THE INTERVIEW
He’s tackled nearly every form
of contemporary music over 27
albums. Now Elvis Costello is
taking his cultural ambassador
skills to their logical conclusion...
as a talk-show host. “Inside the
Actor’s Studio,” he says.“Is that the
guy with the extraordinary beard?”

By CHRIS NORRIS

TERR Y O’NEILL/HULTON ARCHIVE/GE T T Y IMAGES

In December 1977, Saturday Night Live introduced America to a man who would become one of the most iconic and enduring figures in rock history: a spindly, pissed-off-looking Brit with oversize specs and a palsied stance who (as a last-minute sub for the Sex Pistols) halted a performance of “Less Than Zero” mid-verse to instead race through the uncleared anti-censorship screed “Radio Radio” in a torrent of pressured speech and incendiary playing, winning himself the scorn of the network and a fiery rep as the new hyperverbal bard of punk.

Thirty-one years and a few string quartets and jazz suites later, Elvis Costello sits at a booth in Harlem’s Lenox Lounge, preparing to reclaim the small screen. He just finished taping the 13th episode of Spectacle, his Sundance Channel talk show, premiering in December,

down the street at the Apollo Theater and is soon to board a plane to Vancouver with his wife, jazz singer-pianist Diana Krall, and their twin two-year-old sons. Though clearly exhausted, with graying scruff and a sleepy gap-toothed smile, the 54-year-old born Declan Patrick MacManus still looks camera-ready—his trademark glasses set off by the silk scarf, black shirt, gold bracelets, and dark duster coat of an urban troubadour. He sips ice water to nurse a voice hoarsened by weeks of talking and singing and humbling himself with everyone from Tony Bennett to the Police to Lou Reed to soprano Renée Fleming to Bill Clinton. “Every show,” Costello says, “has a moment where your head nearly falls off.”