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"What's my line? I'm happy cleaning windows / Well I'll take my time, I'll see you when my love grows / Baby don't let's lie, I'm a working man in my prime, cleaning windows"
Van Morrison, "Cleaning Windows"
"Strange chap. Or is he? No, actually."
B P Fallon, Sunday Tribune
This image may be yours but it's no longer his. In the summer of 1981, Elvis Costello And The Attractions came to Macroom to encounter a groundling horde of bottle and can throwers who, for some contrary reason, believed their immaturity was in tune with the spirit of the afternoon.
Next day, the Undertones were to cheekily deflate a similar barrage by treating it as a Bogside ticker-tape parade but Costello and Co. hadn't the advantage of a Derry education ducking petrol bombs and plastic bullets. Instead they met fire with fire, and faced the mob down, searing through a seething, threatening version of "Watch Your Step" and closing with a cover of Nick Lowe's "What's So Funny About Peace, Love And Understanding?" that breached the gap between the irony of the situation and the song's sentiments, a performance that mixed contempt, and fury, at the bottlers yet also spoke for the majority of the audience on their side. Those Attractions, that Costello would never bow the knee.
They didn't look back. Leaving a posse of photographers complaining in their wake, they sped to their hotel and were out of Macroom, Cork and possibly Ireland in five minutes. Decked out in Chandleresque fedoras and trench-coats, the international hitmen were impatiently leaving the scene of the crime.
Those scenes were typically abrupt Costello Mark 1. Even intimacy could regularly seem a matter of confrontation not content. But in the recent past, his Irish audiences have seen and heard a different man. Especially at his two Stadium concerts with T-Bone Burnett, aside from his more biting commentaries, there's also been much laughter and warmth, the sort of combination of audience affection and artistic control normally only experienced hereabouts at a Christy Moore concert.
I daresay his audience have been ahead of the hacks. As a flier for King Of America, he released a cover of the Animals' classic "Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and promptly walked into a sucker punch of n NME review from Danny Kelly that depicted him as an embittered, cornered alcoholic, the George Jones of "Primal Therapy", all washed up with a writing block.
Frankly the piece was hilarious to anyone who'd met him through the preceding year. Patently my experiences are incomplete but they're not denied by other informed parties. The well-nigh unanimous impression is of a man with all his marbles intact, currently highly invigorated by his relationship with Pogues' bassist Cait O'Riordan, and who's also been relishing new artistic opportunities steered his way by his new compadre, T-Bone Burnett, a born-again Christian, hardly given to consorting with reprobates or whisky-sodden failures.
But that review also unconsciously exposed some dodgy press preconceptions. In general terms, it's apparently acceptable for acts to connivingly share some coke with a journalist. In some other quarters, it's also apparently acceptable to write up some mainlining idiot who's ludicrously excusing his folly by espousing some spurious cause of romantic Faustian rebellion and bullshit. But to be sometimes legally merry in public is a no-no, even for writers who preach the need to dismantle the eighties star system.
So perhaps Paddies are naturally more tolerant about these matters but I can hardly see the fuss about one bespectacled songwriter deciding to drink after midnight. Also if someone's intentionally humanizing their image and becoming more approachable, they don't need such guff.
But then don't ask this man's opinion. Ask those to whom he affably talked and for whom he signed autographs when he turned up at the Pogues' McGonagles' concert, last year. I figure they'd say they met a man at one with himself.
This is no canonization project. There'll always be the cutting jabs in his conversation, always be a faint trace of bitters to sharpen his opinions but any more cruel genies are corked in the bottle. He seems to have become bored with being constantly viewed as the man with the x-ray eyes and insofar as I'll play amateur psychoanalyst, I suspect he's publically discarding any last streaks of puritanical superiority inherent in his earlier moralistic stances.
Of course, this could be your usual tosh for Elvis Costello sometimes delights in trapping unwary critics in his verbal games. He has a strong, evident desire to explain King Of America but when I wonder could the album's title be misassociated with his absurdist royal rigout on the sleeve, he'll reply "there's all these red herrings in there," a typical comment from a man probably capable of feeding you the line how "Suit Of Lights" was partially inspired by a Coward Brothers sighting — they were the relief band, actually — of Irish battery-operated showband prodigy Magic, in Louth's Blackrock Ballroom on St. Patrick's Day '75.
But I jest. His intentions are good and this time, he does not wish to be misunderstood. A February afternoon in the lobby of London's Kensington Hilton hotel and I keep spying these Jewish rabbis pacing around and wonder if they've been recruited by his manager, Jake Riviera.
But no Jewish rabbi would arrive with Cait who sports a tie with a tricolour insignia specially bought for her by Declan in Cleary's. Later heads will turn when she almost starts a public necking session with him and I see how idle tongues can make bad reputations. But she reclines quietly while her man does the business' intervening only once when he mounts a spirited defence of the Pogues. The mutual affection and reliance is obvious as the interview proceeds fuelled only by tea, coffee and perrier.
I have but one problem. Having heard King Of America only three times on imperfect headphones, I immediately recognize both its quality and shift of sound and vision but before interview time I haven't yet been able to properly focus on its lyrical details. We talk of many matters but don't deal fully with its wordpower. And yet, Declan and Cait, it really is all out in front of me.
King of America reflects a year of breaking routines. Elvis' two preceding albums Punch The Clock and Goodbye Cruel World were produced by Langer and Winstanley but Costello now thinks both were flawed by an overly-conscious attempt to compete in the pop market. Thus the reaction of King Of America.
'85 was also intended as his sabbatical year but this workaholic couldn't entirely quit the music business, producing the Pogues, overseeing Imp Records LPs by Agnes Bernelle and The Men They Couldn't Hang and recording a Coward Brothers single with T-Bone. Add in his Live Aid appearance and his solo tour of Australia and the months preceding the album's recording hardly seem like lotus-eating times.
In fact, for almost the past two years Elvis Costello seems to have been living on two tracks, threading out his pop phase and rediscovering the essence of the song, playing solo with and without Burnett. He half-seriously admits one reason for K.O.A's quality is that "it had eighteen months pre-production!" But that sounds too serious. There was a lot of fun."
Did you find it harder getting motivated than when you were starting?
No, no. I think I consciously took myself out of the routine of touring and recording in a cyclic way because I felt there was more wrong with the last album than any 1 had released. I could pick more holes in it. I don't suppose that's very nice for anyone who spent their money on it and who might conceivably like it, to hear me saying 'I think it's a lot of rubbish.'
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