Hello Elvis Costello

While walking down a hill I met Elvis Costello walking up

I’m no good at spotting celebrities. I have star-spotter friends in LA who have owls’ revolving heads. They spot everybody. People they don’t spot are not anybody. In restaurants, they interrupt the very fascinating story about my life that I am trying to tell them, to hiss that Serena Williams/Alice Cooper/the King of England JUST THIS SECOND WALKED IN!

Even if I see the celebrity, I don’t necessarily recognise them. I talked with Jude Law for ten-minutes at a bar counter without realising who he was. When I got back to my table, my companion asked me if Law and I were old friends, such cool had I displayed. Once when I was working as a celebrity journalist (there’s an irony!) I interviewed the comedian Mike Yarwood, thinking he was the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck.

The day I spotted Elvis Costello was different. For one thing I am an Elvis Costello enthusiast, so I was reasonably sure what he looked like. For another we were in a silent street with nobody else around and nothing else going on to distract my attention. And for a third thing, we were walking towards each other on converging trajectories, so as we drew closer, I had time and licence to observe him and ponder.

We were in Holly Hill, Hampstead, early evening. I was walking down, he was walking up, and we were on the same narrow pavement, so inevitably we would pass within a foot of each other.

Even at 50 yards, the man approaching me looked uncannily like Elvis Costello. Not only that, he was wearing a geezerish sort of rock ’n’ roll hat. At this late moment in the history I’d struggle to describe exactly what a rock ’n’ roll hat looks like; just take it from me: you know one when you see one. Another thing, he had a distinct rock ‘n’ roll gait — an attitude of locomotion.

Perhaps.

With every converging step, the more like Elvis Costello he became. At five yards everything about him said Elvis Costello, at one yard it screamed it. Absolutely no doubt.

Or could I be mistaken?

Only one thing was 100% certain in my mind. I wasn’t going to stop him and ask him. Because that would be so uncool, so pushy, such a nosy, invasion-of-privacy thing to do. It would mark me as a spotter, a tiresome fan grasping at the coattails of fame.

If he was Elvis Costello, I’d be embarrassed for asking. If he wasn’t, I’d be ten times as embarrassed. Even more embarrassing — what if he turned out to be a completely different celebrity, Jimmy Tarbuck or Alice Cooper, say, or the King of England?

Anyway, I’m an Englishman and Englishmen don’t talk to strangers unless there’s reason to apologise, or they’re pushing in front of them in a queue. At the risk of sounding French, Englishmen have sang-froid. 

So I summoned my sang-froid and buttoned my lip. As we passed each other, he looked straight at me and said: “It is.”