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Elvis Costello has two great obsessions - music and football. The music comes as no surprise, but the football? He has supported Liverpool - birthplace of his parents - since childhood, and has shown a similar devotion to the Republic of Ireland football team, because of his Irish roots.
"Paul McGrath is the one I love," he says, "McGrath and Aldo (John Aldridge) I loved that Ireland team, I loved the 1990 team, Ronnie Whelan too. The Jack (Charlton) years were great. And how is it that Robbie Fowler or Steven Gerrard didn't play for Ireland?" he says, referring to the two Liverpool legends. "If Jack Charlton was around now, he would have found the documents that would have said Ireland could have had them."
What does he think of Roy Keane?
"He's whats-his-name, isn't he? He's Roy Kent from Ted Lasso."
He adds that his twin sons Dexter and Frank - with his wife, musician Diana Krall - are not interested in football but love the Emmy award-winning comedy about an American college football coach of that name hired to manage an English Premier League soccer team in London.
"The hard-man character in it is a pro in the last days of his career and he is totally modelled on Roy Keane, in that he constantly looks at people like he's going to kill them. He's not Irish, but in every other respect he is modelled on Roy, obviously.
"You're asking me what I think of a player who played in the other kind of red"
- that of Manchester United rather than the red of his beloved Liverpool - "and you are never going to get an answer out of me, but he did play in green. I loved hi when he played in green."
As for his own football prowess, he played in goal for his school. "I knew I would never go anywhere with it."
Elvis's youth is touched on in The Boy Named If (And Other Children's Tales) his new album with his band The Imposters. It is a collection of complex beautiful songs that "take us from the last days of a bewildered boyhood to that mortifying moment when you are told to stop acting like a child".
"Penelope Halfpenny" is loosely based on a teacher he had in primary school. "She was somebody whom I'm not sure really wanted to be a teacher and when you're that age you notice if a teacher is not committed, and she would talk about other things in her own life. It was like glimpsing a grown-up world that we would one day enter."
In the illustrated booklet that comes with the album, a vignette accompanies every song. On "Farewell, OK", the crack of spectacles on a nose is muffled by the sound of the band breaking into their set in a dancehall. Is that his famous spectacles being broken?
"It isn't an actual experience, no. Though being cross-eyed in a dancehall is something I've experienced on a few occasions.
His father Ross MacManus was a jazz trumpeter and a vocalist in the Joe Loss Orchestra. Not long returned from his National Service with the RAF in Egypt, he met Lillian Alda Ablett in the late 1940s at the counter of Bennett's record shop where she worked in Liverpool. They moved to London where they married in 1952. Two years later Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus was born on August 25, 1954, at St. Mary's Hospital in Paddington. His parents took him north to Birkenhead, where he was baptised in Holy Cross church.
In London, the MacManus family lived a humble life, but one in which music was key. His mother worked in a record shop on Oxford Street, while Ross was out every night with Joe Loss.
"My first memories are of the basement flat that we lived in Evermore Road in Olympia," he says, "it was a boarding house. The Welsh landlady lived above us. She rented out her entire house. My mam had had to give up her job when I was born. My dad wasn't on very much money. We didn't get a TV until about 1958. There weren't a lot of records, but the ones that we had got played a lot. So, they became very familiar to me."
He recalls his mother telling him his favourite album, before he could speak, was Sinatra's "Songs for Swingin' Lovers".
"I don't really remember rock'n'roll in our house." he says, meaning that his father and mother's record collection was a treasure trove of jazz and swing records.
"Recently, I was at my mother's old apartment on the Wirral - because she passed in January of last year. She had a very severe stroke in 2018, and much to everyone's astonishment, regained her words and her strength, it was a struggle over the last couple of years, that's for sure. She was 93."
Remaining text and scanner-error corrections to come...
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