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The blissed out curmudgeon

Elvis Costello once admitted, drunkenly, that his main motivations were guilt and revenge. But now that angry young man has grown up, is in love and has made a work of beauty. So what's up, asks Simon Hattenstone

Simon Hattenstone
Saturday August 30, 2003
The Guardian

When Elvis Costello emerged in the late 1970s, he was
truly shocking - a seething, bitter, sarcastic,
sneering, verbose (he would have used just as many
adjectives) post-punk poet who spat two-minute tirades
of sexual jealousy and betrayal into his mic, slashed
with his guitar and gave great chorus.

Over the years, Costello has shocked us again and
again - when he went country, when he went soul, when
he went French balladeer, when he went classical. But
this. Well this takes the biscuit. Costello has just
made a whole album of melt-your-heart love songs.

It's not the love that is shocking. Of all the
"new-wavers" in the late 1970s and 1980s, he probably
did love better than any. But from the start, and for
all the tenderness of Alison, when he whisper-wailed,
"I heard you let that little friend of mine take off
your party dress," his love was cheated and disgusted.

A decade or so later, he wrote another classic love
song, I Want You. It begins as a honeyed statement of
desire, but becomes something tormented and
tormenting, as the gentle words are repeated till they
become a screaming sneer. For Costello, love has never
been far removed from hate.

But not on the new record, North. Costello himself
admits that North isn't easy to describe. It's
certainly not one of those overstuffed hotchpotch
albums he's produced in recent years: sagging with
tunes and words and seemingly interminable, for all
the good bits.

On North, there are 11 songs, all written at the
piano, most of them two or three minutes long. They
tell the story of love lost and love found. The early
songs are low, melancholic and regretful. The later
songs are ecstatic. The album works as a song cycle, a
lieder for the 21st century.

Elvis and I go back a long way. Elvis helped me
through adolescence. I listened to him in my bedroom -
he sang about all sorts of things, but the ones I
remember best are the tales of woe about those
beautiful girls who would go off with David Watts,
oblivious to Elvis's sincerity and burning soul. Elvis
was made for misunderstood young love-hearts - to some
extent literally, because he was a construct.

It was his manager, Jake Riviera, who suggested Declan
Patrick Aloysius McManus change his name to Elvis
Costello for the sake of his art and his bank balance.
The name was soaked in attitude. No one in real life
dared call themselves Elvis, let alone this computer
programmer with the disproportionately big head.

The real Elvis splayed his legs and wiggled his hips,
and was the personification of sex, while this Elvis
was stiff, sexless and ludicrous. With his skinny
drainpipe legs bent at 10 to three, and those massive
specs, he played up his dweebishness. He looked like
an Etch-A-Sketch cartoon.

Before he knew it, he was on Top Of The Pops, feted
for being so uncool he was cool. He had been playing
music for six or seven years to little acclaim, and
here he was finally hailed an overnight success at 23.
Costello thought it was funny. He'd always had a thing
for irony.

He orders tea for us - English tea in a hotel suite.
He's in his late 40s, and ever so grown up these days.
Brown suit, brown cod-crocodile shoes, striking pink
silk tie, elegantly receding brown hair. He is
certainly not as skinny as he was in the 1970s, nor is
he as rounded and shaggy as he became a few years ago.
He looks healthy and strangely content.

I ask him if he's surprised to have made North. "Yeah,
well everything came as a shock to me." He doesn't
specify what the everything is, but I assume he's
referring to the subject of the album - the break-up
of his 16-year marriage to songwriter and former
Pogues member Cait O'Riordan, his subsequent
desolation, and his new relationship with glamorous
jazz chanteuse Diana Krall. He swiftly moves on to the
album's genesis. "I was on the road last September,
and the songs just came to me one after another.
Sometimes you're not even thinking this is a group of
songs, whereas I knew right away these were. They were immediately a different language, a different register, different emotion, different lyrics." For the first time, he says, he wrote the songs on the album in sequence. The album was recorded in New York, where he spends much of his time these days.

Yes, I say, it does all seem so different, not least
the openness. As soon as I agree with him, he politely disagrees. "I don't think it's that different, actually," he says. "King Of America and Blood & Chocolate, for example, are both different in tone from this, but there's a lot of similarity."

