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Throughout a 25-year career which has encompassed breathtaking highs and jarring lows, Elvis Costello has prided himself on being a world-class irritant. But as middle age approaches the bespectacled punk survivor appears to have lost the galvanising anger that once made him the official pin-up of highbrow critics and pop intellectuals alike.
Costello has been relatively quiet in recent years, suffering label problems, hosting festivals and crafting mellow collaborations. And yet reports claim that the late Nineties saw him embark on a prolific period of songwriting, the result of which will soon be heard on an imminent new solo album, When I Was Cruel. He is also about to set out on a mini-tour of Britain this week with Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle and Nanci Griffith to raise awareness for anti-landmine charities.
The sarcasm that had characterised Costello's acerbic songs seemed to subside with the Thatcher era, leaving behind a versatile elder statesman with an apparently boundless reverence for rock tradition and a restless ear for unlikely collaborators. In 1999, a musical cameo in the second Austin Powers film and a cover of the sugary Charles Aznavour standard "She" for the Notting Hill soundtrack seemed to confirm this former angry young man's final descent into complacent middle age.
But Costello has no time for those who yearn for his old rebelliousness: "It would be completely contrived to attempt to go back and would be insulting the audience," he said recently. "I'm more interested in the reaction of those who've followed me through thick and thin, especially since I started to experiment more with the ways of recording music and the kind of ensembles that might accompany my vocals. I've had all these adventures and not all of them have been destined for the top of the charts, but I knew that."
Costello always seemed a little older and wiser than his punk peers, with Americanised vowels and literate lyrics drawn from the protest-singer tradition of songwriters such as Neil Young and Bob Dylan. He added soul, reggae and country textures to three-chord rock while seething with sexual frustration and political polemic. Crucially, he also wrote some of the best pop singles of the era, including "Watching the Detectives" and "Oliver's Army."
But the sudden fame that came with his 1977 debut album My Aim Is True turned Costello, by his own admission, into an "arsehole." A stormy affair with the rock 'n' roll consort Bebe Buell helped to unravel his first marriage. Then came a notorious 1979 punch-up with Stephen Stills and Bonnie Bramlett in an Ohio hotel after Costello, who was a vocal supporter of Rock Against Racism at the time, referred to Ray Charles as a "blind, ignorant nigger." "I said that more for effect," Costello, explained in 1983. "When you're confronted by a 35-year-old hippie asking you what the difference is between punk and new wave you tend to say things like that. I was just trying to irritate, you know?"
The Eighties marked a cooling of the honeymoon ardour between Elvis, his fans and critics. After hitting a high point with the magnificent Imperial Bedroom in 1982, he seemed to lose momentum. Marriage to Cait O'Riordan of the Pogues and a scene-stealing solo slot at Live Aid in 1985 marked the end of his angry and prolific first chapter. Entering his thirties, he grew a beard, moved to Ireland and briefly reverted to his birth name.
Since then his output has been marked by cussedness and ambition. Furthermore, as last year's magnificent collaboration, For The Stars, with the mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter proved, Costello is clearly not a spent creative force.
With a 25-year back catalogue to explore, Costello's latest shows could be triumphant or terrible. This rock 'n' roll veteran has certainly proved himself capable of both. But, just like Dylan or Young, he has earned the right to experiment and improvise and, of course, to irritate.
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