An arrest outside of a CBS convention. A protest pop icon with a racist
blemish. A cancer blown out of proportion. From unconventional beginnings to healthier endings,
keep watching to discover the truth behind Elvis Costello’s eventful life!
Elvis Costello was born Declan MacManus on August 25, 1954 in the Paddington area
of London. In 1971, he moved with his mother Lillian to Birkenhead,
just across the river from her hometown of Liverpool.
Costello's father Ross MacManus was also a musician. His group,
the Joe Loss orchestra, was known as the U.K.'s biggest dance band in their heyday.
His son would gain his first taste of fame as his backing singer on the famous jingle
"I'm A Secret Lemonade Drinker," which became well known in the country in 1974.
But according to Costello, his mother was the real music expert in the family,
as she worked in a local record store and passed her encyclopedic knowledge down to her son.
Costello's own musical talent grew throughout the early 1970s,
as he showcased his abilities on the local pub rock circuit. His
father advised the young musician to avoid drawing attention to his family's musical
history. But despite his connections, Costello was far from an industry plant.
His early years as a musician were fraught with financial difficulty. By 1974, he was
married to his first wife Mary, and they welcomed their first child, Matthew, shortly thereafter.
Costello was scraping out a living with irregular live performances in local pubs
and sending a string of demos to British record companies. But he also worked a
number of day jobs, including at a bank and a cosmetics company. Mary was also working,
but they failed to make ends meet, and were forced to move in with her family
to get by until he finally secured a record deal with Stiff Records.
Costello's early singles "Less Than Zero" and "Alison" initially failed to chart,
but then the U.K. release of his debut album My Aim Is True in 1977 made him a celebrity. On the
week of its release, he and his new backing band, the Attractions, headed to London.
The visit was accompanied by a shrewd stunt in which Costello
performed an unannounced gig in the street outside the convention
of CBS Records at London's Hilton Hotel. He was arrested for busking,
but he also caught the attention of American record executives, and he was then signed to CBS.
Costello soon became a prominent figure in the early stages of the
so-called second British invasion of the American charts. He was booked
to perform with the Attractions on Saturday Night Live, an appearance
that promised to cement his position as a regular fixture on American airwaves.
But things didn't exactly go smoothly. Originally booked to
play "Less Than Zero," they defied producers by switching to the caustic number "Radio,
Radio," which railed against the commercialization of the music industry.
"I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, there's no reason to do this song here."
Costello was subsequently banned from SNL and wouldn’t appear on the show
for more than a decade. Despite the incident, the mishap put Costello
firmly in the music press and his record sales went through the roof.
"Alison" was released as a single prior to the release of Elvis Costello's debut album,
and it's since become a fan favorite and a staple in his live performances. Much
of its appeal rests on the mystery of the woman in the title. Who exactly is Alison?
The answer has eluded fans for decades. As Costello wrote in his autobiography:
"I've always told people that I wrote the song 'Alison' after seeing a beautiful
checkout girl at the local supermarket. She had a face for which a ship might have once
been named. ... Now she was punching in the prices on cans of beans at a
cash register and looking as if all the hopes and dreams of her youth were draining away."
But the song was really a reflection of Costello's own life. At the time he was writing it,
he was still working a day job, and his dreams of pop stardom had to contend with the reality
of his responsibilities as a husband and father. As he put it in his autobiography,
"Would you like a song less or would you like a
song more if you knew exactly the identity of ... 'Alison'?"
Costello quickly earned a reputation as one of pop music's "angry young
men," whose invective on record was matched by a disdain for the
music industry he was attempting to navigate. In his early years,
he kindled an uneasy relationship with the music press on both sides of the Atlantic.
"We hear so many things, that you don't like doing them."
"I like them when I can do the talking."
One of Costello's major frustrations was arguably a consequence of his own
particular pop-friendly genius. His production and songwriting were so catchy that relatively
few of his fans were picking up on the serious lyricism underpinning his most famous songs.
"This Year's Girl," for example, was criticized by some as misogynistic,
though Costello later clarified that it was meant as a critique of the male gaze.
No song better demonstrates Costello's ability to fill a pop song with caustic
lyricism than "Oliver's Army," a single from his 1979 album Armed Forces. It evokes English
Civil War leader Oliver Cromwell to comment on the contemporary conflict in Northern Ireland.
Costello and his team also looked to the charts for inspiration, and so instrumentation derived
from ABBA's "Dancing Queen" sugar-coated one of Costello's bitterest pills. Despite it
being a bitter pill to swallow, “Oliver’s Army” reached No. 2 in the U.K. charts.
As if Elvis Costello didn't have enough on his plate in the late 70s, he also found time to
become a guiding hand in one of the U.K.'s most important musical movements. That would be 2 Tone,
a London-based ska revival incorporating contemporary punk elements that became
the soundtrack of a country struggling under the weight of a deep recession.
In 1979, Britain was contending with homegrown fascism, and 2 Tone played
an important part in promoting the nation as a multicultural melting pot. Costello ingratiated
himself in the ska revival scene and came to produce the debut album of the Specials,
a socially-conscious ska group made up of both Black and white members.
The album was a hit, and Costello's production helped to define the raw
studio sound that lent the genre its enduring authenticity and appeal.
