The Enchanters vs. Sprawlburg Springs
Costello, who grew up in Florida and moved to Chicago in 1997, says early drafts of The Enchanters were little more than “rants about Orlando.” The decade of revisions turned the material from typical fanzine fodder into a charged satire of the two milieus that shaped him–the punk scene and the culturally bereft exurbs of central Florida. While the story will ring familiar to anyone whose raison d’etre has ever been a seven-inch collection, its real theme is inspiration and evolution: how we become who we are, and the terrible hairstyles we sport along the way. “It’s about the idea that through inspiration we can transform and invent new selves,” explains Costello. “In the Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury they talk about how at early shows they would be playing to these kids with long 70s hair. And then the next time they came through the same kids would be there, but they had short spiky hair and were punks. I wanted to explore those concrete scenes of inspiration, what happens after a new world opens up to you.”
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While Costello insists that his novel is not autobiographical, he does draw from his own experience. The narrator is a drummer (Costello plays drums in the Functional Blackouts) who has just joined a falling-apart-at-the-seams band called the Enchanters. As the book opens, they’re on the porch of someone’s parents’ house about to play a show to an audience of 12 rabid teenagers. “When I walked through the clangy screen door, twelve jaws went slack, and twelve pairs of eyes stared in shock. It was a little awkward. I mean, I made my living as a Squid Cutting Technician for Cleveland Steamerz Good Time Bar and Grille World. I came from humble peasant stock. Just folks, really.”
