Five CDs to mark the 50th anniversary (or thereabouts) of the debut of a musician who has never stopped

London, July ’77. Outside the Hilton on Park Lane, where CBS had gathered its executives for the annual convention, a slim young man wearing Buddy Holly-style glasses plugged his guitar into a portable amplifier and began singing on the pavement. He wanted to get noticed by the Americans. The police spot him first and load him into their van. His name is Declan MacManus, a computer operator at a cosmetics firm who, a few months earlier, had decided to call himself Elvis Costello. Along with a fine (5 pounds) for disturbing the peace, he’ll receive a record deal. Forty-nine years on, Elvis is a 72-year-old with a Queen’s honour on his wall and a five-CD box set that retraces that period: “My Aim Is True (49th Anniversary Edition)”, comprising 104 tracks, 52 of which are previously unreleased, including home demos, outtakes, live performances and radio broadcasts, plus a 72-page essay written in his own hand, as well as diary entries from 1976. Why the 49th and not the 50th? Because to Costello, the idea of celebrating half a century since his debut seemed ridiculous, so he brought it forward by a year. The highlight of the box set is The Blue Print, an album of recordings from ’75 and ’76 featuring plenty of echoes of Springsteen and Van Morrison, Randy Newman-style vaudeville ragtime, and the country music he kept under wraps at the time because it didn’t fit his image.

This box set, however, serves to dispel a misconception, if one were still needed. Costello is part of the history of 1977, the year of the Pistols’ “Never Mind the Bollocks”, but the only thing he possessed and shared with punk was its edginess. My Aim Is True was recorded over four sessions in a small studio in Islington while he was still clocking in at his day job. He was joined by The Clover, a Californian country-rock band who had moved to London, and in the control room were the magic hands of Nick Lowe for Stiff, the independent label that made a point of its snobbery out of brilliant amateurism. The album is packed with all sorts of influences: pub rock, soul, rockabilly, the reggae of “Watching the Detectives”, the harmonies of the Beatles, and the melodies of Bacharach. All things Elvis had listened to whilst growing up with the records of his father Ross, a singer in Joe Loss’s orchestra. His voice is nasal, strained and spitting; the lyrics are full of double entendres and guilt.

‘Alison’ has for years been interpreted as a murder ballad because of the line ‘my aim is true’, even though it never was, and behind it lies nothing more than a supermarket cashier with a melancholic gaze. With The Attractions – Steve Nieve on keyboards, Bruce Thomas on bass, Pete Thomas on drums – Costello released a dizzying succession of albums in just a few years, from This Year’s Model to Armed Forces. He was the ‘angry young man’ with the Telecaster, a quintessentially British icon. As a guest on ‘Saturday Night Live’, he stopped the band after just a few bars of ‘Less Than Zero’ and launched into ‘Radio Radio’, a tirade against commercial radio and the dictates of record producers. He was banned from the programme for twelve years. He left the UK and in 1981 moved to Nashville, where he recorded an album of country covers, *Almost Blue*, infuriating his new wave audience.

The following year, with ‘Imperial Bedroom’ and the Beatles’ sound engineer, he indulged in an almost symphonic, baroque pop sound. A string of departures followed: he wrote with Paul McCartney; recorded a cycle of letters to Juliet with the Brodsky Quartet – which annoyed the critics, who described it as a music theory lesson; and collaborated with Burt Bacharach on "Painted from Memory", in which his voice finally blended with the melody rather than clashing with it. He sang with mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, wrote the ballet Il Sogno on commission from Aterballetto, and married jazz queen Diana Krall. Yet he never came across as a mere genre-hopper. Instead, he was a voracious consumer of music: he studied, learned to read and write scores, never stood still, and often became unruly. One evening in ’79, in a bar in Columbus, Ohio, whilst drunk, he insulted Ray Charles and James Brown with racist remarks. He would spend years apologising for it.

Costello is far from indifferent to political issues either. As early as his first album, in ‘Less Than Zero’, he takes aim at Oswald Mosley, leader of the British fascists. With ‘Oliver’s Army’, he tops the charts with lyrics about mercenaries and the remnants of the empire. He wrote ‘Shipbuilding’ during the Falklands War, depicting the shipbuilding towns regaining work thanks to the war that takes their sons away – in what is arguably the finest protest song of the 1980s, performed almost in a whisper. Today, Costello is a musical institution who rejects the role of veteran but acts as his own archivist, with the meticulousness of a philologist who, in the liner notes, makes no concessions to nostalgia. New songs? “Those days are over,” he replies. The liner notes of the box set, he says, are his final word. Next year, the actual fiftieth anniversary, he will spend doing something else.