He had this to share with the Guardian about his production experience, saying:
“I thought it was my job to learn everything I could about the band before some more
technically capable producer f–-ed it all up and took the fun and danger out of it.”
Costello's backing band the Attractions consisted of keyboardist Steve Nieve,
drummer Pete Thomas, and bassist Bruce Thomas, no relation to Pete.
They're credited as being instrumental in forming the sound that would come to
define their band leader's career. But while they undoubtedly clicked on a musical level,
their working relationship was often fraught, especially when it came to Costello and Bruce
Thomas. As Thomas recounted during a 2021 interview with Wisconsin Public Radio:
"When he asked who my favorite band was via the woman that answered the phone, I said,
'Steely Dan,' and I heard this voice at the other end saying, 'Get rid of him,
get rid of him,' and [Costello's assistant] say, 'No, he sounds OK.'"
"You have been described, by people who have written of you,
as being an angry man. Have you w-"
"Oh, well, you can see that."
And in 1997, Thomas explained to Bass Player Magazine:
"It was always a bit intense with Elvis because he's such
an intensely demanding person — not just artistically, but personally."
The Attractions split in 1986, with Costello intent on working with other musicians,
but the animosity continued. Costello took aim at his former bandmate in the 1991 track
"How To Be Dumb," and Thomas retaliated with a brutal takedown of Costello in his memoir.
Those tensions seem to have been resolved since then,
though, with Costello talking highly of his former bassist in his own autobiography.
During his early years in the public eye, Elvis Costello made a reputation for himself
as combative, confrontational, and uncooperative, though his songwriting talent ensured he enjoyed
mass appeal. But in 1979, one shocking incident threatened to ruin his career irredeemably.
Costello and the Attractions were on tour in the U.S. at the time,
and they found themselves sharing the bar at the Holiday Inn in Columbus,
Ohio with members of the Stephen Stills Band. A generation older than Costello and his new
wave compatriots, tensions soon rose to a boiling point, with Costello drunkenly
disparaging the American music heritage that Stills and his band belonged to.
Costello reportedly particularly overstepped when he referred to James Brown and Ray Charles by the
n-word, and he was then promptly struck across the face by Stills' backing singer Bonnie Bramlett.
As the story gained traction, Costello was forced to face the press he had for
so long opposed. The incident, as well as his truculent non-apology, put the brakes on his
career stateside. It's remained a blemish on his reputation, despite his involvement in
numerous anti-racist campaigns before and since. As he eventually admitted in his autobiography:
"Never mind excuses, there are no excuses."
After making his name as a pop-punk hit machine,
Costello's musical palette widened. By the mid-80s, his music was slowing in tempo,
as he was referencing jazz great Chet Baker as an indication of his expanding sound. In
the years that followed, Costello has accrued a discography of more than 30
studio albums across multiple genres, from pop and punk to country and western and classical.
For many artists, this diversity would make it difficult to put together a coherent live setlist.
But Costello has come up with an ingenious method of ensuring his back catalog gets a fair shake.
It's called the "spectacular spinning songbook," a gimmick that he first employed in the 80s.
He and his musicians are joined on stage by a huge wheel, on which 40 of his best-loved
songs are written. Audience members are then invited up to "spin the wheel for
England" and choose which song from Costello's extensive back catalog the band plays next.
"It calls for us to know about 50 songs for that game to work. We
don't have any preconceived ideas about when a song is coming up."
As his ample discography and continued live performances demonstrate,
Elvis Costello has shown no signs of slowing down,
even more than four decades after he first emerged on the world stage. That is, until 2018,
when he announced to the world that he was pulling out of his remaining summer tour as a result of
prostate cancer. He announced that the diagnosis was like, quote, "entering into the unknown."
Costello also reportedly described the cancer as "​​a small but very aggressive cancerous
malignancy”. While his fans waited for more details of his condition,
he made it clear that he was far from pleased
by the ensuing press speculation that followed. As he announced at the time:
"It was a little upsetting to members of my family and friends about some of the hysterical versions
of the reports, tabloids in particular love to dramatize and have no sense of responsibility."
Fortunately, Costello and his fans soon had cause for celebration, as he declared:
"No, I'm not dying!"
His surgery was a complete success, and he's since released two more studio albums,
2018's Look Now and 2020's Hey Clockface, and he also continues to tour to sellout crowds.
"How's your health?"
"I'm great!"
In March 2020, Elvis Costello returned to Liverpool's historic Olympia Theater for
a homecoming gig. The city is the birthplace of both of his parents,
and it's also where he made his first musical steps.
The show earned rave reviews from major British news outlets, partly because
of one particularly personal element. In the audience was Costello's beloved mother Lillian,
who had instilled an everlasting love and encyclopedic knowledge of popular music
in her son. She'd recently fallen ill, and her presence was warmly applauded by Costello's fans.
Then in February 2021, Costello announced on his Facebook page that Lillian had passed
away. In the 3,000-word post, he described his mother's eventful life and the profound
influence she had on him throughout his childhood and career. As he put it:
"I have known several people who never knew the love of their mother or endured a painful or even
violent relationship with a parent. I have so much for which I have to thank my mother.
There is not enough to show my gratitude for all she gave to me,
teaching me or handing on to me so many things."