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Elvin Costello's head is buried in a booklet. He's not being rude; he simply must check this out immediately. The booklet is about Elvis Costello.
"Extraordinary!" says the singer, oblivious to the reporter whose tape recorder is still running a few feet away. "How did they get all of this? They even have the medleys that I did. And look at this! How did they find out that I DJ'd in a club six months ago. They must follow me everywhere."
Elvis Costello looks up for a brief moment. "You know, they even called my dad once for some information. Can you believe it?" His head returns to the booklet, a skinny mimeographed sheet from Holland by a group of fans calling itself the Elvis Costello Information Service. He'd heard about them but had never seen one of their published reports before. "Would you like their address?" the interviewer asks.
"Absolutely! Oh, now look at this. They've got this wrong. I never played 'Ready Teddy' or 'Rip It Up' And I certainly never played 'Dance To The Music.' And not 'Imagine' either, although I think Steve might've played that. But how in the world do they know that we once recorded 'First I Look At The Purse?' This is too much."
Costello shaking his head, puts aside the fanzine's list of every song he's ever covered by another artist. He still can't believe that someone would take the time to document his every breath. But his promise to get in touch with the club and straighten things out proves at least one thing other than Costello's perplexity over the whole thing. It proves that Elvis Costello, who wouldn't talk to press for nearly five years, has come out of his shell. The new Elvis has something to say.
But is he really a new Elvis or has the man just outlived the myth that grew up around him? In many ways Elvis Costello is a changed man. But in other ways it is obvious that time has simply eroded some of the confusion and fury that made this bespectacled, rather soft-spoken, dedicated musician into the pigeon-toed "Angry Young Man of the New Wave" in the late '70s. The Costello one meets in 1983 is cordial and down-to-earth, hardly a threat in anyway. And one gets the impression that had things not ballooned the way they had over four years ago when he became one of the first successful new wave artists, Costello would've been just a regular nice guy then too.
So why dad this Costello avoid the press throughout the entire period that he was attracting the most attention? Simple. "When you're first starting out and you do interviews, you only end up talking about what you did when you were 12," says Costello in his diamond-shaped hotel suite overlooking New York's Central Park.
It's the morning after his New York concert date and the former Declan Patrick MacManus, hair still rumpled, blue horn-rims in place, and shirt buttoned to the neck, is sipping from a pot of Twinings tea. His room is littered with clothes, magazines and records (everything from 12" funk reonds to a Motown boxed set to new ones by Style Council and Aztec Camera, the latter who supported his tour). An Aretha tape plays on a portable stereo as the interviewer enters. There's an Elvis Costello tour booklet lying on the floor. The TV set, sound off, is tuned to a show about gorillas, later giving way to Sesame Street. But Costello is wide awake and lucid at this early hour, every bit as intelligent and well-spoken as his songs would lead one to believe he'd be.
"I have some things now that can bear explanation," be says. "1 guess I just have more to say than I did five years ago." Costello is acutely aware of his own history and everything that has surrounded his career. He knows about the myth that defined him to his fans during those silent years and he has an answer for it. And his answer is that it wag no big deal.
"The reason was very basic. People wanted to turn it into a myth, but all it was was that we didn't have anything to say. It got blown into this thing that I must be very aggressive. But we didn't have time far some of the niceties that some of the bigger record companies did. When we first started out at Stiff Records, it was all of us doing whatever had to be done, even taking the records and putting than into sleeves. We were very proud of what we were doing and we saw no reason that we should conform to some of the niceties that we regarded as bullshit, receptions and that kind of crap.
"I had a very disillusioned attitude towards the record companies, because they were so unimaginative. I disliked most of what was going on. It seemed convenient to them that they could just pigeonhole us as new wave and then they could just absorb it all up. So I was very wary of that as well. Perhaps that's why I'm still going and a lot of the bands that thought they were so outrageous are all split up and beck on the dole. You've got to have the sense to see them try to absorb you. The record business took a step backwards when '77 happened. Then they just absorbed it all and sucked people in. You have to be a bit cunning to sidestep them, or you become ridiculous."
Costello has sidestepped the rules at every turn. When be saw himself becoming, in his own words, a "parody" of himself, becoming a typical new wave act, be recorded Get Happy!, a tribute album to Stax-styled soul music. That was the beginning of Elvis Costello's liberation from his own myth. A couple years later came Almost Blue, an album of country standards. At that time he also appeared on a George Jones TY special and a Jones LP. That was followed by Imperial Bedroom, including lushly arranged ballads, completely ignoring the big beat that brought him recognition in the first place. It was a gamble perhaps. but one which paid off; the album was Costello's most critically lauded, proving to any doubters that he is a master musician who refused to lock himself into any trends or expectations. (He's even taped a spot on a TV special dueting with Tony Bennett!) But by that point, Costello had learned enough about the workings of the biz to be able to shoo away the eulogizers; he wasn't buying any new images to replace the old,
"Imperial Bedroom made people give me a whole new set of labels," he flatly states. "The new George Gershwin and all that kind of stuff. I found it ridiculous. It's very flattering, but if you took it seriously you'd be a fool. There are a lot worse things 1 could have been called though, like the new Loverboy."
Costello knew when he recorded Imperial Bedroom that he would alienate some of his rock audience and wipe out, perhaps permanently, the image that had followed him since he emerged with his first album, My Aim Is True, in 1977. That's what he wanted to. "That record (Bedroom) was consciously made in willful disregard of the mainstream. It proved that you have to be in an already commanding commercial position to do something as different as that, and not be overlooked by
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