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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 Tutt, 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 trim and dapper; clean-shaven, too, with no hint of the whiskers that give him such an hilariously woe-begone appearance on the darkly comic sleeve of KOA, where he looks like he's been ridden hard all night and hung up wet to dry. Basically, he only wanted to talk about the new album, but was soon off in a number of tangental directions. The edited account that follows is as comprehensive as space permits, but is probably already out of date. At the time of writing, the word is that Costello's already back in the studio recording a new album with The Attractions and produced by Nick Lowe.
To what extent was the musical direction you've pursued on King Of America dictated by the hostile critical response to Goodbye Cruel World?
I don't think it's anything to do with the response to that album. I think it might have something to do with the fact that it's a pretty terrible record. I just didn't have very many clear ideas at the time. i think I wrote the songs all too quickly and I didn't do enough preparation. Goodbye Cruel World wasn't a terribly troublesome record to make, it was just a bit laborious and therefore it lacked inspiration.
Did you think, though, that both in terms of songwriting and your approach to recording you were beginning merely to fulfill a routine?
In retrospect, yes. We started off to make a sort of live, open record, but Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, those guys didn't have the right approach. That's no disrespect to them — in fact, they didn't even want to do that record, Clive just did it as a favour, really — but they've developed a way of working that's completely contrary to spontaneity. So really it was just a mistake. Everybody makes mistakes from time to time. Unfortunately, they're preserved on vinyl in this case. It's a shame because I think two or three of the songs I could've done much better now. "Joe Porterhouse," "The Comedians" and "The Deportees Club", some of those story songs, were the beginnings of the kind of writing I'm doing on this album. In fact, I've re-written "The Deportees Club". It's now a ballad, a really pretty song. I wanted to re-record it, but I didn't want people to think I was re-recording old songs because I haven't got any new ones, which isn't the case at all. "King Of America" could easily have been a double album.
Do you think "Cruel World" was too harshly criticised?
Not really... not that it matters much to me. After all, criticism is only reliant on what's been said about you in the past. It was almost like, "Well, thank Good for that. He's finally made a record we can really have a go at..." I'm sure in the past that I've been overly praised, so if people came down hard on that record, it was only because they were dying for the chance to do it. But I think you've got to be careful not to take criticism too seriously unless you can learn from it. You see, I didn't need to learn from the criticism of that album, because I already knew what was wrong with it. It's a bad record. So what? There were plenty of other bad records released that year.
It seems to me that you're one of the people who're not actually allowed to get away with such public mistakes.
Maybe, but I don't think that's very important. I think again that's holding it all too much under a microscope. It's a very critical perspective. I don't think the general public feel that way. I'm not that important for them to think like that about me. I mean, if The Beatles went in a wrong direction, or what people thought was a confusing direction, it really sat heavily on people. Like, Magical Mystery Tour was seen as a national disaster. Frank Sinatra was like that as well. If he went into an artistic decline, it affected a lot of people. People like myself, you know, I don't sell enough records, I don't have a big enough following for it to even effect the musical climate of the country if I make a bad record. But I don't sit around fretting over these things. It's a different world, it's a different business now. It's much more a sale of dreams. It always was, but there was perhaps more musical substance to it or artistic substance to it in the past. These days, there's nobody that's enormously popular and successful who is very good musically. I mean, look at George Michael. Music is only 50 per cent of what he does, and s the other 50 per cent that he does very well that makes him successful. There are people who are in the business of being famous, you know, and he's one of them. I'm not in the business of being famous. I just make records. I write songs. That's all I do.
The critics of your last tour with The Attractions seemed pretty much unanimous in agreeing that it sounded like you'd exhausted all possible permutations with the group and the most immediately sensible thing to do would be to
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