Elvis Costello
Few performers can claim the range and success of Elvis Costello: from punk rock to classical, he has been consistently one of the leading musical creators of the past thirty years. Born Declan Patrick MacManus in 1954 in London, he began his musical career in the early seventies, forming a pub rock band called Flip City. After a demo tape caught the ear of Jake Riviera at Stiff Records, he changed his name to Elvis Costello, releasing a single, and then an album, My Aim Is True, in 1977. Together with his band, The Attractions, Costello quickly rose to the top of the UK charts, then, promoted by Columbia Records, matched that success in the USA. In 1978, Costello and The Attractions released This Year's Model - the album was proclaimed best album of the year in a Village Voice poll, and has consistently ranked among the top 100 albums of all time in critical polls. The followup album, Armed Forces, proved to be just as successful. While many performers would have chosen to stay with a proven formula at this point, Costello did just the opposite: rather than remain focused on a punk/new wave sound, he branched out into soul with Get Happy!!; pop with Trust; and a hybrid of the two in Punch the Clock. Throughout the eighties, Costello continued to experiment with musical genres: in 1986, working with T-Bone Burnett, he recorded the acoustic guitar album King of America; in 1989, he released Spike, a pop album that featured a chart-topping collaboration with Paul McCartney in the song "Veronica". By 1993, Costello had decided to venture outside the popular music arena, collaborating with the Brodsky Quartet on the classical music album, The Juliet Letters. While the Attractions broke up in 1996, this did not stop Costello from continuing to develop new musical ideas: collaborations with Burt Bacharach alternated with a period in 2001 as the "artist in residence" at UCLA, and the creation of music for a ballet and operatic songs. In 2004 his ballet, Il Sogno, was performed in New York, and subsequently recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra, to acclaim from the classical music critical world. Most recently, he has recorded a jazz collaboration with Marian McPartland, and a R&B collaboration with Allen Toussaint.
