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He was once New Wave's angry young man, a rock-pop singer labeled a menace and a misfit. But the cynical, sardonic, aggressive Elvis Costello is mellowing these days. So much so that he's now appearing in a TV series, something that would have been unthinkable in his scornful early days.
Appropriately enough, his role is a bit bizarre — he has a running one-line gag throughout Channel Four's series Scully, starring Andrew Schofield and written by Boys from the Blackstuff's Alan Bleasdale — but he says acting made him feel like a star for the first time in his career.
"I was in the middle of an English tour at the time, so a car had to be on call to whisk me out of each town, back to the studio to film, then off to the next one-night stand. I'm not used to that sort of starlike existence – usually it’s a case of piling into the bus with the rest of the band and off up the motorway.’
Costello, a unique, bespectacled poet of pop, had actually come a long way from that image when we met. Now, he was enjoying some Hollywood star treatment while in Los Angeles for a one-night concert at the huge Universal Amphitheatre, on his way to an Australian tour. And he was well satisfied next day with reviews that said his performance may well turn out to be the highlight of the season.
In Scully, young Schofield spends most of his time daydreaming about being footballer Kenny Dalglish. Costello, himself the object of a few adolescent fantasies, remembers how he used to lose himself in reveries, imagining he was John Lennon, footballer Ian St John or any one of the legendary Liverpool team of the mid-sixties.
‘They were my heroes,’ he says, their names rolling off his tongue like a catechism. ‘Lawrence, Lawler, Burns, Milne, Yeats, Stephenson, Callaghan, Hunt, St John, Strong, Thompson. I was about 10. Completely obsessed with them till I was about 14, then music took over. I wasn’t the only one – there was the guy who named his daughter after the whole team. Even the trainers got in there.
‘But the one player I wanted to be was Roger Hunt, he played inside right. Maybe this is nostalgia colouring it, but played like the people in comics do. I think he only got booked once in his entire career. He was like one of those ruthlessly fair sports, a real sportsman. Roy of the Rovers come to life.
‘The team had a tremendous kind of spirit, an attitude of never giving up, total dedication and a wonderful standard of fitness. I never met them. All those years of going with me Dad, a scrupulously fair Liverpudlian. He took me to see both Everton and Liverpool and let me make up my own mind – and yet I never met any of them.
‘Then last year, a mate of mine got me tickets to see Liverpool play Spurs. After the game he said, “Right, we’re going in here for a drink,” and he pushed us into this room where people were standing around watching the results on television. Suddenly it dawned on me, it’s the players’ bar. There I am, standing there, 20 years old again, and as the team started coming in I had to leave. I just couldn’t face meeting them. I felt tongue-tied, a right idiot.
‘I have to shake myself sometimes when people go all peculiar when they are introduced to me. It’s only me. I can’t understand it when anyone gets tongue-tied around me, but there I was, totally incapable of saying anything.
‘I’ve never found that a problem in showbusiness. I’ve met people I’ve admired for years and it’s never bothered me, but I just couldn’t meet the lads. Kenny Dalglish was standing not five feet away from me, but I couldn’t say congratulations to him any more than I could fly around the room. It’s nice to know you still have people you can admire, even if you do feel a little bit foolish.’
One of the terrible tragedies of Costello’s life, he says, ‘is that I was a terrible footballer as a kid, dreadful. Nothing happened between my brain and my feet. My son Matthew, who’s 10, thinks I’m all right – I can still tackle him, just about. But wait till he gets taller than me, then he’ll flatten me.’
A softer and, as it turns out, much more lucrative daydream was to imagine himself as John Lennon. ‘If I’d been a girl, perhaps, I would have had a picture of Paul McCartney on my wall. But for me it was always John. I joined their fan club when I was 11, collected all the magazines, played along with them like thousands of kids. I was very taken with Georgie Fame later, too. I knew every note on one of his LPs.’
Costello, born Declan Patrick McManus in London, was brought up in a musical family. His father was a jazz musician with a penchant for colourful clothes – Declan used to be terrified that his father would meet him from school wearing one of his outrageous kaftans. His parents divorced when he was 10 and he and his mother moved to Liverpool at the height of Beatlemania.
‘I never felt embarrassed about being a Beatle fan, you know, the way you grow out of being a Bay City Rollers fan. The Beatles’ music changed and grew so much. Because of my father being in music, I listened to all sorts of records and developed a broad knowledge over the years. It wasn’t till my late teens that I really started having serious fantasies about being a singer. It was always football first.
‘Music was always around but it wasn’t as if I saw performing it as my destiny. I just felt I didn’t have the equipment for stardom. If I got carried away fantasising all I had to do was look in the mirror to be able to say, “you’re not going to be famous, pal.”’
He left school at 18 to start work as a computer programmer. By 19 he was married to his high-school sweetheart, Mary, and was the father of a son. He was already a prolific songwriter, churning out fascinating, sometimes simple, sometimes incomprehensible lyrics, grabbing the chance to appear in local clubs for a few pounds a night.
He looked more like Buddy Holly than Elvis (the name was his manager’s idea), still does. Costello came from his mother’s side of the family, and his uninhibited artistic streak from his father. His unorthodox approach to fame started in 1977 when he sang outside the London Hilton where a record convention was taking place. Not only was he arrested but he also won himself a record contract at the same time. He has been a controversial figure ever since, with an unforgivable outburst on singer Ray Charles and a tirade against American radio music (it’s not even music, it’s wallpaper) that had him eating his words and refusing to open his mouth to the press for years.
Now he’s a television star. He even wrote the theme tune for Scully, too. The rock-pop rebel, music’s Mr Bad Guy, is changing his image. He’ll want a door-to-door limousine service next.
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