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Elvis Costello | page 1, 2, 3

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The Suit of Lights

He was born Declan Patrick MacManus, in 1955. His father, Ross, was a workaday musician, a singer in a silly dance-hall cover band called the Joe Loss Orchestra. He grew up in London but lived in Liverpool from 16 on. He developed a keen musical knowledge and an unhealthy contempt for almost everything on earth during this period, and also wrote songs. He left school and was a computer operator (not a programmer) and a wannabe folkie in his late teen years. He met Nick Lowe, then playing in Brinsley Schwartz, as early as 1972.

He spent the next few years working at boring computer jobs, getting married and trying to sell his songs. His tapes were rejected by most record companies. Finally, Lowe got him a contract with a new label called Stiff, which would become an amusing feature of the British music scene over the next few years. Besides the predictable double entrendres ("If it ain't Stiff it ain't worth a fuck"), the company's name allowed its PR department to supply record stores with signs saying "We got Stiffs in stock." Along with early work from Lowe, the Damned, Graham Parker, Ian Dury and Lene Lovitch, the label put out Costello's first astonishing singles ("Less Than Zero," "Alison," "Red Shoes" and "Watching the Detectives"). His full-length debut, "My Aim Is True," was released in England in July 1977; after (as the perhaps apocryphal story goes) he was arrested for busking outside a CBS Records convention, Columbia Records put it out in the United States some months later, beginning his 13-year association with the label.

From the start, his temperament distinguished him. The other major figure of this period, Johnny Rotten, of the Sex Pistols, hated the world with an innate zeal and used that emotion as a vehicle for an unusual and provocative social analysis. ("A rock band can tear down society.") This, depending on whom you talk to, was either societally dangerous (and a fantastic but portentous failure) or merely part of a centuries-spanning but relatively benign subversive order (and a complete, pointless success). Elvis Costello, by contrast, didn't hate, exactly. He was mostly irritated, and motivated by much different things. "That girl who won't go out with me" was the most important one, though "It took me too long to get a record contract" came a close second.

On "My Aim Is True," he introduced himself as a folk rocker cum sex killer who used a pleasant familiarity with folk, rockabilly, reggae and soul as a sardonic façade for a somewhat narrow set of lyrical concerns. These typically leveraged themselves against his primary concerns of -- as he notoriously put it -- "revenge and guilt," the shame of the latter presumably fueling the ferocity of his desire for the former. In this peculiar recipe he found an outlet for a molten psyche that did indeed seem to equal that of Rotten's, which is saying something.

Sexual confusion, sexual frustration, sexual jealousy -- these are the key themes from that first album. Consider the malevolence of the singer in "Watching the Detectives," who is upset not that mass culture degrades humanity nor that cartoon violence deadens it, but rather that the woman on the couch next to him won't stop watching TV. The most recurring images are slightly disturbing ones, with various species of impotence -- voyeurism, submissiveness -- emerging again and again.

A year later, on "This Year's Model," aided by a violent trio known as the Attractions and a strange encoding of the mid-'60s work of the Rolling Stones, he delivered a rock masterwork that includes all the sexual dysfunctionality of his first record and adds a dollop or two of social criticism, detailing his displeasure with, among other things, advertising, censorship, models, record companies, the corporate ladder generally, radio and poseurdom. Yet arching over it all still is his utterly distracting obsession with girls. This sometimes made for amusing moments. His attitude toward oral sex, for example -- "If I'm gonna go down/You're gonna come with me" -- can be described as unhelpfully confrontational.

A year after that he produced "Armed Forces," a rabid pop exposition that found no little joy in the world of mercenaries and a lot to be fearful of in romance. It began with a winning admission of indecision ("Oh, I just don't know where to begin") and ended with a hugely unlikely song, a cover of Lowe's "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding," sung with such indigestible sarcasm that to this day many fans think he was being sentimental.

His fourth album is a remarkable, soul-inflected work perversely called "Get Happy!!" It was the last record he would release that would even come close to the top 10. He and Nick Lowe shoehorned 20 songs onto one of those old-fashioned LP records, quite an achievement at the time, even if it did sound as if it had been recorded on a Walkman. Some of the songs Costello later admitted he'd written in a cab on the way back to the studio from lunch. (Good ones -- "Possession," for example.)

In America, around this time, he released a record called "Taking Liberties," a scintillating collection that included various non-album songs and B-sides; these tracks are now distributed across the respective albums in Rykodisc's elegant, essential reissues of his original Columbia albums. 1981's "Trust" has an amazing cover photograph. He has jowls and an innocent expression, and seems to want to please. The songs are gorgeous, if essentially meaningless. Dismayed that "Trust" didn't sell, Costello embarked on an odd excursion into country. "Almost Blue" confused fans and wasn't very good, either; today the C&W posturing seems tinny after more substantive country-inflected numbers like "Stranger in the House." The baroque "Imperial Bedroom" followed. Then came two utterly boring efforts, "Punch the Clock" and "Goodbye Cruel World." In the Ryko reissue of the latter, Costello's liner notes begin, "Congratulations! You've just purchased our worst album."

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Goon Squad

During this time Costello's personal life was wound up with nonstop touring, lots of speed and this and that variation of rock-star nogoodnickness. He seems not to have forgiven the world for not making him a star until he was 23; out of a sense of principle the source of which is unclear at this late date he was by his own account an asshole to most of those he came into contact with during this time. By 1979 fans were sometimes booing his short and unpleasant performances.

In this atmosphere of pointless aggression and self-indulgence, Costello began to distinguish himself. The first chance he got, he began dating models. One was Bebe Buell, that era's escort of choice of has-been rock stars. She had recently given birth to Steven Tyler's child. (The kid, incidentally, grew up to be Liv Tyler.) Their very public affair was doggedly covered by the British tabloids. Costello's wife must have enjoyed it. (They eventually divorced.) The Buell-Costello alliance lasted a few years, until Costello unceremoniously dumped her: She said he hung up on her one day and that she never heard from him again. In March 1979, Costello capped off this productive period in his extra-artistic life by getting himself into a scrap with Stephen Stills (of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young fame) and Bonnie Bramlett (a minor singer from the '60s) in a hotel bar in Ohio. Again motivated by an unclear principle, he did his best to offend them, finally resorting to a burst of profanity and bigotry, capped with the assertion that Ray Charles was a "blind, ignorant nigger."

There's no evidence that Costello was a racist -- he'd been active in Rock Against Racism before it was fashionable and was too smart in any event to let it show if he was -- but he was being as stupid, reckless and out of control as any of the broken-down '60s stars his energy, brains and invective were supposed to be an antidote for. In any event, Bramlett industriously publicized the exchange and Costello tried to explain and apologize. He took his lumps in a months-long transatlantic brouhaha; to this day some serious critics hold him in contempt.

Next page | The very words "Rod Stewart" were synonymous with pop degradation