A suburban family man with an office job, Declan Patrick McManus was somewhat removed from the revolution being staged in late-night clubs in 1977 London by punk-rock pioneers like The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned. \u201cAll these bands were playing in the middle of the night,\u201d he later recounted \u201cso I couldn\u2019t go. I was married with a son.\u201d Unlike most of the other wage-earners he rode the tube with, however, Declan McManus was about to become a star himself, though not under his given name. After three years living in London and trying to balance his day job with his musical ambitions, the man now known as Elvis Costello finally made his breakthrough with the release of his debut album, My Aim Is True, on this day in 1977.<\/p>\n
Both musically and personally, Costello wasn\u2019t really part of the punk scene he came out of, but the anger and attitude that defined Costello\u2019s far more sophisticated songwriting definitely reflected his sympathy with the punk movement. \u201cWe lived in a block of flats and we couldn\u2019t really play music at night,\u201d he later recalled, \u201cbut I really used to enjoy playing \u2018God Save The Queen\u2019\u2014loud\u2014because all the little old ladies would be outraged.\u201d Costello wrote nearly all of the songs that would make up My Aim Is True during the first half of 1977, while playing live gigs and squeezing in recording sessions with producer Nick Lowe around his day job. From its appropriately titled first track, \u201cWelcome To The Working Week,\u201d to the now-classic \u201cAlison,\u201d \u201cLess Than Zero\u201d and \u201c(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,\u201d My Aim Is True announced the arrival of a truly unique new talent.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Concerned that his music might not reach a wide enough audience, Costello staged the now-famous stunt of performing live on the street outside a meeting of CBS executives in late July 1977 to \u201cprotest\u201d the fact that his album, released in the UK on the independent Stiff label, had no distribution in the United States. Within months, he was signed to CBS, and the American release of My Aim Is True followed in the spring of 1978. Less than 12 months later, Elvis Costello had two more full-length albums in release\u2014This Year\u2019s Model (1978) and Armed Forces (1979)\u2014and was well on his way toward becoming a superstar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A suburban family man with an office job, Declan Patrick McManus was somewhat removed from the revolution being staged in late-night clubs in 1977 London by punk-rock pioneers like The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned. \u201cAll these bands were playing in the middle of the night,\u201d he later recounted \u201cso I couldn\u2019t go. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9742\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}