Imagine, if you will, a man living two completely
distinct lives. In one life, he is a quiet, bespectacled
computer operator in 1970s London. Right. He
spends his days in this deafeningly loud air
-conditioned room, logging data for a bank, you
know, worrying about making rent, going home
to his wife and young child. And this man is
Declan Patrick McManus. Exactly. But then there's
this other life. And in the other life, he is
a figure who seems to have been engineered in
a laboratory specifically to start fights. Yeah.
He operates under a name that feels like a deliberate
provocation, a name that hijacked the king of
rock and roll and paired it with a vibe that
was, I don't know, equal parts gangster and stand
-up comic. And that man is Elvis Costello. That's
him. It is a massive dichotomy. Usually when
we talk about rock stars on this show, we focus
on the star part. Sure, the excess, the stadiums.
We talk about the private jets, the sold out
stadiums, the excess. But today, we aren't just
doing a greatest hits run through. We have a
very specific mission. We do. Our goal for this
deep dive is to deconstruct the architecture
of a career that, by all conventional logic,
really shouldn't have worked. How so? Well. We're
looking at how a guy who looked more like a confused
librarian or, I don't know, a disgruntled accountant
managed to bridge the gap between the raw, spit
-flying energy of 1977 punk rock and the sophisticated,
complex songwriting of Tin Pan Alley. And just
to pause there for a second, Tin Pan Alley, that's
a term we hear a lot, but let's just ground it
for a second. Yeah. We're talking about that
golden era of American songwriting, early 20th
century, right? Exactly. It refers to the collection
of music publishers and songwriters in New York
City who just dominated. pop music before rock
and roll came along. So people like Gershwin.
We're talking about George Gershwin, Irving Berlin,
Cole Porter. The music was structured, it was
melodic, and lyrically it was incredibly witty.
Which is a far cry from the three -chord thrash
of the Sex Pistols. A million miles away, and
yet our subject today, Elvis Costello, somehow
embodies both of those worlds simultaneously.
That is the central tension we're exploring.
How does one man go from sharing a stage with
The Clash to writing a ballet score? Or how do
you pivot from being the angry young man to collaborating
with Burt Bacharach? It's wild. To get to the
bottom of this, we are pulling from a massive
stack of sources today. We have definitive biographies,
session notes from the recording studios, decades
of interviews, and crucially, his own incredibly
dense and fascinating memoir, Unfaithful Music
and Disappearing Ink. That memoir is a goldmine.
It's not your typical sex, drugs, and rock and
roll tell -all. No, not at all. It's more like
a treatise on musicology written by someone who
just happened to be famous. And I have to say,
the sheer volume of material here is staggering.
We're talking about a guy who claimed to have
written hundreds of songs before his first album
even dropped. Not dozens, hundreds. Hundreds.
And that volume is your first clue to understanding
him. As we work through this, I want you to keep
an eye out for the why. The motivation behind
it all. Yeah. Why the constant name changes?
Why the obsession with wordplay? And why the
refusal to stay in one musical lane? It's not
just restlessness. It's a fundamental philosophy
about what music is. So let's start at the source.
To understand the why, we have to go back to
the who. Back to Declan McManus. Declan McManus.
And specifically, the house he grew up in. Because
in the McManus household, music wasn't a hobby,
was it? Far from it. In the McManus house, music
was a trade. It was a job. It was blue -collar
work. Exactly, just like plumbing or carpentry.
His father, Ross McManus, was a professional
musician. He was a trumpet player and a vocalist
with the Joe Loss Orchestra. Now, for those who
might not be up on their mid -century British
band leaders, the Jolas Orchestra wasn't just
some local garage band. Oh, no. This was a massive
institution. Huge. They were one of the most
popular big bands of the era in Britain. But
more importantly for our story, they had a residency
on the radio. They had a weekly show where they
had to play the hits of the day. So they were
essentially a human jukebox. Right. A live Spotify
playlist. Precisely. They were the Spotify of
their time. If the Beatles had a new hit on Monday,
Ross McManus had to learn it by Wednesday to
sing it on the air by Friday. Which meant he
was bringing home the source material. So Ross
would come home on a Tuesday with a stack of
demo records, acetate discs of the current top
40. Motown tracks, Merseybeat, whatever was charting.
Which means young Declan is sitting there getting
early exclusive access to the best pop music
in the world. But he's not just listening to
it like a fan, is he? No, and this is the crucial
distinction. He's not sitting there mesmerized
by the magic of the Beatles. He is watching his
father dissect these songs for work. He's watching
him figure out the chord changes, the vocal phrasing,
the structure. He's seeing the mechanics of how
a hit song is built. It completely changes your
relationship with art. It demystifies it. It
turns it from magic into engineering. It creates
a sense of detachment that served him so well.
