Elvis Costello Is Not a Nerd

The glasses threw everyone off. Wide-rimmed, slightly academic, worn by a man with a name that was clearly a joke and a sneer at the same time. When Elvis Costello appeared on the cover of My Aim Is True in 1977, he looked like an accountant who had been told to act threatening. The music press filed him accordingly — angry young man, new wave provocateur, clever but bloodless. An intellectual with a guitar.

They were wrong about almost everything except the clever part.

Declan Patrick MacManus — and it is worth knowing that name, because it explains a lot — was born in London in 1954, the son of a jazz bandleader. He grew up between London and Liverpool, absorbing music the way children of musicians do: not as a consumer but as a participant in something ongoing. His father played trumpet in the Joe Loss Orchestra. His grandfather played tuba. Music in the MacManus household was not a hobby. It was the furniture.

The Name and What It Means

Jake Riviera, his manager at Stiff Records, gave him the name. The Elvis was a joke about rock star pretensions. The Costello was his mother's maiden name. The combination was meant to be slightly ridiculous, and it worked perfectly — because Costello spent the next five decades being slightly ridiculous in the best possible way. He was never a rock star in the conventional sense. He was something more interesting: a songwriter who kept getting better and stranger and more unpredictable, record after record, for nearly fifty years.

My Aim Is True was recorded in twenty-four hours with two thousand pounds and a group of American session musicians called Clover. It was a debut that sounded like a man who had been writing songs for ten years — which he had. The album contained "Alison," a ballad so perfectly constructed that Linda Ronstadt, George Jones, and Chet Baker all recorded versions of it. It contained "Less Than Zero," a song about Oswald Mosley written after Costello saw a television interview with Mosley's son defending his father. It contained "Watching the Detectives," a reggae-inflected noir that sounded like nothing else in the new wave landscape. The album spawned no hit singles. Rolling Stone named it one of the year's best records.

The Attractions and the Three-Album Run

For his second album, Costello assembled the Attractions: Steve Nieve on keyboards, Bruce Thomas on bass, Pete Thomas on drums. The group was extraordinary — Nieve in particular was a genuine prodigy, a classically trained pianist who could play anything and frequently did. With the Attractions behind him, Costello made the three-album run that constitutes one of the great sustained achievements in rock songwriting.

This Year's Model (1978) was harder, faster, and angrier than the debut — the guitars sharper, the grooves tighter, the lyrics more claustrophobic. Armed Forces (1979) opened up the sound: bigger production, piano more prominent than organ, melodies that owed as much to ABBA as to the Clash. "Oliver's Army" — built on a piano figure that Costello has said was borrowed from ABBA's "Dancing Queen" — became his biggest UK hit, a song about British military recruitment that most radio stations played without noticing what it was about. Get Happy!! (1980) went in a completely different direction again: twenty short soul songs recorded in a compressed burst, influenced by Stax and Motown, dense and punchy and almost overwhelmingly energetic.

Three albums in three years. Three completely different records. Each one coherent on its own terms.

The Gear

Costello is not a gear obsessive in the manner of Eddie Van Halen or Eric Clapton, but his instrument choices have always been deliberate. His primary guitar through the early career was a Fender Jazzmaster — the offset, slightly awkward-looking guitar that suited his slightly awkward-looking public image. The Jazzmaster's natural jangle and chime gave the Attractions records their particular guitar texture, sitting cleanly under Nieve's keyboards without fighting them.

He has also played a Fender Telecaster extensively — the more direct, percussive character of the Tele showing up particularly on the rockier material where he needed more attack and less shimmer. His amp choices have tended toward the Vox AC30, the British amp whose clean headroom and natural compression suited his rhythm-heavy approach to guitar playing. Costello is primarily a songwriter who plays guitar rather than a guitarist who writes songs — the instrument serves the song rather than the other way around, which is why his gear has never been the point of the conversation.

What has always been the point is the voice. Not technically — Costello is not a singer in the way Stevie Wonder or Aretha Franklin are singers. His voice is nasal, slightly pinched, occasionally rough at the edges. But it is completely distinctive, and it carries a quality of urgent commitment that makes even his weakest songs sound important. He sounds like he means it, always, which is the most important thing a singer can do.

The Detour That Wasn't a Detour

In 1981, with the Attractions at the height of their commercial success, Costello went to Nashville and recorded Almost Blue — an album of country covers, produced by Billy Sherrill, who had produced George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Country radio refused to play it because it was rock. Rock radio refused to play it because it was country. Costello was delighted.

This was not a detour. This was the pattern. Imperial Bedroom (1982) was orchestrated pop with arrangements by Anne Dudley. The Juliet Letters (1993) was a song cycle recorded with the Brodsky Quartet — no drums, no electric guitars, just voice and strings. Painted from Memory (1998) was a songwriting collaboration with Burt Bacharach, one of the most formally sophisticated popular songwriters of the twentieth century. Wise Up Ghost (2013) was a collaboration with the Roots, hip-hop and rock colliding in ways that should not have worked and did. North (2003) was a collection of torch songs.

Every time the music press thought they had him categorized, he made a record that made the category useless. This is not eclecticism for its own sake. It is the natural behavior of a man who grew up hearing jazz, big band, soul, country, and rock simultaneously, who has never understood why these things should be separate.

The Saturday Night Live Incident

In December 1977, Costello appeared on Saturday Night Live. He was supposed to play "Less Than Zero." He started playing it, stopped, turned to the band, and launched into "Radio Radio" — a song about the homogenization of commercial music that his label had specifically asked him not to perform. NBC banned him from the show for years. He has said it was the most important thing he ever did on television.

It was also entirely in character. Costello has spent his entire career doing the thing he was not supposed to do, and being right about it.

What He Actually Is

Elvis Costello is not a nerd. He is a man who looks like a nerd in the way that Buddy Holly looked like a nerd — which is to say, the look is real but the content behind it is something else entirely. Holly wrote rock and roll that nobody had heard before. Costello wrote songs that kept changing shape for fifty years without ever losing the quality that made them recognizable as his.

He is also one of the few songwriters of his generation whose catalog genuinely rewards extended listening. The obvious records — This Year's Model, Armed Forces, Imperial Bedroom — are known quantities. But the deep cuts, the collaborations, the country album, the string quartet record, the Bacharach collaboration — these are not curiosities. They are the work of someone who has spent five decades taking music seriously in every direction it pointed him.

The glasses are still there. The name is still a joke. The music is still astonishing.

Explore Elvis Costello, the Fender Jazzmaster, and new wave on Sonic City.