Complicated Shadows (10 page)

Declan occasionally supported Hula Valley at the Half Moon and elsewhere, and as Dore got to know him better it became abundantly clear how driven and self-contained he had become. ‘He was
very self-assured, very much a one-man band,’ she says. ‘He was intense, utterly focused and single-minded. He didn’t suffer fools gladly. He would get very frustrated with people
who stood in his way or didn’t get it.’

Often, the entire audience seemed to be full of such types and the aggression would be raised a notch or two. On one occasion, Declan supported Hula Valley at a London pancake house called the
Obelisk, a recipe for disaster if ever there was one. ‘People would be stuffing their faces with pancakes or asking for more syrup as he was singing about wringing someone’s
neck,’ says Dore. ‘He hated that. I remember him moaning about playing “while those fuckers eat!”. The attitude was definitely already there.’

Some nights he was practically seething. There was rarely any attempt made at ingratiating his audience, little in the way of ‘I wrote this song about’ repartee. At one performance
at a traditional London folk club – probably either the Grail Folk Club in Hounslow or Centrefolk, both semi-regular gigs – there were a couple of chairs on stage that had been used by
the previous act. When Declan strolled on for his set, he swung his foot as hard as he could and kicked one of the chairs over. It was hardly on a par with Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar, but it
struck many observers as a rather odd way to behave.

Partly, these kind of antics stemmed from his desire
to make an impression, the same canny impulse which later recognised that taking the name of Elvis might not be such a
bad career move. They could also be attributed to a genuine build-up of nerves; but mostly they were an expression of sincere contempt. ‘I wasn’t going up to people meekly and saying,
“Look, with your help and with all your expertise and knowledge of the world of music we might have a moderate success on our hands.” I was thinking: “You’re a bunch of
fucking idiots who don’t know what you’re doing.” It didn’t
make
me bitter. I was already bitter.’
³

By now, he had a stage name. Like Ross before him, Declan had taken the maiden name of his great-grandmother, then initialised his two forenames, and became D.P. Costello. It was primarily
convenience. MacManus didn’t really trip off the tongue, although part of him would have been happy to be continuing where his father had left off. Declan insisted that his stage name was
pronounced COS-tello – rhyming with ‘Manilow’, with the emphasis firmly on the first syllable in the traditional Irish manner – rather than Cos-TELLO, as it would become. He
later dropped this attempt at authentic pronounciation when it became clear that Anglo tongues weren’t prepared to make the required effort.

Lack of effort was not something D.P. could be accused of. He was writing prodigiously. Unshackled by the demands of getting a band to learn and perform the songs, his imagination was running
riot. Newly penned numbers like ‘Hoover Factory’, ‘Jump Up’, ‘Wave A White Flag’, ‘Dr Luther’s Assistant’, ‘Call On Me’, ‘I
Hear A Melody’, ‘Blue Minute’ and ‘Ghost Train’ were wildly different to what he had being doing with Flip City; baroque, musically much more adventurous and
experimental, with a nod to the classic American songwriters from Hoagy Carmichael to John Prine and Randy Newman, and an equally large nod to country music, which was increasingly taking a hold on
him. The old Hank Williams favourite ‘You Win Again’ was still making an appearance in his live set, as it would for many, many years to come.

Declan recorded once again at Dave Robinson’s Hope
and Anchor Studios, and was sending reams of acoustic and vocal demo tapes off to every record company and song
publisher he could think of. ‘I didn’t know enough to realise that no publisher has the patience to listen to twenty songs in the hope that the eighteenth one is the one that’s
good,’
⁴
he later recalled. He tried a more direct approach, landing up outside publisher’s offices, guitar in hand, to sing directly to
them in the hope that the immediacy of his performance – and a desperate Costello at full throttle could be a pretty immediate experience – would rouse them from their day-to-day office
distractions long enough to give him a second, more attentive listen. It may have worked for Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, but it didn’t work for Declan.

Finally sensing that he needed to muster a supreme effort and make a concise, professional and unified presentation of his best songs, in the early summer of 1976 Declan borrowed a Revox
recorder from a friend and taped a number of tracks with just voice and acousic guitar in his bedroom at the flat in Cypress Avenue. He then selected the best of the bunch and sent them off to
record companies, publishers, radio stations and DJs. The songs he recorded were all recent compositions: ‘Mystery Dance’, ‘Cheap Reward’, ‘Jump Up’, ‘Wave
A White Flag’, ‘Blame It On Cain’ and ‘Poison Moon’.

