New Musical Express, February 22, 1986: Difference between revisions
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"Yeah, but I do go up and down. Alcohol is a debilitating pastime. It's like if someone takes a picture of you after your three week annual holiday binge, you're not going to look your best. | "Yeah, but I do go up and down. Alcohol is a debilitating pastime. It's like if someone takes a picture of you after your three week annual holiday binge, you're not going to look your best. | ||
"I never actually said I was in the competition to be a pin-up. I 'm a celebrity of sorts whether I like it or not, so my appearance is important... So if I get fucked up by being on a spree a couple of weeks … | "I never actually said I was in the competition to be a pin-up. I 'm a celebrity of sorts whether I like it or not, so my appearance is important... So if I get fucked up by being on a spree a couple of weeks … | ||
“But in my line of work, if you drank all the drinks, and took all the drugs you were offered, you would ''die''. Simple as that. | |||
“Look, in eight years, I had three weeks holiday. So now I have six months without the physical rigours of the road, and I don’t look my best. I don’t think it’s anyone’s fucking business if I look like shit. ''I'' have to face myself in the morning, not them! Then you think, Fuck it, I’d better get back into shape. Also, you just get fed up of the headaches.” | |||
He’s high on self-defence now, so with Cait still on the loafers rail, I’ll push on. The advent of the prettiest (no prizes) Pogue in Costello’s affection zone, and the trauma generally associated with such arrivals, is another commonly proffered reason for both Costello’s lengthy absence, and his poor shape. | |||
“When I’m not working,” he frowns, “people should keep their fucking noses out of my life, y’know.” | |||
That’s indisputably true. But I still want to know. | |||
He leans back, staring at the ceiling with an expression he’s borrowed from Job. “Just let me say this to dispel the rumours. My Life Is Great, Official! I don’t want to get into a confessional interview, y’know, like Andy Summers’ ‘Sex Keeps Me Fit At Forty’ type bullshit, but at the same time I can’t pretend that certain things aren’t going on. So, as I say, life is great. | |||
In fact, any bad shape I might have appeared to have been in was as likely to have been the result of having to much of a ''good'' time.” | |||
AH YES, mention of people having too much of a good time brings us, with a neatness not normally associated with them, to The Pogues. Costello’s relationship with those rum sodomists – his role as producer complicated by his dalliance with Cait – is yet another gushing geyser of gleeful gossip. The sessions that spawned ‘''Rum, Sodomy And The Lash''’ were characterised, the stories insist, by vitriolic animosity between band and knob-twiddler. | |||
“Groups like The Pogues, groups that are in a class of their own – like the Pistols, from what we hear – can be very cruel, and The Pogues are ''terribly'' cruel to one another. When I’m about, the cruelty just transfers to me.” | |||
It’s an answer typical of ''this'' Elvis Costello. Neat, tidy, squeaky clean behind its ears. But its ‘no problem’ nonchalance doesn’t quite fit the facts. When, soon after the launch of ‘Rum’, I questioned Shane and Spider Pogue about their producer, the silence was thick as Guinness and accompanied by much staring at feet. Either something was being shiftily avoided or Costello’s a thief with a fetish for shoelaces! | |||
And the tales of bad blood and personal abuse of EC – real nasty stuff – continue to simmer away merrily, maliciously. | |||
The explanation, part two: “There’s a kind of deprecatory humour between us. They say irreverent things about me which other people find shocking, thinking they should be more respectful. But why the fuck should they? | |||
“If Shane takes the piss out of me for being an old fart or whatever, I ask him how many references to death, rain and canals does his next song have? That’s the way Nick Lowe used to deal with us. The studio process is very boring, and that kind of humour helps people to not take it all so fucking seriously.” | |||
There he goes again, see, a ready rationalisation always effortlessly to hand. A place for everything and… | |||
The answers come easily, almost too easily. It’s a bit like talking to one of those manically moronic ''Blue Peter'' presenters who, just at the alchemic moment when two egg boxers and a coathanger are to become a fully functioning pocket computer, reach down with practised card-sharp dexterity, and produce the magically finished item. I have one here that I prepared a little earlier. | |||
Quite. | |||
Yes, Elvis, actually there is one more thing before we get ‘round to the record, one more thing that demands clarification. | |||
Open a copy of ''Nutty Boys; The Rock Hack’s Guide to DIY Psychology'' and there it is, Chapter Five: Identity Crises. | |||
Get this; the words ‘Elvis Costello’ appear ''nowhere'' on ‘''King Of America''’. The spine – the sleeve itself maintaining a deathly hush – credits the record to something called The Costello Show. The songs are written, seemingly, by the firm of Declan, Patrick, Aloysius, and Macmanus (Costello was christened Declan Patrick Macmanus, the Aloysius is a more recent addition). And the inner bag throughout tags the vocalist/guitarist as LHC, The Little Hands Of Concrete. | |||
Add to this his other lives as The Imposter and as a Coward Brother, and the notion – in that much abused dissection of ‘Misunderstood’ – of a frantic, perhaps irreversible, hacking away of the Costello past, doesn’t see, quite so hysterical. | |||
“There’s nothing suspicious there either,” begins the man in the clerics robes, wet-blanketing madly, “no drama. The losing of my name is just a little device to remind people that there was always a human being behind the funny glasses. For the first few records it was such an effective guise, a smokescreen for insecurities and a cover for the public learning process that was forced on me. But then I found that people couldn’t rid themselves of their preconceptions and kept looking for things on the later records that just weren’t there. | |||
“Elvis Costello became more and more a character that I ''played'' because people wouldn’t let him grow up. And so…” | |||
A silence ''charged'' with possibility hangs in the space left by the fading away of that last sentence. And so… what? The grinning figure opposite is enjoying his drum-roll dramatic climax, watching me squirm to the unavoidable, hold-the-front-page conclusion. Declan Patrick Aloysius Macmanus has, face it, ''killed'' Elvis Costello. | |||
Like all those unhinged, disbelieving souls outside Gracelands nine years ago, I brace myself and mumble the unthinkable. Is Elvis … really … ''dead''? | |||
“In some senses … YES.” | |||
In some senses? What does ''that'' mean? It is a death certificate or a stay of execution, suspended animation or premature burial. We have no way of knowing, no power to intervene; all that’s up to … what the hell do I call him now? Declan? | |||
“Call me what you like.” | |||
Right then, Dec it is, like the bloke from The Bachelors who doesn’t pay his TV licence fee. But Dec, you know where all this is leading, you know that this mid –career identity-hopping can be taken as a sign of instability – derangement even – in musicians. | |||
Sure, cute and clever David Robert Jones of Brixton, London, always knew exactly where the fantasy/reality lines were drawn between himself and Ziggy Stardust, but that coin has another darker side too. Think of Sly Stone maybe (like the dearly departed Costello, a compositional giant), distracted and eventually destroyed by the war between his Sly/Sylvester Stewart alter egos. | |||
I’m winding him up, and for the first time this Valentine’s afternoon, Declan Macmanus ''sneers''. It is a sneer unshakably convinced of its own sanity. | |||
“That’s over-reading things and taking them too seriously again. In many cases, people’s psychoses are not an accident but induced by drugs. Sly Stone brought all that shit on himself. | |||
“David Crosby too. Even his best friends admit he’s a hopeless case. Some people are like that, they will ''kill'' themselves. Plenty of foolish people do it every day, and lots of people get seriously upset about them, when there’s much more deserving people dying | |||
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Revision as of 23:44, 9 February 2017
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