Tom Petty vs Elvis Costello, 1977-1983: Who was the real king of new wave?
From the 1990s onward, Tom Petty and Elvis Costello settled into very similar roles as cynical but soft-hearted rock and roll ambassadors; respected middle-aged liaisons between the founders of the genre and the up-and-comers of the next generation.
Grizzled, bearded, forever on tour, getting inducted or inducting other people into various halls of fame, bemoaning the state of the music industry; this was their life. Costello, now 71, is still very much in that mode, 33 albums into his career. Petty, of course, was gone too soon, laid to rest in 2017 at 66.
Knowing what we know about the later chapters of their careers, the Wilburys and Burt Bacharachs and Diana Kralls and adult contemporariness of it all, it can be hard to remember how Petty and Costello were perceived when they broke on the scene as new wave newbs in the late 1970s.
Despite looking almost like polar opposites of one another aesthetically, the dark-haired, bespectacled Londoner and the blond-maned, long-faced Floridian, Elvis and Tom, were both routinely tagged with the “P” word at first. Journalists were still trying to sort out whether the punk explosion of 1976 had been a one-off detonation or an ongoing thing. If Costello and Petty weren’t quite raging punks in the Sex Pistols mould, they were certainly sneering garage rockers of a sort; loud, cocky, up to something sneaky.
Look at the shit-eating grin Petty is sporting on the album sleeve of the Heartbreakers’ self-titled 1976 debut album, or Costello’s tongue-in-cheek Buddy Holly pose on his own debut, My Aim Is True, a year later. Before you heard a lick of their music, seeing their faces on display at the local record shop would draw immediate curiosity. What did these two guys know about the future of rock music that you didn’t? Turns out, quite a lot.
Both frontmen wasted very little time establishing themselves as the most melodically skilled new songwriters on their respective sides of the Atlantic, although each found the UK more responsive to their early efforts than the USA.
The reggae-inspired 1977 single ‘Watching the Detectives’ was Costello’s first top 20 hit in his home country, but it was the earlier, initially overlooked single ‘Alison’ that wound up generating more attention, revealing Costello’s depth as a romantic balladeer; a bridge between The Clash and the singer/songwriters of Laurel Canyon.
At the exact same moment in time, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ first-ever tour of the UK had generated major buzz around the band, whose first album had mostly flopped back in the States. ‘Breakdown’, ‘Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll’, and ‘American Girl’ all became hits on the British charts.
Suddenly grouped in with a new “scene” he didn’t fully understand, a 26-year-old Petty looked around at the other new artists he was getting compared to and had to admit, he didn’t mind the company.
“We were in London for the first or second time Elvis Costello ever played in front of an audience,” Petty told Spin magazine in 1989. “I thought, hmmm, ballsy name, and then he comes out, just him and a guitar, and he was great.
“Those were wonderful days,” Petty added, “though we really took shit from both sides. To the punks, we were slow and wimpy, and to the mainstream crowd, we were wild and original.”
Costello and Petty immediately seemed to appreciate that they existed in that same in-between zone, and on December 2nd, 1977, their paths crossed on the same stage for the first time, as Costello, still just 23, opened for the Heartbreakers at a gig in Chicago.
“He was the only person I ever opened for during the first 25 years of my career,” Costello recalled in 2017, shortly after Petty’s death. “I opened for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, me and the Attractions, the first time we went to Chicago”.
“We played the Riviera Theatre, and we barely filled it with the two bands… [Tom] was a terrific songwriter, terrific singer, great attitude.”
Elvis was inspired enough by Petty’s tunes on that night that he just might have borrowed an idea or two for his next record, something Petty wasn’t shy about pointing out.
“It didn’t quite go clean with us and Elvis Costello,” he told interviewer Paul Zollo years later. “Elvis stole the ending of that song [‘Listen to Her Heart’], and he admits it! [laughs] He watched us do the ending, and he put it on this song he just wrote called ‘Radio Radio’. If you listen, it’s the same ending! I thought that was humorous. … He admitted that he took it that night at the Riviera Theatre.”
By 1978, now in full, semi-respectful songwriting combat with one another, Petty and Costello were finally getting their overdue attention in America, as the Heartbreakers’ You’re Gonna Get It and Elvis’s This Year’s Model both reached the top 30 on the Billboard album chart. Costello’s big moment had come during his US television debut on Saturday Night Live, when he famously switched up the agreed-upon song selection and tore through a blistering rendition of the Petty-inspired ‘Radio Radio’. It certainly felt like a punk rock moment, but then again, that word was starting to feel as poisonous as “disco”.