I'm not sure if Costello is arguing with me or with
himself, but it's good to see a trace of the
traditional bristle. Perhaps, I say, open is the wrong
word, it's more that these songs are irony-free. In
the past, Costello often used irony as an emotional
safety net - on one level, he exposed himself but on
another he didn't because so much of what he sang was double-edged (Hope You're Happy Now when he doesn't hope you are, I'm Not Angry when he is).

"Yes, there is no irony," he says. The trouble is, he
says, you get known for one thing, and then the media
leaves the young you frozen in aspic. "For instance, I
don't think there's been a single pun on any of my
records for 10 years and yet I'm known for that
because of the first few albums. And the same with
irony - it's an overplayed hand and it's also a
juvenile hand. The deliberate seeking of darkness and
the sardonic, and the denial of feeling and the denial
of trust and belief, it's something that you do when
you're younger and it's something that is right - part
of it's genuine and part of it is insecurity. I'm not
saying that was all wrong. I love a lot of the songs I
wrote then, I still sing them, but there's room in the
world for lots of different points of view, lots of
different types of expression, even inside the
repertoire of one songwriter and singer."

In the early days, the songs he covered by other
writers couldn't have been more different from his own
- Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, (What's So Funny
'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding and My Funny
Valentine were straight from the heart and totally
unambiguous. In their openness, they seemed to be an acknowledgment of his own limitations.

I tell him that I love so many of his songs, even
though I don't have a clue what they are about. Fair
enough, he says, neither did he. "I don't see any
reason why you should have to understand them. I would
always defend the right to create a vague picture, or
a blurred picture with words that adds up differently
to different people because I've done it countless
times. It's like the chance Polaroid that is better
than the sharp-focus, well-taken photograph.There's a
song on the last record, Tart, that doesn't make any
sense at all."

He comes to a stop, but not for long. "In the case of
North I don't think people will have that problem
because it is pretty damn clear what's going on,
y'know. I can tell you how I did it, when I did it,
but I can't tell you more about what it is, because
everything is in there. I'm not saying I won't answer
any more questions, but... " It seems like a
pre-emptive strike. Costello hates talking about his
private life.

The first songs are incredibly painful. The album
starts with a track called You Left Me In The Dark.
Before I ask the question, he answers. "I think people
will assume that it is about romantic loss, but it is
actually about bereavement. It is about someone
contemplating the last loving thing said by someone
who has gone. Y'know, people always assume that love
happens detached from other realities. But other
realities happen concurrently with changes in the
heart. Whether or not these songs happened exactly as
they appeared to happen to me doesn't matter in my
opinion. It doesn't make it better to listen to, it
doesn't make it more authentic." He's still not
mentioned any names, so I take the plunge. In the
first half of the album there is the sense that you
can't understand how your relationship with Cait has
ended, I say. Silence.

"I've got to say, Simon, and I want to really stress,
it's entirely at your discretion to mention her name,
but I very much want to be respectful of her
independence as a person. And one of the things you
have to say when you part with somebody is that they
have the right not to be drawn into the consideration
of your life. It's really important that I don't say
anything that puts her in the public focus. It's not
fair, she didn't ask for it. [Pause.] Then there is
the other side of that equation, which is I write,
that's what I do, I draw on personal experience.
[Pause.] But as I keep saying, the importance to me is
that people see themselves in the songs rather than
pore over them as voyeurs would. I think that would be
a fairly dissatisfying listen, frankly."

There is something of the schoolmaster about Costello.
But he has a point. The record works beautifully
because it tells a universal story. There are no names
named on the album, no tales told, no scores settled.
The lyrics of North are incredibly personal, but the
details could apply to any of us who has been in love
(the coat he wraps around her shoulders, the way he
can't stop telling friends about her and becomes the
ultimate love bore). Has Cait heard North?

"I don't know. I'm not being evasive... but I have
very consciously not written an album about any
unhappiness I lived through, or any bitter feeling I
have." Instead, he says, he wants to express the hope
that there is for anybody. "You've reached an impasse
and something else can happen." He often takes the
most circuitous route to answer a question, but he
does answer. Actually, by his standards he is being a
right old gossip. He says there are wonderful records
that document relationships, but they only mean
anything to us because they transcend biography.

