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Elvis Costello bursts into the Park Avenue hotel suite mumbling "Hello," looking back over his shoulder to make sure his wife Cait O'Riordan is still following him. Her face hidden by a mass of dark hair, she looks only at him. He peers over the rim of this year's glasses and, taking laughably large, flat-footed steps, approaches, hand extended. "Careful," he says. "I might give you a shock."
Born August 25, 1955, the son of a jazz trumpeter, Declan Patrick MacManus grew up in working-class Liverpool, where he read the music weeklies because he couldn't afford to go to shows. In 1977, a 22-year-old malcontent with a wife, a kid, and an album's worth of songs recorded on sick days away from his computer job, he went to London and played in the street outside a CBS Records convention, hoping to get signed to a major label.
He released My Aim Is True, checkerboard cover framing a hostile geek calling himself Elvis Costello (he got the name late one night, drunk off his head in a pub, from manager lake Riviera) and spitting things like, "Why do you have to say that there's always someone who can do it better than I can." The stage was set; the script boiled with dissatisfaction, sexual insecurity, political atrocity, the rage of a passionate boy in complacent company; and the actor was well-suited.
There's a table in the corner of the hotel suite with coffee and Perrier water on it. Elvis and Cait are fooling around, whispering to each other; she pours some Perrier water on him and giggles while he says, "Oh, that's a very rock 'n' roll thing to do." They moon about like they've got a secret. Elvis takes his coffee black and sits down on the end of the sofa. Cait, in an over-sized black sweater covering her four-month stomach, curls up at the other end, sniggering through the pages of a paperback novel, never saying a word.
He glances over at Cait from time to time — a silver chain on his left wrist reads, "Dec Ama Cait." When he leans forward, the cuff of his shirt pinches the flesh on his forearm and his thighs strain the inner seams of his tailored black trousers. "Do you know flowers are not the colors they are?" he asks. "Do you know this? Scientists have worked out the spectrum that insects and birds see and obviously we know the one that we see and they're completely different. And like daisies are not yellow and white, they're really purple and orange."
In the 12 years between My Aim Is True and the new Spike, Costello has been separated, reconciled and divorced; has abused drugs, philandered and quite recently remarried, this time to former Pogue Cait O'Riordan. He's been covered by Linda Ronstadt, Roy Orbison, George Jones and Johnny Cash, insulted Ray Charles, put out eleven albums, turned 33, and recorded under so many names that 1987's Out of Our Idiot, a compilation of b-sides and alternative versions, was credited to "various artists." The various artists — the Impostor, the Emotional Toothpaste, Elvis Costello, the Coward Brothers (with T-Bone Burnett), Napoleon Dynamite — were all Declan MacManus holding the world at arm's length.
"You can change your name but you can't change your face," he wrote in a song lyric, then in 1986 decided to legally change his name back to Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus. The "Aloysius" was his reward for enduring the life of Elvis Costello. Now he's the Beloved Entertainer, playing with society's sick fascination with the private lives of its stars.
Are there mornings when you wake up as Elvis Costello and mornings when you wake up as Declan MacManus?
No, I never think about those things.
Never?
Except when people ask me questions about it. People try to psychoanalyze why I've used different names at different times. It's just a device. I think sometimes people whose job it is to write about music ponder too much for their own sanity on the meanings of things and transfer their own neuroses about those sort of things onto people who do things for much more basic motives.
I wasn't questioning your motivation, it's just that you've been at it for so long. the line between the real and the public might have blurred.
If an actor kind of won't drop his role they think he's crazy. Nobody thinks anything of seeing an actor one day playing an old man and the next day playing a hoodlum.
What if he plays the same role over and over again?
I think with a singer it's so common to get one idea and make a whole career out of that. If you don't do that then you're a weirdo. You do what I do, which is just follow your feelings and use different characters from time to time to present something appropriate to the song, like I separated the song "Pills and Soap" from the rest of my material by [recording it under the name] the Impostor, which I thought was funny. I didn't want that to be me, even though it was me. It was very basic theater, just like an actor. And then suddenly it's gotta have some dark psychological meaning.
Nobody used to do that. [raising his voice] Nobody ever questioned — nobody ever said about Louis Armstrong, "Oh, there he is, old Satchmo, what does that mean? Maybe he's got a skin like leather." People had that image of him. But nobody ever separated it. It, it, it wasn't relevant, he was just a trumpet player, he was just a brilliant trumpet player. This all came out of that 1969 era when everything turned into damn art. Before that it was just music. Nobody ever said, "Duke Ellington, who the fuck does he think he is, calling himself Duke?" Now, people think, "Oh, Prince, that means he's a control freak."
But that's his name.
But that's much less interesting than listening to one of his records. Isn't it? I think so.
But, but...
I don't want to read a book about Prince. I want to listen to one of his records. I want to listen to Duke Ellington, I don't want to analyze him. The only point to all of this is just to tell people where to go and get it, it's like a signpost, the rest of it's just nonsense. I really do believe that. I can't agree with it. It's just wacky.
On Spike you worked with a lot of people: Paul McCartney, Chrissie Hynde, Alien Toussaint. Has anyone ever turned you down on a project?
No. I haven't ever really called up people out of the blue. There's nearly always some contact. The people I was most nervous about approaching for this record were Derek Bell, the harp player from the Chieftains, 'cause I didn't know him and neither did anybody else. And Roger McGuinn [of the Byrds], who wasn't originally scheduled to be on the record, but we met him while we were recording — and T-Bone [Burnett, one of Costello's producers] had met him on Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour in the 70s. I've worked with all the other people before in one way or another.
Do you find it ultimately confining or inspiring to work with other people?
Other people as opposed to just myself?
Yes.
It's quite different. I love going in the studio and putting together rough versions. I don't make home demos very often. I usually get my ideas pretty clear and if I do any demos at all I go into a proper recording studio and start making a little record of it. I like to be able to use several instruments, and I never use a drum machine. So what you end up with is a completely chaotic version of a song, because nothing's in time. And I love these little demos, I've even put a few of them out — the ones that hold together enough. I love doing them 'cause I discover what I want to hear in the song. You experiment by getting in the music, and it's like being a child with a mudbath.
You use several of Tom Waits's musicians. Would you like to work with Waits?
I think it would be quite difficult to accommodate the two people. I really, really love his music but I can't really imagine how it would happen.
He's in a class of one. He creates a kind of crazy house with these funny little angles inside it, with the different players doing these things and the characters can't walk in a straight line anymore. They have to walk crooked around this stuff. It's like a little room and it encourages you into it, and then it's like a Venus flytrap — it all closes in around you. If you don't want to go in that room then there's no way you're gonna enter.
It sounds like a nice idea, working with him, yet that's a bit like making up your favorite football team. Some people might even think that's what I was doing with this record — to get these ideal people — but I honestly stand by all of the choices.
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