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Elvis Costello started out writing post-punk songs about lost love and 25 years later he’s still going strong. Simon Hattenstone reports.

When Elvis Costello emerged in the late 1970s, he was truly shocking - a seething, bitter, sarcastic, 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 reinvented himself 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 '80s, he probably did love better than any. But from the start his love was cheated and disgusted. 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 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.

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Elvis and I go back a long way. He 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 someone else.

Elvis was made for misunderstood young lovehearts - 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 a disproportionately big head. The real Elvis splayed his legs and wiggled his hips, while this Elvis was stiff, sexless and ludicrous. With his skinny drainpipe legs and those massive specs, he played up his dweebishness.

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 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. He's in his late forties, and ever so grown up these days. Brown suit, brown shoes, striking pink silk tie, elegantly receding brown hair. He is not as skinny as he was in the '70s, nor as rounded and shaggy as he became a few years ago. He looks healthy and strangely content.
Costello has reinvented himself many times over the years

Is he 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 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."

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. I'm not sure if Costello is arguing with me or 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. "Yes, there is no irony," he says. The trouble is, he says, you get known for one thing, and then the media leaves you frozen in aspic.

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 add 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."

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.

"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."

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. "It's entirely at your discretion to mention her name, but I very much want to be respectful of her independence as a person. 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."

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 f---ing 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.

"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 cliche of romance or a cheap version of love. 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 sleeve notes, Costello describes how, after the success of the album Armed Forces, he was embraced by the corporate pop machine and 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 - 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.

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."

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.

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. 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."

North is released on September 21.