Elvis Costello: Daddy Cruel.

When I Was Cruel is in stores now.

The first time Elvis Costello toured Australia he looked like a spastic Frankenstein clone of Buddy Holly. He looked like he was in pain. He sounded otherwise. Even then in the first weeks of 1979, EC was already a star, even if he didn't think so. Costello has made so many albums with his band the Attractions, as a solo artist and in association variously with the Brodsky Quartet, Bill Frisell and Anne Sofie von Otter that it's impossible to summarise his musical contribution other than to euphemise endlessly and toss around words like epic, staggering, profound.

Now he's released his first solo album, When I Was Cruel, since 1995's Kojak Variety. Naturally, it's brilliant and an obvious contender for album of the year this early in 2002.

"There are two songs called When I Was Cruel," he explains. "I wrote one song called When I Was Cruel and wasn't satisfied with just that one; I might go on writing songs called When I Was Cruel because it's one of those titles you could have lots of different thoughts about. The first song was perhaps a more straight forward song written from the personal view of the narrator while the song that's ended up on the record is a little bit more expansive and a bit more of a panorama. I didn't particularly think it represented anything more than what you wanted it to represent. It's one that invites other people's thoughts and, really, that's my job - to invite other people's thoughts and feelings. I'm not a dictator of feelings, emotions or thoughts. I don't want to tell them what to think. I just want to provoke them, whatever part of them that can be stimulated."

Declan McManus, born August 25 1954 to a highly musical family, always has an explanation or an idea about why things are. He has an extraordinary memory and a knowledge of music that is encyclopaedic. Two decades and more than 300 songs later, Costello is unarguably the most gifted songwriter of his generation.

"I have asked a lot of different questions of listeners and I often haven't made my thinking clear," he says. "I can tell them there isn't a message to When I Was Cruel, there is a celebration. If Painted From Memory was an examination of or luxuriating in melancholy this one is a celebration of the absurd."

"I think it helps not to do the same thing over and over again. If you were making the same album every couple of years or every year as I did initially, that burst of energy you have when you first start out - because you're so thrilled to make records as a kid - means you can make three or four and you don't even notice the years go by. I made three pretty great albums in two-and-a-half-years at the beginning of my career and it's hard to sustain that work out and do all the touring."

"I work harder now but work on different things, different types of music, so when you get that feeling you want to make a noisy record, as I'd call this, a rock 'n' roll record or whatever you want to call it, one that's just got my same on it predominantly, then you're really ready to do it because it's been building up for a while."

He does, despite rumours to the contrary, rest. Exactly when seems hard to imagine as there always seems to be some sort of project with his name pencilled on it. After touring When I Was Cruel over the next few months, he's appearing on The Simpsons, will collaborate with director Neil LaBute on a film project, and his orchestral score for a ballet adaptation of A Midsummer's Night Dream will be recorded for Deutsche Grammophon with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.

"I do get tired and paint myself into a corner with doing too many things but it is hard to turn things down," he says. "You've got Charles Mingus' widow, Sue, who has this ferocious amount of energy that makes me seem like I'm a slacker saying 'We're doing this concert. Do you want to come and sing with the jazz orchestra?' That means I'm going to sing to all this fantastic music by Mingus for the entire night. Then she tells me I can also write words for it. Well, you can't turn that down.”

“Then somebody says 'Do you want to do this television show with Lucinda Williams?' She's just made one of the greatest records, Essence, that I can imagine - and I get to sing Blue with her on stage! Or I get to go on the Concert For A Landmine Free World and sing songs I wrote 15 years ago and duet with Emmylou Harris and have her come in to the concert and say 'Will you sing Sleepless Nights with me?' It can't really get very much better."