"Take Blood On The Tracks [Bob Dylan] or Blue [Joni
Mitchell], they are two albums that appear to be
rooted in very, very painful personal experience, yet
they have humour in them, some sense of joy as well as desolation. And at least one of those albums has a tremendous amount of anger that my record doesn't have." He smiles, amazed at what he's just said.

"That's the biggest shock - that it doesn't have any
anger in it. That's useless to me, to have anger or recrimination in my songs because I have spent such a long time talking about matters of anger."

In recent years, Costello has reissued old albums with
detailed essays about the history of the songs. "If
you look at the sleeve notes of the reissue of Blood & Chocolate, I said, very honestly, when I wrote that record I felt I had put aside fucking up my life, which is what the first seven years of my career were about, so I could write songs about it." (That's when he started doing the pop star thing - drinking himself silly, being loud and abusive, leaving his first wife for a model.)

Later, the songs were less immediate, more reflective.
It felt a natural evolution - he was married to Cait,
in a stable relationship, and he wanted to explore
anger rather than live it. But, of course, it's never
as simple as that. "Then you have to start questioning
whether you are doing that to avoid emotional truths,
and whether you're all wearing disguises for a good or
bad reason."

And, even as he talks, the great contrarian seems to
be arguing it out in his head. I ask him if all the
bile of the early days was heartfelt. "Well, I don't
actually agree with that..." No, no, I burble, there
was tenderness there as well. "Yeah, that's the thing.
I'm not complaining about it retrospectively, I think
it's understandable that it makes good copy and I play
along with it and up to it sometimes, so I can't
complain that the lasting impression of those first
few years focuses more on the anger than the
tenderness. There have been outbursts of much more
profound anger since. Y'know, Tramp The Dirt Down, the
whole of Mighty Like A Rose are much angrier than the
first three albums put together. And specific and
focused anger. And honed. And, y'know, watered and
fertilised anger."

The lyrics to Tramp The Dirt Down, dedicated to
Margaret Thatcher, are possibly the most bilious he
has written.

... there's one thing, I know, I'd like to live
Long enough to savour
That's when they finally put you in the ground
I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down.

He's still thinking about his reputation. "You know,"
he says out of the blue, "the thing that I never, ever
got was misogyny and that was attached to me a lot
early on. A lot. And I could never get that. A lot of
the songs early on were more disappointed that anybody
would fall for the cliché of romance or fashion or a
cheap version of love. And that's a consistent
theme... "

Not a misogynist, I say, but you did come out with
some right bollocks. "Oh, absolutely. Tons of
bollocks." He grins. He once said his driving forces
were guilt and revenge. "Shall I tell you something?
That much-repeated quote was said after 14 Pernods, in
one of those kind of fits of beautiful drunken bravado
when you didn't throw up and you didn't fall down and
you suddenly had a moment of clarity that you thought
was like the most original thought."

I remind him of another time when he was drunk, this
time in America in 1979, and he described Ray Charles
as "an ignorant, blind nigger". He doesn't need
reminding. In the past, he has called that the low
point of his career.

"Read the sleeve notes to Get Happy!! I'll get it sent
to you, and that's what I'm going to say about that."

A few days later the album arrives in the post. In the
sleeve notes, Costello describes how, after the
success of the album Armed Forces, he was embraced by
the corporate pop machine and he was spoiling for a
fight.

"This would come to an end in April 1979 at Columbus,
Ohio, where a ridiculous drunken argument would
culminate in me speaking the exact opposite of my true
beliefs in an attempt to provoke a fight that
inevitably arrived. That I was speaking in some
absurd, exaggerated, supposedly ironic humour, in
which everything is expressed in the reverse of that
which one knows to be true, is no excuse. There was
nothing sparkling or glorious about the wordplay, just
the seed of madness. It was the product of crazed
indulgence."

Afterwards, Costello received more than 100 death
threats, his records were pulled from US playlists and
his shows were picketed by the very anti-racist
organisation for which he had appeared six months
earlier. "The humour of outrage never did sit that
well with people and is particularly useless if the
intent is garbled drunkenly," he explains.

Get Happy!! was released the following year, and was
his tribute to the soul music that had been such an
inspiration for him. It was something of an apology.
But he never said as much. Pride got the better of
him. Costello says that the only time he has ever
really been in fashion was in 1979, and he was
determined, wittingly or unwittingly, to screw it up.

