Background and career
Declan Patrick MacManus (born 25 August 1954), known professionally as Elvis Costello, is an English singer, songwriter, record producer, author, and television host. According to Rolling Stone, Costello "reinvigorated the literate, lyrical traditions of Bob Dylan and Van Morrison with the raw energy and sass that were principal ethics of punk", noting the "construction of his songs, which set densely layered wordplay in an ever-expanding repertoire of styles". He is the recipient of numerous accolades, including two Grammy Awards and two Ivor Novello Awards, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003 and into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2016. Born into a musical family, Costello was raised with knowledge and appreciation of a wide range of musical styles and an insider's view of the music business. His professional career as a musician coincided with the rise of punk rock in England. The primitivism brought into fashion by punk led Costello to disguise his musical knowledge at the beginning of his career, but his stylistic range has come to encompass R&B, country, jazz, baroque pop, Tin Pan Alley and classical music. His debut album, My Aim Is True (1977), produced no hit singles but contains some of his best-known songs, including the ballad "Alison". Costello's next two albums, This Year's Model (1978) and Armed Forces (1979), helped define the new wave. From late 1977 until early 1980, all of his singles reached the UK Top 30, including his biggest hit "Oliver's Army" (1979). He has had more modest commercial success in the US but has earned much critical praise. From 1977 until the early 2000s, Costello's albums regularly ranked high on The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics' poll, with This Year's Model and Imperial Bedroom (1982) voted the best album of their respective years. His biggest US hit single, "Veronica" (1989), reached No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100. For most of his early career, Costello performed with a backing band, the Attractions. He has released album-length collaborations with classical ensemble the Brodsky Quartet, R & B songwriter Allen Toussaint, and hip-hop group the Roots. His current backing band are known as the Imposters. Costello has written more than a dozen songs with Paul McCartney and had a long-running songwriting partnership with Burt Bacharach. He has had hits with cover versions of songs, including Sam & Dave's "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down", Jerry Chesnut's "Good Year for the Roses", and Charles Aznavour's "She". One of his best-known songs, "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding", was a cover of a song by Nick Lowe's group Brinsley Schwarz, which had remained obscure until Costello's 1979 version. Costello's own songs have been recorded by artists including Linda Ronstadt, George Jones, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Dave Edmunds, Chet Baker, and Alison Krauss. From 2008 to 2010, he hosted a television show, Spectacle: Elvis Costello with..., on which he interviewed other musicians. In 2015, he published a well-received memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. In 2019, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his services to music.
Elvis Costello was born Declan Patrick MacManus on 25 August 1954, at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, west London, the only child of a record shop worker and a jazz musician. Both parents were from the Liverpool area and had moved to London together. Costello's father was of Irish descent and a Roman Catholic, while his mother was English and was raised a Congregationalist.
Costello's mother, Lillian MacManus (née Ablett, 1927–2021), was born and raised in Toxteth, Liverpool, the daughter of a gas-main layer and a mother who became increasingly disabled by rheumatoid arthritis as Lillian grew up. Responsible for caring for her younger brother and sick mother, Lillian left school at 13 and took the first of a series of jobs at music stores. After moving to London with her future husband Ross in 1951, she took a job in the record department in Selfridges department store and continued selling records through the 1960s. Even after she no longer worked selling records, Lillian maintained a keen interest in a wide variety of music, including the popular music of the day. Costello's father, Ross MacManus, was a professional trumpet player and singer, born and raised in Birkenhead, across the River Mersey from Liverpool. He began his career in music in the late 1940s, playing trumpet in bebop bands in Birkenhead and Liverpool. He switched to playing trumpet and singing in modern jazz bands after moving to London in 1951. By 1954 he was sufficiently well known for his son's birth to be announced in the New Musical Express. From 1955 to 1968 he was a featured singer in the Joe Loss Orchestra, one of Britain's most popular big bands. Ross had a solo cabaret act from 1969 into the 1990s, playing workingmen's social clubs in Scotland, Wales, and the north of England. Ross recorded for small record labels under a variety of aliases, including Day Costello – Costello being Ross's paternal grandmother's maiden name. He also recorded advertising jingles. Ross's father, Patrick Matthew McManus, known as Pat, was also a professional musician. From the age of eight, Pat was raised in an orphanage where he learned to play trumpet. He later played trumpet as an army bandsman, a ship's musician for the White Star Line, and an orchestra musician in music halls and in theatres showing silent films. Costello has said that Pat, being the first in the family to make a career in music, is the reason he himself is a musician.
