Complicated Shadows (3 page)

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Ronald Patrick Ross McManus arrived on 20 October 1927, born at home in Birkenhead, a town where religious choices were still an important issue. ‘As a child I lived in an
area where bigotry was rife,’
³
he later recalled, which served only to fan the flames of that ‘anti’ feeling that Declan felt was
part of his genetic inheritance.

Ross was gifted both his father’s passion and talent for music. In time, he learned to read music and later mastered the trumpet, emulating the jazz records he loved. Ross was something of
a pioneer: according to local musical history sources, he was perhaps the first musician brave enough to blow his beloved be-bop in Birkenhead.

Learning his trade in the myriad swing bands that flourished in Britain around the time of the Second World War, Ross augmented his musical work with a job as a
shipping
clerk. Although principally a trumpet player, he would occasionally sing with the band, and found he had both reasonable technique and immense power. ‘I have a memory of him singing and the
door rattling in the frame,’
⁴
recalled Declan, who inherited a considerable percentage of his father’s vocal punch.

Ross settled down in 1952, marrying Lilian Alda Ablett in Bromley Registry Office, south-west London. Both bride and groom were twenty-four at the time and living – at separate addresses,
naturally – in Sidcup, Kent. The daughter of Jim and Ada, Lilian was another product of a displaced Irish Catholic family from Smithdown Road in Liverpool’s Toxteth, a tough,
multi-racial dockside neighbourhood flanking the Mersey.

The couple’s similar upbringings cemented their relationship and informed their left-wing social and political values, but it was music that really brought them together; Lilian had helped
run some of the jazz clubs where Ross played early in his career, and, at the time of her marriage, was working as a gramophone record assistant at Selfridges department store in London’s
Oxford Street.

‘She had to sell all different kinds of music,’ said Declan. ‘So she was knowlegable about lots of records.’
⁵
Lilian’s enthusiasm for music existed independently of her husband, grounded firmly in the classic ballad singing of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. She would become an invaluable source
for Declan.

Young, versatile and good-looking enough when dressed for action, Ross’s hum-drum musical career took a quantum leap in 1954, when a talent scout for Joe Loss spotted him singing with a
band in Nottingham. At the time, Loss was the leader of the most famous big band in the UK, the closest thing Britain had to Glenn Miller. His fourteen-piece orchestra played sell-out seasons in
every major dance hall in the country, when they weren’t entertaining royalty or making one of their constant radio or television appearances. They were
the
band to be in. Ross was
signed as one of the three principal vocalists, alongside Rose Brennan and Larry Gretton. It was the biggest of breaks.

By the time of Declan’s birth on 25 August 1954, Lilian and Ross had moved to 46a Avonmore Road in Olympia, west London. Home was a rented ground-floor flat just off
the intersection of Hammersmith Road and Kensington High Street, on a quiet, cosmopolitan street which had once boasted Edward Elgar among its residents. The flat in Avonmore Road was the setting
for the photographs which later appeared as part of the
Brutal Youth
artwork, and also inspired the flickering childhood shadowplays of 1986’s ‘Battered Old Bird’,
although in reality the young Declan was taught to swear in Welsh, not French, by the live-in landlady.

The child was taken home and almost immediately enveloped in music. Ross was already an integral part of the Joe Loss Orchestra, quickly settling into a fourteen-year-long residency at the
Hammersmith Palais, the famous London ballroom only a short distance away from Avonmore Road. The band were required to turn around the hits of the day week-in, week-out at the Palais, embarking on
short national tours during the summer. Sometimes, Declan would hop on the tour bus to see a couple of shows and catch up with his dad, but most of the early memories of watching his father come
from the Hammersmith Palais.

As well as playing to paying punters, the Joe Loss Orchestra also performed a live radio broadcast every Friday lunchtime, churning out faithful approximations of all the current
hits.
⁴
Declan was listening to all of this – and learning.

