UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Pretty self-explanatory
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by Jack of All Parades »

I have taken this approach to reading the book-as it is non-chronological, I, too, have been meandering back and forth. I find it all the more enjoyable to read it that way. As his narrative drifts back and forth over time and location and personage or event, so does my perusal. And a perusal it is. A satisfying aspect of the book is its conversational tone-you read[or listen if you let your mind] to a distinctive voice entertain you with anecdotes and stories that are most often cap-stoned with a 'life-lesson' parable or aphorism. One reads of a life fully lived. I suspect there will be few regrets when he finally closes his 'book'. I have to believe he has 'self-censored' his written voice but the words spill out on the pages as if he was sharing a late night conversation with a select million or so close friends. His syntax is brisk-the sentences build with a judicious detail or metaphor. He does not linger or dally as there is much to relay. I read the pages as if only he has my ear. The relaying of his time in Dylan's company is a prime example for me so far as to how this book works for me-he is vulnerable enough to show that he, too, can be a fan and he caps that portion of his memory off with a trading of laughter over his usage of the word "amanuensis" where Dylan rightly calls him out on his crossword moment.

I do not regret the lack of an index. This is a memoir and I like the fact that it is not over researched, except for the sifting of his memories. This gives it an immediacy and at the same time a filter that time puts one's memories through in the re-telling.

Can you tell I am having a good time with this book?
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by erey »

charliestumpy wrote:A discography etc would have been nice too.
Maybe there's one on the internet somewhere. ;)
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by Top balcony »

Enquired of this in my local WH Smiths, conversation truly went like this:

Me "excuse me madam, do you have Elvis Costello's autobiography?"

Madam " I'll have a look - who's the author?"
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/bo ... ful-music/

Elvis Costello Will Be the Final Authority on Elvis Costello

A look at the rock n' roll musician's new memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink.

"Real life becomes a rumor," Elvis Costello once sang on the terrific Imperial Bedroom song, "Man Out of Time."

And that evocative turn of phrase—one of Costello's trademarks since exploding on to the rock scene nearly four decades ago—underscores the story he tells in his engrossing new memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink (Blue Rider Press/Penguin).

Costello seems intent on correcting, if not rewriting, his history. Who can blame him? Just as Bob Dylan lives down the media's pat description of him as The Spokesman for a Generation, scribes' insistence that Costello is and always will be Mr. Revenge and Guilt.

In the afterglow of the buzz over My Aim Is True, his remarkable 1977 debut album, Costello recklessly told a British music journalist that his songs were about revenge and guilt. Identified by his black horn-rimmed glasses, he has been living down his image ever since, as rock's Angry Young Dork (or, if you please, Buddy Holly After Shock Therapy).

That's only one of the falsehoods and exaggerations that the ironic lyricist, who wrote a song called "I'm Not Angry" on his first album, is determined to correct. Misguided critics suggested that such songs as "This Year's Girl" and "Party Girl" were attacks on women because Costello seemed to veer from callous to dismissive in his songwriting. Costello shrugs off the label when touching upon "This Year's Girl," a ditty from his frenetic early period.

"Even at the time of first singing these songs, I could sense there were people out there who perhaps really did harbor misogynistic feelings," Costello notes. "Some of them had notebooks in their hands. Perhaps they saw me as some kind of mouthpiece for their own, uglier feelings. They just weren't listening very hard."

Unfaithful Music should satisfy his diehard fans, the group that is most likely to plunk down thirty bucks for a rock and roll memoir. Costello serves up ample helpings of such red-met highlights as the time in 1979 when he cursed out Ray Charles in a drunken rage; formed the Attractions; toured America in his wild youth; changed songs abruptly while performing on Saturday Night Live in 1977; wrote songs and performed with Paul McCartney and so many other luminaries; toured with Bob Dylan; and experienced the highs and lows of three marriages.

I suspect that Costello will write more books. He can stay close to home and help raise his two young sons. It beats living out of a suitcase in, as a road-weary George Harrison once put it, "some cruddy motel." I'm sure it is not lost on him that he has garnered more ink for this book than he has for River in Reverse, Momofuko, National Ransom or any of his other recent fine albums. (When was the last time that the New York Times Magazine profiled Elvis to celebrate a new album?)

Elvis may yet blossom in a new literary career, much as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has done in his post-basketball life. It's easy to imagine Costello emerging as a pundit for all seasons. Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink is a start.

Jon Friedman is the author of Forget About Today: Bob Dylan's Genius for (Re-)Invention, Shunning the Naysayers, And Creating A Personal Revolution​
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/o ... ve-no-idea

Elvis Costello: ‘The only reason to write about showbusiness is to point out the absurdity of it all’

Elvis Costello ruined his first marriage with drugs and sex, but always took music seriously. Now he has written a book about his life and, over a long lunch in Manhattan, explains why he is not looking for pity.

Elvis Costello is one of the music business’s great survivors. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he wasn’t a pop supernova who flamed out after just a couple of hits; nor did he melt into a drug-induced puddle. In the late 1970s he rode New Wave like a pro surfer then, when it began to crash, did what any clever entrepreneur would do: diversified.

He went through his Nashville country period in the 80s, dabbled with classical music in the 90s with the Brodsky Quartet, embraced the New Orleans sound after Hurricane Katrina, and most recently delved with the Roots into funky R&B. Through it all he has managed to keep the character of Elvis Costello – that quizzical blend of Londoner and Liverpudlian, overlain with a thick American vocal drawl – strong and consistent, so that the listener has no doubt that funky Costello and the Costello of Pump It Up are one and the same being.

Now he’s done it again. The master of the 30-line song lyric has turned his hand to something a little wordier. To the dismay of ghostwriters everywhere, he has sat down at a computer entirely unaided and composed a thumping 670-page autobiography (a word that he doesn’t entirely like, though he prefers it to “memoir”, which he finds a bit poncy).

In writing an epic tome that straddles his childhood in the southern English suburbs and Merseyside all the way to his current life, aged 61, in Vancouver, Costello has clearly benefited from elephantine powers of recall. “I do have a fairly scary memory,” he agrees. “I had to look up dates, and people will alight on mistakes, but that’s not the important thing – the memory of how things felt is what’s important. The absurdity of things. The only reason to write about a life in showbusiness is to point out the absurdity of it all, because very little is consequential.”

In fact, there is plenty of consequence in the book. For a start, he recalls with absolute precision how he came to write each of his most famous songs. Pump It Up, a paean to rock’n’roll decadence, was scribbled on hotel notepaper on a fire escape in Newcastle; Everyday I Write the Book was penned “for a lark in 10 minutes”; Alison was composed when he was living with his first wife and infant son in the suburbs making £30 a week in a computer job.

He also recounts how some of his best-known songs came to him, almost mystically, in a flash – lyrics, music and all. He calls them “visitations”. “I had six of them in one day,” he says, still sounding a little startled. When he was 22, he was sitting on a train to Lime Street and (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes descended on him fully formed – he had to run to his mother’s house singing the song to himself manically before he could grab a guitar and get it down.

The book is called Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink – a duplicitous title, as it’s evident in the reading that music has in fact been very faithful to him. “And me to it,” he adds pointedly. The book bristles with details of his many encounters with such legends as Joe Strummer, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Paul McCartney and Burt Bacharach. Every page exudes his deep love and knowledge of modern music and its basic building block: the three-minute song.

