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He was a computer operator and not a happy one. It was 1976 and he had a wife and young child to support and he wrote songs and played guitar and his given name was Declan MacManus. In less than three years his name would be Elvis and when it was read or spoken there would be no confusion as to who was being referred to.
He was small and his face was not particularly striking and the previous couple of years had seen him leaving the A&R departments of every major record company with his unsold demo tapes.
The little advert in the classified columns of the music paper was like hundreds of others. A new company was being formed and they were looking for talent. He had nothing to lose. He applied, they listened, picked a song and agreed to put out a single.
Stiff Records was the collaborative brain-child of Jake Riviera (nee Andrew Jakeman) and Dave Robinson. It was small, independent, and lived in a converted shop in a West London backstreet.
Between them the two men had more than a decade of solid if chequered experience in the music business. Both had been heavily involved in the pub-rock phenomenon of the previous few years: Riviera had managed country-rockers Chilli Willi and The Red Hot Peppers and worked as road manager for Dr. Feelgood; Robinson had been co-manager of key venue The Hope & Anchor and was now looking after the blooming career of Graham Parker and The Rumour.
The independent record label was nothing new. Labels like Sun in Memphis that had given rock 'n' roll its first breaks, after all. The idea had recurred in the late Sixties, both to established artists like The Beatles as well as less moneyed idealists like disc jockey John Peel. Riviera himself had issued the first Chilli Willi LP this way and more recently still there'd been Greg Shaw's Bomp! in the States and the Franco-Dutch Skydog enterprise.
Changing Declan MacManus' name to Elvis Costello was typical of the wry blend of humour and sharp commercial sense that characterised the early days of Stiff, a sure-fire guaranteed attention-grabber. All that was needed after that was a product strong enough to justify such an audacious spiel. Costello went along with it; he still had nothing to lose and, as he would state with increasing confidence over the next year or so, he knew he was good.
Stiff's eleventh release was Elvis Costello's "Less Than Zero" c/w "Radio Sweetheart," produced by Nick Lowe, a highly respected singer and writer whose major commercial success to date had been with a Japanese chart-buster capitalising on the success of the Bay City Rollers. Costello still had no band, so the sessions for "Zero" and what would become his first LP featured the instrumental skills of Clover, a West Coast import who had so far only enjoyed a cult following of the kind represented by enthusiastic coverage in pre-punk ZigZag magazine.
With no live act to back them up, neither "Less Than Zero" nor its successor, a typically double-edged "love" song named "Alison" enjoyed more than modest success. The picture sleeve on "Alison" gave the name a face: Costello was shown crouched in a corner, hands extended outwards, ambiguously poised somewhere between aggression and defence, eyes hidden behind dark glasses of peculiar shape but still normal dimensions. Reviews were keen and curious. On the back of the "Alison" sleeve was the reconstituted face of a girl with mid-Sixties hair, all flick-ups and fringe; a picture that had been re-assembled after being torn into four ragged pieces.
My Aim Is True was the clincher — a sharp, immaculately programmed agglomeration of styles with the bulk of its generous complement (fifteen songs) more than living up to the "Alison"-derived title. Costello stares out from the cover shot (and from his huge-framed glasses) with determined, tight-lipped menace. His legs are in tight, roll-cuffed denims, knees pointed inward in classic Fifties pose; he holds his guitar tight to his stomach as if nothing else in the world mattered. All around the central snapshot a black and white mosaic repeats the legend first stolen for the run-out band of his first single: ELVIS IS KING.
"Why d'you have to say that there's always someone
Who can do it better than I can?
Don't you think that I know that walking on the water
won't make me a miracle man?"
Miracle Man
My Aim Is True arrived at the height of the punk boom, a 'movement' whose biggest oversight had been the early dismissal of "love" from its list of preoccupations. And while the rejection of emotional involvements ("It's something I feel for a dog or a cat," The Pistols' Johnny Rotten had told Caroline Coon) can be seen as little more than yet another way of being obviously provocative, it also separated the movement from the traditional stamping grounds of popular music. The punks would have doubtless replied that there were more urgent matters on hand; being on the dole, loathsome housing conditions, the deteriorating relationship between the races. Costello as portrayed on My Aim Is True, however, is almost exclusively concerned with sex.
Or the lack of it: "Well, I remember when the lights went out / And I was trying to make it look like it was never in doubt / And she thought that I knew / And I thought that she knew / So both of us were willin' but we didn't know how to do it." In "Mystery Dance" there's at least the promise of something happening; most frequently Costello's characters are left on the outside looking hopelessly in: the voyeur of the ironically-titled "I'm Not Angry," the couples who don't couple any more in "Welcome To The Working Week," "No Dancing" and "Miracle Man."
By the time the newlyweds join the spooky train journey of the final "Waiting For The End Of The World," we suspect what's in store for them. "Hiding from a scandal in the national press / They've been waiting to get married since they stole the wedding dress" says the narrator: "You may see them drowning as you're strolling on the beach / Don't throw them a lifeline 'til they're... clean out of reach."
While its verbal preoccupations can be said to be over-balanced heavily in the direction of concerns of a venereal kind (with, it should be noted, the exceptions of the anti-Fascist "Less Than Zero" and the everyday unease brilliantly evoked on "Waiting For The End Of The World"), Aim's primary appeal was on musical terms. Compared to the closeted thrashings of the punks, the album was a musical encyclopaedia, taking in everything from Shadow Morton, to country, blues, Merseybeat — you name it, it's in there somewhere. Costello's vocal style took no heed of the recent
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