‘I knew the names of jazz musicians before I went to school,’ he recalled. ‘[Dizzy] Gillespie, Charles Mingus, I really loved Peggy Lee; and that comes from the
broad-mindedness that was fostered in my household from an early age.’
⁶

Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Clifford Brown were among the other frequent and welcome guests on the MacManus turntable, providing a far more fruitful
education than
school. Declan began attending the local Catholic primary in 1959, but he didn’t linger long. In 1961, the family moved from the bustle of west Kensington to the leafier locale of 16 Beaulieu
Close in Twickenham Park, just over the river from Richmond and a stone’s throw from the banks of the Thames.

The family were doing well. They went to Spain on holiday every year – certainly not the common occurrence then that it is now – and the new house was comfortably middle-class: a
medium-sized, modern maisonette, one in a semi-detached block of four in a pleasant cul-de-sac just outside London’s city limits in Middlesex.
⁵

The change of address meant a change of school. Aged seven, Declan started at St Edmund’s primary school in Nelson Road in the suburb of Whitton, a couple of miles west of his new house,
near where the England Rugby Union stadium now stands and literally around the corner from where he would establish his first marital home nearly fifteen years later.

With a total pupil roll of around 150, St Edmund’s was a small parish school in a sedate suburban area, run by nuns and attached to St Edmund’s Church. An utterly ordinary example of
its type, with its one-storey buildings, fenced-in asphalt play area and small grass playing field, it was a friendly enough environment, although in keeping with most institutions which involve
nuns, there was inevitably an aggressively religious atmosphere coursing through it. ‘I didn’t like it very much,’ Declan said later. ‘I don’t think anybody likes
school very much.’
⁷

The feeling wasn’t necessarily mutual. He was popular with the nuns, partially because most of them were of Irish extraction and anyone with Irish links and an obviously Irish heritage was
regarded favourably, but above all
because he was very little trouble to anyone. School friend Robert Azavedo remembers him as ‘a quiet lad’, and this seemed to
personify his primary school days.

Brian Burke was another friend from Declan’s class at St Edmund’s who recalls random snapshots of him from that time: taking their first Holy Communion together, working on a piece
of basketwork during craft classes, and one striking vignette which hinted that his future ambitions lay not merely in consuming music, but in performing it.

‘The one thing that has always stuck in my mind is him singing ‘The Little White Bull’ in class one day,’ says Burke, painting a slightly unsettling picture of the boy
who went on to write ‘Tramp The Dirt Down’ sneering through a Tommy Steele number. ‘He still has this sort of nasal singing style which I recognise as being the way he sang back
then, just from this single song.’

It was perhaps the first public exhibition of a stubborn, single-minded determination and a certain immunity to ridicule, core characteristics which to date have shown no sign of diminishing.
Physically, Declan was on the plump side, and one vital ingredient was missing. ‘He wasn’t wearing glasses,’ says Burke. ‘But you could recognise him in old photographs that
I have as Elvis Costello. You can see the facial resemblance.’

Ross’s status as a local celebrity with the Joe Loss Orchestra did Declan no harm at school either. ‘The nuns would go crazy when his father came to collect him,’ recalls
Robert Azavedo. ‘He used to come to school dressed in white trousers, blue socks and white Italian shoes. Drove the nuns clucking mad like giggly schoolgirls.’

His father’s career was becoming more and more important, and not just to excitable women under strict religious orders. By the age of nine or ten, Declan was taking every opportunity to
capitalise on the benefits of Ross’s job, especially keen to catch the preparations for the weekly radio show whenever he could.

‘Fridays during the [school] holidays were something that I really used to look forward to,’ he recalls. ‘I used to see bands rehearse. I would get there at nine in the morning
and see The Hollies, then Billy J. Kramer, then
Engelbert Humperdinck or whoever it was.’
⁸

Regularly observing the stars of the day first-hand over a number of years was an invaluable learning experience, even if it did drain most of the romance from the idea of being a professional
musician. ‘A lot of the instinctive things I have about being onstage come from watching my dad and the discipline of that band, but I saw that it wasn’t actually glamourous, that it
was sort of a job.’
⁹

There was precious little ‘sort of’ about it. By the mid-’60s the glamour of the big-band era had long since ebbed away, along with most of the groups that had helped create
it. Even the Joe Loss Orchestra needed to be increasingly adaptable to survive. The band had evolved into an amazingly versatile if somewhat eccentric beast, album releases like
Go Latin With
Loss!
– featuring a booming Ross singing ‘La Bamba’ – with performances combining everything from straight renditions of the latest Tony Bennett 45 to full treatments
of The Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘See Emily Play’ by Pink Floyd.