You take songs incredibly seriously, I say. “Why would you not?” he replies. “You’ve got to take something seriously. Maybe it’s the tiny bit of me that isn’t English – the Irish bit – that has saved me from the affliction that everything is a joke. It’s not.”

We are sitting in the dining room of the Friars Club in midtown Manhattan, haunt of such comedy greats as Lucille Ball, Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis. It’s odd that Costello belongs to a club for comedians, and that someone formerly on the edges of the punk scene should invite me to lunch at a venue that bans jeans and sneakers and insists on jackets when the weather turns colder.

But then, consider the Elvis Costello who is sitting next to me. Today he is wearing a black waistcoat and jacket, a polka-dot tie and, of course, his ever-present horn-rimmed glasses and fedora, which he wears throughout servings of mozzarella and tomato, broccoli and double macchiato. The outfit, which has remained virtually unchanged since he devised it in the late 70s, meets the Friars Club rules and also has the virtue of being just a tad comedic, in an ironic sort of way.

When I observe that Elvis Costello, the character played by the man who was born Declan MacManus, is ironic, he grunts and says he’d rather call it “perverse”. “Think of what pop stars looked like in 1976 and a whole bunch of us – myself, Ian Dury – didn’t look like that. We wouldn’t make it in a beauty contest with the Bay City Rollers or compete with David Essex in looks, so the only way to go was to exaggerate the difference. That’s not ironic, it’s expedient.”

Even in the absence of alcohol – Costello no longer drinks – our conversation warms up over the course of a lunch that stretches to two and a half hours. By the end he is relaxed, funny and chatty. But in the jobbing part of our conversation, when the more sensitive bits of the book need to be discussed, he seems wary of me and slightly on the defensive. And why wouldn’t he be, given the roasting – another specialism of the Friars Club – that he’s been given over the years by the tabloids?

Large stretches of the book are turned over to the years from 1977 to the mid-80s when he was rocketed to stardom on the back of his first album, My Aim Is True. He quickly took on a bad-boy image – or as he describes it, he messed up his life “so I could write stupid little songs about it”. There were “blue pills” and “white pills”, and he alludes to a formidable number of casual sexual encounters that destroyed his first marriage to childhood sweetheart Mary Burgoyne, to his bitter regret.

Unfaithful Music – the title is also a riff on that epoch of promiscuity – is admirably honest about what I suggest to him were his years of notoriety. He grunts and corrects me a second time. “Infamy would be better,” he says.

The most notorious – or infamous – of his outrages occurred in 1979 when in a drunken bar brawl he used the N-word to refer to James Brown and Ray Charles, adding “blind” and “ignorant” to Charles for good measure. In the book he makes no attempt to justify his behaviour, saying “it took just five minutes to detach my tongue from my mind and my life from the rail it was on”. I remark on that lack of justification, and he says: “No, that should be clear by now. I did say that’s the last word on the matter, because I have explained several times – I’ve never ducked it.”

Then he asks me to pass the salt.

Costello is tough on himself. He writes that he was an “arrogant bastard back then”, and he clearly flagellated himself about his selfish deeds for years afterwards. He berates himself for having broken the heart “of one kind girl”, a reference to Burgoyne. In a searing passage in which he discusses his ensuing 17-year relationship with the Pogues bass player Cait O’Riordan, he suggests that he embarked on that eventually unhappy union because “I wanted to punish myself for the things I’d done. For my lack of gratitude. For all my vanity.”

But when I suggest to him that he is his own harshest critic, he bridles. “If that’s what you read, that’s what’s there,” he says. “That’s not what I set out to prove. I wasn’t interested in writing a book that said, ‘Aren’t I great’.”

No, that’s not what I was implying, I say, on the defensive myself now. Costello is leaning towards me as he speaks, his eyes unblinking behind his trademark spectacles. It’s certainly a long way from the scraps he used to get into in the 70s, but there’s a definite charge in the air.

“I’m not looking for pity,” he says. “It’s the way I see it. People who sit around honing their withering remarks have no idea how much harder on yourself you are than anybody else is. It’s a failure to understand how this is even done. People who go, ‘That’s all rubbish!’ – you couldn’t even write one of my songs, so what are you talking about? You wouldn’t even know how to begin. You couldn’t even write my worst song.”

I’m a little taken aback. Where did that come from? It feels like we have both travelled back in time to the 70s and I have metamorphosed into one of those seedy Daily Mirror journalists in a stained mackintosh whose hostile interviews he obviously detested.

Do my questions make you uncomfortable, I ask, in an attempt to clear the air. “Are you kidding?” he says. “You’re not even close.” Then he giggles. And the air clears.

We move back on to safer ground – Costello’s undiminished passion for songs. One of the notable qualities of his music is that several of his biggest hits were scorchingly political – Oliver’s Army written after a visit to Belfast; Less Than Zero on the British fascist Oswald Mosley; and, of course, his heart-stopping lyrics evoking the contradictions of war in Shipbuilding, the song that for many progressives summed up the Falklands War in 3min 4sec.

And yet Costello resists the label of political songwriter. “I never really thought of myself like that. I am sceptical about the realistic expectation of change through a song. I think you can delude yourself: ‘Well, I’ve written that now, that’s that dealt with.’ You could be self-satisfied, and I think there was a degree of that with the protest song.”

But Shipbuilding resounds with an intense political anger, I say. “Yes, but I didn’t think it was going to stop the war. I don’t really want to be called political, because, you know, who is political? Politicians. How many of them do you want to call friends? Not very many.”

His talk of politicians gives me an opening to ask him about his native England, which he quit for Ireland, then the US, and then Canada, where he now lives with his jazz-pianist wife, Diana Krall, and their eight-year-old twin sons, Dexter and Frank. No point beating about the bush: what does he think of David Cameron? “I try not to think about Cameron. I’ve just eaten!”

And Jeremy Corbyn? Costello says he’s been amused by the way the rightwing press is portraying the new Labour leader as a major threat to British national security. “Corbyn can’t actually change anything, even inside his own party. So what are they so afraid of, if not another opinion? He’s just expressing views that are different from theirs – I thought that was democracy.”

Though it’s been 25 years since he left the UK, his ties at home remain strong through his eldest son, Matthew, Costello’s mother, Lilian (who lives outside Liverpool) and, until his death in 2011, his father, Ross MacManus. To say that Costello was born into music is no exaggeration – his parents met over the counter of a record shop, MacManus was a singer with the Joe Loss Orchestra and even Costello’s grandfather, Pat, played trumpet on the White Star Line between Liverpool and New York.

Some of the most moving passages of Unfaithful Music relate to Costello’s father, who taught him so much about a vocation in showbusiness. Poignantly, he notes that both his father and grandfather were in the end made redundant by technology: when Pat came off the liners he found he was made obsolete by talking pictures, and in Ross’s case, his living as a live club performer was undermined by the advent of recorded backing tracks.

The world is changing even faster today, so isn’t Costello fearful that technology will inflict the same fate on him? “Didn’t it already do that?” he chuckles.

But let’s not end on a downer. My reading of Unfaithful Music is that the pain he suffered in his early years, all that self-inflicted grief, is now behind him, and that he has learned to forgive himself. There is joy in his life now. Nice try. Not happening.

