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A crowd of ageing hipsters sat forward on the plush velvet seats of Toronto's Massey Hall last Wednesday as Elvis Costello, once the angry little darling of New Wave, walked to centre stage.
He last played Massey Hall 21 years earlier. His 1978 concert was a blistering hour of enraged rock and roll, a fierce rendering of perfectly honed three-minute pop songs performed by a slight, awkward Englishman who looked like Buddy Holly on lighter fluid.
In the intervening two decades, Elvis Costello shifted styles many times, from country and western (on Almost Blue) to classical (The Juliet Letters), to his most recent album, Painted from Memory, a collaboration released last year with venerable '60s songwriter Burt Bacharach.
This time, when Costello, now 45, took the stage he didn't seem so angry. Wearing a baggy black suit and black hat, accompanied by original Attractions keyboardist Steve Nieve, he performed for two and a quarter hours, including four encores, making nice with his shrinking, mellowed fan base. There were no riots, but his beautiful, craggy voice thrilled the crowd anyway.
Painted from Memory has only sold 10,000 copies in Canada and 180,000 in the United States, well short of sales for his earlier albums, which often went gold, like My Aim is True and Spike. But Costello claims not to be concerned.
The day after the concert, he sits in the fourth-floor room of the Four Seasons Hotel that he is sharing with his wife, Cait O'Riordan, the former bassist of the Pogues, and talks about how to keep a career alive for so long.
"You can't keep one thing going forever," he says. "You have to go out of focus for a while so people can come and rediscover you."
Costello is aware that his style-shifting career has created a fragmented audience — each of his different personae now has its own devotees.
"I'm not trying to create one big cumulative audience that knows everything and likes everything," he says. "I'm happy with each individual person's response. If it's one song they like, that's great. It doesn't seem right to stick to a winning formula if you don't enjoy it. So many people seem to just be constantly trying to make the same record because they don't know how to do anything else. It's of no interest to me."
In addition to his recent recordings with Bacharach, Costello has recorded in Nashville, learned musical notation to perform classical works with the Brodsky Quartet, and, most recently, contributed a straight-ahead, sentimental version of "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, as well as a re-recorded version of Charles Aznavour's "She" to the Notting Hill soundtrack.
In the late '70s, Costello, bored by the stale direction of such rock supergroups as Kansas and Boston, famously declared, "Any song that's over three minutes long gets boring?' But in the years that followed, Costello experimented not only with song length, but with lyrics and instrumentation as well. The result was critical acclaim and devoted fans, but diminishing radio play.
Costello says he has no regrets. He says that "I'll Wear It Proudly," a melancholy song on King of America, would have been a hit if he had arranged it like a Tom Petty ballad, but also would have been dishonest.
"No disrespect to Tom, he does his thing great," says Costello. "He really likes the way that music sounds. But I hear differently. Which means it's buried on an album. But it's still a good song."
The subjects Costello addresses in his lyrics are darker than most pop songs. From his early days up to the present, his songs have mined the same themes — envy, jealousy, bitterness. "I'm not being lazy," Costello says. "I'm aware of the fact that I return to the same territory."
Why all the infidelity?
"I think infidelity is an interesting moment," he says. "When I was married to my first wife and my son was very young my wife stayed at home. I was 22 and I went mad, broke her heart, and was very cruel. But then again, I can't deny the experience."
Costello's musical style will no doubt continue to evolve as he makes his way through the minefield of middle age. But don't expect his darkness to fade. "I could never imagine writing 'The Lady in Red,'" he says.
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