It was no coincidence that the two most melodically immediate and musically most straightforward numbers – ‘Mystery Dance’ and ‘Blame It On Cain’ – would
survive Declan’s blitzkreig writing jag of 1976 to finally make the cut on
My Aim Is True
. The former was a true wonder, a ’50s-style rocker with a persona-defining lyrical
portrait of a young man caught between sexual desire, frustration and confusion. ‘Both of us were willing, but we didn’t know how to do it’, he yelped, not without humour. It was
a rare thing indeed to hear such straightforward admissions of inadequacy and embarassment in a pop song. ‘Blame It On Cain’ on the other hand, was a confident, chugging, bluesy number
that harked back to the Flip City days, with the traditional taxpayer’s groan against ‘government burglars’ thrown in for good measure.

The other four songs were discarded quite quickly. ‘I later realised that most of the songs on the tape just didn’t speak up enough to be
heard,’
⁵
he said. In other words, in accordance with the harsh punk diktats of 1976, they were a little too sophisticated and complicated for
popular consumption. But that didn’t mean they weren’t any good.

No matter how much Declan later dismissed the tape,
²¹
in the main the songs were undeniably impressive. ‘Cheap Reward’ was a breezy uptempo
country tune with a sly lyric, while one could imagine a band taking hold of the short, sombre ‘Poison Moon’ and twisting it into something remarkable. Only ‘Jump Up’ was a
misfire, veering off into a disjointed, rambling jazzy structure, with very little resembling a verse or a chorus.

‘Wave A White Flag’ was the pick of the litter, a caustic, Randy Newman-esque tale of two lovers in love with their domestic disharmony. It pointed to a soon-to-be enduring lyrical
obsession of the dark discord that goes on behind closed doors, admitting that ‘something deep inside me wants to turn you black and blue’. He sings it sweetly, with a smile in his
voice, but given the tempestuous nature of his marriage, the listener can only hope that it’s a character study.

The combination of the carefree vocal, happy tempo and nasty lyrics was undoubtedly commanding, and it’s not hard to see why it was this track that pricked up a few ears. The opening coda
in particular sounds so musically sophisticated and vocally rich that it could have turned up on
Spike
or
Mighty Like A Rose
without sounding out of place. However, it was clearly
too strong a brew for
My Aim Is True
. The rest of the song skips into a neat, pre-war jazz-guitar styling,
which only just fails to avoid falling into pastiche with
its final, tongue-in-cheek lament of ‘gee whiz, baby!’.

The demo finally prompted some genuine interest in Declan and his songs. Most significantly, it got him played on the radio, courtesy of Charlie Gillett, a highly influential DJ on BBC Radio
London whose Sunday afternoon
Honky Tonk
show had recently brought Graham Parker to public notice and would later break the career of Dire Straits. Gillett had been aware of the existence
of Flip City through his acquaintance with Ken Smith, who sometimes helped out on the radio show by volunteering to answer phones. Indeed, Gillett had plugged Flip City gigs on his show and had
once made a specific effort to see the band in 1975, which ended in vain when he couldn’t find the venue. Perhaps fortuitously, having failed to hear the band, when Gillett received
Declan’s tape in the post he made no connection between Flip City and D.P. Costello. ‘I knew nothing about [him],’ he recalls. ‘This little three-inch reel-to-reel tape came
through with D.P. Costello written on the outside, which – when I played – I just liked the sound of.’

Interestingly, for someone who would be lauded primarily for his songwriting and his lyrical invention, what struck Gillett most immediately about Declan was the voice. That
‘desperate’ sound which had attracted Declan to the likes of Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen and Rick Danko now immediately drew Charlie Gillett to D.P. Costello. ‘The strongest
vocal association I made at the time was that he sounded a bit like Tim Hardin, which is not a name I’ve ever heard mentioned in association with him. Hardin had that slight quaver in his
voice of somebody on the edge of crying.’
²²

And just because Declan’s voice was the immediate hook, it didn’t mean that Gillett didn’t also appreciate the songs and the intellectual craft behind them as well. His
particular favourite was ‘Wave A White Flag’. ‘It was a fantastic song,’ he says. ‘Everything about it: the use of words, like when he sings
“Til you ca-pit-u-late”. Even right back in those days he had that thing of picking out words that you rarely heard in pop songs. The songs were essentially not that unusual, [but] a
few unusual words would jump up at you, and it really made a difference.’

