Elvis Costello
Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus (born August 25, 1954), better known by his stage name, Elvis Costello, is a popular British musician, singer, and songwriter of Irish ancestry. He was an early participant in London's pub rock scene in the mid-1970s, and later became associated with the punk rock and new wave musical genres, before establishing himself as a unique and original voice in the 1980s. His output has been wildly diverse: One critic has written that "Costello, the pop encyclopedia, can reinvent the past in his own image."[1]
Biography
Early Life and Career
MacManus was born in St Mary's Hospital, Paddington in London, living in the area until he was sixteen. With an already musical family (his father, Ross MacManus, sang with Joe Loss), MacManus moved with his mother to Liverpool in 1971. It was there that he formed his first band, Flip City, which had a style very much in the pub rock vein. They lasted until 1975–1976, by which time MacManus was living in London with a wife and child.
MacManus worked a number of dead-end jobs, most famously at a cosmetics firm---immortalized in one of his song lyrics as the "vanity factory"---where he put in time as a data entry clerk. He continued to write songs, and began aggressively looking for a solo recording contract. On the basis of a demo tape, he was signed to Stiff Records. His manager at Stiff, Jake Riviera, suggested a name change, using Elvis Presley's first name and his mother's maiden name to form Elvis Costello.
1970s
Costello's first album for Stiff, My Aim Is True (1977), was a moderate commercial success (No. 14 in the UK and Top 40 in the US) with Costello appearing on the cover in his trademark oversize glasses, bearing a striking resemblance to a menacing Buddy Holly. Costello's backing on this first album was provided by American West Coast band Clover, a roots/country outfit who would later become Huey Lewis and The News. Costello was marketed as a new wave artist or a punk. The same year, Costello recruited his own permanent band, The Attractions, consisting of Steve Nieve (born Steve Nason; piano), Bruce Thomas (bass guitar), and Pete Thomas (unrelated to Bruce Thomas; drums). He released his first major hit single, "Watching The Detectives," recorded with Nieve and the pair of Steve Goulding (drums) and Andrew Bodnar (bass), both members of Graham Parker & The Rumour.
Stiff was a new independent UK label, formed to provide an outlet for practioners in the then-burgeoning pub rock scene in London. Its records were initially distributed only in the UK, which meant that Costello's first album and singles were initially available in the US as imports only. In an attempt to change this, Costello was arrested for busking outside of a London convention of CBS (Columbia Records) executives, "protesting" the fact that no US record company had yet seen fit to release Elvis Costello records in the United States. Costello signed to CBS in the US a few months later.
In December 1977, Costello and The Attractions appeared on Saturday Night Live. During the live broadcast, Costello played the first few bars of "Less Than Zero," then--much to the shock of the program's producers--stopped and broke into a spirited rendition of the then-unreleased "Radio, Radio" (despite having been denied permission to play that song because of its anti-corporate message). Costello was not invited to perform on Saturday Night Live again until 1989 when he was invited (along with the Beastie Boys) to recreate this famous moment for Saturday Night Live's 25th anniversary special.
Following a whirlwind tour with other Stiff artists (captured on the Live Stiffs album, notable for Costello's recording of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David standard "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself") the band recorded the frenetic, raucous This Year's Model (1978). Some of the more popular tracks include the British hit "(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea" and "Lipstick Vogue". A tour of the US and Canada also saw the release of the much bootlegged promo-only "Live At The El Mocambo," which finally saw an official release as part of the "2 1/2 Years" box set in 1993.
1979 would arguably see the peak of Costello's commercial success with the release of Armed Forces (originally titled "Emotional Fascism"). Both the album and the single "Oliver's Army" went to No. 2 in the UK. Costello also found time in 1979 to produce the debut album for ska band The Specials.
His success in the US was severely bruised, when, during a drunken argument with Bonnie Bramlett in a Columbus, Ohio Holiday Inn hotel bar, Costello referred to James Brown as an "ignorant nigger," then upped the ante by pronouncing Ray Charles a "blind, ignorant nigger." Bramlett and friends had evidently been baiting Costello with derisive comments about British rock music in general and "sawed-off Limey"-type comments aimed at him in particular. A contrite Costello apologised at a New York City press conference a few days later, claiming that he had been drunk and had been attempting to be obnoxious in order to bring the conversation to a swift conclusion, not anticipating that Bramlett would bring his comments to the press. In his liner notes for the expanded version of Get Happy!!, Costello writes that some time after the incident he had declined an offer to meet Charles out of guilt and embarrassment. It is notable that Costello worked extensively in Britain's "Rock Against Racism" campaign both before and after this interlude.
