Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  A sense of futility finally overwhelmed the group and in the autumn of 1975 Declan told the other band members he was leaving. It had run the gamut as far as he was concerned. They had been together for over two years, and it was abundantly clear that Flip City were not a band who were going to make it. It was equally clear that a nice bunch of guys who had fun playing in a bar band was never going to be enough for him.

  It was an amicable enough parting of the ways. With an afternoon and evening residency at the Red Cow in Hammersmith and a final gig booked at Ewell College, the band agreed to fulfil their remaining engagements. The penultimate gig at the Red Cow took place on 30 November, 1975, preserved for posterity on bootleg. It is clear from listening to the recording that Declan is in charge. He changes the setlist at one point to throw Sam Cooke’s ‘Bring It On Home To Me’ into the mix – to the mild irritation of some of the band – and introduces Steve Hazelhurst’s ‘On The Road’ with the only slightly patronising aside, ‘Finally, the world is ready for Steven Hazelhurst – the reluctant hero!’

  There is muted audience response, and only on ‘Radio Soul’ and a reworked version of the Smokey Robinson classic ‘One More Heartache’ do they finally show their mettle. Through the smoke and stale beer, it’s possible to catch a tantalising glimpse of what Declan would later go on to achieve. But as quickly as it appears, it’s gone.

  The end came soon after, supporting an incarnation of the Climax Blues Band, on this occasion called Climax Chicago, at Ewell College. Flip City limped to the finishing post on something of a sour note. They had opted to end their set and bring down the curtain on the band with ‘Third Rate Romance’, but Declan decided to ignore both the setlist and the wishes of the rest of the band by launching into an impromptu version of the R&B classic ‘Money’ instead.

  ‘He just walked up to the mic and [sang]: “The best things in life are free” and went straight into it,’ says Steve Hazelhurst. ‘There was no real nastiness afterwards, but it was like: “We didn’t want you to do that. Why did you do it?” It was a bit sad.’

  Declan wasn’t overly concerned, either by the slightly bitter ending or the demise of the band. Indeed, he later dismissed Flip City virtually out of hand. ‘[We were] just a regular bar band, on the periphary of the dying embers of the pub-rock scene. There was no focus to it; it was aimless. With no offence to the guys, we weren’t very good.’11

  Harsh, perhaps, but true. Within a matter of months Declan would have a record deal. Within twelve months he would be recording his debut album as a solo artist with one of his favourite bands backing him and one of his heroes at the mixing desk. He knew it was time to move on.

  Chapter Three

  1976–77

  BY EARLY 1976, THE YOUNG MACMANUS family had left Twickenham Park and moved to Palgrave House, a modern block of Housing Association flats on the corner of Cypress Avenue in Whitton.20 Their new home was situated in the sole block of flats in a neat, well-maintained road of two-up-two-downs, literally just around the corner from Declan’s old primary school in Nelson Road. Whitton would not have been his area of choice. ‘It’s a very boring area,’ he later admitted. ‘It’s a terrible place. Awful. Nowhere. Nothing happens.’1 Its very blankness and sense of creeping claustrophobia became in itself a kind of negative inspiration for many of the early songs: his music would always be particularly effective when imagining the sinister and sometimes nightmarish underbelly of the most outwardly unremarkable places – and faces. Of the early songs, ‘Blame It On Cain’, ‘Waiting For The End Of The World’, and ‘I’m Not Angry’ in particular are driven by the motor of suburban paranoia.

  Flip City may have flopped to a fittingly lacklustre end, but the break- up in no way signalled defeat or lowered expectations. On the contrary, with a band who couldn’t meet his escalating requirements, Declan regarded his departure as a necessary step towards a bona fide career. Now, he felt that the best way to present the songs he was writing was by singing them loud and direct to the audience, without any fancy guitar embellishment. ‘I’d really got the volume up by then,’ he recalled later. ‘I was so fucking loud. I’d abandoned all attempts at playing subtle guitar. The style came from having to cover myself in noisy clubs.’2

  He played whenever he could, at The White Lion in Putney, The Swan in Mill Street, Kingston upon Thames, even at a charity fete in Chiswick in early 1976, where he supported his father by playing Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ on piano, before Ross rounded off an eccentric evening of entertainment with a version of Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’. The appearances at The Swan were more conventional. It was a rocker’s pub, with a backroom where Ken Smith and his friend Scott Giles ran The Amarillo Club on a Saturday night. Declan played there on ‘numerous’ occasions in 1976, usually a forty-minute acoustic set supporting the headlining act.

  ‘It was a pretty rowdy place,’ says Smith. ‘I remember introducing him as “The man Randy Newman should take his hat off to!” before he belted some of his songs out. [By then] he was a very forceful performer.’

  As evidenced by his performances at Smith’s Amarillo Club, Declan was still in contact with some of his old friends from Flip City, and there remained a degree of solidarity. Following the demise of the band, Steve Hazelhurst had recorded a demo of his own songs which he had sent to several record companies, with little luck. One rejection letter he received in reply was particularly scathing in its assessment of his musical talents. Despondent, Steve showed the letter to Declan. ‘He actually wrote me a letter back saying, “Don’t take any notice of this, keep on, you’ve got to keep doing it”,’ recalls Hazelhurst. ‘Furthermore, he did one of my songs [the sadly non-prophetic ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’] at one of his solo gigs. He suddenly said “This is for my mate Steve,” and played it, which was a nice little touch. I’ve always appreciated it.’

  Declan’s most regular haunt was the Half Moon in Putney, where he played at least a couple of times a month through to April 1976, usually for 50p and a plate of sandwiches. Charlie Dore, a singer with the group Hula Valley who befriended Declan at the time, recalls first seeing him perform at the Half Moon in late 1975 or early in 1976. ‘Ralph McTell told me to come and check this guy out. I was expecting this folkie type thing and was very much surprised. He looked normal, there was nothing particularly distinctive about him, but I was just impressed by his range, the whole [musical] package.’

  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 tak
ing 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.