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Earlier this month came the moment when the two musical worlds of Elvis Costello collided. A cry from the audience at His Majesty's Theatre in Aberdeen was aimed squarely at the bespectacled figure widely seen as the most original singer-songwriter of his generation.
"Psycho!" bellowed someone with a Caledonian accent. Heads turned and voices whispered anxiously in the darkness.
This was no sweaty rock 'n' roll gig. On stage were an assembly of smartly-dressed musicians, including jazz saxophonist Andy Sheppard and soprano Sarah Leonard. And Costello had just finished vocals on the last of three Shakespearian sonnets.
The EC aficionado was calling for one of his favourites, a dark country and western ditty. "It was done with a sense of humour," says Costello, 41.
"The people in the audience who know me were amused, but I'm sure the people who don't were completely bewildered. They probably thought it was a comment on my performance," he quips.
His north west fans have a chance to comment themselves on his latest expedition into music's wilder shores at Manchester's new Bridgewater Hall next Monday.
Music normally comes in boxes with clearly marked labels. Yet the Aberdeen incident reveals the size of the musical divide he bestrides, a music colossus among the pygmies of pop.
The London-born son of a showband singer started out as folk artist Declan MacManus (his real name) before My Aim Is True, his 1977 debut album as punky four-eyes Elvis Costello, was a worldwide smash.
He became a massive star in the US, then totally against type recorded country music album Almost Blue in 1981 in Nashville.
Versatile is hardly the word to describe his crowded musical career, which has produced 19 albums in 20 years. He has performed with bands from the Count Basie Orchestra to Van Morrison and the Chieftains, written songs for Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison, and co-written an album with Paul McCartney.
For one country-influenced album, he assembled Elvis Presley's original band, and when failed rock star Wendy James wrote to him in despair, he dashed off an album's worth of songs for her... in a weekend.
He tells me he has just come back from New York completing a song with Mr Melody himself, Burt Bacharach.
And now the Bard. Given his dazzling lyrical wordplay (Costello is known for his puns, something Old Bill was also partial to), he seems the nearest thing to a poet in the often moronic melée of pop.
Monday evening will see a category-busting show. Costello will breathe new life into the three songs from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, sing on a new arrangement of "Shipbuilding" (his poignant hit about the Falklands War), and on a new treatment of "Flow My Tears," the song by Elizabethan composer John Dowland. But as he points out, the evening is really about John Harle, the frighteningly talented saxophonist and composer. He is the driving force behind the record and show, both titled Terror And Magnificence, in which his aim is to explore the medieval world using modern and age-old music.
It's Harle's link up with Costello which has provoked much interest in the worlds of classical and early music and modern jazz, styles the unlikely bedfellows mix together. The record reveals Costello s gruff soulfulness as a perfect foil for the aural textures conjured up by Harle. And with names like Sarah Leonard and Andy Sheppard on the bill, it's plain that this is an esoteric night, one for concentration, not for rocking out.
But how plain is it? The huge billboards of Costello in Manchester city centre, with his picture and the legend "This Year's Model" — with his collaborators' names in tiny letters — leaves the man himself unimpressed.
"I'm a little worried if people see that and think that it's a conventional performance. To be perfectly honest, they (the Bridgewater Hall) are doing that at their peril. I don't want people coming and getting annoyed because they've been led to believe it's all me."
How comfortable does he feel approaching the more formal world of, for want of a better term, classical music?
"When you think of the world of rock 'n' roll, you think of floosies and Jacuzzis, but it really isn't like that.
"There's showbusiness and there's music. I know how showbusiness works but it doesn't interest me that much. I've had big success but managed to escape the security of playing the same 12 songs from your album for a couple of years. It's limiting."
And he reminds me: "Some of these Elizabethan songs are very, very emotional. Classical singers can sing the words very technically, but they are dark songs — real rip-your-heart-out stuff, and I like dark, emotional songs."
Those who recall his 1977 ballad "Alison," about a spurned lover's bitter vengeance, may nod assent to that one.
Politics provides another wellspring of raw emotion. His 1989 song, "Tramp The Dirt Down," was a spite-filled rant against Margaret Thatcher.
Costello's home since 1991 has been the farmhouse outside Dublin he shares with former Pogues singer Cait O'Riordan, but he bristles at the implication that he fled Britain.
"I didn't run away. My company is based in Britain and I still pay taxes there.
"If you live on the edge of London, you're in Weybridge, full of company directors and gangsters. Here it's a regular neighbourhood, a bit more rural. Adam Clayton of U2 lives on the other side of the hill, but it's not Beverly Hills."
Ireland suits him better as a songwriting environment, and it no doubt gives him a vantage point to view where his homeland is going.
"If people hadn't been so gullible to vote for the tax bribes, we would have a very different society from now," he says, referring to Conservative victories.
As for the likely prospect of a New Labour victory under Tony Blair, Mr Costello is hardly jumping for joy.
"I'm not sure this guy and his cronies are the right people. I'm deeply suspicious of them.
"I would still vote Labour if only to get this lot out, but the things Labour say and do show you they are so bloody similar to the Tories. I want them to be different."
About next Monday's Manchester concert, he confesses: "I'm a little nervous. But that's a good thing."
Angry, adventurous, intense, honest, hard-working. You can apply the same adjectives to Elvis Costello as when he started out 20 years ago.
As the man said, there's showbusiness — and then there's music.
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