1980s
Get Happy!! would thus be the first, and - along with King Of America - possibly most successful, of Costello's many experiments with genres beyond those he is normally associated with (the single, "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down" was an old Sam and Dave song, though Costello increased the tempo considerably). The brevity of the songs (20 tracks in about 45 minutes) suited the band's new style (the Thomas' typically melodic rhythm section and Nieve's reasonable impersonation of Booker T Jones) as well as the frantic and stressful conditions under which it was written and recorded, crammed between live dates and fuelled by excessive drinking. Lyrically, the songs are full of Costello's signature wordplay, to the point that he later felt he'd become something of a self-parody and toned it down on later releases.
1981's Trust had a more pop sound, but the overall result was clearly affected by the growing tensions within the band, particularly between Bruce and Pete Thomas. Despite its eclecticism ("Different Finger" had a distinct country feel) and pop hooks, Trust was not a major success and the first album since his debut to generate no hit singles.
Following the commercial disappointment of Trust, Costello took a break from songwriting and the band decamped to Nashville to record Almost Blue, an album of country music cover songs written by the likes of Hank Williams ("Why Don't You Love Me (Like You Used To Do?)"), Merle Haggard ("Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down") and Gram Parsons ("How Much I Lied"). It was not a country-rock album (a la The Byrds or Eagles), which might have been more palatable to his established audience and to reviewers, but rather an undiluted country album. It received mixed reviews, some of which accused Costello of growing soft. Perhaps in anticipation of the inevitable accusations of apostasy, the first pressings of the record in the UK bore a sticker with the message:
- "WARNING: This album contains country & western music and may cause offence to narrow minded listeners".
Almost Blue did spawn a surprise UK hit single in a version of Jerry Chesnut's "Good Year For The Roses."
Imperial Bedroom (1982) marked a much darker, almost baroque sound for Costello, due in large part to the production of Geoff Emerick, famed for engineering several Beatles records. Featuring a superior set of songs - both musically and lyrically - it remains one of his most critically acclaimed records but again failed to produce any hit singles. Costello has said he disliked the marketing pitch for the album, weak ads consisting only of the phrase "Masterpiece?". Imperial Bedroom also featured Costello's song "Almost Blue"; jazz singer and trumpeter Chet Baker would later perform and record a beautifully morose version of this song.
1983 saw another sidetrack with the pop-soul of Punch the Clock, featuring female backing vocals (Afrodiziak) and a four piece horn section (The TKO Horns), alongside The Attractions. Clive Langer (who co-produced with Alan Winstanley), provided Costello with a melody which eventually became "Shipbuilding," an oblique and articulate look at the political contradictions of the Falklands War: The controversial military build-up provided jobs for Britain's struggling shipyards. The song featured a striking solo by Chet Baker. (Prior to the release of Costello's own version, an affecting, emotive version of the song was a minor UK hit for former Soft Machine drummer and political activist Robert Wyatt). Equally political was "Pills And Soap" -- a UK hit for Costello himself under the pseudonym of "The Imposter" -- an attack on the changes in British society brought on by Thatcherism, released to coincide with the run-up to the 1983 UK general election. (The electorate were seemingly not swayed.) Punch the Clock also generated an international hit in the single "Everyday I Write the Book," aided by a prophetic music video featuring lookalikes of the Prince and Princess of Wales undergoing domestic strife in a suburban home.
Tensions within the band were beginning to tell, and with Costello starting to feel burnt out he announced his retirement and the disbandment of the group shortly before they were to record Goodbye Cruel World (1984). Costello would later say of this record that they had "got it as wrong as you can in terms of the execution". With a number of poor songs (and even the better songs harmed by murky production), the record was poorly received upon its initial release, and even many ardent Costello fans see Goodbye as his weakest album. Despite the record's poor reputation, a few songs were well-regarded, such as "The Comedians" (later recorded, with rewritten lyrics, by Roy Orbison, and also quoted, in its original version, in Alan Moore's seminal comic series Watchmen). On the album's second single, The Only Flame in Town, Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates shared lead vocals.
Costello's retirement, although short-lived, was accompanied by two compilations, Elvis Costello: The Man in the UK, Europe and Australia and The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions in the USA.
In 1985, Costello teamed up with good friend T-Bone Burnett for a single called "The People's Limousine" under the moniker of The Coward Brothers. That year, Costello also produced Rum, Sodomy and the Lash for the punk/folk band the Pogues. It was then that he met his second wife, Pogues bassist Cait O'Riordan.
By 1986, Costello was preparing to make a comeback. Working in the US with Burnett, a band containing a number of Elvis Presley's sidemen (including James Burton and Jerry Scheff), and minor input from the Attractions, he produced King Of America, an acoustic-guitar-driven album with a country sound, augmented by some of his best songs for some time. Around this time he legally changed his name back to Declan MacManus, adding Aloysius as an extra middle name.
