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He swaggers knock-kneed in a sweat-stained suit so tattered the Salvation Army would reject it. His face trembles red and his neck veins bulge blue as he spits lyrics into the microphone.
With triple-thickness horn rims and a Lenny Bruce haircut, he's the most homely, ill-fitting rocker ever to sing. Like a time warp.
Elvis Costello is. On purpose.
"I could never imagine people wanting this ugly geek in glasses ramming his songs down their throats." a flippant 23-year-old Costello told an interviewer last year. "And that's exactly what I'm in it for. I'm in it to disrupt people's lives."
Saturday night, the most forceful voice in British New Wave rock comes to the Victory Theatre. Elvis Costello is the crown's revenge.
"I'm not an artist" he told another writer. "Even the word musician I kind of balk at. I'm a songwriter and a singer. But no hyphen, see? Don't make that mistake. Even a simple mistake like that can be costly in terms of misinformation."
Costello defies description. He looks like a cross between Buddy Holly and a life insurance salesman (in reality. he was into computers before rock), and his music adheres to rock's basics too closely to be true New Wave.
"What I do is a matter of life and death," he says. "I don't choose to explain it, of course. I'm doing it and I'll keep doing it until somebody stops me forcibly."
With the success of his third album, Armed Forces, it's doubtful anyone can hold Costello back.
His two New York City dates sold out in near-record time. Tickets for the Victory Theatre show disappeared without a single advertisement.
Costello's voice can best be described as harsh. And, while the rest of rock leans towards disco or mixing room overproduction, he and his three-piece band, the Attractions, remain basic and raw.
That doesn't mean, though, that his songs are one-two mindless exercises. Costello's lyrics are provocative and insightful — the real power behind his raging performance.
"My songs have to do with situations," he told one reporter. "They aren't philosophical treatises. I didn't name the songs 'guilt,' 'revenge' or 'sarcasm.' The journalists did that."
Born Declan Patrick McManus, Costello took his first name from Presley and his last from his mother. His father, a jazz trumpeter and singer, abandoned marriage when Elvis was just a kid.
Costello moved to London and began working as a computer technician when he was graduated from high school at age 18. He played guitar on the side, focusing his songs on the blue-collar life of work and machines.
In 1976 he signed with a tiny recording studio, receiving an amp and tape recorder for an advance. He taped his first album, My Aim Is True, during his days off.
In July, 1977 Costello raced to the London Hilton with his guitar on a tip that CBS International was meeting there. He planted himself across the street, hoping to land a contract. But his sidewalk show only landed him in jail.
It wasn't until later that year that Columbia asked Elvis to sign the dotted line. "Columbia was one of those big companies who were the enemy at the time," Costello remembers. "They weren't paying any attention."
This Year's Model, Elvis' second LP, won a spot on just about every rock critic's 1978 Best Ten list, but the public let it slide.
It wasn't until the group played the Christmas edition of Saturday Night Live that America awoke to the bizarre, hard-driving style of Elvis Costello.
Thirty seconds into a piece, he signaled his band to stop — explaining that the song wasn't relevant to Americans — and switched to "Radio, Radio," a blast on conservative AM programming.
The performance enraged NBC technicians (who were afraid the song would run too long) and it bewildered Americans.
"We just decided to do a more appropriate song. What's wrong with that?" Costello later demanded. "We stepped outside the show's safe little formula. That's what we need more in radio and television and music — break the formulas. They don't do anybody any good."
Costello is known to break formulas regularly when he's in concert. So, anything can happen when he comes to the Victory.
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