Costello spent most of his childhood in Twickenham, in western Greater London, before moving to Liverpool with his mother in 1970. Costello was raised Roman Catholic and served as an altar boy until he was 14. Costello's parents had separated by the time Costello was 10 years old, after which he was raised by his mother. Ross continued to be a significant presence in Costello's life, and the two remained close until Ross's death in 2011. Costello has said that a childhood spent watching his father work gave him an innate sense of how to be a musician but also an understanding that a career in music was a job like any other, requiring discipline and hard work. Costello's parents never insisted he take music lessons or otherwise pushed him to follow in the family business. Instead, they raised him in a home filled with music, encouraged his musical curiosity, and supported his efforts to find his own way toward a career in music. Lillian told journalists that she knew before Costello was born he would have a career in music and that she listened to a broad range of music while she was pregnant with him with the intention of giving him an early start in music appreciation. As a young child, Costello's musical influences came from his parents' record collection, which encompassed a wide range of styles but centred on traditional pop and jazz. Ross's job with the Joe Loss Orchestra required him to sing many of the pop hits of the day for the band's weekly radio show. To learn these songs, Ross received demonstration copies of the original artists' records, which he brought home to rehearse. When Costello grew old enough to have an interest in the current pop hits, Ross began giving him five or six of these demonstration records per week. Costello has said, "That's why I know so many songs". Costello's early favourites among the hit-makers of the day were the Beatles. He has said that, having turned nine years old in 1963, he was exactly the right age to experience the full force of Beatles fandom as he grew up. He has described the Beatles as his biggest musical influence. Costello was also deeply impressed by the songs of his future collaborator Burt Bacharach, which he knew through the hits British artists Cilla Black and Dusty Springfield had with them. As Costello grew into his teens, his favourites included British beat groups the Kinks, Small Faces, and the Who, Jamaican rocksteady and reggae acts who were popular in Britain, and especially Motown artists, whose work he knew through their British hit singles and through the Motown Chartbusters compilation series. By the time he reached his mid-teens, Joni Mitchell had become an important influence. When Costello moved to Liverpool, he found he did not enjoy much of the progressive rock that was popular with his peers, and so, casting around for music he might like, he developed an interest in the Grateful Dead and folk rock groups like the Band and the Byrds, whose Sweetheart of the Rodeo introduced him to country music.
Costello was a well-behaved if sometimes argumentative student, but not generally an outstanding one. Not having scored well enough on his eleven-plus exams to go on to grammar school, he attended Archbishop Myers secondary modern school in Hounslow and then a comprehensive school in Everton, Liverpool, for sixth form. Costello showed an early talent for writing. His mother told a journalist that, when Costello was 11 years old, his school entered him into a writing contest held by The Times intended for people aged 16 to 25, for which he won a prize. As he finished secondary school, he earned one A-level, in English, despite having made a firm decision to pursue a career in music a few months earlier and putting little effort into his final months of school. Although he never had any alternative career plan, Costello had previously been reluctant to commit to a career in music, partly because his upbringing had made him aware of the potential pitfalls involved. The shock of witnessing a teenage friend's death in a traffic accident changed his mind. He would later write, "Suddenly, everything but music seemed like a waste of precious time". Costello completed his formal education in 1972 and, still living at home with his mother, set out to find a job that would earn him a steady wage while he pursued a career in music. He soon took a job as a computer operator at the Midland Bank data centre, in the Merseyside town of Bootle, because, at £20 a week, it paid slightly better than other unskilled work for which he felt he was qualified. According to Costello, the job consisted of essentially manual labour such as mounting tape reels and loading punched cards. Because the job involved frequent periods of waiting for the mainframe computers to complete their tasks before beginning them on the next one, it gave Costello time to write songs while at work. Except for a few months in 1973 when he worked as a clerk at the Midland Bank Putney branch, he continued to work full-time as a computer operator until a few weeks before his first album was released in July 1977.
Costello began writing songs and teaching himself to play guitar by age 14. To test his songs in front of an audience, he performed them in folk clubs that permitted amateur musicians to perform unpaid. He played these clubs regularly in London and continued in similar clubs when he moved to Liverpool at age 16, although folk music venues that welcomed original songs were scarcer in Liverpool than in London. By 17, he was occasionally being paid a little money. On the eve of the release of his debut album in 1977, Costello told Allan Jones that he had written hundreds of songs.