“If you’re asking: am I happier now? No, I’m not happier now, because it’s not a competition. Happy, yes. Grateful, yes. But it’s not a contest between the reality of when I was this age and the way I am now. You can’t have that. You don’t get to do that. You get to live when you are living.”
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.metronews.ca/entertainment/2 ... book-.html

Elvis Costello finally writes that book
By Alan Cross

In his memoir, Costello reflects on his prolific output, and his father.


“I was asked to write an autobiography when I was 24,” says Elvis Costello, “and I said ‘Can I get back to you when I’ve done something?’” Now at age 61 — and ten years after he was approached again — he’s finally published a memoir.

“There’s a lot of stuff ahead,” he tells Metro, “and if I had to carry all this memory around with me without any other account of it ... I never kept a diary. All of this is what I remembered.”

Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink is more than a review of life lived in music; it’s a love letter to a father, a massive influence on his life. Elvis’ dad worked as a jazz singer for decades. Before that, his granddad was a trumpeter with the White Star Line playing standards to passengers.

His father met his mother in a record store — “It’s lovely. It’s a beautiful thing!” he exclaims — so it’s no surprise that Elvis was exposed to all kinds of music as a child: Dizzy Gillespie, Sinatra, the Beatles, Peggy Lee. If ever he challenges you to a game of musical trivia, politely take a pass and save yourself the embarrassment.

There are some very clever descriptions in the book. He recalls his New Wave period as “being tipped into a shoebox with all the other broken toys” featuring “anyone who played fast, spiteful songs in a narrow tie, rather than with the authentic voice and attire of punk outrage.”

He’s had more than his share of hits, but has always refused to be pigeonholed. Some in the industry say that he could have been much more commercially successful if he hadn’t been so prolific.

“They’re businessmen, not artists,” counters Elvis, “But let me remind you of this: How many proper albums did the Beatles put out in 1965 and 1966? (Three: Help!, Rubber Soul and Revolver.) That’s what I grew up with.”

Elvis lives to make all kinds of music: country, ballet scores, operas, co-productions with Burt Bacharach, Allen Toussaint and even Paul McCartney, sessions where McCartney good-naturedly accused him of “getting all the good lines.”

He keeps plugging along but he also says he won’t record new music now because his dad is gone and he was the sole audience about whom he cared. The e-book comes with additional photos and there’s a companion soundtrack CD featuring many of the songs discussed in the book.

“I see now that I was lucky to work in the record business during that brief interlude between the time when they bought your songs outright for 50 bucks or the keys to a Cadillac, and now, when everything is supposed to be free.”

Yes, he’s been lucky. And so have we.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2 ... stell.html

Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello Review

By Eric Swedlund

Across the nearly 700 pages of Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, Elvis Costello delivers an impeccably detailed autobiography. He’s often as brilliant at turning a phrase in prose as he is in his lyrics.

The book opens with Costello’s boyhood memories of Saturday afternoons hanging around London’s Hammersmith Palais, where his father performed as a singer in the Joe Loss Orchestra. Costello and The Attractions played in the same venue, an overcrowded and overheated rock club years later, and area cabbies told Costello his father “was a better bloody singer than you’ll ever be.”

Costello explains that his passion centered entirely on music as a late teen, hardly a surprise for an only child whose parents met across the counter at a record shop. “Suddenly everything but music seemed like a waste of precious time,” he writes. But the knowledge of his father’s career—and the off-stage temptations that ultimately ruined his parents’ marriage—stood as more of a deterrent than anything: “For all that music meant to me, it still didn’t seem a likely or inviting occupation.”

However unlikely or uninviting, Costello’s career in music took an ascendant arc that he neatly describes: his debut record My Aim Is True was cut in a total of 24 hours; its follow-up, This Year’s Model, took 11 days; his seventh album Imperial Bedroom was booked for 12 weeks of studio time, with famed Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick producing.

Costello first heard the Beatles when his father learned to sing “Please Please Me” by playing the single over and over. Soon, his father would share a bill on the Royal Command Performance with the Beatles, bringing their autographs back to his son. Unfaithful Music then jumps to 1999, when Costello is singing harmony with Paul McCartney at the tribute concert for his late wife, Linda McCartney.

That jump perfectly encapsulates the amazement and gratitude that shadow Costello’s recollections, sensations that never diminish despite his Hall of Fame credentials. “I know I never expected to meet half the people who I’ve encountered down these years and across these pages,” he writes in the final chapter. “I thought they were just names on record jackets, reputations spelled out in the light bulbs of a marquee, or consoling voices in the dark, but that’s not the way it has turned out.”

Costello’s reflective final passages aside, the book sparkles most during the pre-fame portion of his life. He looks fondly on his childhood, remembering family car trips to Spain and France and saving cereal box lids to get a Zorro sword. His first band was an imagined one, The Meteors, at seven years old, playing with cardboard guitars and wooden spoon drumsticks. Later, he’d spend hours at the “magnificent cave” of his local Liverpool record store, where he bought his first acoustic guitar on installment at age 14.

The writing that covers those years is full of wonder, and as his artistic identity begins to emerge, the reader is witness to the epiphanies that built upon each other to mold the Elvis Costello we now know.

Costello first heard himself on the radio after he’d passed a demo tape to a BBC disc jokey who devoted a part of his show to homegrown releases: “My voice sounded lower and older than I’d imagined, but I was still finding a way to sing, and the performance was still full of strange affectations, just not all of the strange affectations with which I’d eventually make my name.”

Broke and struggling, Costello road the bus past a Hoover factory every day on his way to work, penning lines inspired by Jonathan Richman’s wry, everyday observations. “When I wrote those lyrics, I was through the door to a different, less ingratiating way of speaking,” he writes. “My gentle, sometimes heartfelt, sometimes trite little songs were not going to command a room, much less the fickle attentions of ratio listeners. I needed a new vocabulary and a different music.”

That different music would be created in a two-year blitz that saw three acclaimed albums and many of Costello’s most well-known songs: “Alison,” “Pump It Up,” “Watching the Detectives,” “Radio, Radio,” “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea” and “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?”

“Back then in pop music, you started out trying to copy something exactly and accidently came up with your own sound while getting it completely wrong … The difference was The Attractions could play rings around everybody else. I just had to stand in the middle and sing.”

In a particularly poignant scene, Costello recalls a trip back to London from a Manchester gig, parking at 3 a.m. to eat at a roadside stop, running into his father making the way back from his own performance. Costello relates the story without commentary, but it’s vivid enough to leave the impression that as much as anything else that happened, that moment signaled his arrival as a career musician.

Costello writes richly of his first American tour (and the two that followed mere months later). He spent days digging through record store bins (“I did thirty years of listening in the first nine months of visiting America”) and nights on stage with the Talking Heads and Eddie Money (proving that Columbia Records wasn’t quite sure what to make of British new-wavers). He met Tom Waits at the Tropicana in Los Angeles, Bob Dylan backstage at the Universal Amphitheatre and traded “polite, shy” questions with Bruce Springsteen after a show in New Jersey.

After Costello’s rock ‘n’ roll burst with The Attractions, he struggled in the mid 1980s, when the prevailing trends pushed pop music toward a slick, saccharine and synthetic realm. “I tried to go along with the plan for a while, but I felt like a blacksmith in a glass factory.” His songwriting in those years was unable to escape the “tarnished, exhausted views of love” brought on by his failures in marriage. “It took me nearly another ten years to finish writing about the misery I provoked and the darkness that could envelope two people once so brightly in love.”