He said later, That's why I know so many songs.
He learned that a song is something you construct,
not just something that falls out of the sky.
It's a craft. It's a craft. And there's a delightful,
almost bizarre detail in the notes that perfectly
illustrates this working musician mentality.
The secret lemonade drinker. I was hoping we'd
get to this. This is a legendary piece of trivia
that I feel like every Costello fan knows, but
the casual listener will be shocked by. It really
is a gem. So in 1973, Ross McManus got a gig
to sing a jingle for R. White's Lemonade. A huge
ad in the UK at the time. It became a cult classic
ad, a guy in pajamas sneaking downstairs in the
middle of the night to drink lemonade. Ron is
singing the lead vocal, but if you listen very
closely to the backing vocals. That high -pitched,
I'm a secret lemonade drinker. That backing voice
is a young Elvis Costello, or rather, Declan
McManus. No way. He was dragged along to the
studio by his dad to do the gig it wasn't art
it wasn't about expressing his soul it was a
paycheck it was a paycheck it's a perfect example
of that trade mentality you show up you sing
the jingle you get paid and it wasn't just his
dad his mom lillian was also in the business,
but from the retail side. Yes. Lillian managed
the record department at Selfridges, a big department
store. She had what they call an insider's ear.
So she knew it was good. She was the one curating
the sounds in the house, bringing home jazz records,
encouraging his curiosity. There's a story that
she actually predicted his career before he was
born simply because the environment was so saturated
with music. So you have the father. providing
the technical discipline, the how -to, and the
mother. providing the access and the encouragement.
And going back even further, his grandfather,
Pat McManus, was an orphan who learned trumpet
in the army and played on the White Star Line
cruise ships. The Titanic's cruise line. The
very same. So for Declan, picking up a guitar
wasn't an act of rebellion against his parents,
which is the standard rock star trope. Right,
the I'm going to show them narrative. For him,
it was joining the family business. Which brings
us to the computer operator legend. This is one
of those rock myths that needs a bit of busting
or at least some context. You always hear the
story. Elvis Costello was just a boring office
drone, a computer operator, and then poof, he's
a rock star. But the reality is a little more
nuanced, right? It is. He absolutely worked as
a computer operator. He worked at Midland Bank
in Boodle and later at the Elizabeth Arden Cosmetics
Factory. Cosmetics Factory. Seriously. Seriously.
But we have to contextualize what computer operator
meant in the earth. We're not talking about a
guy sitting at a sweet desk with a MacBook sipping
a latte at a WeWork. Not at all. We are talking
about noisy. air -conditioned rooms, housing
massive mainframe computers. Okay. The IBM 360s.
These were room -sized machines that used giant
reels of magnetic tape and punch cards. Oh, wow.
Punch cards. These machines were deafeningly
loud. The hum of the cooling fans, the clatter
of the card readers, the spinning of the tape
drive. It's an industrial environment. It's closer
to working in a factory than an office. Completely
industrial. And here's the key insight that connects
his job to his music. These computers were slow.
Right. You would load a deck of lunch cards,
hit run, and then you had to wait. There was
significant lag time while the machine processed
the data. You can't really chat with your coworkers
because of all that noise. Exactly. So you have
a young man full of creative energy standing
in a loud, rhythmic environment with 10 or 15
minute bursts of free time where he has to look
busy that has nothing to do. So what did he do?
He wrote songs in his head. He's getting paid
by the bank to write. watching the detectives
inside his own brain. Essentially, yes. And if
you look at his early lyrical style, it's very
staccato. Lots of wordplay, rapid -fire images.
Yeah, you can hear that. Some musicologists argue
that the rhythm of those noisy printers and the
isolation of that computer room actually influenced
the cadence of his writing. He wasn't noodling
on a guitar in a bedroom. He was constructing
verses to the rhythm of a machine. That is fascinating.