Over the course of a few weeks, Gillett played two or three songs from the demo tape on his show. Declan was a regular listener and was uncharacteristically excited when he heard his own songs
coming over the airwaves for the first time without any prior warning. ‘Mary later told me that it was one of the big moments of his life,’ says Gillett. ‘Because I didn’t
tell him I was going to play it. I just did.’

The radio exposure finally began to stir up some interest. Virgin Records put a ‘really pitiful deal’
⁶
on the table, according to
Declan, while Island – who later distributed
My Aim Is True
– sniffed around and then turned him down. They said they couldn’t hear a hit. An A&R man at
America’s CBS Records, who were looking for British talent, was also unimpressed when Gillett played him the tape. ‘He just didn’t get it at all,’ says Gillett. ‘I was
very surprised and disappointed. I said to him, “You’re wrong, you’re wrong! This will do well in America”. And he said, “Well, my brief is to get things that work in
the UK. If somebody else gets him and he does well, we can still pick him up in America”.’
²³

Gillett also talked to Declan about putting out a single on his own Oval label. It was less a formal approach than a loose meeting to sound out what Declan felt he needed to move forward. The
sticking point came when everybody agreed that some kind of backing band was required.

Although he was playing solo gigs and accompanying himself on the
Honky Tonk
demos, Declan was essentially a rhythmic songwriter whose style of playing and singing suggested the
cadences of a band. ‘He had a lot of dynamics
just as a one-man act,’ says John McFee, who later played guitar on
My Aim Is True
. ‘A lot of the
stuff like the drum build-ups, he was doing on his guitar.’ D.P. Costello wasn’t going to be the next Donovan, but unfortunately Oval didn’t have a core of session musicians who
they could just call in to make some recordings.

It wasn’t to matter. In August 1976, Declan came across an advert in
Melody Maker
for a a small independent record company looking for new acts. It looked interesting. The label
was called Stiff.

* * *

Stiff was the brainchild of Dave Robinson and Jake Riviera. A handsome, whip-smart impressario in the tough, no-nonsense managerial mould of Peter Grant or Don Arden, Jake in
particular was absolutely key to the development of Declan. Born Andrew Jakeman, Jake had managed pub-rock par-celebs Chilli Willi and The Red Peppers before they split in 1975, and was now tour
manager for Dr Feelgood. In addition, he co-managed Dave Edmunds and Graham Parker as part of the Advancedale Management group he ran with Dave Robinson, who had previous managerial experience with
such London luminaries as Ian Dury’s Kilburn and The High Roads and Brinsley Schwarz.

Those who met Riviera were often split between admiration and disgust. His attitude towards journalists, photographers and even fans was often described as aggressive and hostile, and from the
very start he seemed intent on creating an atmosphere of surly suspicion around his charge which sounded out an implicit – and sometimes not so implicit – keep-your-distance warning to
unwelcome inquisitors. However, there is no doubting that Jake’s utter determination and loyalty, often-inspired marketing, and tightrope tactical ruses were a major factor in Declan’s
initial propulsion into fame. ‘Jake could be very difficult sometimes and irritating, but at the same time he was totally devoted to Declan,’ says Roger Bechirian, a recording engineer
and colleague of Nick Lowe’s who was also managed by Riviera.
‘If Jake believed in something, he went with it with every cell of his body.’

Together, Dave and Jake set up Stiff. Their credo was an all-encompassing, wildly eclectic love for music rooted in live performance, strong songwriting and more than a passing fascination with
the eccentric. Having spent years trying to make tone-deaf A&R men sit up and listen to their acts, Robinson and Riviera’s combined hatred of the cartels of major labels was the driving
force behind the label, which harboured a distinctly malevolent, anti-establishment streak behind its carefree exterior. ‘Jake and I had the same kind of attitude,’ says Robinson.
‘We thought if you had a good songwriter and he or she could sing their own songs, you were ahead of the game. We saw the record company as a partner to the artist, rather than an
employer.’