In 1987, Costello began a songwriting collaboration with McCartney and joined the band for Roy Orbison’s HBO special A Black and White Night. Those projects drove him to seek more collaborations, eager to write, produce or record for an unexpected range of creative partners. Costello describes working with Burt Bacharach, T Bone Burnett, Allen Toussaint, the Brodsky Quartet and The Roots, among others.

Aware that his “songs sounded like puzzles to people who were used to more straightforward sentiments,” Costello doesn’t bend to simplicity in this endeavor either. Unfaithful Music contains a web of tangents and muddled chronology, with ventures into family history that bog down an already lengthy book.

But those are minor inconveniences, like a track to skip on an otherwise entertaining album. Much like his musical career, Costello’s Unfaithful Music is dense, multifaceted, singular and slightly unwieldy. Though not everyone will get it, the book certainly rewards the patience of those eager to take the plunge.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.mystatesman.com/news/enterta ... h-y/nnx4s/

Costello’s memoir has a melody, and it sticks with you

By Steve Scheibal - Special to the American-Statesman

Elvis Costello’s music has always had a take-it-or-leave-it quality.

There’s “Allison,” one of his first and best-known songs, which could be a teen slow-dance tune, a midlife crisis meditation or a murder ballad. There’s the decades-long string of musical dalliances that left him without a genre, his fans better measured by their loyalty than their numbers. There’s even his famous 1977 “Saturday Night Live” appearance, in which the producers very much tried to leave his song “Radio Radio,” and he made them take it anyway (playing it over their objections and getting himself banned from the show in the process).

Costello’s new memoir, “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink,” has the same feel, and probably not just for the reader. The book’s back cover stresses it was “written entirely by Costello” and describes the work as “idiosyncratic.” After 670 pages, these seem less like promotional phrases than disclaimers from a beleaguered editor. The sprawling volume unleashes Costello’s already distinctive voice from rhythm and rhyme, setting loose an author with an artist’s doubt, a showman’s enthusiasm, a critic’s archness and all the order of a riot.

To Costello’s fans, that probably sounds like great fun — which it is. But the book is likely to confound the uninitiated for the same reasons his songs so often do. The references are oblique. The narrative is, charitably, elliptical, especially in the book’s rich first half. And the narrator often is less than reliable.

Still, “Unfaithful Music” illuminates the qualities that put Costello in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and inspired collaborations with a firmament stretching from Paul McCartney to The Brodsky Quartet to Allen Toussaint to The Roots — all of whom receive lengthy treatments here. It pivots lyrically between Costello and his characters, and the emotion he evokes reaches across the distance he creates.

There’s a melody to it, and it sticks with you.

The memoir digs deeply into his childhood, re-creating the primordial post-war British ooze that transformed Declan Patrick MacManus into Elvis Costello — his first and most reliable alias. He took his surname from his great-grandmother and his first name from … well, you know.

His father, Ross, was a singer and musician of some note, making his name with the Joe Loss Orchestra. Costello lovingly recollects watching his father play in dance halls and devouring new records that his father had to learn — back when recorded music was scarce and fans sought out big bands like his dad’s to hear the hits.

Costello skips in and out of his childhood like it’s a dream, the threads unspooling into both memories of his career and origin stories for his songs. Parts of the book match his best work as a lyricist and storyteller. He writes about how his grandfather, a Royal Military School of Music student who learned to play the cornet and French horn, was wounded and presumed dead in World War I, recovered, got a job as a ship’s musician on the White Star Line, and then withered as work dried up and old age set in.

Even Elvis Costello’s grandfather is an Elvis Costello song.

The later part of the book is far more linear, dutifully cataloging famous names, famous concerts, tours and recording sessions. Some parts, especially the chapter on Toussaint and New Orleans, match the artistic pitch of the earlier pages, but most feel hurried. Then again, adulthood seldom offers the electricity of that moment when Costello first tried on a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses, inadvertently launching a brand that’s older than the AT&T logo.

“It was like Superman in reverse,” he writes.

For the most part, the memoir serves as a paean to songwriting. It’s impossible to look at Costello’s career, exploding out of the British punk scene to fly into every imaginable direction, and not see his love for the craft and his wonder at its possibilities. His passion is deep and wide, and its products are numerous and treasured. In telling his own story, “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” is Costello’s love letter to music.

Take it or leave it.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/bo ... esman.html

Elvis Costello: From an angry young man to elder statesman

While certain details are sparse, the man who wrote "Everyday I Write the Book" pens a compelling memoir

“Don’t start me talking, I could talk all night,” go the lyrics to Elvis Costello’s 1979 song “Oliver’s Army.” The sentiment was clearly the case while writing his hefty but illuminating new memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink.

Costello’s appealingly non-linear narrative style often feels like a jammy windshield wiper: chapters repeatedly return to certain chronological spots — the lead-up to his late-seventies’ breakout with his band The Attractions, for instance — yet delay mention of salient details like the adoption of his stage name (he had no particular fondness for his namesake, who died shortly before his first US tour), or his defiant television debut on Saturday Night Live, which famously got him banned from the show.

Anyone who watched Spectacle, the music-interview program Costello hosted for two seasons, was left with no doubt about his encyclopedic, genre-spanning musical knowledge. Though his first record, My Aim is True, is considered one of the greatest rock albums of all time, Costello has since made serious forays into jazz, classical and country. He’s at home in Nashville and New Orleans, where he collaborated, post-Katrina, with Allen Toussaint. His 2003 marriage to Diana Krall was surprising only to those unaware of his omnivorous musical sensibilities.

Though he only lived with him until age seven when his parents split, Costello’s late father, Ross MacManus, remains an indelible presence throughout the book. A versatile working musician, MacManus not only passed his musical genes on to his son (née Declan Patrick MacManus), he also passed on the actual music, in the form of the hit singles he got through his job, that became Costello’s emotional and professional gruel.

Costello is conspicuously silent about his first two marriages, though his guilt over infidelity during his first, which made him a father in his early twenties, is palpable. In contrast, the ink spilled over his second, to Pogues’ bassist Cait O’Riordan, is as sparse as it is cringeworthy (“I went inside a room, turned off all the lights, and could not find the door. For eighteen years.”) When things get awkward, Costello tends to let his lyrics do the talking.

He is most at ease, and endlessly compelling, when writing of his Irish-English lineage, his artistic process and countless musical collaborations, and his remarkable evolution from angry young man to respected musical not-quite-elder statesman.

Emily Donaldson is a freelance critic and editor
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by verbal gymnastics »

erey wrote:
charliestumpy wrote:A discography etc would have been nice too.
Maybe there's one on the internet somewhere. ;)
A discography would add another 100 pages. :lol:
Who’s this kid with his mumbo jumbo?
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

Image




http://www.wsj.com/articles/sneaky-feelings-1445021916


Sneaky Feelings

Drunken early interviews tagged Elvis Costello with the image of a sneering misanthrope.

By D.J. TAYLOR
Oct. 16, 2015

In his early days as an ornament of popular music’s late 1970s New Wave, Elvis Costello had a reputation that went way beyond the rock-and-roll artist’s time-honored rambunctiousness. His first records sounded as if their singer had been spitting tacks into the mixing board between takes. There were abusive run-ins with the stars of a previous era—these included Stephen Stills, whom Mr. Costello, in a nod to his cocaine use, invited to “f--- off, steel nose”—and legendarily abrasive interviews. A celebrated sit-down with the New Musical Express’s Nick Kent in 1977, in which Mr. Costello volunteered that “the only two things that matter to me . . . are guilt and revenge.” involved the subject producing an outsize bent steel nail from his jacket pocket, the assumption being, as Mr. Kent put it, that this “was his chosen weapon of defense.” Here in his early 20s, Mr. Costello (born in 1954) was clearly not a man to be trifled with.