“I’m not a punk rocker who only appeals to a small group of people,” Costello told the Scrantonian Tribune in 1978, noting that his current hits like ‘Pump It Up’ were getting embraced by the masses. “I’m a mainstream rock and roller who just wants to get all the pop off the radio and get some more rock back on.”
Roughly a month later, Petty expressed a very similar sentiment to the Houston Chronicle while he was promoting his latest top 40 hits, ‘I Need to Know’ and ‘Listen to Her Heart’. “I wasn’t angry about being called a punk,” he said. “I just thought it was incorrect. And before I could finally get anybody to listen to me, I had to start screaming about it.”
That shared mission of the Heartbreakers and the Attractions was showing extremely fruitful results by the end of the decade. Costello’s Armed Forces and Get Happy! LPs reached number ten and number 11, respectively, in America, while Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes got all the way to number two. Unlike some of the prog rock or art rock of the same period, these records weren’t dense or heavily conceptual either. They succeeded because they were jam-packed with great, instantly hummable radio songs. There might have been a hint of a punk edge still in there, but a new word was needed for whatever it was. Some critics went with “power-pop”, but “new wave” is the one that stuck.
Tom Petty grew to tolerate the new label, even suggesting more than once that the Heartbreakers had “invented” new wave. He still thought it was generally wrong for any band to put themselves exclusively under one umbrella, but felt alright calling himself a “card-carrying member” of the new wave scene in 1979, telling the surely biased New Wave Rock magazine that he dug many of the other supposed members of the club, including Nick Lowe, the Cars, and the “fantastic” Elvis Costello.
In retrospect, if the heyday of new wave can generally be described as the years between punk’s initial flame out and the rise of MTV, 1977 to 1983, then it’s hard to argue that any two songwriters churned out more classics in that span of time than Tom Petty and Elvis Costello. They were commercial darlings and hit makers with extremely broad appeal; edgy enough for the punks, poppy enough for the Top 40 kids, intellectual enough for the indie brats.
There is plenty of room for both of them in the new wave Hall of Fame, should one ever be created. For the sake of pointless competition, though, the question must be asked… Who was the true master of the new wave universe, the skilled tunesmith who delivered the most pound-for-pound power-pop perfection between the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations?
The head-to-head tale of the tape is too close for any clear winner to be crowned, but it’s a safe bet that every listener’s sensibilities will nudge them one way or the other. Do you prefer a little Byrds-esque SoCal jangle with your radio jams, or are you more inclined to watch the proverbial “angry young man” of England gradually chill out by infusing his sound with Motown and Nashville?
Maybe a single-for-single Petty vs Costello battle royale can settle the issue for you? Pick your winners from each of these match-ups and see who comes out on top. Or just enjoy listening to some of the best pop songs ever committed to tape.
Tom Petty vs Elvis Costello – single vs single, 1977-1983:
1977
- ‘Alison’ (Costello) vs ‘American Girl’ (Petty)
- ‘Watching the Detectives’ (Costello) vs ‘Breakdown’ (Petty)
- ‘(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea’ (Costello) vs ‘Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll’ (Petty)
1978
- ‘Radio Radio’ (Costello) vs ‘Listen to Her Heart’ (Petty)
- ‘Pump It Up’ (Costello) vs ‘I Need to Know’ (Petty)
1979
- ‘Oliver’s Army’ (Costello) vs ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’ (Petty)
- ‘Accidents Will Happen’ (Costello) vs ‘Even the Losers’ (Petty)
1980
- ‘High Fidelity’ (Costello) vs ‘Refugee’ (Petty)
- ‘New Amsterdam’ (Costello) vs ‘Here Comes My Girl’ (Petty)
1981
- ‘Watch Your Step’ (Costello) vs ‘The Waiting’ (Petty)
- ‘From a Whisper to a Scream’ (Costello) vs ‘A Woman in Love (It’s Not Me)’ (Petty)
1982
- ‘You Little Fool’ (Costello) vs ‘You Got Lucky’ (Petty)
- ‘Man Out of Time’ (Costello) vs ‘Straight Into Darkness’ (Petty)
1983
- ‘Everyday I Write the Book’ (Costello) vs ‘Change of Heart’ (Petty)