It's industrial music before industrial was a
genre. And he kept these jobs for a long time,
right? He didn't quit the moment he wrote a good
song. No, he was risk -verse. He had a wife and
a child. He kept his job at the Elizabeth Arden
factory until just weeks before his first album,
My Aim Is True, was released. That's incredible.
He wasn't an amateur dabbling. He was a prolific
writer masquerading as a bank clerk. But he was
trying to get bands going during this time. He
had a folk duo called Rusty. With Alan Mays,
they played schools, folk clubs, very much in
that kind of singer -songwriter mold. And later
he formed Flip City, which was a pub rock band.
Pub rock is a term we should probably define
for the listener. It's very specific to the UK
in the mid -70s, isn't it? It is, and it's important.
Pub rock was a reaction against the bloated prog
rock of the era. You know, the 20 -minute drum
solos, the capes. the fantasy lyric about wizards.
Right, all the excess. Pub rock was back to basics.
R &B, rock and roll played in small bars. It
was sweaty, simple, and fun. Bands like Dr. Feelgood.
So Flip City is playing these pubs, trying to
get people to dance while they drink their pints.
They were. And they were actually playing early
versions of songs that would become Costello
hits, like Miracle Man and Radio Radio. Oh, really?
That early? Yeah, but they were playing them
loosely. They weren't going anywhere fast. Declan
realized that to break out, he needed a change.
He needed a vehicle. Enter Stiff Records. Jake
Riviera and Dave Robinson. These guys were the
ultimate disruptors of the London music scene.
Absolutely. They weren't just record executives.
They were provocateurs. You were chaos agents.
They looked at Declan McManus, this slightly
chubby guy with glasses on a desperate intensity,
and they saw something. But not the name. No,
they knew Declan McManus wasn't a name that was
going to sell records to teenagers. So they give
him the name, Elvis. It was audacious. In 1977,
Elvis Presley was still alive, though he was
in decline. He was the king. You don't just take
that name. Taking that name was considered sacrilege
to some people. It was like calling yourself
Jesus Jones. But to stiff records, it was just
a shock tactic. It was a way to make people look
twice at a poster. And... Costello didn't care
about the comparison. He didn't feel weird about
stepping on the king's toes. He really didn't.
To him, names were just costumes. His dad used
a stage name day Costello for some of his work,
so he took the Elvis from Presley to shock people
and the Costello from his dad to ground it. A
perfect combination of blasphemy and tradition.
You could say that, but then Stiff did something
else. They crafted the look. The glasses. The
iconic black framed spectacles. He actually needed
glasses to see. He wore rimless ones usually.
But Jake Riviera took him out and bought him
those heavy black framed Buddy Holly glasses.
Ah, so that was a deliberate choice. Oh, completely.
They cut his hair short. They put him in ill
-fitting suits, emphasizing a sort of knock -kneed
awkwardness. It was a very specific aesthetic.
Buddy Holly on acid. It was nerdy, but it was
aggressive. It was weaponized nerdiness. It said,
I might look like a computer operator, but I
am smart. It was the perfect counter -programming
to the sex symbols of the 70s like Robert Plant
or Peter Frampton. So now we have the name, we
have the look, and we have the songs written
on the bank's dime. It's 1977. We get the debut
album, My Aim Is True. A landmark record. And
the recording process is a marvel of efficiency.
It was recorded in six four -hour sessions. Six
four -hour sessions. That's 24 hours total studio
time. For the whole album. That is absurdly fast.
Most bands spend 24 hours just getting the drum
sound right. It cost about a thousand pounds
to make. And remember, he's calling in sick to
the factory to do this. Incredible. But here
is a detail that often trips people up. The backing
band on My Aim Is True is not the attractions.
Right. The famous backing band comes later. So
who were these guys playing on the debut? It
was a band called Clover. And get this, they
were an American country rock band from California.
Wait, what? California country rockers playing
on a British new wave punk album? That makes
no sense. It was an accident of history. They
were in London, stiff records had access to them,
and they needed a band. This is why, if you listen
to My Aim Is True carefully, it has a slightly
different feel than his later stuff. How so?
