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‘A punk point of view reduced to a dead stare’: how Elvis Costello made My Aim Is True

Elvis Costello's 1977 photo shoot for the cover of My Aim Is True - Redferns
Elvis Costello's 1977 photo shoot for the cover of My Aim Is True - Redferns

On the evening of May 27 1977, Declan Patrick MacManus made his first public appearance under the name Elvis Costello. Performing a short and precise set at The Nashville Room in Hammersmith, the 22 year-old premiered a collection of songs recently recorded in six-hour sessions on days off from his job as a computer operator at the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics complex in Park Royal. Despite a budget of just £2,000, the debut album on which they would soon emerge would be the first instalment from one of the most extraordinary talents Britain has ever produced.

Unveiled 45 years ago, on July 22 1977, My Aim Is True was a top 20 hit in the United Kingdom and the highest selling import record in the United States in its year of release. The LP’s original berth of a dozen songs comprises a cast of characters that includes washed-up British fascists, drugged-up music journalists, a compliment of spurned and inadequate lovers, and, in Alison, a fractured heroine held captive in a song of such exquisite bitter-sweetness that the young Costello sounds both ageless and timeless in the two-minutes and 54-seconds it takes him to sing it.

More than this, though, My Aim Is True provides a snapshot of Elvis Costello taken but a nanosecond before he assumed the persona of the marketable sociopath with which he would see out the 1970s. Heading out on tour with his first named backing band, The Attractions, in the summer of 1977, onstage the musicians infused the material with the kind of pummelling claustrophobia that would define This Year’s Model, Costello’s second LP, from 1978. In a review of a concert in San Francisco on their first US tour, Rolling Stone’s description of “a punk point of view reduced to a dead stare” is probably about right.

But My Aim Is True got there before the concrete had set. Recorded at the tiny Pathway studios, near Highbury, the album’s accomplished personnel included members of Clover, a long-haired country rock group from the suburbs of San Francisco who had suffered the misfortune of landing in London on the very day the Sex Pistols appeared on the cover of the New Musical Express.

After metamorphosing into the blockbusting Huey Lewis and the News, in 1979, in years to come the musicians would have their pick of prestigious live engagements. But in the unforgiving season of punk, the band required a crash course in survival from a talented English songwriter who had somehow ended up as their tour manager.

“Nick [Lowe] showed us how to tour, British style, and became our mentor,” Huey Lewis told the author Will Birch in his book Cruel To Be Kind: The Life And Music Of Nick Lowe. “He told us, ‘Right, this is how proper touring goes – you put your toothbrush in your pocket, you put your skinny jeans on, and you buy a three-pack of clean underwear every three days. We meet in the bar at seven, we get in [the venue], we do our thing, and we get out. And there’s no whining and no whingeing.’”

As well as road work, Nick Lowe’s role as producer on Elvis Costello’s debut album landed Clover a lowly-paying studio gig. After rehearsing material at Headley Grange, in Hampshire, the singer and his ad hoc backing band convened the following day at Pathway to record songs that were often cut in a single take. Despite an array of patient and sometimes luxuriant performances from the uncredited musicians – My Aim Is True is surely the only punk-adjacent record on which can be heard a pedal steel guitar – there was no time for indulgence. Speaking to Rolling Stone, Costello remembered the sessions being “governed by a very limited budget”.

Which leads us to the record company. When Elvis Costello sent his demo tape of acoustic songs to 32 Alexander Street in Westbourne Park, the independent Stiff Records had been in business for only a matter of weeks. Founded by Dave Robinson and Jake Riviera, one of the more combustible pairings in music business history, by 1977 the rough’n’rumble label had issued singles and albums by Ian Dury, Richard Hell, Motorhead and more. Behind the scenes, though, the impecuniousness was such that the master tape on which Nick Lowe had produced the debut album from The Damned – including New Rose, the world’s first punk single – was recorded over with songs from My Aim In True.

