Elvis lives!
First published in Ipswich Live, November 16, 1999
OH, I just don't know where to begin... Elvis the pop star, Elvis the cabaret singer, Elvis the r'n'b belter, the country crooner, the angry young man - Elvis the beloved entertainer.
So let's go back to the very beginning, or just before the beginning.
It was that summer I, like so many others, underwent overnight metamorphosis - long-hair to punk. The summer safety-pins, bin-liners, bondage trousers suddenly sprouted as items of street fashion. (It was also the summer Abba and The Wombles outsold The Clash, The Jam, The Pistols and everybody else, but we didn't notice that at the time.)
In the street-corner record shop I was running as a vac job, the big sellers were Fleetwood Mac and Robert Palmer. Then a couple of copies came in of a record we weren't supposed to have.
It was the first album on a new label - Stiff Records - and due to some contractual dispute or other with the distributors the release date was held up by a court order. Thousands of copies were holed up somewhere in a bonded warehouse, banned by law from hitting the streets.
That, at least, was the story. Looking back, it might just have been a bit of very cute marketing by the label's founder, Jake Rivera. It seems the sort of thing he might have done.
Either way, two copies of this strange LP found their way into my hands. After one hearing, I took one copy straight home. I still have it.
The other played over and over in the shop, racking up lots of advance orders from customers who liked what they heard - or were at least intrigued enough to want to hear more.
The cover of My Aim Is True didn't tell you much about who it was by. Just the name, obviously made up - Elvis Costello - and a black-and-white picture of a very dorky guy in a jacket, with big glasses like Buddy Holly's and knock knees in turned-up jeans. Even with a Fender guitar round his neck he looked about as uncool as me.
The producer was Nick Lowe, known already as the writing and singing talent of the excellent college-circuit band Brinsley Schwarz, and there were rumours that "Elvis Costello" was really Lowe himself. That seemed the sort of thing he might have done.
But though Lowe wrote great poppy tunes and neat witty ballads (still does), these songs were somehow sharper-edged. Each two minutes or so of well-honed attack on the modern world nearly made sense, but was just off-kilter enough to stick in the brain more or less permanently.
Yes, this highly original voice really was Costello - or Declan MacManus, as we all learned much later he had been christened. A songwriter of genius in an age when the meaningless pomp of Yes and Led Zeppelin was supposed to be swept away by the almost equally meaningless spit and vomit of punk.
It was a handy Stiff sales slogan to say they were "surfing on the New Wave", but Elvis never had much in common with either the Boring Old Farts or the vulgar young upstarts. And no self-respecting three-chord thashers would have had much time for the crystal-clear lead guitar that was such a feature of tunes like Red Shoes, I'm Not Angry, or the gorgeous ballad Alison.
(That guitar wasn't played by Costello, despite the cover pose - it was the work of John McFee of the American country-rock band Clover, whose lead singer Huey Lewis later made The News. But we didn't learn that till long after, either: in fact for reasons that may or may not have been contractual, Clover have never been officially credited as Costello's first recorded backing group.)
By the time I got to see Elvis live, at a Stiff Christmas bash at London's Lyceum Ballroom, he was more or less sharing top billing with the endearing Ian Dury, whose anthemic Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll brought the cast together in a rollicking finale.
It was one of those memorable, life-highlight concerts, even if some of the performers fell quite quickly into the whatever-happened-to category. Like Wreckless Eric - two brilliant singles and then what? Or Larry Wallis (one single - I'm A Police Car).
And it was the first introduction to The Attractions, who were to be Elvis's backing group for the next eight years (plus one album in the Nineties).
The distinctive keyboard playing of Steve Nieve has been a feature of Costello's music on and off ever since, and the two are back together for the tour which arrives in Ipswich next week.
The Attractions' tight three-piece sound (snappy drumming by Pete Thomas, bass by Bruce Thomas and Nieve's spiky keyboards augmented by Costello's own guitar) made the second album, This Year's Model, sound very different from the first.
As the title suggests, it was very much of its time (Year Two of New Wave, and another brand new label - Radar). Yet it's also lasted, songs like This Year's Girl, The Beat and Lip Service sounding far fresher on a turntable tonight than most records released in the 21 years since.
To be truthful, it sounds fresher than much of what Elvis has been up to in those years. Yet he's never been away for long, and every time you've felt like writing him off, he's popped up again with something of real quality.
And if he's not exactly a novelty act any more, he's never lost that element of surprise, either.
Whether it's a whole album of then deeply unfashionable country songs - Almost Blue - in 1981, an adventurous but frankly dire collaboration with the classical Brodsky Quartet - The Juliet Letters - or last year's sublime partnership with Burt Bacharach, Elvis has always been a master of the unexpected.
The ability to turn a phrase, then turn it again, is about the only thing that has run right through his prolific songwriting career.
Only Guardian headline-writers and cryptic crossword-compilers live by the pun as much as Costello.
If I have a criticism of the most intelligent songwriter I know, it's that his lyrics come from the head more often than from the heart. But it's hard not to love his consistent and persistent word-play, all the way from Alison ("I don't know if you are loving somebody, I only know it isn't mine") to Painted From Memory.
And for all the cleverness, some of those songs really have come from the heart.
No politician feels his politics more deeply than the man who wrote Tramp The Dirt Down about Margaret Thatcher's hypocrisy on his adopted Ireland; or Shipbuilding, about the futility and inevitability of the Falklands War; or Pills And Soap, about TV and journalistic intrusion into private griefs, among other things.
Despite occasional tantalising hints at a rich velvet voice, notably on the albums King Of America, Spike and last year's Painted From Memory, Costello has never been what you could call a great singer.
He's always written great songs, though, from the hard-edged (try sitting comfortably while listening to Let Him Dangle) to the whimsical (Hoover Factory); the fun to the sentimental.
He has written, as he has remarked himself, a lot of songs. And he's worked with a lot of very varied musicians, and had songs covered by an extraordinary array of talents.
Books have been written "explaining" his lyrics, but why bother? After all, the songs themselves are there for you to enjoy, and to puzzle over if you want to.
Elvis himself has said: "It's just a bunch of songs."
Now he's bringing a sackload of them to Ipswich, pared down to the musical bone, with just the man himself and Steve Nieve for musical company. I can hardly wait.
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