When I got back from Scotland, Elvis Presley was dead and Elvis Costello was riding high in the album charts. There were new punks at play—the Adverts with the summer's teenybop groover, "Gary Gilmore's Eyes", the Boomtown Rats with the summer's Stones riff, "Lookin' After Number One." Eddie and the Hot Rods had changed their name to the Rods and become successful again. The joint was boppin' and Elvis P's death was an irritation more than anything else.

I'd missed the first media spree and arrived home in time for the secondary effects of death. Bleached, elderly actresses were boasting of Pelvis thrusts in dressing rooms on obscure film sets in 1962 (odd boasts these, in the light of last month's bodyguard revelations of Elvis' total lack of sexual discrimination). And there were trinkets everywhere on display—Presley tee shirts and mugs and posters and old, old singles. RCA was obliged to re-employ a whole bunch of workers they'd just made redundant (no doubt they'll sack 'em now just in time for Christmas).

In England, in short, the most significant aspect of Elvis' death was the boost it gave to this year's bizarre youth cult: the regenerated Teds—their mission, to Stomp The Punks, their weapons, twenty-year-old styles and sounds and sulks. I dunno about anyone else but I find it distinctly disturbing to meet some cherub-faced youth dressed in the yellow suit and bootlace tie and lacquered hair of the demons of my own childhood, and Elvis C was disturbed enough to go to gigs prepared for trouble—if Teds hate punks, what are they gonna do to a Stiff weed taking THE NAME in vain?

The other thing I missed, and what a weepy event it must've been, was the annual convention of the Elvis Presley Fan Club—already scheduled to meet in Nottingham the weekend after

D-Day. These are emotional occasions at the best of times—as bits of Presley's trousers are auctioned off and as every film he ever made is shown one after another—but the meeting's usual high point is the annual discussion of whether this will be THE YEAR (when EP comes to Britain) and in the past, the fans' optimism has never flickered. I don't know what happened this time but I suspect it still didn't flicker— British pop fans have a great capacity for coping with death.

For these fans, for the media, for most rock critics, Elvis long since lost significance as a musician, long since paid his interest as a commodity—an object for whatever dreams or arguments or prejudices took one's fancy. The Presley myth is now so deeply entrenched that I doubt it'll ever be shifted: energetic and inspiring young rebel sold out to £loth and bland conformity by the Colonel and RCA and the army and show biz greed; the booze and pills and pot belly, the guilty symbols of dire records and wasted opportunity. Elvis' appeal, this story goes, was a matter of attitude and age.

Most rock fans are too young to have experienced Elvis as anything other than an establishment pop star—his original sexy edge is taken on trust and no one listens anymore (except his original fans, long dismissed in rock terms as the Las Vegas middle-aged). It took two late events to make me hear Elvis Presley as the finest rock 'n' roll singer there ever was: the v1968 TV Special was an amazing revelation that Elvis' power came from his own art and not from the tailored image and the fans' frenzy; and Greil Marcus' "Presliad" (in Mystery Train) made me listen to Presley's voice (rather than to its associations) and realise that his art didn't vanish with the uniform.

One of the many ironies vof Presley's career was that the more rock critics wrote about Elvis, the less they listened to him; the more they honored his early records, the more they sneered at his later ones. I've only read one English reviewer who even bothered to treat Moody Blue, the last album, seriously, or to point out what good singing there is on it. Elvis had the misfortune to make it before there was a Rock Community to give a hip cover to the star's life of repetition ahd crowd pleasing and sitting around getting fat on fame and tedium and lackeys. Elvis didn't make any excuses and didn't have any.

But the obituarists found him guilty anyway. "Died trying to escape," my brother said, when the news came flickering through. Maybe so, but what he was escaping is still w^iat everyone else, from Mick Jagger to Johnny Rotten, wants, and, in the end, Elvis enjoyed being a commodity with more grace, less pretense, and more mockery than most stars. At least he never had the self-righteousness that seems to have afflicted the writers of all the death notices. "It's Now Or Never,he sang, and for him it turned out to be never. For us, listening to his records it can still be now.