Time, not to mention appearances at the White House and invitations to collaborate with Paul McCartney, has a tendency to soften this kind of asperity. And while there are occasional swipes at former sidekicks in his new memoir—one-time bass player Bruce Thomas is described as “pretty funny once”—it’s no surprise to discover that a fair part of this long and digressive book is concerned with, as it were, setting the record straight.


It turns out that the young Elvis’s natural manner was criminally misunderstood, and that passport-requesting airport officials diagnosed “attitude” where none existed. The New Musical Express interview was apparently a grotesque misreading of his character, and the image-defining “Horn-Rims From Hell” moniker thereby bestowed on him the result of too many pre-interrogation Pernods.

Even that famous Saturday Night Live performance from 1977, when Mr. Costello gave great offense to his hosts by ostentatiously departing from the script, has its retrospective rationale. Told to perform “Less Than Zero” to an American audience who knew nothing of its target (the aged British fascist Oswald Mosley), our man opted instead for “Radio Radio,” with its immortal line about the medium being in the hands of “such a lot of fools trying to anesthetize the way that you feel.” The spectacle of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as faux-sanitation men clearing out his dressing room raised not a snicker on Mr. Costello’s part, for the star had no idea who they were.

You sense that Mr. Costello is intrigued and at times troubled by these early attempts at persona-brokering, while consoling himself with the fact that, in a musical landscape where “attitude” had become supremely important, they were, at the very least, highly convenient. He remarks of the Pernod-fueled interview debacle that “By accident or through collusion, this conversation effectively invented a character that I would inhabit for the next few years.” Certainly, the late-’70s British media were intrigued by the composer of “Oliver’s Army,” his defiantly un-hip pose symbolized by drain-pipe trousers and ever-present eyewear. (A music magazine once offered a caricature in which Mr. Costello removed his spectacles to reveal only sunken holes.)



As a series of sidelights on a career, rather than an examination of a personal myth, “Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink” has one overriding point of interest. This is the revelation that, like many another racket-merchant from the days of the Carter presidency, Mr. Costello’s roots could be found in very different kinds of music from the nervy, snarl-heavy adrenaline rush with which he made his name. His father—the patronym was MacManus and Elvis’s baptismal name Declan—was himself a full-time musician who not only sang Tin Pan Alley tunes with the Joe Loss Orchestra but also recorded anonymous covers of the hits of the moment. The son’s early forays were into folk music and the West Coast stylings of Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. This grounding was important in professional terms, for it gave him a perspective that, once New Wave had burned itself out, enabled him to expand his repertoire into country and western (see his Nashville homage, “Almost Blue”) and classical collaborations with the Brodsky Quartet.

If Mr. Costello is always illuminating on the songwriter’s craft—note some sagacious remarks on longtime collaborator Burt Bacharach and Paul McCartney’s habit of letting the melody line lead the words rather than the other way around—then there are other roots on display here, in particularly a tough-sounding childhood in Liverpool and West London dominated by a Catholic education, a friend’s traumatic early death, parental break-up and, once he was married to his childhood sweetheart (there have since been two more Mrs. Costellos, the current spouse being Diana Krall), the struggle to balance music-making with the demands of hearth and home. If not quite as indifferent to the British “Establishment” as his near-exact contemporary, the Sex Pistols’ John Lydon, then our Grammy-winning sexagenarian seems much more at ease in the U.S., and certainly keener to play for President Obama than, say, a member of the British royal family.

Fans of the linear rock memoir will possibly be irked by this book’s shaky chronological grip and its author’s tendency to ramble. On the other hand, Mr. Costello’s maternal grandfather, James Ablett, who spent four years as a German POW and took to his bed on each of the two days his daughters married Catholics, and his father, Pat, who at one point started a rock band called Hand-Embroidered Lemon-Peel as a way “to seduce hippy girls,” probably each deserve their own memoir.

There is much to be said in Mr. Costello’s favor: He clearly wrote the book himself; the ego-burnishing that undermines most exercises in pop career retrieval is of no interest to him; his memories of Beatle-haunted Merseyside and the instrument shops with their Rickenbacker guitars marked “formerly owned by George Harrison” are a treat. But, really, however much his famous orneriness may have been nudged into being by journalists, I could have done with more of the revenge and guilt.

—Mr. Taylor has written biographies of George Orwell and William Thackeray. His latest book is a collection of short stories, “Wrote for Luck.”
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by Jack of All Parades »

John, thank you for sharing that piece from the WSJ- of the many that I have read, it comes off as a balanced assessment and knowledgeable at the same time. It struck a chord with me as my reading of the book, too, has been punctuated with the encountering of frequent 'mea culpa' moments. I have suspected for some time a "Lord Jim" aspect to his life.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by erey »

Jack of All Parades wrote:John, thank you for sharing that piece from the WSJ- of the many that I have read, it comes off as a balanced assessment and knowledgeable at the same time.
Well, knowledgeable for a review that gets Ross's(!) name wrong and turns EC's uncle into an aunt.
I thought the WSJ review was one of the least thoughtful and most bound up in preconceptions.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by martinfoyle »

Enjoyed the book, he tells a good yarn. Now that he's got it out of his system it would be nice if he went back to something he's really good at, making rock music. Was privileged to see one of Davey Faraghers recent shows with Richard Thompson. Great stripped down trio stuff, lead, bass & drums. Be wonderful if Elvis were to adopt the same formula.

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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by Otis Westinghouse »

I agree with that point! I really enjoyed seeing Thompson on Later, that's a great line-up.

I'm looking forward to reading the book cover to cover on holiday, but I was aghast at the lack of an index. I think Penguin should have added a few more pages with one. For a book of this length with thus much detail, it's a necessity.

I got it for£15 off hive.co.uk. Good site, very prompt, no delivery charge.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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http://thequietus.com/articles/19020-el ... ink-review

Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink Review And Extract

Terry Staunton took the phone off the hook and buried himself in Elvis Costello’s 670-page autobiography. Well, it’s not every day he writes a book

Between 2001 and 2006, Elvis Costello contributed extensive liner notes to the deluxe reissues of his first 17 albums, totalling more than 60,000 words. The US magazine Slate pointed out that EC’s text was longer than The Great Gatsby, but they might just have as easily referenced Farenheit 451, Lord Of The Flies or Slaughterhouse Five.

A sneaky move, perhaps? Was Elvis’s underlying message: “Yes, you can read my autobiography, as long as you buy 34 compact discs”? He’s been teasing fans with the prospect of a tell-all tome for a while now, turning up on TV talk shows and playing his old pal and producer Nick Lowe’s song ‘When I Write The Book’.

Many Costello biographies have been published over the years, the vast majority of them fumbling cut-and-paste jobs that failed to get anywhere even remotely close to the true heart of one of popular music’s most intriguing and contrary figures. Graeme Thomson’s Complicated Shadows (Canongate, 2004) is the exception, and nigh on essential in terms of an outsider perspective, but ultimately the job was one that would have to be done by the man himself.