"I hated just about everything in my world, reserving
the greatest disdain for myself," he writes on Get
Happy!! After writing all those songs about being a
loser, about not being able to get the girl, what was
it like when he realised that he could get her? "Well,
I hated that. You start to feel wretched about it. For
a short period of time I think it brings about a
certain self-satisfaction and greed, and then you
start to hate yourself pretty quickly." For what? "For
being everything you said you didn't like."

I ask him if he feels more secure with age. "Well, you
can become more insecure because you've got more to
lose. History teaches us that people become more
conservative with a small c, more pragmatic or
cautious, or timid, whichever word you want to use for
not taking chances, and I sort of feel the opposite."

Security, for Costello, is the willingness to flirt
with insecurity. Music is in his bones. He talks about
growing up in Liverpool and London with his mum
Lillian and his dad Ross McManus, the singer and
trumpet player. (The only recorded song they ever sang
together was I'm A Secret Lemonade Drinker for the R
White's advert when he was 17.)

His grandfather had been an army musician who became a
ship's musician. "He went to America in the 20s,
Kyoto, India. The only ambition I ever had was to see
the world, and I've done that." He has apartments in
New York and Dublin, but he says he doesn't really
feel as if he lives in any one particular place these
days. Costello has a grown-up son from his first
marriage. What does he do? "He writes..." And he stops
himself. His son is another person whose privacy he
doesn't want to invade.

What he really loves talking about is music. He tells
me how Burt Bacharach, with whom he recorded Painted
>From Memory, taught him the importance of paring down
words ("Three or four years ago I was telling anybody
who would listen that my ambition was to not write any
words at all"); how he recently heard a wonderful
album by the lost soul star Howard Tate; how he and
the Attractions were inducted into the Rock And Roll
Hall Of Fame along with the Clash and the Police ("The
Police were so bad, so appallingly bad, really bad,"
he says with relish. "It was so funny. It was all the weaknesses of the band amplified by time. Sting just looked like he'd rather be anywhere else. Actually, the unthinkable happened - I felt sorry for him"); how he learnt the importance of phrasing through listening to Sinatra. Then he's on to the intolerant political climate in America and how the Dixie Chicks were lambasted for saying that they were ashamed of coming from Texas, the same state as George Bush.

"The media is so contrived and hysterical. It's
terrible. The political debate is so belligerent, all
shouting, just like a cartoon, it's all about logos
and slogans." As for British politics, he says, they
are also just glorified ad men."In the old days there
was an establishment against which people railed. Even
up to the Margaret Thatcher days there was an
establishment. Although it was a new establishment, it
was still an establishment. Now there isn't."

Typical Costello - detests the establishment, and
complains when it disappears. "Obviously there is a
big and bad world happening out there, and maybe there
is another time to sing of those things, but I cannot
think of anything better to do than to sing of love
right now." Has he ever written about love in such a
way before? "No, either because it didn't occur to me
or because it just didn't happen."

I ask him if he ever steps back and asks how the young
nerd who lost Alison could end up with Diana Krall.
"Well, people will always say that, won't they?" And
he decides to answer a different question - one that
he seems to have asked himself. "Well, we just all
want to find some peace. You can entertain dark
thoughts, you can retain your sense of indignation,
disgust with things that deserve those responses and
still have some sense of peace..."

He asks me if I think people will listen to the record
for what it is, rather than as a piece of potted
biography. Well, I say, it's inevitable that people
will be interested in the story behind it. "I hope it
doesn't crowd anybody," he says. "My intention was not
to crowd. It was to make something beautiful. It's the
only record I've ever made that aspired to beauty as
the prime objective. That's really all I was trying to
do. Make something beautiful."

What amazes me about North is Costello's state of
total bliss in the second half of the album. While in
the first half he was astonished to find himself so
lost, now he is even more astonished to find such
love. I'm sure he'll probably strike me down for
saying so, but I've never heard such rapture in his
songs. For once he doesn't disagree. "Well, that's a
nice word. I think it is rapturous. Yeah, I'll accept
that, thank you."

· North is released on September 15. Costello's UK
tour goes to Glasgow Royal Concert Hall (October 7),
Newcastle Opera House (, Manchester Bridgewater Hall
(10), London Royal Festival Hall (11) and Birmingham
Symphony Hall (November 7).