Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello: The Angriest Craftsman in Pop

In the early 1970s a young Londoner named Declan MacManus spent his days working as a computer programmer and his evenings playing folk clubs under the name D.P. Costello. Within a few years he had borrowed a first name from Elvis Presley, a surname from his mother, and a backing band he would spend four decades quarrelling with and returning to. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame would eventually sum him up in a single line: he "took the literacy of folk music and broke it wide open against the ragged edges of punk."

The Bandleader's Son

Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus was born in Paddington, London, on 25 August 1954. His father, Ross McManus, was a working British bandleader, which meant that for the son music was less a rebellion than the family trade. The apprenticeship was long and unglamorous. Through the early 1970s he held down the programming job while grinding through London's pub-rock and folk-club circuit, and by 1976 he was fronting a country-rock outfit called Flip City and pressing demo tapes on anyone willing to take one.

A Borrowed Name

One of those tapes reached Jake Riviera at Stiff Records. In 1977 Stiff signed him, but as a solo artist rather than as Flip City's frontman, and the stage name was assembled on the spot: Elvis from Presley, Costello from his mother's maiden name. It was an act of nerve bordering on vandalism, appropriating the most famous name in rock and daring listeners to object.

With Nick Lowe producing and the American band Clover supplying the backing, he cut *My Aim Is True*. The first singles, "Less Than Zero" and "Alison," went nowhere. The album did not: it reached number 14 in Britain, and by the end of 1977 the reggae-inflected "Watching the Detectives," his final single for Stiff, delivered his first genuine hit.

The Attractions

By the summer of 1977 he had assembled the band that would define him: Bruce Thomas on bass, Steve Nieve on keyboards, Pete Thomas on drums. Billed as the Attractions, they made their live debut that July. The Hall of Fame remembers the figure who fronted them as "skinny-tied, gap-toothed" — an unlikely pop star whose weapon was verbal rather than physical.

The records came fast and got better. *This Year's Model* (1978) was rawer and broader in reach, hitting number four in Britain and number 30 in America. *Armed Forces* (1979) was more ambitious still, reaching number two at home and the American top ten, with "Oliver's Army" stalling one place short of the British top spot. *Get Happy!!* (1980), the first release on Riviera's new F-Beat label, turned hard toward soul and reached number two in Britain and number 11 in the States. *Trust* (1981) entered the British chart at nine.

A Genre a Year

What followed was one of the more restless runs in modern pop. *Almost Blue* (1981) was an album of country covers cut in Nashville with Billy Sherrill producing; "A Good Year for the Roses" became a British top ten single, though reviewers split. *Imperial Bedroom* (1982), produced by the Beatles' engineer Geoff Emerick, drew his strongest notices yet and entered at number six without yielding a Top 40 hit. *Punch the Clock* (1983), made with Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, reached number three in Britain and 24 in America, and "Everyday I Write the Book" cracked the Top 40 on both sides of the Atlantic.

Then the run broke. *Goodbye Cruel World* (1984) failed commercially and critically. He recovered with *King of America* (1986), released as The Costello Show, which abandoned the Attractions for a stripped-back country-folk sound and earned his best reviews since *Imperial Bedroom*, and then reconvened the band and Nick Lowe for *Blood and Chocolate* the same year.

Collaborator by Instinct

*Spike* (1989) was his most musically various record to that point and featured collaborations with Paul McCartney; "Veronica" became his biggest American hit at number 19. *Mighty Like a Rose* (1991) went darker. *The Juliet Letters* (1993), a song cycle written with the Brodsky Quartet, was his first move into classical composition. *Brutal Youth* (1994) reunited him with the Attractions for a direct pop record; *Kojak Variety* (1995) collected shelved covers; *All This Useless Beauty* (1996) gathered originals he had previously handed to other singers. *Painted from Memory* (1998), written with Burt Bacharach, won critical admiration while struggling to sell at home.

The list of partners kept lengthening: the mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, the jazz pianist Marian McPartland, Allen Toussaint, Bruce Springsteen, and the pianist Diana Krall, whom he married. He also wrote a ballet adaptation of *A Midsummer Night's Dream*.

The Long Third Act

*When I Was Cruel* (2002), self-produced with a new band called the Imposters, opened another productive stretch. *North* (2003) sat somewhere between Gershwin and Sondheim; *Il Sogno* (2004) was a full classical work; *The Delivery Man* arrived the same year. *The River in Reverse* (2006) paired him with Toussaint, *Secret, Profane & Sugarcane* (2009) and *National Ransom* (2010) with T-Bone Burnett, and *Wise Up Ghost* (2013) with the hip-hop band The Roots. *Look Now* (2018) won a Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. *Hey Clockface* (2020) leaned jazzward, *Spanish Model* (2021) rebuilt *This Year's Model* around Latino vocalists, and *The Boy Named If* (2022) recovered the vitriolic kick of his earliest work.

The honours accumulated in parallel: a Grammy in 1998, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Attractions in 2003, an Academy Award nomination in 2004 for "The Scarlet Tide," co-written with T-Bone Burnett, and induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2016.

Why Elvis Is Called a Genius

The faculty in question is compression joined to assimilation. At his best Costello packs more reversals, puns and double meanings into a three-minute pop song than most writers manage across an album, and he can absorb an entire idiom — Nashville country, Stax soul, Tin Pan Alley, the string quartet — quickly enough to write inside it rather than merely quote it. The word has been used by people with standing to use it. AllMusic calls him "the most evocative, innovative, and gifted songwriter since Bob Dylan." The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame calls him "one of the best and most consistent songwriters of his generation" and credits him with refusing to become formulaic. Britannica records that he "extended the musical and lyrical range of the punk and new wave movements."

The honest counter-case is that this is a synthesist's gift rather than an inventor's. Costello did not originate country, soul or chamber music; he annexed them, brilliantly, and the restlessness that critics praise also produced real misfires — *Goodbye Cruel World* failed on both counts, *Almost Blue* divided reviewers, and the classical ventures are more respected than loved. Consistency cuts both ways, too: a man who releases a record most years for nearly five decades will produce a great deal that is merely accomplished. The strongest claim rests on a narrow, ferocious band of years between 1977 and 1982, and on a refusal to repeat himself that has outlasted almost all of his contemporaries.

Legacy

Costello's durability is the argument. He arrived as a sneering spitfire in the year punk broke and was still making vital records forty-five years later, having passed through new wave, country, soul, Americana, jazz, hip-hop and the concert hall without ever quite sounding like a tourist. What he demonstrated, and what younger writers took from him, is that a pop song can carry the density of literature without losing its snarl.

Achievements

• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — 2003
• Worked as singer, guitarist and songwriter