And here it is. Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink (Penguin Viking) is, without doubt, one of the greatest self-penned appraisals of a popular entertainer’s life and work. It’s a scattergun narrative, leaping back and forth in time, but each remembrance, each assessment of people and places, each argument, each confession is presented in evocative, eloquent prose that mirrors the poetry of Costello’s own lyrics.

You’ll discover fresh insights into the 300-plus songs he’s written and taken to market, you’ll be amused by his interactions with others (hungover breakfasts with Van Morrison, incurring the wrath of June Carter Cash, fan boy fear when sharing a stage with Roy Orbison), but it’s beyond the concerns of the day job that Costello writes with such grace and passion and (occasionally) rage.

His father, jazz trumpeter and singer Ross MacManus, looms large; from childhood trips to the Hammersmith Palais watching dad with the Joe Loss Orchestra, to afternoons at home listening to sixties hit parade songs the elder man had to learn for radio broadcasts, and – most heartbreakingly – Ross’s last years when dementia all but wiped his own memories of the past.

Chapters about the MacManus clan afford Elvis the opportunity to delve deep into not just his family history, but the pre- and post-war experiences of the working class in London and Liverpool. It’s here where Costello proves himself to be an admirably articulate social chronicler, with an eye for detail and an unerring knack for placing his extended family’s past into context with his own career’s trajectory.

Similarly, when he writes about making an album with New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it’s prefixed with an astonishing passage of reportage, cataloguing his own visit to the devastated city, its hope and determination bubbling up from the filth and detritus of the flood waters.

There’s loads of stuff about his songs, about making albums that people either adored or dismissed, but most of that was covered in those aforementioned liner notes. What makes this book a classic (yes, you heard me) is the beauty of the writing, the seemingly effortless imagery of situations, saints and sinners (EC puts himself in the latter category, often), and the persuasive nature of the text that should make even the most casual reader clamour for more after 670 pages.

Don’t start him talking, he could talk all night. On this evidence, it’d be worth listening to him talk every night for the next couple of years.

Exclusive extract from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello

I was the first songwriter through the door after reading an announcement that Stiff Records was open for business. I called in a sick day for my computer job and rode the Tube to a single shop front building in Westbourne Park. I’d been to record company premises and publisher’s offices before, but this didn’t seem like any operation I’d ever encountered. There was only one person looking after the store, a delightfully well-spoken young woman with a hennaed Mia Farrow haircut. She had been left alone manning the phones but had a slightly scattered air. I half expected her to sell me a scented candle. She seemed surprised that any potential recording artists might be knocking on the door so soon, and I left my home recorded demo tape with the assurances it would be auditioned and returned to me.

I walked back to the Tube station and, with all the improbability of the movie version of our lives, walked straight into Nick Lowe, who must have been arriving to the Stiff offices in his capacity as their sole artist and potential house producer.

Nick said, “Are you going to tread the planks again any time soon, old chap?” and we stood there for a moment like two old vaudevillians chatting at the stage door of the local music hall.

I bade Nick farewell and went on my way, not knowing whether I would see him so often, now that his band had broken up.

I already knew one of the Stiff bosses, Dave Robinson. He had managed Nick in Brinsley Schwarz and once roadied for Jimi Hendrix and had the pictures to prove it. He was an Irishman who looked like he might be a good judge of a horse. In 1975, when Dave was tinkering with the equipment at the studio he’d installed above the Hope and Anchor public house in Islington, he offered me the chance to come in and make some solo recordings while he twiddled the dials. I would get a demo reel out of the deal.

I cut every song that I’d written that year, about twenty-five of them in total. Not one of them ever saw the light of day.

The control booth contained an 8-track board that had belonged to Eddy Grant of The Equals, although only seven tracks ever worked.

The word went around that Dave had written to Al Green’s producer, Willie Mitchell, for the floor plan at Royal Studios in Memphis, asking where Willie located his drum booth and positioned his microphones, allegedly receiving a pretty detailed reply, although I never saw the blueprints with my own eyes.

Dave then hatched a scheme to record Flip City for a one-off single of “Third Rate Romance,” a song I’d learned from a Jesse Winchester record, but the plan ran out of money and time, as the band disintegrated when we found out that we couldn’t play like the Hodges Brothers.

However, the experience of being in the studio was both educational and a little death defying. The recording gear was set in a function room at the top of a flight of stairs where the pub had previously held wedding receptions, but there was nothing to stop the two tons of equipment from crashing down on the patrons in the bar below and even into the music venue in the basement.

At least “Unpromising Young Band Slays Audience” would have made an interesting headline.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/bo ... stello.ece

Memoir review: ‘Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink,’ by Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello’s autobiography can be every bit as witty, snarky and poignant as his lyrics. But it rarely packs the same punch as one of his 3-minute songs.

Tipping the scales at 688 pages, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink is the equivalent of a 15-CD box set larded with enough outtakes to test the patience of even the biggest Elvis fanatic.

Written entirely by Costello, with an editor nowhere in sight, the former Declan McManus jumps back and forth in time while detailing what seems like every LP he purchased, every musician he met and every last childhood memory. Some of the family history is fascinating, like his recollections of his grandmother and how her struggles with Alzheimer’s inspired his 1989 hit “Veronica.”

But he goes overboard, barricading the reader in a room piled dangerously high with family mementos. Long stretches of the book seem less like an autobiography than an unabridged Costello family history — especially the overly lengthy passages devoted to his dad, Ross, a jazz musician whose philandering broke up the Costello home when Elvis was a lad.

Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink improves whenever the spotlight returns to Elvis’ unpredictable career. After quitting his job as data-entry clerk, he casts himself as one of London’s angry young punks, and in 1977 releases My Aim Is True, a stunning debut fueled by dazzling wordplay, jittery punk tunes and the soulful ballad “Alison.”

“My career went off like a Roman candle and blew my life to smithereens,” he writes, admitting the carnage wasn’t fate, per se, but a deliberate effort on his part to “mess up my life so I could write stupid little songs about it.”

As the tunes pour out of him, he goes on an endless bender of vodka and pills, culminating in the infamous 1979 hotel bar argument with Stephen Stills’ touring party in which a plastered Elvis used the N-word to disparage Ray Charles. All these years later, he handles the incident with aplomb, never excusing his idiotic behavior but admitting that the whole ugly chapter actually prompted him to slow down his “potentially fatal orbit.”

Given the book’s length and all the boozy early passages, it’s surprising that he refuses to talk about — or even acknowledge, really — giving up alcohol and drugs in the ’90s, or about how sobriety has affected his life since then. But he’s full of candor on other topics, like his affairs that broke up his first marriage to Mary Burgoyne and his problems with his second wife, Pogues bassist Cait O’Riordan, whom he says was, at times, “completely insufferable … I tolerated it all much longer than I should have.”

At 61, Costello is still the same caustic punk he was in his early 20s, slinging darts at everyone from Cat Stevens to Led Zeppelin to Geraldo Rivera. But he’s just as hard on himself: “The trouble with finishing any autobiographical tome like this is that for every mildly diverting tale or precious memory, you eventually arrive at this thought: I don’t much care for the subject,” he writes.

Luckily, he’s got diverting tales by the truckload. He writes vividly about the 1977 publicity stunt that got him arrested in London and the performance that same year that got him banned from Saturday Night Live (turns out he got the idea for abruptly stopping one tune and starting another from Jimi Hendrix).

