
We were prepared for yet another crazy, but PR-hungry young man who inadvertently burping, spat, farted and monkeyed around. Instead, a serious thinking guy came in overcoat jacket, tie and horn-rimmed glasses.
I had never heard him, his first single, "Less Than Zero" had come out a few days earlier and on the record company Stiff, where we met, the gramophone was broken.
But it was easily remedied, Elvis went and picked up an acoustic guitar and sang — "Less Than Zero" for us. The sound bounced against the concrete walls in the basement where we sat and I was very impressed. Much more impressed than when I heard the album later.
The only reason I asked to meet him was that I heard his name, and who can resist the name Elvis Costello?
We sat for a long time and talked, moving after a while to a nearby pub. Elvis told about television. People's contact problem, about fascism, about the Social Democrats, he belonged to their left wing.
Elvis also told me that he had been playing in the London area for a long time, including In a bluegrass band called Flip City.
He was cursed. Pissed on record companies, self-reliant journalists — anyone who for several years had denied him the chance to become full-time rock musician.
Then he did not dare to believe he had a better chance. A single on a new record label, possibly an LP later. My Aim Is True would be hot, for such was Elvis Costello.
He had a big black book with people he would revenge if he managed to get something big. There were most record directors, there were journalists, and there were other rock musicians.
And Elvis Costello became something big. A few months after we met, his LP came out. The carousel started spinning. Elvis quit the computer presenter, had less time watching TV, he formed his own band, something he used to be hesitant to "get so tied up with a band"
Six months later, I met him again. Then Elvis was great. He came on a flash visit to Stockholm to record some songs for TV.
We met at the cafeteria in the radio house. It was one of the last interviews Elvis did. He had decided not to speak, with any exception, to English media.
"I'm rock singer, what I want to say, I say with my music and with my lyrics. What I do when I'm not playing should the newspapers run in."
A while after that, at the turn of the year 77-78, it became quiet from Elvis Costello.
Then the rumors began to come. Elvis appeared in rock magazines' gossip columns with new girls, reported to be drunk on the record company party and so on. Elvis also moved away from his wife, whom he always left outside the newspapers, and his child.
Instead, he stacked to a floor in the Rolls and the upper class Kensington together with Bebe Buell. Bebe has been a girl in Playboy and has been together with a lot of rockers, before Elvis was Rod Stewart and Ted Nugent.
And Elvis, who in the past, supported Rock Against Racism in England and recorded intense attacks on the English fascists, was reported to have expressed racist words. For one of these, according to the papers, he also got a bang on the jaw by Bonnie Bramlett — she with Delaney.
Did the success have changed completely on the sympathetic loser Elvis Costello? He simply had. Become an ego-tripped pig?
Nobody knows, because Elvis does not want to talk to newspapers and television.
Then the suspicion arises. Elvis does not talk to newspapers, what does newspaper think? No major paranoia is required to imagine that a number of disappointed editors would like to punish Elvis Costello.
It's just a theory, but, but... Everything's right. All the rumors about Elvis appear just after he stopped talking to the press. Before that, there were only articles about what nice guy Elvis Costello is.
If you go to Elvis yourself — by listening to his music — there is nothing to suggest that this incredible personality change would have taken place. His songs are still about the same things.
Obviously, someone listening to his latest LP's Armed Forces and professed noticing that Elvis is not a Marxist revolutionary, that's all right. But he has never been. Elvis is and has always been a pessimist. And politically he has always been foolish. So what?
At that time, Elvis talked about himself in public, he always said he would never experience his musical decline. No one would think he came with a plate that was just prepared to sell or that he came out with a stage show where he was no longer hungry, old and tired. Then he would make sure he died and referred to his old idol Gram Parson who died of an overdose before he he made a fool of himself.
These are natural disagreeable opinions for anyone who wants to be a cult figure. A James Dean in the creation maybe.
Conclusions are that maybe Elvis Costello begins to tell about himself again, then we may find out how he changed his success if he is a pig nowadays. Or, Elvis will never tell more about himself.
Is he like Dylan more open when he grows old or like Garbo as quiet? Or does he die like James Dean? Who knows? In the meantime, you can listen to his music. After all, that's his thing.
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