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Like some frantic salesman, Declan Patrick Aloysius Macmanus, as these days Elvis Costello prefers to call himself, has been everywhere these last two weeks, busily promoting his new LP, King Of America. The day we met, he'd just returned from a hectic whirl of interviews in New York: he complained, understandably, of tiredness, although there was not much fatigue evident in the energy and enthusiasm with which he approached the three and a half hours of our conversation. The next few days would be similarly devoted to the selling of the new album. For someone usually so shy of interrogation, it's been an unprecedented flurry of public explanation.
The cause has been worthwhile, however. King Of America is a resounding return to form and probably his most compelling and assured record in five years. Like Get Happy!! whose emotional frankness it recalls, King Of America reaches us after an unsettled year for its author. Get Happy!! appeared in the wake of the infamous Costello-Bonnie Bramlett-Stephen Stills brawl in Columbus, Ohio, from which Costello emerged in the eyes of the sanctimonious American press as a sinsister bigot, with the commercial momentum of his career severely interrupted by the ensuing, vindictive backlash. King Of America arrives after a period of similar turmoil. Following the critical and commercial failure of Goodbye Cruel World in 1984, Costello had suspended The Attractions, toured only as a solo act, usually with the American songwriter T-Bone Burnett for company and support. He has produced The Pogues and The Big Heat; he has been involved in the score of Julien Temple's Absolute Beginners; he and T-Bone released "The Peoples' Limousine" under the name of The Coward Brothers; he appeared on Eurythmics' Be Yourself Tonight and made a memorable appearance at Live Aid. Mostly, though, he's kept his head down and in his absence, as it were, rumours began to swarm; he had become an alcoholic; he was creatively bankrupt; he'd stopped writing songs, he couldn't write any songs; his private life was in several stages of turmoil; he was going through a painful divorce.
According to the NME, the final authentication of these rumours was provided by the release of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" as a trailer for the new LP. "An undisguised plea for compassion," declared Donny Kelly in his now celebrated review. Mr Kelly went onto describe Costello as in a creative slump, allude to his drink problem and the record itself as a "landmark in the nosedive of one of the great pop talents of the last decade". Costello's work has often inspired obsessive analysis, but this seemed journalistic presumption taken to quite bumptious extremes. Upon its arrival, however, King Of America has successfully checked the gossip. KOA finds Costello refreshed after the strained conceits of Punch The Clock and Goodbye Cruel World. Adopting a lucid, very straightforward writing style that largely abandons the slickly orchestrated word play that by his last releases was becoming wearisome, Costello has rarely written so affectingly. Or addressed his audience so directly: he sounds like he's writing songs again, not polishing devious epigrams.
Musically, too, there's a welcome break from recent forms. Produced by Costello, T-Bone and Larry Hirsch and recorded in the studio that during the Fifties had played host to Frank Sinatra, KOA makes spectacular use of the peerless musicianship of James Burton, Ron Tuft, Jerry Scheff, Jim Keltner — "the wildest drummer I've ever worked with" — and supreme jazzers Ray Brown and Earl Palmer. Former Costello stalwarts The Attractions appear on only one track, the controversial "Suit Of Lights", which has been widely written up as Declan's final farewell to the Elvis Costello persona, a notion that Costello has carefully encouraged without emphatically endorsing it.
Costello had arrived for this interview looking
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