And he spins one colorful tale after the next about collaborating with what seems like half the members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Grand Ole Opry. This is when Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink really comes alive, as Elvis combines his fanatical passion with his musicologist’s knowledge to describe what it’s like to write songs with Paul McCartney, trade lyrics with Bob Dylan and try not to get blown off the stage by Aretha Franklin.

Yet when he’s describing his own music, he goes a bit too far. For every great story about the genesis of “Watching the Detectives” or “(Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,” there’s way too much navel-gazing at his own lyrics, which never quite leap off the printed page the way they do with his records.

Early on, he dismisses them as “a stack of show-off rhymes and quips,” but the longer the book goes, the more hellbent he is on quoting and analyzing his rhymes to remind everyone what a brilliant lyricist he is. Even more annoying is the way he keeps dropping short-story-like vignettes into the book, as if he’s trying to secretly launch a new career as a fiction writer.

For all his immense talent and ego, Costello is admirably quick to credit the many musicians who helped make his career shine, especially Nick Lowe and Fort Worth’s T Bone Burnett, two first-rate producers who sharpened and edited his best albums.

It’s too bad he didn’t ask them to do the same with Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink.

Thor Christensen is a Dallas writer and critic.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

http://missoulian.com/entertainment/boo ... d6781.html

An explosion of rock 'n' roll memories


DAN DELUCA Philadelphia Inquirer

Blame it on Keith Richards and the inexorable passage of time.

Since the Rolling Stone’s memoir “Life” became a million-selling sensation in 2010, book publishers have been keen to get music celebrities to bare their souls and tell lewd and licentious tales about their creative heydays.

The outpouring of rock-and-roll memoirs spurred by “Life,” as well as Patti Smith’s National Book Award-winning “Just Kids” (2010), is reaching critical mass.

Artists of a younger vintage than the septuagenarian Stone have grown long enough in the tooth to look back, with a particular concentration by acts that came of age in the punk-New Wave-disco 1970s.

That period is also the focus of “City on Fire,” Garth Risk Hallberg’s 900-page music-saturated, hotly hyped novel, whose spine I have yet to crack.

Many of the 2015 music memoirs of note are by women of that era who fought the testosterone tide in a gender-imbalanced industry. Three-quarters of the books examined here fit that description: “Reckless: My Life As a Pretender,” by Chrissie Hynde; “I’ll Never Write My Memoirs” by Grace Jones; and “M Train,” the follow-up by rock poet Smith. The fourth, and the longest, is “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink,” the sprawling 670-page volume by Elvis Costello.

(...)

The Costello book is capacious, clever and full of heart and soul. It has a bit of everything, from backstories behind previously puzzling song lyrics to controversy regarding a 1979 drunken brawl in which he referred to Ray Charles using a racial slur. He’s still obviously deeply ashamed and rightly says there are no excuses.

What comes across most of all in “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” – which, in true Costello fashion, even has a title that’s a little too much – and what makes it so engaging is Costello’s omnivorous appetite for music in all forms. Making sense of his ecumenical affection for jazz and show tunes and rock-and-roll and country music, he writes: “There is no high and low. The beautiful thing is, you don’t have to choose, you can love it all.”
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-s ... 19422.html

The Adventures of Elvis Costello (and Robin Hood)

Michael Sigman - Writer/Editor; Music Publisher

In Elvis Costello's brand new memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, the brilliant musician/songwriter recalls his childhood affection for the '50s TV hit The Adventures of Robin Hood, wherein a mythic green-clad archer in tights and his "merrie men" roam Sherwood Forest redistributing income from Nottingham's one-percenters to those less fortunate. (The book was released just days before the start of International Robin Hood Week, Nottingham's celebration of all things Robin. Coincidence? I think so.)

Elvis homes in on the show's theme song, written by my dad, Carl Sigman, right around the time Elvis was born. (Coincidence? Definitely.)

The catchy chorus still inhabits the musical DNA of boomers throughout the English-speaking world:

Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men
Feared by the bad/loved by the good
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood


The politics of income inequality in America intruded on the pleasures of Unfaithful Music when a modern-day would-be Robin Hood named Bernie joined four other candidates for the first Democratic presidential debate of 2015. But the roguish adventures of Elvis/Robin resonated as the group took on the GOP mantra that the root of all evil isn't love of money; it's expecting billionaires to contribute a tiny fraction of their wealth to the common good (socialism!).

Like me and my then pre-teen friends, Elvis enjoyed The Adventures of Robin Hood sans politics. But it shouldn't be altogether surprising that the show had its roots in, well, socialism: it was created and produced by Hannah Weinstein, an American journalist and left-wing activist who moved to London in 1952 to avoid the perils of blacklisting and McCarthyism.

Weinstein deployed more than a dozen stellar blacklisted writers, including Waldo Salt and Ring Lardner, Jr. Their political passions underpinned the tales of Robin's derring-do. Lardner, a member of the Hollywood Ten, went to jail rather than give up the names of other Tinseltown heavyweights suspected of Communist sympathies; he wrote the first episode as "Lawrence McClellan" and later said that Robin Hood provided him "with plenty of opportunities to comment on issues and institutions in Eisenhower-era America."

Elvis Costello has, of course, written many great songs that touch on the obscene divide between bosses and workers, between rich and poor. "Oliver's Army" is a stirring anti-war anthem that the author says was based on the premise that "they always get a working class boy to do the killing." The stunning, elegiac "Shipbuilding" poses the stark question that politicians rarely confront before sending young and disproportionately poor people to war: "Is it worth it?" "Radio, Radio" -- with its biting, "I want to bite the hand that feeds me / I want to bite that hand so badly" -- joins Johnny Paycheck's "Take This Job and Shove It" in the annals of raw, anti-corporate expressiveness.

And then there's "Welcome to the working week," the 91 second tour de force that introduces Elvis's debut Columbia album, My Aim Is True.

I emailed Gregg Geller, the man who signed Elvis to Columbia in 1977, about that track and, more broadly, to ask whether he thought Elvis's politics might be connected to the Robin Hood ethos.

Gregg wrote, "I first heard 'Welcome To The Working Week' while standing on the sidewalk after exiting the morning session of a CBS Records convention at the London Hilton on July 26, 1977 (my 30th birthday), an encounter that led directly to signing him to Columbia Records. I quickly came to love his image (knock-kneed, pigeon-toed, with spectacles), his attitude (intense, angry), his music (stripped-down, energetic) and his lyrics (sharp, intelligent) -- all of which ran counter to the prevailing, predominant style of the day which had turned tired, bloated, and not-at-all my idea of what rock 'n' roll was and should be. So, while I don't doubt that you're correct, Elvis couldn't possibly have consciously considered the political implications of Robin Hood. But I've also no doubt that that which we experience early in life subconsciously impacts our mindset and worldview."

As the song says, "You gotta do it till you're through it so you better get to it."

------------

After the Democratic debate, I returned to Unfaithful Music and devoured Elvis's tales of his first American tour (accompanied by his own band of merrie men, The Attractions), where bar fights, radio boycotts, and death threats filled the hours between thrilling performances. And I imagined a 20-something Elvis sitting down to breakfast at a cheap motel -- perhaps with a killer hangover -- and delighting in a couplet my dad, a proud Kennedy liberal, wrote for "Robin Hood" that wasn't included in the truncated TV version: "To cheating and corruption, he would never, never yield/And danger was his breakfast ev'ry day."

