Photo by Terry O'Neill
In December 1977, Saturday Night Live introduced America to a man who would become one of the most iconic and enduring figures in rock history: a spindly, pissed-off-looking Brit with oversize specs and a palsied stance who (as a last-minute sub for the Sex Pistols) halted a performance of "Less Than Zero" mid-verse to instead race through the uncleared anti-censorship screed "Radio Radio" in a torrent of pressured speech and incendiary playing, winning himself the scorn of the network and a fiery rep as the new hyperverbal bard of punk.
Thirty-one years and a few string quartets and jazz suites later, Elvis Costello sits at a booth in Harlem's Lenox Lounge, preparing to reclaim the small screen. He just finished taping the 13th episode of Spectacle, his Sundance Channel talk show, premiering in December, down the street at the Apollo Theater and is soon to board a plane to Vancouver with his wife, jazz singer-pianist Diana Krall, and their twin two-year-old sons. Though clearly exhausted, with graying scruff and a sleepy gap-toothed smile, the 54-year-old born Declan Patrick MacManus still looks camera-ready -- his trademark glasses set off by the silk scarf, black shirt, gold bracelets, and dark duster coat of an urban troubadour. He sips ice water to nurse a voice hoarsened by weeks of talking and singing and humbling himself with everyone from Tony Bennett to the Police to Lou Reed to soprano Renée Fleming to Bill Clinton. "Every show," Costello says, "has a moment where your head nearly falls off."
I understand you just finished interviewing James Taylor. It's hard to imagine a starker antithesis -- acid-penned terrorist versus Sweet Baby James.
We did mention [our respective reputations], of course. The curious thing for me is that I was such a fan of his; he has one of the most beautiful voices in American music. The singer-songwriter is almost back in vogue now, but it certainly wasn't when I was coming up. Ours was the music that was going to get rid of that -- along with a lot of other stuff. But it usually doesn't work that way. After a while, everyone has to fess up to having older records in their collection. Like the Clash—"No Beatles, no Stones in 1977"—then London Calling comes out and you realize that's Joe Strummer's entire record collection. But I think we're past those juvenile arguments about music, like, "Our generation, our music." Because right now you're living in a time when everybody you speak to can listen to everything they want to.
Introducing the episode with Smokey Robinson, you said you couldn't be more excited if Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, or Groucho Marx were about to come out. Was Robinson the most daunting guest you've had?
He was pretty daunting. I wasn't kidding when I said the first record I ever owned was With the Beatles and the first Smokey Robinson song I ever heard was [their version of] "You Really Got a Hold on Me." And now I'm onstage at the Apollo singing it with the guy who wrote it!
From your debut album, My Aim Is True, and on, you have incorporated country, reggae, Tin Pan Alley, and scores of other styles, but you were marketed as one thing: punk.
Well, I was marketed by other people, not by me. And "punk" -- what nonsense that was. Or "new wave" -- even bigger nonsense. I'm just a song- writer. I knew older stuff and I knew newer stuff.
But as far as marketing goes, that was definitely some of the coolest of the 20th century. Didn't you relish being part of it?
