I can vividly remember Less Than Zero, the song that launched Elvis Costello’s career, coming out in March 1977 when I was at college.
Stiff Records, already notorious for their stunts, gave out no information at all about the singer in order to surround the song with a mystique that might help sell it.
Not sure that worked, as the song wasn’t a hit, but it certainly piqued my interest. In fact, I was convinced it was an alias for Graham Parker.
Because “Elvis Costello” was so obviously a stage name, and no backstory was forthcoming, there was a widespread assumption – encouraged by canny Stiff supremos Jake Riviera and Dave Robinson – that it might not be a newcomer but a pseudonym for someone famous.
My smartarse theory was that it was Parker, of whom I was already a big fan, and whose strangulated vocals and sarcastic phrasing bore quite a similarity to those of “Elvis.”
Even the cover photo of a heavily bespectacled young man with his hands thrust insolently into his pockets like an off-duty office clerk could have been Parker in disguise.
Little did I know then that Parker and Costello came from the same stable and that Robinson had actually taken the young Parker to see him when he was plain Declan “D.P.” McManus, performing in his band Flip City.
Nor did I know he was the Lennon-lookalike bass guitarist seen on the right in the R.White’s Lemonade ad of the time about “a secret lemonade drinker.”
Less Than Zero was not just a great tune; it was a searing indictment of fascism in general and Oswald Mosley in particular – not that I realised it at the time, being seduced by the song itself, which was backed by an out-and-out country tune called Radio Sweetheart, complete with weeping pedal steel guitar.
Costello has since explained that he wrote the lyrics after seeing Mosley, former leader of the British Union of Fascists, interviewed on BBC TV. “He seemed unrepentant about his poisonous actions of the 1930s. The song was more of a slandering fantasy than a reasoned argument.”
Nor did I know that, as a result of American audiences not knowing who Oswald Mosley was – most assumed the reference in the opening line (“Calling Mr Oswald with the swastika tattoo”) was about Lee Harvey Oswald – he later rewrote the lyrics substantially to relate to the JFK assassination, performing what became known as “The Dallas Version” in the USA.