Destined never to remain nameless, Declan MacManus has enjoyed more than one incarnation - Napoleon Dynamite, The Emotional Toothpaste, Spike The Beloved Entertainer and more. But it is his first assumed identity as Elvis Costello that sticks and holds firm - a name alive with all the confident playfulness that has guided a quite remarkable career to date.
From early chart success with The Attractions to his current project with Burt Bacharach (they're co-writing an album, due out in December), Elvis Costello has turned his hand with considerable skill to just about everything. He has persistently disciplined and challenged himself by moving into territory not normally associated with someone who first emerged aggressively knock-kneed during the punk era.
Doubtless some of his fans have been challenged too and while record companies might also prefer him to stay in the one box, Costello has ploughed on into country, soul, r'n'b, jazz, rock 'n' roll, even a song sequence for string quartet and voice. So much for received, music business wisdom about having a distinctive style of your own.
"You're right; I don't think I have a style. I think a style is the ability to be instantly recognisable and yet have very few variations in what you do. And I don't think I've got a style in that sense because there isn't one thing that I always defer to. There are people with a very definite style and its like a thread. I think of Van Morrison as someone with a definite style.
He can cast a song in the ballad mode and you know the contours of it and yet it's still an original song. There are several different tributaries of the one main thing that he does. He's like Muddy Waters. The great blues players had very few variations and yet they were so emphatic.
I think there's one or two people in rock 'n' roll with a definite style and I think Van's one of them, Lennon was maybe another one but I don't think I'm like that." From the very beginning it was clear that Elvis Costello had both a way with words and a particular genius for melody.
The other factor that set himself and The Attractions so far ahead of most of their contemporaries was that they had a genuine musical hinterland. They were never one of those punk or post-punk bands whose strength lay in their very lack of history; that they didn't really seem to know what they were at all.
Elvis clearly did know his stuff and all those great Attractions songs were well and truly informed by the pop music of the '50s and '60s. The references are there, be it a line from a Supremes' song or a quick touch of Booker T.
I had always assumed, up until relatively recently when we talked about his work with Burt Bacharach, that it was simply because of Elvis's obvious passion for so many genres and his ability to write and perform within those genres that no one particular and definite style had emerged.
"Yes but I think it's more that I'm part of a different tradition of popular songwriting, that is not governed by the history of rock 'n' roll. I've never really wholly cast my lot in with rock 'n' roll and I never really developed that side of it.
Even before I had started, I had already abandoned a whole lot of songs that were quite sophisticated. I quite rightly anticipated that I would get very little distance if I tried to put over very sophisticated songs. Of course they probably weren't really that sophisticated at all - they were precocious really and when I listen to them now I'm rather glad that they didn't manage to get a hearing. And so it came down to narrowing my musical options to the thing that allowed me to get peoples' attention. Once I had their attention and then I started to diversify and explore all the different things that interest me."
The major factor in all of this, however, is that like Van Morrison, Elvis Costello grew up in a very cool house. His father Ross is from Dungannon and sang with The Joe Loss Orchestra and was a bandleader in his own right. Even Beatles white labels arrived though the letterbox direct from the publishers, keen to ensure that dance-bands were performing covers of their latest recordings. His mother too was a music fan and so the MacManus family home was an actual source in itself.
"The first music I literally grew up listening to as a baby was Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter. Theirs would have been the first songs that I could name. Obviously I didn't know who had written them at the age of two but my mother says that where kids normally liked nursery rhymes, I liked I've Got You Under My Skin." Interest in the more rock 'n' roll side of things was not therefore inevitable. In a sense the young Declan was not easily pleased when it came to pop music and he did not necessarily swallow everything that was around at the time. It took the Beatles, both their own songs and their well chosen covers, to lure him into that world.
"They were talking in my own voice or it seemed like my own voice. I didn't really like Elvis Presley but I could understand the Beatles. The Elvis records coming out in the early '60s weren't really the sexy records, they were those pseudo-operatic things like It's Now Or Never and they didn't seem very good to me. And I think that even as a young kid I could tell that there was something inherently square about Cliff. Maybe if I had been 14 when he came out I would feel differently. But you know the way seven-year-old kids can see right through adults? I thought Cliff had more to do with Frank Ifield than with Elvis. Basically a square.
"But the Beatles spoke to me. Although I didn't know where all these songs came from. I thought they'd written Roll Over Beethoven until I checked the credits properly. I thought everything was theirs although they imprinted so much of their personality on everything that it might as well have been theirs. To this day I prefer the Beatles version of You Really Got A Hold On Me to Smokey Robinson's. And yet I loved Smokey when I came to that.
I think that before you make your own choices about music it's very important what you hear. If your parents only played Ray Conniff records, rock 'n' roll would seem like a really big escape. But we had a lot of really good records in the house and the good pop things which my parents got into as well were just part of a great world that included Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. I didn't know all of those records intimately but I was familiar with their names from I was a tiny baby. I knew the names of jazz musicians the way other people know the name of footballers." Given the sounds in the MacManus house, given that Elvis Costello seemed more likely to pursue a career as a songwriter in the mould of someone like Frank Loesser (if such a thing could be imagined in 1977) and given that he feels he never totally committed to the rock 'n' roll thing, it might seem strange that he started out with a pub band called Flip City, got signed by Stiff Records, fronted probably the best band of the period and came up with some of the finest and most significant pop records for that generation.