Listen to the guitar on Allison. It's jangly,
it's soulful, it's not punk. It has that West
Coast laid back proficiency. But there is one
track on the album where the sound shifts. Yeah.
Watching the detectives. That is the pivot point.
He recorded that separately. He said that was
the first time he felt he was making a record
rather than just capturing a song. And what was
different about it? It was heavily influenced
by The Clash's debut album, which he had just
heard, and fascinatingly by Bernard Herrmann's
film scores. Bernard Herrmann, the guy who did
the music for Psycho and Vertigo. The master
of tension. Costello wanted that cinematic creepiness.
You can hear it in the reggae -influenced bassline
and that jarring staccato organ. And the lyrics
are so dark. It's a song about watching someone
watch violence on TV. It's meta, it's dark, and
it was the sign of things to come. So the album
comes out, the critics love it, but now he has
to tour. And Clover, the California Country Boys,
go home. Right. He needs a band that can match
his intensity. He needs the attractions. And
he didn't just want a backing band. He wanted
a weapon. He held auditions and found three musicians
who would define his sound for the next decade.
Let's break down this lineup because their chemistry
is essential to understanding why Costello worked.
First, you have Steve Neve on keyboards. He was
a 19 -year -old student at the Royal College
of Music. Classically trained. Yeah, and he hadn't
really played in a rock band. He brought this
incredibly ornate... almost carnival -esque organ
sound. He could go from playing a fairground
waltz to a piercing new wave riff in seconds.
Then Bruce Thomas on bass. The experienced pro.
He had played with bands like Sutherland Brothers
and Quiver. He played melodic bass lines. He
wasn't just thumping the root note. He was playing
counter melodies. That danced around the vocals.
It was brilliant. And Pete Thomas on drums. Who
Elvis and many critics have called the best rock
drummer in the world. Pete Thomas played with
a ferocity that was frightening. He could play
fast, but he could swing. Oh, you put those three
together with Costello's rhythm guitar? And you
got a chemical reaction. A controlled explosion.
This leads us into the golden run. 1978's This
Year's Model and 1979's Armed Forces. This Year's
Model is just relentless energy. It's sonic assault.
Costello described it as a ghost version of the
Rolling Stones' aftermath. What does that mean,
a ghost version? He wanted it stripped down,
no reverb, no production tricks, just the band
in a room playing hard. Raw and direct. This
is where we get pump it up. An absolute anthem.
And the story behind it is so perfectly Elvis.
He wrote it on a fire escape step in Newcastle.
He was on the Stiff Life Stiffs Tour, which was
this debauched, alcohol -fueled traveling circus.
So he's seeing all this bad behavior, rock and
roll excess. He's watching everyone indulge in
what he called idiotic rock and roll decadence.
And he writes this thumping, sarcastic song about
it. Pump it up until you can feel it. It sounds
like a party song. But it's actually a critique.
And then Armed Forces in 1979, the sound changes
again. It gets shinier, more polished. Emotional
fascism. Wow. ABA. The Swedish pop superstars.
I would not have guessed that. Absolutely. And
Kraftwerk, the German electronic pioneers. Also
David Bowie's Berlin albums. Costello was obsessed
with the production value of ABBA. You can hear
it now that you say it. Listen to the piano lines
in Oliver's Army. It's pure glittering pop. It
bounces. And ironically, Oliver's Army became
his biggest selling UK single. It sold over half
a million copies. Which is wild because the lyrics
are about the troubles in Northern Ireland and
the exploitation of working class soldiers. He
was inspired by seeing British soldiers in Belfast.
So you have this incredibly catchy ABBA -esque
melody masking a song about geopolitical conflict
and imperialism. That is the Costello trademark.
Sugar -coated poison pills. You're humming along
and then you realize you're singing about mercenaries.
He tricks you into listening to the message.
Now, we can't talk about this era without talking
about the moment America met Elvis Costello,
Saturday Night Live, December 1977. Legendary.
So, the Sex Pistols were supposed to perform,
but they couldn't get visas in time. Right, they
were too controversial. SNL needs a replacement.
They call Columbia Records, and they get Elvis
Costello. He's the backup punk. Right. And the
label explicitly tells him. Play Less Than Zero.