The Attractions felt understandably insecure about their indispensability upon perceiving that their boss had cut a new album largely without them, and was planning to undertake a major tour showcasing the King Of America material with his new musical partners. To allay their fears, Costello retooled his upcoming tour to allow for multiple nights in each city; playing one night with The Confederates (James Burton et al.), one night with The Attractions, and one night solo acoustic. In New York City he played five nights in a row! This arrangement put a strain on fans' stamina and wallets, as many wanted to see as many of the permutations available in their area as possible, not just one.
Later that year, he returned to the studio with the Attractions and recorded Blood and Chocolate, which was lauded for a post-punk fervor not heard since 1978's This Year's Model. It also marked the return of producer Nick Lowe, who had produced Costello's first five albums. It is on this album that Costello adopted the alias "Napoleon Dynamite", the name he later attributed to the character of the obnoxious emcee that he played during the vaudeville-style tour to support Blood and Chocolate. (The pseudonym had previously been used in 1982, when the b-side single "Imperial Bedroom" was credited to "Napoleon Dynamite & The Royal Guard".)
In 1987, Costello, with a new contract with Warner Bros., began a long-running songwriting collaboration with Paul McCartney. They wrote a number of songs together, including Costello's "Veronica" and "Pads, Paws and Claws" from Spike (1989) and "So Like Candy" and "Playboy to a Man" from Mighty Like A Rose (1991) and McCartney's "My Brave Face", "Don't Be Careless Love", "That Day Is Done" and "You Want Her Too" from Flowers in the Dirt and "The Lovers That Never Were" and "Mistress and Maid" from Off The Ground. In 1989, he appeared on the HBO special Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and White Night, which featured his long-time idol Roy Orbison, and was invited back to Saturday Night Live for the first time since 1977.
1990s
In 1991 Costello released the aforementioned Mighty Like A Rose, during which time he infamously grew a long beard.
In 1993, Costello tested the waters of classical music with a critically acclaimed collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet on The Juliet Letters. Costello would return to rock and roll the following year with a project that reunited him with The Attractions, Brutal Youth. An album of cover songs recorded 5 years previously was released in 1995, Kojak Variety, followed in 1996 by an album of songs he had originally written for other artists, All This Useless Beauty. This was the final album of his Warner Bros. contract.
He collaborated with Burt Bacharach in 1996 on a song called "God Give Me Strength" for the movie Grace of My Heart. That collaboration led the pair to write and record an album together, Painted From Memory, released in 1998 under his new contract with Mercury Records.
For the 25th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, Costello was invited to the program, where he re-enacted his abrupt song-switch: This time, however, he interrupted the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage", and they acted as his backing group for "Radio, Radio".
2000 to present
In 2001, Costello was announced as the featured "artist in residence" at UCLA (although he ended up making fewer appearances than expected) and wrote the music for a new ballet. He produced and appeared on an album of songs for opera singer Anne Sofie von Otter, For The Stars.
In 2002 he released a new album, When I Was Cruel, and toured with a new band, the Imposters (the Attractions with a different bass player, Davey Faragher, formerly of Cracker). Costello split with second wife Cait O'Riordan toward the end of the year.
In March 2003, Elvis Costello & The Attractions were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In May, his engagement to Canadian jazz singer and pianist Diana Krall was announced. September saw the release of North, an album of piano-based ballads concerning the breakdown of his former marriage, and his falling in love with Krall. In December, Costello and Krall married at the London estate of Elton John. In 2004, the song "Scarlet Tide" (co-written by Costello and T-Bone Burnett and used in the film Cold Mountain) was nominated for an Academy Award; he performed it at the awards ceremony with Alison Krauss, who also sang the song on the official soundtrack.
In July 2004 Costello's first full-scale orchestral work, Il Sogno, was performed in New York. The work, a ballet after Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, was commissioned by Italian dance troupe Aterballeto, and received critical acclaim from the classical music critics, while being scorned by the popular music press. Whilst composing it, Costello deliberately avoided listening to the previous interpretations by Mendelssohn and Britten in order to ensure his own originality. A range of musical moods and styles are used to represent the different elements of the cast - satirical pomp for the courtiers, jazz for the faeries, and for Bottom a deliberately intrusive "brass band" motif. It was released on CD in September by Deutsche Grammophon.
Costello released another album that same month: The Delivery Man, a rock album recorded in Oxford, Mississippi. Mainly blues, country, and folk, The Delivery Man received early acclaim as one of Costello's best albums, and continues Elvis' personal quest to release an album on each of Universal's record labels.
