But as the songs took over - as you caught the strange, utterly assured merging of rock 'n' roll classicism and punk perversity, heard both the thug hiding in the singer's throat (go ahead, believe him when he says "I'm not angry", it's your funeral) and the cultivated, literary person writing his songs - the story behind the songs ceased to matter. The real story was, if anything, harder to believe - that the record was the work of one Declan McManus, a moonlighting 22-year-old married computer operator who grew up in Liverpool and who now, in London, had already declared that all of his songs were motivated solely by "revenge and guilt".
It was that I didn't believe anyone as geeky as the character on the jacket, who looked as if he were about to trip over his own feet, would have the nerve to appear in public under his own name. It wasn't simply the fact that Lowe, Parker's producer - a prankster who had recorded at least two songs about the joys of Bay City Roller fandom - was also credited with producing "Elvis Costello", or that the singer sounded something like Parker, whose 1976 albums Howlin Wind and Heat Treatment were the most nervous pop music the UK had turned up in years.
It wasn't just the pseudonym, as obvious as it was ridiculous. I was an instant sucker for anything approximating whatever it was that was happening in London, Manchester and Liverpool, but in 1977 even I could tell that Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True, released in the UK on the Stiff label, was a hoax cooked up by jack of all pop trades Nick Lowe and singer Graham Parker. As someone wrote at the time, it became one of those places you were afraid to walk into - because of how much it would cost you to get out. Once the Sex Pistols's Anarchy In The UK arrived as a $10 import in early 1977, (I'd) Rather (Be) Ripped Records in Berkeley went punk overnight.
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