It was a song from his first album. But there
was a problem with Less Than Zero for an American
audience, wasn't there? Huge problem. The song
is about Oswald Mosley. a British fascist leader
from the 1930s. Americans had no idea who that
was. It would have just gone over everyone's
heads. Costello knew it would land flat. He wanted
to play Radio Radio, a new song that was a biting
attack on corporate media control and censorship.
A song that bites the hand that feeds it, essentially.
But the SNL producers, including Lorne Michaels,
said absolutely not. They forbade it. So showtime
comes. The band starts playing Less Than Zero.
They get a few bars in. And then he does the
thing. He turns to the band, slashes his hand
across his throat, and stops them. The studio
goes silent. I can't imagine the panic in the
control room. He walks up to the mic and says,
I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, there's no reason
to do this song here. And he screams, radio,
radio. And the band launches into it. Live on
national television. You have to understand the
pressure of live TV. The control room must have
been in absolute chaos. Lorne Michaels was furious.
Costello was flipping the bird to the entire
network infrastructure. In the fallout. He was
banned from SNL for over a decade. He didn't
come back. until 1989. Wow. It killed his relationship
with the show, but it made his career. It cemented
his image as the guy who couldn't be controlled,
the punk who wouldn't listen to the suits. It's
such a heroic moment in rock history. But as
we move into 1979, that rebellious energy takes
a very dark, very ugly turn. We have to talk
about the crash. We do. This is the turning point
of the deep dive. The Columbus incident. This
was in Ohio, March 1979. Right. He's on a high
-stress U .S. tour. He's drinking heavily. He's
exhausted. And he ends up in a Holiday Inn bar
in Columbus. Okay. Also in the bar are members
of Stephen Stills' band, Stephen Stills from
Crosby, Stills & Nash. So you have the old guard,
American rockers, and the new ways, British punk.
Oil and water. And it turns into an argument.
Bonnie Bramlett, a backing singer, is there.
They are arguing about music, about America versus
England. And Costello, in an attempt to be, as
he put it, outrageous and to end the argument
by making them hate him. He goes too far. He
uses racial slurs to describe James Brown and
Ray Charles. We need to be very clear here. The
words he used were horrific. But we also need
to report what the sources say about his intent.
Right. Costello has always maintained that those
words were the exact opposite of what he actually
felt. He claimed he was just saying the most
offensive thing he could think of to trigger
a reaction. That is his account, and it's supported
by his history of working with Rock Against Racism
before the incident. But words have power, regardless
of intent. The press picked up the story weeks
later. And the fallout was catastrophic. It was
a nuclear bomb for his career in America. He
went from being the cool righteous rebel to a
pariah. His records were pulled from radio playlists.
He received death threats. He had to do a press
conference. He had to hold a press conference
where he apologized, calling the remarks obnoxious
and offensive. But the stain remained for a long
time. And this brings us back to the why we talked
about earlier. Why did he change his sound so
drastically in 1980? You can draw a straight
line from that Holiday Inn bar to his next album.
You absolutely can. The angry young man persona
was dead. It had eaten itself. He couldn't play
that character anymore. So he pivots. He pivots
hard. He releases Get Happy in 1980. Which is
a soul and R &B record. A complete left turn.
It's 20 tracks of Stax -influenced, Motown -influenced
music. It was a complete departure. It was almost
an act of musical penance. An apology through
music. You could see it that way. He was engaging
deeply and respectfully with the very music,
Black American music, that he had insulted in
that drunken stupor. And the sheer density of
that album. 20 songs on a single vinyl LP. How
did that even work? It was crammed. The grooves
on the vinyl were so close together you had to
turn the volume up on your stereo to hear it
properly. It was frantic, soulful, and brilliant.
And he doesn't stop shifting. Trust in 1981 and
then Imperial Bedroom in 1982. Imperial Bedroom
is often called his masterpiece. It's the moment
he stops being a punk and become the composer.
It was produced by Jeff Emmerich. The Beatles
engineer. The guy who did Straight Pepper. That's
the one. Costello wanted to use the studio as
an instrument. The production is complex, layered.
What kind of things was he doing? Accordions,
harpsichords, intricate vocal harmonies. They
call it Baroque pop. It's miles away from the
three -chord aggression of My Aim is True. He
was proving he had the vocabulary of a classical
composer, not just a pub rocker. This brings
us to the segment of his career where he becomes
the chameleon. I feel like in the 80s and 90s,
if you bought an Elvis Costello album, You were
playing a game of roulette. You had no idea what
genre you were going to get. Yeah. And nothing
illustrates that better than Almost Blue in 1981.