Elvis Costello performing in 1977 - Redferns
Elvis Costello performing in 1977 - Redferns

Stiff Records compensated for its lack of capital with attitude and application. With mottos that included “Undertakers to the Industry”, “If They’re Dead, We’ll Sign ’Em” and – my personal favourite – “If It Ain’t Stiff, It Ain’t Worth A F___”, the company operated with a heedless speed of which major labels could only dream. On the spot, Riviera decreed that his latest signatory change his stage name from D.P. Costello to Elvis, and that he should face the world in a pair of Buddy Holly glasses. It worked, too –  his lively first feature in the NME appeared under the headline “Horn-Rims from Hell”.

Even the commercial failure of early-day singles such as Less Than Zero and (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes couldn’t detain him. In an incident that made the front page of the Melody Maker, on the week of the release of his debut album, Costello was arrested by the Metropolitan Police for causing a disturbance outside a hotel on Park Lane upon which a troupe of American record executives had descended for a conference.

“I am Elvis Costello,” he said while playing songs through a battery amplifier, “sign me.” Listening to the short set while clutching bags emblazoned with the words “sa big fat thank you from Ted Nugent”, eventually they did. In November of 1977, My Aim Is True was released domestically in the United States on Columbia Records.

Elvis Costello performing with Richard Hell & The Voidoids at CBGB's in New York, 1978 - Redferns
Elvis Costello performing with Richard Hell & The Voidoids at CBGB's in New York, 1978 - Redferns

“I went to a lot of record companies before I came to Stiff,” he told the writer Allan Jones in an interview from the time reprinted in the compelling book Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down. “Major labels. And I never went looking for charity. I didn’t want any favours. I didn’t go in and say, ‘Look, I’ve got these songs and, well, with a bit of polishing up and a good producer I might make a good record if you’d just be kind enough to sign me to your wonderful label’. I went in and said, ‘I’ve got some f______ great songs, why don’t you get off your f______ arse and put them out?’”

I did tell you that the moment of innocence captured on My Aim Is True lasted only as long as the album itself, didn’t I? By now, Elvis Costello was no longer the anonymous young man who had struggled to walk the half mile from Highbury & Islington station to Pathway Studios burdened with two guitars and a twin reverb amplifier. No longer was he the arriviste who, upon unpacking a brand new Fender Telecaster, proceeded to record half an LP with the strings raised an inch from the neck because he’d yet to learn that the settings could be adjusted. Now, almost at once, he was fully formed. “Prince Charmless” was how the Toronto Sun described him.

Inevitably, the press took to it like catnip. As David Lee Roth wryly observed, “Music critics like Elvis Costello because music critics look like Elvis Costello”. Maybe, but they liked the kind of copy he enabled, too, not to mention the quotes that allowed the unimaginative among them to turn him into a caricature.

“I bear a grudge, I’m vindictive,” he told Dave Hancock of the London Evening News. “And I couldn’t care less whether this attitude is damaging to me or not because I’d like to take [my enemies] all to bits and rain havoc on them. They deserve it. They deserve me. They deserve everything they get.” Good luck trying to outrun that kind of hyperbole when the time arrives to calm things down a bit.

In the end, even the sound of My Aim Is True was dragged into deeper and darker waters with the subsequent addition of a masterpiece for the album’s US release and all future worldwide editions. After hunkering down for an entire night in the company of the debut album from The Clash, the following morning, fuelled by caffeine, Costello wrote Watching The Detectives, his first hit single. Recorded with members of Graham Parker’s backing band The Rumour and future Attraction Steve Nieve, for the first time the music was as one with the lyrics. Tension and menace ran riot.

“It was obvious from the first playback of Detectives that this song was the real beginning of making records as opposed to just recording some songs in a room,” Costello observed in his well-written and superbly structured memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink.

With his life’s work at last underway, Elvis Costello was required to draw breath only once in what remained of 1977. While on a tour of Britain in support of My Aim Is True, on August 18 news reached the travelling party of the death of Elvis Presley. Unperturbed, Stiff Records issued a new motto for their artist and his label. “The King Is Dead,” it read. “Long Live The King.”