"It comes with the time. If I had been 15 in 1963 I'd have ended up in a beat group. At another time, if I'd started a little earlier, I might have ended up in a disco band or, a little later, a glam band. It so happened that the kind of music I started playing was very rootsy rock 'n' roll. But it was an affectation really. I copied what I saw other people doing. I couldn't be like a lot of the groups that I wanted to be like but I could be like the groups that were trying to be like the groups.
For instance I couldn't be like The Band but I could understand how the Brinsleys could be like The Band. They found this magic formula of one country and western song, one r'n'b song, one Motown song that was really appealing and apparently easy to do.
I could see that I could do it like that and you didn't have to be virtuosic in that dazzling way - like the way the psychedelic bands had apparently been." The punk contingent reacted quite rightly against the absurd excesses of rock music and their approach was both refreshing and necessary. Costello too re-injected a sense of honesty and genuine good value with a string of albums that were crammed full of short and spot-on songs. His lyrics addressed social issues and all manner of twisted and difficult love - the whole lot shot through with a certain anger that at times was chilling.
This too was a million miles from the pomp and excess of the monster bands who preferred interminable guitar solos and songs about wizards. (Just a week ago Elvis confessed to me that he had heard Led Zeppelin's rock 'n' roll for the first time. He thought it was great.) "I was always a bit suspicious of all that although I liked the Grateful Dead because it was kind of cranky and weird. I was a late convert to Hendrix. I liked Hendrix's pop songs more than I liked his guitar playing. And I loved his singing too but I thought he played out of tune a lot because I didn't appreciate when I was that age that it was all descriptive. But you grow into that - maybe it's because you grow older and weirder. Maybe you get crankier or just go deaf or whatever.
At one point a couple of years ago I was heading towards atonality. I was trying to let go of everything and I might still go that way. There are certain kinds of sounds in my head that I haven't got out yet. But I've gone very harmonic again now. I like a particular kind of rich and strong harmony with really attractive and unexpected changes."
Composition in the sense that Elvis Costello now wishes to pursue it requires a certain language. Inevitably this raises the issue of acquired skill as opposed to instinct - an instinct which some writers would prefer not to mess with. But with typical discipline, Elvis has chosen to study and learn how to write music. He had his reasons and as far as he is concerned, nothing has been lost and much has been gained. It also means that he can communicate with the likes of Burt Bacharach in his own language.
"I don't know whether I have all the skills necessary and certainly I've come to some of these skills quite late in the day but I had some of these skills instinctively. I always had a good ear but I didn't develop the ability to convey my ideas accurately until comparatively recently. I'm still learning and I hope I go on learning. It's one of the advantages of not learning everything from the start. I know plenty of people who are trained to the fingernails but can't write a note of music because they know all the options. Burt is different. I think he could be spoken about in the same breath as Richard Rodgers. I think he's that good.
"I don't think too many people in the modern day are really as aware as he is. I think a lot of the brilliant things they do are instinctive and almost accidental - they do it in spite of the things they don't know. But Burt can do it because of what he knows and yet he isn't bound by it. It can be quite intimidating but then I've found my own way around music now. I'm sort of half schooled which I'm finding is a very interesting place to be.
"I'm in two minds as to whether to become much more learned or whether that's going to shut me off from the more instinctive thing. I don't really agree with Paul McCartney's view that learning the notation is an inhibition to the melodic gift. Certainly it might be true for him. He's too good a melodist to run the risk of losing the thread. But I've gone the other way and I now have limited skills to be able to write it down." Working with Bacharach Elvis has to modify his approach to writing lyrics. Everything must be sparer than usual and might mark another turn in his songwriting. In the past his lyrics have been a source of endless scrutiny, such is their sometimes multi-layered complexity and quite bizarre imagery - one minute naked and the next a quite astonishing riot. In some cases, his songs contain lyrics as heavy as lyrics can get and yet always the playful touch, the twist and the wordplay. These days, ironically, it is those very words that he once seemed to relish so much, that have become the troublesome preoccupation.
"I have a different relationship to words now than I did just a couple of years ago. And I've been more troubled by the relationship between word and thought and what use it is to me, than by anything else. I am troubled by that. I'm troubled by what the point is in saying anything else - you just have to look at a library full of books, all of them full of thoughts that somebody thought was important at some stage. It might sound like a justification for indolence but why add a single wasted word to the stack of wasted words?
I'd like to become good enough to become as expressive with music as I may ever may have been with words - not that I think I've written many words of consequence. But I do feel that tunes are much more open to a longer life and greater sense of universal good. I'd like to think that someday, it might be when I'm 80, I might write something where everybody could say, yes I know what he means but there were no words involved. It's a very distant horizon but I can say it optimistically. My ambition is to write no words at all."