British GQ, April 1994

Bibliography   72 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 UK & Ireland weeklies UK & Ireland magazines UK & Ireland newspapers US newspapers US rock magazines US music magazines US magazines US alternative weeklies European magazines European newspapers Canada  •  Mexico  •  Asia Australia  •  New Zealand South America  •  Africa Blogs  •  Fanzines  •  Books Online publications GQ   1993 November 1998 November 1999 December 2015 October 2018 September GQ UK 2002 April GQ Germany 2002 June GQ Italy 2013 September GQ Japan 1998 October GQ Mexico 2014 April — Elvis Lives In 1977, Elvis Costello was an angry nerd who sang about his disgust with war, work, women and the world. Seventeen years on, he’s made music in every style from country to classical. But, as Dave Hill discovers, he’s still the main attraction Dave Hill There are certain things that Elvis Costello cannot do: he cannot cross the Thames via the Hungerford footbridge on his own, because heights put his equilibrium to flight; he cannot gratify himself with the knowledge that his face fuels the fantasies of a million teenage girls, because he doesn’t have those kinds of looks; he cannot reflect that seventeen years in show business have made him the object of universal love, because he has an outsider’s talent for pissing insiders off he cannot cut a dash in the slick suit of celebrity because he only ever lifts it from his wardrobe in order to tear a strip off it; and he cannot quite reconcile his image of himself with the tailored pages of GQ. “How the fuck I get to be in it, I don’t know.” He makes the observation in passing, not with malice or false modesty. but with an insistent self-effacement that contrasts strongly with the definition, edge and ardour that characterise his many, varied and often brilliant songs. And making songs is something Elvis Costello can do, He has been doing ii — writing, playing and singing them — in rest less abundance since he debuted in earnest with My Aim Is True in 1977, an album which from artwork to attitude, chimed with the tone of its time as resonantly as any of the raging punk rockers whose slipstream Costello moved in. The record presented the romantic heroism of the conventional rock scar turned inside out: for the sleeve he posed as a cartoon nerd with loser’s glasses, a malicious smile, pigeon toes and a twangy guitar; in the grooves, the caricature assumed three dimensions in songs which matched spring-heeled melodies with lyrics which excavated the bleaker vistas of love. A subsequent single. "Watching the Detectives," detailed a woman's deeper interest in the allure of a TV cop show than the attentions of her flailing suitor with morbid accuracy: She's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake. It's the kind of line that confirms admirers in the belief that Costello is the brightest blue chip left in the rubble of post-punk popular music: a man whose bespectacled vision brings into fragmentary focus the dark comedies and warped wisdoms of the modern world. This month Costello releases Brutal Youth, his fifteenth solo album of new recordings. Graced by The Attractions, the three-piece band with whom he rocket-packed to international success at the end of the Seventies, it arrives replete with signatures of the type that have made his name: cutely crafted tunes both fast and slow, bursting with half-familiar moments from pop's past; vocals that switch back and forth from terseness to tenderness; lyrics that fizz with images and conceits. The album's a typically busy piece of work that draws on several of the many genres he has borrowed from before and made over to suit his own skewed perspectives. Repose is not his racket and his records won't let you rest. If there's one frozen impression that can do him any justice it is of an enigma in a hurry. "It always sounds like you're showing off when you say this." Costello says, covering himself against accusations of conceit, "but I honestly did write about five of the songs in one day, in terms of the music. That day it really caught fire and for about ten hours, every time I picked up the guitar I was just unstoppable. I had to go for a lie down at the end of it. I started to feel a bit dizzy." You can picture it easily enough. Even though he comes across as so earnestly obligating, sitting at an alcove table in the downstairs bar of a hotel near his London home in Holland Park, explosions of creative vertigo are not hard to imagine. His pleasantness doesn't entirely banish the feeling that beneath the skin he is every bit as wired as everyone routinely says he is and always has been, albeit these days more benignly. We all project our own meanings onto pop songs, though perhaps more so with Costello's than most. This is partly because their fabric is unusually suggestive, partly because Ins own identity - the "Real Elvis Costello". that sort of guff - has remained heavily concealed. Autobiography enters his material only peripatetically and then usually undetectably. He is about as given to public confession as government ministers are to monogamy. But the emotion that seemed to drive his earliest endeavours was anger, anger, anger. His first efforts were released by Stiff Records, a west London independent label dedicated to advancing the cause of rock 'n' roll individualists of a type scorned by the major companies: Ian Dury, Reckless Eric, Nick Lowe. Another. Declan MacManus, had been earning a crust as a computer operator at the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics factory in Ealing by day composing alone and playing with scratch bands by night. Uniformly spurned by the musical establishment and justifiably embittered, he got his first break after giving an office audition to Stiff boss and entrepreneur Dave Robinson. Between them, they dreamed up MacManus. stage name. "Costello". after the singer's mother's maiden moniker; "Elvis" to wind people up. His first single was "Less Than Zero". a loathing critique of the psychology of the National Front. It appeared on, but did not typify, the ensuing My Aim Is True, which was more concerned with girls and the problems they seemed to present for the prickly Other Elvis. The album's roaring success was quickly consolidated by This Year's Model, which introduced the stylised, febrile sound of The Attractions, a distinctive mix of punk attack and pop confection. An anti-star was born. Costello approached the concert circuit with concentrated rancour. Two shows stick in my mind. The first was on a Stiff ensemble tour (pre-Attractions) in Guildford. A handful of herberts had been assaulting the stage with broken glass and phlegm. Costello beetled on to do his slot: "I see we've got some cunts in the audience tonight." he snarled. No more broken glass and phlegm. The second was a headlining This Year's Model tour gig in Canterbury where the Costello set created an atmosphere of such admiring antipathy that he and the band had to be locked in the dressing room for their own safety. He remembers that one: "You think back on it now and it was all about nothing really. It was, like, we didn't do an encore." Wryly, he recalls: "There was quite a lot of that, actually I was just wound up. Some of it was righteous, some of it got to be, like, a thing you did, you know. The danger of any kind of angry behaviour is that it becomes a habit. It becomes your act: you're him: be angry! It's the problem some comedians have when they can't stop telling jokes." A third album, Armed Forces (1979), distinguished by its dissident socio-political sentiments, confirmed Costello as the class act of the New Wave and the hand crash-landed onto the global market. A widespread misconception of the time was that these were the kind of thinking pop boys who didn't Remainder of text to come... British GQ, April 1994 Dave Hill interviews Elvis Costello. Images Cover and contents page. Photos by Joseph Montezinos. Photo by Joseph Montezinos.

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