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It's been a rough old week for Elvis Costello. Last weekend he was right up there in the play lists with his "Red Shoes" single – a tentative third-time-lucky – a cosey Top 20 cloister for the album and even the national press getting hot-to-trot with the Costello form for 1977.
The Daily Express's showbusiness correspondent, a fellow with the unlikely name of Garth Pierce, did an interview with E.C. for a full page "this-is-my tip-to-click" item dated for last Thursday as did an influential scribe from the Daily Mail, again for last week.
And what happens? Some other geezer sharing Costello's maiden name sloughs off the mortal coil and all the "tastemakers" consider it irreverent to even make mention of this young-blood's very existence.
Result: the man who would be king's career is in a right two-and-eight for the whole week of August 13-20. A grevious impasse after such a mecurial lift-off...
El's already had his share of controversy, y'know. Yessir, even the National Front have apparently been trying to dog his tracks ever since the release of the first-ever Costello vinyl artifact "Less Than Zero" (Stiff 45) which bears a heavy anti-N.F. bias, the song itself being a tacitly fanciful depiction of the landed gentry's fave black sheep boy of the Isherwood era, Oswald Mosley.
"Calling Mr. Oswald with the swastika tatoo"... croons our El before pointing out in a ream of impressive if often fairly obtuse couplets, the innate British hypocrisy afoot on the double-moral-standard twists that forbid your favourite new wave band, say, from polluting the main media outlets while some gnarled pathetic self-confessed anti-Semite like the senile Mosley can blithely saunter into the BBC studios and run off at the mouth for 45 rivetting minutes over his sordid reminiscences.
The marchings, the beatings, the black shirts, the foul sub-Nietzchen rhetoric — the Nation "tut-tutted" at the time, hut now it's OK 'cos the old fool's past it and virtually everything in this scum-pit that is England gets a benevolent white-washed canonization as time goes by.
Just a few obligatory barbed questions behind and ol' Mose can bleat on about his mistakes, his regrets, his thoughts on the current state of unrest, and everything remains hunky-dory.
It's OK with everyone except for one Mr. Costello, computer operator of Whitton near Twickenham, married with one child, whose brain somehow has been left unaffected by TV-land brain-cell bleach-out, who is offended by having this slimey old fascist drooling away in his living room and who, instead of penning a barbed missive to his local MP, sets down and writes a classic work of sly simmering anger.
"Let's talk about the future now we've put the past away".
We're in a pub just round the corner from Island Records' St Peters Square building, Elvis and me, talking about the subject matter of "Less Than Zero" when Jake Riviera suddenly pipes up with the information that all the Yanks who've heard it think it's about Lee Harvey Oswald.
"Yeah right," Costello's terse gruff voice breaks in.
"In fact (he's quite animated now) just for the States, I'm going to write a song about ... a guy, yeah, this guy's watching the box when he suddenly sees his girlfriend right behind Lee Harvey Oswald just at the moment when Jack Ruby shoots him. And the screen ... the shot freezes, y'know..."
He sits back with a self-satisfied smirk, savouring this perverse little morsel while Jake, whose job it is partly to deal with all the little weirdnesses spurting from the Costello "cerebus" gives his protege a part-"pained", part-"aw come on", and part ... well, impressed squint.
Costello is temporarily fulfilled though. He looks pleased with himself, pleased enough that maybe, just maybe he'll go ahead and conceive just that plot-line for a song tonight when he gets back to Whitton.
After all, his song-vignettes — a lot of them anyway — are pretty damn weird — starting from simple everyday occurences the composer finds himself observing on the tube, or maybe on his way down to the off-licence, and then blossoming into raging chunks of perfectly matched melody and savage eloquence.
Like even I'm in an Elvis Costello song. El reckons he saw me one night on a tube bound for Osterley and.... "you were obviously pretty 'out of it' 'cos you didn't even notice all the other people in the compartment staring at you. I was just amazed that one person could draw that much reaction from others. After I saw you there, I came up with 'Waiting For The World to End.' You're the guy in the opening verse."
I touch my forelock at the imparting of this factoid. After all, being in a Costello song is a deal more prestigious than being a name in this little black book he carries around, and which possibly might soon be making quite a name for itself.
Elvis's black book? Oh, it's just full of these names of folk who have crossed our El, who have hindered the unravelling of his true destiny these past years. Maybe they were responsible for not signing him to their label (prior to the Stiff inking this is) or maybe they referred to him as another Van Morrison sound-alike just like all those other squat, nervy types with short hair and glasses with whom such parallels appear obligatory in today's music press.
Whatever the cause, they're all marked men, cows before the slaughter, names and livelihoods about to come under the thunder of Costello.
Elvis is very into revenge, see. "The only two things that matter to me, the only motivation points for me writing all these songs," opines Costello with a perverse leer, "are revenge and guilt. Those are the only emotions I know about, that I know I can feel. Love? I dunno what it means, really, and it doesn't exist in my songs.
"Like" — he's into this discourse now — "when I played earlier in front of all those reps or whatever they're called — all those guys working for Island — did you hear me introducing Lipservice'?
" 'This song is called 'Lipservice' and that's all you're gonna get from me'. That was straight from the heart, that, 'cos last year I actually went to Island with my demo tape and none of them wanted to know. Back then they wouldn't give me the time of day. But now..."
Now, Elvis is gloating because suddenly he's one of the new breed golden boys, already a name to be bandied about, with two excellent singles under his belt and a much-raved-over album finally in the shops after a couple of months of collecting dust in the warehouse while Stiff and Island re-jigged terms of distribution.
And of course, all the pop pen-pushers are latching on fast, getting nosey about the past and generally pushing for an intimate gander at the man behind the horn-rims and insect ungainliness.
Results thus far have been pretty uneventful, however, what with the press boys generally getting scattergunned by Elvis' tight-lipped "Fuck-you" fiestiness and backing off under the deluge to pen pieces loaded with said-one-dimensional verbal acidity.
This policy in fact seems lately to have reached such tight lipped proportions that when Costello was finally awarded the prestigious cover-space of two rival music rags during the same week, the one which purported to carry an actual interview caught Costello at his moodiest, refusing to give any details about his life whatsoever, coming on rude and terse to the point where the piece itself insight-wise was little more than a bad joke.
My single encounter with Costello, however, was a good deal more revelatory, basically because we both ended up drunk and talked for some four hours. Still he refused to discuss his past musical endeavours in any detail and it was only afterwards, by chance, that I learnt about his former identity as one D.P. Costello, lead singer of a bluegrass group called Flip City whose collective high-point was the totally unexciting fact of them having a residency as house support-band at the Marquee maybe two years back.
" 'Course nobody wanted to know back then. None of yer Chas de
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