Elvis Costello: It's all about the adventures
"Allison" helped to put Elvis Costello on the musical map. Not bad for a Liverpool lad whose real name wasn't quite so marquee-ready. He talks to our Anthony Mason . . . FOR THE RECORD:
Cross the River Mersey on the ferry to Liverpool, and you sail back into Declan McManus' youth.
"Liverpool's really in your blood," said Mason.
"It literally is, in that my mother's from here and my Dad's from the other side," said Costello.
A teenaged Declan played his first paid gigs here.
"We'd play anywhere that have us," he said outside St. George's Hall. "We played schools and poetry evenings."
That was before he moved to London, took our King's name and became Elvis Costello, the spindly singer with the big specs and biting lyrics, who the Village Voice would call "the avenging dork."
"You were pretty angry on stage in the beginning," said Mason.
"Maybe I came off that way. I mean, I'm not trying to deny it now. But I do think some of it's just the face you're born with. And this gap in my teeth! Some people, like Jane Birkin, that made her incredibly sexy. Well, obviously it hasn't worked for me. But it does make things I say sound more emphatic sometimes than they are.
"So even if I'm saying something that's relatively reasonable or tender, it comes out as if it's a threat or a provocation."
A new pair of glasses came with his first record contract, as did his stage name, which he says wasn't his idea: "I go to the office one day and they say, 'We've got a great idea. We're gonna call you Elvis.' And I thought they were kidding, you know. 'Put these on.' And they had obviously thought it out, that I was too kind of non-descript looking, really."
When his debut album, "My Aim Is True," exploded in 1977, he still had a day job as a computer technician at a London beauty salon -- writing songs at Elizabeth Arden. "Yeah, after hours. I'd take my guitar in the evening, and I'd be in there playing."
Another song, "(Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes," came to him on a train trip to Liverpool, "about ten to fifteen minutes out in Runcorn," Costello said. "The whole thing just appeared."
Costello would use Liverpool as a backdrop for his band, The Attractions, shooting on the ferry ramp, and at the Observatory ... but Elvis grew up in London.
"I was born in the same hospital in which Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin," he writes in his new memoir, "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink" (Blue Rider Press). "I apologize in advance that I have not been the same boon to mankind."
The McManuses lived on a quiet street in London's Twickenham neighborhood. His mother worked in a record shop. His father, Ross McManus, was a singer and a trumpet player in a popular big band. In 1963, his dad played a royal command performance for the Queen Mother.
Also on the bill that night, "a little group from Liverpool called The Beatles," Costello recalled. "And my Dad brought home The Beatles' autographs for me. I glued 'em in my book."
Elvis was 14 when he saved up to buy his first guitar, from a store across the Thames River, in Richmond: "And then the day I got it, it was pretty great. I walked over with it over my shoulder."
"Back across the bridge?"
"Yeah! So yeah, 'I'm a musician now, you see?'" he laughed.
"You've talked about this whole idea of fluidity of identity," said Mason. "You have not had a problem sort of shifting your identity."
"This also goes back to my Dad."
To make extra cash, his father would sing as other artists on cheap knockoff records: "They would make note-for-note covers of current hits. And he would be Frank Bacon and the Baconeers, or Hal Prince and the Layabouts. So was it unusual to be called Elvis? Not if your Dad's Frank Bacon."
"You can be anybody."
"And have been!"
He's changed identities -- and writing partners, once working with Paul McCartney. "I thought it was a prank when I was told that Paul wanted me to come and write songs. But you don't turn up, you know, in your short trousers and your fan club card in your top pocket sticking out, you know? I mean, obviously you have to turn up responsibly with your guitar and a couple of ideas."
Costello had the beginnings of a song about his grandmother grappling with Alzheimer's. "So we made it, 'Veronica,' into a pop record that actually got onto the radio even though it's speaking about the unraveling of the mind."
A decade later, he collaborated with Burt Bacharach, beginning what has become a 20-year relationship. They're writing two musicals together.
"It's midnight and the phone rings, and it's Burt Bacharach: 'Elvis, where are the lyrics?' You know it's him driving it all the time, it's pretty great!" he laughed.
He jumps genres, from pop to classical to jazz. He once performed with an 80-piece orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. That's where he once saw his future wife, jazz great Diana Krall, play one of his songs many years ago.
"I saw Diana play when we first friends. She played 'Almost Blue' as an encore. And I thought, 'Hmmmm.' That was pretty exciting."
"You had a pretty rowdy life when you were younger," said Mason. "When you got married again in 2003, did you put that all away?"
"I tried to put it away a bunch of times. I mean, to my shame I didn't succeed in staying true to my first wife, who I deeply love. She gave me that beautiful son. And Diana is very understanding of that.
"The rowdy's not gone away. But the rowdy's just focused on one person!" he laughed.
And on two others. Costello, and Krall have twin eight-year-old sons together.
"You seem to be really enjoying that," said Mason.
"Well, yeah! Yeah. What do you want to know about Minecraft?"
At 61, Elvis Costello is still learning.
"And that's been the case in all of these adventures, that might seem like wildly casting around for something to people who are, you know, dogmatic about rock and roll to begin with."
"So for you it's been about the adventures?
"Totally."
And about being a man of many musical hats.
Mason asked off his collection, "How many hats do you have?"
"I have 400. No! I don't know. I've always liked 'em. You know, they keep your brains in!" he laughed.
For more info:
- "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink" by Elvis Costello (Blue Rider Press); Also available in eBook, Enhanced eBook, Unabridged Digital Audio Download, and Unabridged Digital Audio CD formats
- "Unfaithful Music & Soundtrack Album" by Elvis Costello (UME); Available via Amazon and iTunes
- elviscostello.com
- Follow @ElvisCostello on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube
- Eagle Rock Entertainment