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As America swelters in the hottest summer in living memory, the temperature in Los Angeles is nudging the mid-nineties. Not that you would be able to tell from Elvis Costello's attire, which is more suited to an autumn evening in Dublin, his adopted hometown, than the midday heat haze of Sunset Strip: black leather jacket, black shirt, black trousers and black loafers. Atop his newly-shorn head sits an unlikely looking straw hat of the variety so beloved by an older generation of jazz hipsters. It is his single concession to the Californian climate. This is an outfit that betokens a man not given to compromise; one whose chosen career path has, of late, been as out of step with the thrust of contemporary pop as it was once so effortlessly in synch with the post-punk public appetite for articulate, acerbic songwriting.
Burt Bacharach, on the other hand, is hatless, and dressed head-to-foot in freshly-laundered leisurewear: white sweatshirt, white slacks, white sneakers and matching socks. It is an outfit that suggests this is a
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