Here's the full lyric of "Robin Hood," a pop hit on both sides of the pond in 1955, as sung by Dick James (with Stephen James and His Chums), who would become the Beatles publisher -- and produced by George Martin, who would become the Beatles' producer.

Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men
Feared by the bad, loved by the good
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood

He called the greatest archers to a tavern on the green
They vowed to help the people of the king
They handled all the troubles on the English country scene
And still found plenty of time to sing

He came to Sherwood Forest with a feather in his cap
A fighter never looking for a fight
His bow was always ready, and he kept his arrows sharp.
He used them to fight for what was right

With Friar Tuck and Little John they had a roguish look,
They did the deed the others wouldn't dare.
He captured all the money that the evil sheriff took,
And rescued many a lady fair

To cheating and corruption, he would never, never yield
And danger was his breakfast ev'ry day
The cobbler in the hamlet and the farmer in the field
Were always helping him get away


He rode up to the palace and was cheered by ev'ryone
His Lady Marian threw him a rose
The King of England knighted him the Earl of Huntington
And that's the way that the legend goes

Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men
Feared by the bad, loved by the good
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

That reminds me of a possibly apocryphal story - a teacher asked children for the name of Robin Hood's girlfriend. 'Trudy Glen' says one lad. When asked to explain, he says the song says so , as in 'Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Riding through the glen....'.maybe you have to be Irish to get this joke !
sweetest punch
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Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents ... /?ref=mmpg

When did you write the book, Mr Costello? Everyday.

By Keith Bruce

As anyone who knows me even slightly can probably testify, any opinion I express regarding the work of Elvis Costello is not so much biased as besotted. I have all his recordings and, although there is plenty of competition among similarly devoted fans I have encountered over the past 37 years of concert-attending, would be in with a good shout for the perfect attendance prize for all of his tours to Scotland, including the Get Happy! album trek that visited out of the way venues like West Calder and Dunfermline's Kinema ballroom. That last gig is one that merits a mention in Costello's new memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, published this week. In the light of my confession above, you will be unsurprised to learn that I think it is one of the finest musical autobiographies I have ever read, and I have read many. But the truth is that it really is, and I am absolutely convinced that someone with as much interest Costello as I have in One Direction will find it an engrossing and rewarding read. Possibly excluding only many actual fans of 1-D.

My perfect attendance record is most significantly blotted by my failure to be at his earliest gig in Scotland, at the Silver Thread in Paisley on August 30, 1977. The date is not mentioned in the book (although he does say it was five days after his 23rd birthday), but is ingrained on my memory, because I was really very cross at the time that I couldn't go. On the same evening, however, what I am sure was a much smaller crowd was in a pub in Glasgow's Sauchiehall Street called the Amphora to watch the combo I was singing with, then called Fever, go through a set of recent chart hits and a couple of funky numbers the guitarist and I had written. As Costello writes, he was not allowed to perform in any of the city centre venues in which I could murder Ace's How Long? and Why Did You Do It? by Stretch: "The city's ferocious reputation was then being belied by the decision of the city fathers to deny a license to any promoter reckless enough to propose bringing anything vaguely connected to punk inside the city limits. Just being on the same label as The Damned meant that we were exiled to the function room in a small hotel of a satellite town."

The book also relates the sequel to the Paisley show, which involved a precarious journey in a tiny chartered aircraft so that the band would make its first appearance on Top of the Pops despite there being an airline strike that week. As with every wry anecdote in the book, Costello has spookily detailed recall of the events of those days, and narrates it with compelling style. Anyone who has seen him perform in recent years will know that he spices his sets with riveting introductions to the songs, and some of the stories collected between hard covers are ones he has rehearsed previously. What is quite brilliant about the book, is the way he has structured it to interleave tales of life on the road with the story of his own life and music and that of his family. It is also quite clear that the death of his father, big band singer Ross MacManus, has both allowed and driven him to write the book, and about which he is quite wonderfully moving. Take it from the besotted, you should buy this book.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
johnfoyle
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Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

Edit -;Just noticed this appeared earlier - sorry!

http://thequietus.com/articles/19020-el ... ink-review


Tome On The Range


Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink Review

Terry Staunton , October 18th, 2015


Terry Staunton took the phone off the hook and buried himself in Elvis Costello’s 670-page autobiography. Well, it’s not every day he writes a book

Between 2001 and 2006, Elvis Costello contributed extensive liner notes to the deluxe reissues of his first 17 albums, totalling more than 60,000 words. The US magazine Slate pointed out that EC’s text was longer than The Great Gatsby, but they might just have as easily referencedFarenheit 451, Lord Of The Flies or Slaughterhouse Five.

A sneaky move, perhaps? Was Elvis’s underlying message: “Yes, you can read my autobiography, as long as you buy 34 compact discs”? He’s been teasing fans with the prospect of a tell-all tome for a while now, turning up on TV talk shows and playing his old pal and producer Nick Lowe’s song ‘When I Write The Book’.

Many Costello biographies have been published over the years, the vast majority of them fumbling cut-and-paste jobs that failed to get anywhere even remotely close to the true heart of one of popular music’s most intriguing and contrary figures. Graeme Thomson’s Complicated Shadows(Canongate, 2004) is the exception, and nigh on essential in terms of an outsider perspective, but ultimately the job was one that would have to be done by the man himself.

And here it is. Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink (Penguin Viking) is, without doubt, one of the greatest self-penned appraisals of a popular entertainer’s life and work. It’s a scattergun narrative, leaping back and forth in time, but each remembrance, each assessment of people and places, each argument, each confession is presented in evocative, eloquent prose that mirrors the poetry of Costello’s own lyrics.


You’ll discover fresh insights into the 300-plus songs he’s written and taken to market, you’ll be amused by his interactions with others (hungover breakfasts with Van Morrison, incurring the wrath of June Carter Cash, fan boy fear when sharing a stage with Roy Orbison), but it’s beyond the concerns of the day job that Costello writes with such grace and passion and (occasionally) rage.

His father, jazz trumpeter and singer Ross MacManus, looms large; from childhood trips to the Hammersmith Palais watching dad with the Joe Loss Orchestra, to afternoons at home listening to sixties hit parade songs the elder man had to learn for radio broadcasts, and – most heartbreakingly – Ross’s last years when dementia all but wiped his own memories of the past.

Chapters about the MacManus clan afford Elvis the opportunity to delve deep into not just his family history, but the pre- and post-war experiences of the working class in London and Liverpool. It’s here where Costello proves himself to be an admirably articulate social chronicler, with an eye for detail and an unerring knack for placing his extended family’s past into context with his own career’s trajectory.

Similarly, when he writes about making an album with New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it’s prefixed with an astonishing passage of reportage, cataloguing his own visit to the devastated city, its hope and determination bubbling up from the filth and detritus of the flood waters.

There’s loads of stuff about his songs, about making albums that people either adored or dismissed, but most of that was covered in those aforementioned liner notes. What makes this book a classic (yes, you heard me) is the beauty of the writing, the seemingly effortless imagery of situations, saints and sinners (EC puts himself in the latter category, often), and the persuasive nature of the text that should make even the most casual reader clamour for more after 670 pages.

Don’t start him talking, he could talk all night. On this evidence, it’d be worth listening to him talk every night for the next couple of years.
Last edited by johnfoyle on Sun Oct 18, 2015 6:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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