Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1992,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a musician, widely regarded as one of the best British songwriters of recent years, he comes from a musical family.

Both his grandfather and father were trumpeters. He taught himself to play the guitar, left school at 18

and went to work for the Midland Bank. Eventually in 1976 he signed up with a

record company and first alone and then with his band The Attractions had a series of

hits including watching the detectives this year's model and Oliver's army. His

brush with pop stardom he says has not proved fatal and he continues to be successful

working with Paul McCartney and co-writing the music for Alan Blaisdell's

television series GBH among other things.

He is Declan McManus, otherwise known as Elvis Costello.

Shall we deal with a name first? What happened to Declan McManus in all this?

Well, as you just illustrated, it's a rather difficult name to say say particularly over the telephone and all the way

through school I was tortured by teachers imitating the sound of somebody twanging elastic bands

when saying my name.

It found it proved equally difficult over the phone when dealing when

when dealing with record company people when I was trying to get my tapes listened to.

And so I adopted my great-grandmother's name, Costello, as you would say in Ireland,

or Costello, as you would say, in Ireland, or Costello, as people there said it here.

And somewhere along the way, the gentleman who became my manager, still is.

Jack Riviera just announced one day I was going to be Elvis and it seemed in the time

...