Where some might have scoffed, the polished diversity of what Ross and the Joe Loss Orchestra were able to do was not lost on Declan. Nor was the effort it required: there’s no question
that his work ethic was forged from an observance of his father in those days. Penning a tribute to the recently deceased Joe Loss in the
Guardian
in 1990, Ross recalled: ‘I still
travel 50,000 miles a year entertaining people and every night I operate to the same principles as everyone who has passed through Joe’s hand: discipline, punctuality, hard work and value for
money.’ It’s an ethos that clearly made an impact on his son. Declan would always be a worker, perhaps deferring only to James Brown for the title of hardest working man in the
business.

There was little sense of any generational divide in the MacManus household. Ross’s work ensured he had no need to make the kind of excruciating – if well-intentioned –
attempts to understand or appreciate his son’s tastes that wrought divisions in many other families. The two males were close, and when Declan later grew into adulthood it would become
possible to identify several shared father-son characteristics.

‘I remember that the woman my dad sang with for a number of years, Rosie Brennan, told me that my dad was always flirting with the tallest, best-looking woman in the
room or trying to pick a fight with the biggest guy, depending on his mood,’ said Declan. ‘He was a terror! I think that’s where I get some of it from.’
¹⁰
Ross was also a very loving father, articulate, passionate, loquacious and witty, and passed on many of these attributes to his son. He also bequeathed the
mighty MacManus nose.

It was an unusually tight father-son relationship, made all the more unique by the fact that Declan’s mother also defied stereotype. Allan Mayes played with Declan in Liverpool in the
early ’70s and remembers Lilian well from those days: ‘[She] was hipper than my mother, hipper than any other mother. She was like, “Have you heard the new Band album, Declan? I
heard Neil Young on the radio this afternoon.” She knew stuff like that, and she had stories to tell about life on the road with the Joe Loss Band. And she was a very nice lady.’

Declan himself noted that his parents were a bit beatnik, and later sensed that Ross had sacrificed most of his own artistic ambitions to be a serious jazz artist as a young man by throwing in
his lot with the middle-of-the-road stability of the Joe Loss Orchestra. Although there was never any parental pressure on Declan to be a musician, the legacy of his father’s compromised
career stayed with him. Later, when he realised he had the privilege of an audience that was prepared to follow him down some of his more experimental avenues, he would seize the opportunity to
cover every inch of musical territory he possibly could. Ross would expect no less. As contemporary composer and some-time Costello collaborator, Richard Harvey notes: ‘I think Declan is very
much aware of being the son his father would want him to be.’

* * *

In August 1965, Declan turned eleven and moved up to Catholic secondary school. Archbishop Myers, now renamed St Mark’s, was situated on Bath Road in Hounslow,
north-west of Whitton and a trip which necessitated a ride on the No. 281 bus. Life required some adjustment. It was a secondary modern school, much bigger than St Edmund’s,
above average in standard, and Declan was by no means part of the social or academic elite. However, he was beginning to make an impression as an individual character, if a bit of a loner.

‘I liked him, he was very independent,’ remembers Marianne Burgess, who was in Declan’s class at Myers. ‘He wasn’t bothered by what people thought of him. I
remember him wearing a bow tie to the school dance, which was quite unusual. We girls could have sensible chats with him because he seemed very mature.’

He may have been mature, but maturity is seldom what teenage girls are really interested in. Declan was very chunky, serious-minded and stubbornly individual, and by all accounts was not a
particularly big hit with the opposite sex. However, there was the perennial teenage boy’s consolation prize: he was a ‘solid footballer’, according to Robert Azavedo.