In November 2005 Costello will start recording a new album with Allen Toussaint and producer Joe Henry.
Discography
Albums
- 1977 - My Aim Is True (UK #14, US #32)
- 1978 - This Year's Model (UK #4, US #30)
- 1979 - Armed Forces (UK #2, US #10)
- 1980 - Get Happy!! (UK #2, US #11)
- 1981 - Trust (UK #9, US #28)
- 1981 - Almost Blue (UK #7, US #50)
- 1982 - Imperial Bedroom (UK #6, US #30)
- 1983 - Punch the Clock (UK #3, US #24)
- 1984 - Goodbye Cruel World (UK #10, US #35)
- 1986 - King of America (UK #11, US #39)
- 1986 - Blood and Chocolate (UK #16, US #84)
- 1989 - Spike (UK #5, US #32)
- 1991 - Mighty Like a Rose (UK #5, US #55)
- 1993 - The Juliet Letters (UK #18)
- 1994 - Brutal Youth (UK #2, US #34)
- 1995 - Kojak Variety (UK #21)
- 1996 - All This Useless Beauty (UK #28, US #53)
- 1996 - Costello & Nieve
- 1998 - Painted from Memory, with Burt Bacharach (UK #32, US #78)
- 2002 - When I Was Cruel (US #20)
- 2002 - Cruel Smile
- 2003 - North (UK #44, US #57, US Traditional Jazz #1)
- 2004 - The Delivery Man (US #40)
- 2004 - Il Sogno
Collections
- 1980 - Taking Liberties
- 1980 - Ten Bloody Marys & Ten How's Your Fathers
- 1987 - Out of Our Idiot
- 1993 - 2½ Years
- 1999 - The Very Best Of Elvis Costello (2-CD) (UK #4)
- 2003 - Singles, Volume 1
- 2003 - Singles, Volume 2
- 2003 - Singles, Volume 3
This section is incomplete.
Rhino Reissues
All Costello's studio albums up until 1996 (with the exception, as of this writing, of The Juliet Letters) were reissued from 2001 to 2005 by Rhino Records (which constituted the second set of re-releases after Ryko (US) and Demon (UK) had done so from 1993 to 1995), under the guidance of Mr. Costello himself and featuring, in each case, a bonus disc of b-sides, outtakes, live tracks, alternate versions and/or demos of songs. The sound was remastered for each album and Costello wrote new liner notes about his thoughts on the music and anecdotes from the period when it was recorded.
The Almost Blue and Kojak Variety bonus discs were particularly notable as each contained, essentially, an entire new album's worth of material also performed but either not issued, or released as b-sides on singles originally.
The Get Happy bonus disc was also of note, with 30 additional tracks, bringing the total for the 2-disc set to 50 songs.
Tribute Albums
- 1998 - Bespoke Songs, Lost Dogs, Detours & Rendezvous - (various artists)
- 2002 - Almost You: The Songs of Elvis Costello - (various artists)
- 2003 - The Elvis Costello Songbook - Bonnie Brett
- 2004 - A Tribute to Elvis Costello - Patrik Tanner
Singles
| Year | Title | Chart Positions | Album | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US Hot 100 | US Modern Rock | |||
| 1983 | "Everyday I Write the Book" (with The Attractions) | #65 | - | Punch the Clock |
| 1989 | "Veronica" | - | #1 (2 weeks) | Spike |
| 1989 | "...This Town..." | - | #4 | Spike |
| 1991 | "The Other Side of Summer" | - | #1 (4 weeks) | Mighty Like a Rose |
| 1994 | "13 Steps Lead Down" | - | #6 | Brutal Youth |
Filmography
- 1979 film debut as 'Earl Manchester' in Americathon
- 1984 as 'Henry Scully' in UK TV series Scully
- 1985 as inept magician 'Rosco de Ville' in Alan Bleasdale film No Surrender
- 1987 as 'Hives the Butler' in Alex Cox film Straight to Hell, starring Joe Strummer and Courtney Love
- 1997 as himself in Spice World
- 1999 as himself in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, performing with Burt Bacharach
- 1999 as himself in 200 Cigarettes
- 2001 as a public defender and a teacher in Prison Song,
- 2002 as himself in How I Spent My Strummer Vacation, an episode of The Simpsons
- 2003 Academy Award nomination for best original song The Scarlet Tide in Cold Mountain.
- 2003 as 'Ben' in the Frasier episode "Farewell, Nervosa"
- 2003 as guest host on The Late Show with David Letterman
- 2004 performing the Cole Porter song "Let's Misbehave" in De-Lovely