The country album. The country album. Recorded
in Nashville. An album of covers. George Jones.
Merle Haggard. And remember, this is a UK new
wave guy. The reception was expected to be so
hostile that the UK pressing actually had a warning
label on the cover. I love this detail. What
did the label say? It read, warning. This album
contains country and western music and may cause
a reaction in narrow -minded listeners. That
is brilliant marketing. It's a challenge to the
fan. If you don't like this, you're the problem.
And it produced a genuine hit. Goodyear for the
roses. It showed he had the voice for it. He
wasn't mocking the genre. He revered it. He treated
it with total seriousness. He did. And then swinging
wildly to the other side of the spectrum, he
starts working with Paul McCartney in the late
80s. This was a massive partnership. Two of the
greatest pop songwriters of their generations.
They wrote songs together knee to knee, just
like Lennon and McCartney used to do. This resulted
in Veronica, which became Costello's biggest
U .S. hit, reaching number 19 on Billboard. Veronica
is such a catchy song. Incredibly poppy, but
again, the subject matter. It's devastating.
It's about his grandmother suffering from dementia.
Oh, I didn't know that. She's sitting in a chair,
flickering in and out of reality. Is it all in
that pretty little head of yours? Classic Costello.
A buoyant, McCartney -esque melody with lyrics
about the disintegration of memory. And McCartney
brought the melodic brightness that Costello
sometimes resisted. It was a perfect balance.
But he didn't stop at pop or country. In the
90s, he takes a hard left turn into a world that
most rock stars fail miserably at. Classical.
The Juliet Letters in 1993. He teamed up with
the Brodsky Quartet. So no rock band at all?
No guitars, no drums, just Costello's voice and
a string quartet. I remember when this came out,
people were confused. They thought it was pretentious.
Some did. But if you listen to it, it's not a
rock star trying to write Mozart. It's a collection
of songs written as imaginary letters. It's theatrical.
It's more like a song cycle. Exactly. It showed
that he could write for instruments other than
a rock band. It was about textures. And that
paved the way for perhaps his most surprising
collaboration. painted from memory with Burt
Bacharach in 1998. Now, on paper, this shouldn't
work. Elvis Costello, the revenge and guilt guy,
and Burt Bacharach, the king of easy listening,
the guy who wrote What's New Pussycat. And raindrops
keep falling on my head. It sounds like oil and
water. But if you look deeper, it makes perfect
sense. Costello always loved complex melodies.
Bacharach is the master of complex melodies and
tricky time signatures. His songs are incredibly
hard to sing. Notoriously difficult because the
rhythms shift constantly. It wasn't irony. Costello
genuinely loved Bacharach's craft. And that album
is heartbreakingly beautiful. It is. Listen to
God Give Me Strength. It starts with this slow,
mournful horn line. Costello's voice is fragile,
almost cracking. He's not shouting anymore. He's
pleading. It's a performance that the angry young
man of 1977 couldn't have given. No way. It is
a vocal performance that Declan McManus, the
bank clerk, probably couldn't have imagined he'd
ever deliver. It really highlights the range
from radio, radio to God give me strength. It's
the same guy, but a different lifetime. And while
he's doing all this music, he's also writing.
And I don't mean lyrics, I mean prose. The liner
notes. For the reissues. Oh, yes. When Rikadisk
and later Rhino reissued his albums, Costello
wrote extensive essays for each one. We're talking
over 60 ,000 words total. That's a whole book.
Basically a memoir in installments. And they
aren't just, we recorded this in London. They're
critical essays. They're brutally honest. He
critiques his own singing. He critiques the production.
He famously wrote about the reissue of Goodbye
Cruel World. Congratulations, you've just purchased
our worst album. That is a level of self -awareness
you rarely see in a narcissist heavy industry.
It showed that he engaged with his own work not
as a star but as a critic. He could step outside
himself and say that didn't work. Moving into
the 2000s he settles into this role of the elder
statesman but he doesn't slow down and his personal
life takes a very public very romantic turn.
He met Diana Krall the jazz pianist and singer
at the Grammys in 2002. They married in 2003
at Elton John's estate. Which is a flex. A significant
flex. But it also sparked a creative period.
He released North in 2003, which is an album
of piano ballads. And about their relationship.
It's incredibly intimate music about falling
in love with her and the end of his previous
marriage. Very raw. And he also took that musicologist
brain of his to television with the show Spectacle.
Spectacle. Elvis Costello. This ran from 2008
to 2010. It was a talk show, but it was unique.
It wasn't a typical talk show at all. He would
sit down with Bruce Springsteen, Tony Bennett,
Lou Reed, Smokey Robinson, and they wouldn't
talk about their new music. movie or gossip,
they would pick up guitars and talk about songwriting.
It was like a master class, the best music class
you could ever take. It showcased just how deep
his knowledge went. He could analyze a chord
progression with Paul Simon or discuss vocal
phrasing with Tony Bennett. It proved he was
a student of the game first and foremost. But
just when you think he's settling into the tuxedo
-wearing host role, he pivots again. He teams
up with The Roots. Wise Up Ghost in 2013, a funk
and hip -hop collaboration. This one really surprised
me. The Roots are the best band in late -night
TV, Hip -hop legends. How did that even come
about? They connected through Jimmy Fallon's
show and Costello fit right in. The textures
were gritty. The grooves were deep. And his lyrics
worked over those beats. His lyrical density,
that staccato style we talked about from his
computer operator days, fit perfectly over that
tight, snapping hip -hop production. We have
to touch on the recent years because he had a
bit of a scare in 2018. He did. He had to cancel
tour dates due to surgery for cancerous growth.
It was a reminder of mortality. But he recovered.
And typically he went right back to work. And
the work has been interesting. Spanish model
in 2021. What was that project? This is a fascinating
concept. He took the original instrumental master
tapes from 1978's This Year's model. So the attractions
playing at their absolute peak. The raw tapes.
The raw tapes. And he stripped his own vocals
off. Then he had Spanish -speaking artists like
Juanes and Luis Fonsi record the lyrics translated
into Spanish. That is such a cool idea. It's
like remixing history. It recontextualizes the
songs completely. It proves that the melody and
the energy transcends the language. It's the
same rage, just in a different tone. Exactly.
And then in 2022, he releases The Boy Named If,
which is just a raucous rock album, and reunites
with Alan Mays, his partner from his first band.
Rusty for the resurrection of rust. Full circle.
Completely full circle. So let's bring this all
together. We've gone from the mainframe computer
room to the order of the British Empire. We've
gone from punk to country to classical to hip
hop. What does this all mean? I think the key
lies in that origin story we discussed. The Costello
identity started as a mask. It was a marketing
tool, a shock tactic. It was a character. It
was a character. But because Declan McManus viewed
music as a job, a discipline, thanks to his father,
that mask became a A vessel that could hold anything.
Exactly. He wasn't precious about the brand of
Elvis Costello. If the brand was supposed to
be angry punk, he didn't care. If he wanted to
do a jazz record, he did it. Because to him...
The work is the point. It comes back to the work
ethic. Writing hundreds of songs. Writing journalism.
Touring constantly. He treats it like a trade.
You show up. You do the work. You learn the song.
Just like his dad learned the Beatles hits for
the radio. There's a provocative thought in the
title of his memoir, Unfaithful Music. Yes. He
has been unfaithful to genres. He abandons them
constantly. He cheats on New Wave with country.
He cheats on rock with classical. But that lack
of loyalty to a single sound, that is the very
thing that has allowed him to survive for five
decades. If he had stayed the angry young man
in the skinny tie. He would have become a nostalgia
act by 1985. He would be playing the state fair
circuit, playing Allison over and over again.
By being unfaithful to the genre, he remained
faithful to his own creativity. Instead of a
nostalgia act, he became a legend. So here is
our challenge to you. The listener, if you want
to hear the impossible range of the man born
Declan McManus, do this. Go listen to God Give
Me Strength, his collaboration with Burt Bacharach.
Listen to the fragility and the control in that
voice and then immediately play Radio Radio.
The whiplash will tell you everything you need
to know. That's it for this deep dive. Thanks
for listening and keep unpacking the music. Until
next time.