UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Pretty self-explanatory
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Jack of All Parades
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by Jack of All Parades »

Here is a 'novel' appreciation of the memoir just printed in a publication known as The Week. It speaks to some concerns I share about the book and it rightly praises aspects of the book that I, too, enjoy:

http://theweek.com/articles/586900/chao ... s-costello
"....there's a merry song that starts in 'I' and ends in 'You', as many famous pop songs do....'
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

A interesting aspect of the finer paper used for the U.S. edition is mentioned -

http://onetrackmine.com/5-complaints-ab ... nt-memoir/

(extract)

Typeface

Wow, I’m really nitpicking now, but I would swear the text isn’t black but a dark grey. Or maybe it’s because the pages seem kinda thin and you can see through a little to the text on the underside. Or, perhaps, this alludes to the titular disappearing ink. Maybe one day I’ll open this book to find 700 blank pages. While that would be genius, I live in the present, and like many of Costello’s fans, my eyesight ain’t what it used to be.

Once again, eBook readers, and anyone enjoying the audio book, won’t have this gripe. The rest of us may need an electron microscope and an arc lamp as we read into the night.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books ... -1.2420038

Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello: his aim is true

The singer has written an acutely self-aware, scathingly honest and passionate autobiography

‘If there is an apple cart, you must do your best to upset it.” True to form, Elvis Costello has written an autobiography that most musicians don’t write. There is no grandstanding, no false notes, no salacious commentary, no mean-spiritedness, no settling of old scores, and above all, no self-serving.

Rather, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink is an acutely self-aware, scathingly honest, passionate and poignant review of family, fame, fortune, mishap and misdemeanours. Costello takes the autobiographical route less travelled – that of finely wrought connectivity instead of strict chronology. He doesn’t mention the day of his birth until page 81 (“I was born in the same hospital in which Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. I apologise in advance that I have not been the same boon to mankind.”) There is a continuous sequence of time travelling from one decade to another, and a little bit of criss-crossing, but there are no obvious gaps. And if you’re looking for an index, don’t bother.

Another surprise is the depth of family and personal background he goes into; for a person who has always been reticent to talk about his private life, in this book he unveils a wealth of information that has trumped his many straw-clutching biographers down through the decades.

The book starts with the seven-year-old Declan McManus peering over the balcony at the Hammersmith Palais, as he watches his musician father, Ross McManus, rehearse with his employer, bandleader Joe Loss. From birth, music seeped into Declan’s consciousness, and forays into the world his father worked in consolidated the appeal. Factor in his status as an only child, and you have the makings of the man.

“If you are an only child,” he writes, “and you don’t have an older sibling to smother you with a pillow or keep you awake with endless speculation about a sweetheart, there’s a lot of time alone with your own imaginings. There is always someone or something to dream about.”

Nick Lowe and Stiff

Moving from a suburb outside London to Liverpool – and then back again to London – the early story we are reasonably familiar with unfolds. A couple of musical endeavours run dry (“a steady pattern of inertia laced with a few moments of faint hope”); he plays gigs wherever and whenever he can; he bumps into the songwriter Nick Lowe; he hawks demo tapes around until a few songs are deemed fit for radio play; he signs to Stiff Records; he releases a debut album ( My Aim is True, 1977), and subsequently, in no small part due to punk rock’s affiliation with oddballs and outsiders, he turns into a reluctant pop star.

And then, via early media interviews, he gains a reputation for being “difficult”. His first interview with the New Musical Express (then the make-or-break weekly) invented, he writes, “a character that I would inhabit for the next few years. Out tumbled a mess of highly quotable exaggerations of my true feelings, while reducing my motivation and the concerns of all my songs to ‘revenge’ and ‘guilt’ . . . Bravado and alcohol made me amplify whatever was roasting my goat. I set out my stall and closed up shop at the very same time. From that moment, I just wanted to get on with my job without being interrupted.”

As the chapters and years unfold, it turns out he gets on with his job exceedingly well, writing songs that enlighten, seduce, offer solace, display anger. His work, however, was underscored by an itch that took him decades to scratch into some kind of comfort. “Once I had recognised that it was not my vocation to write a happy ending, I did my damnedest to avoid one entirely.”

The core of the book, though, is not his work as a songwriter and a musical polymath. Only in the final furlongs of this hefty tome do you get a sense Costello is trying to mention everything he has engaged with (classical, opera, television shows, and much more besides). Yet even throughout this closing-down section, he writes as you might expect: smart, sharp, incisive.

True incisiveness, however, is saved for what is at the heart of the book: father, family, love. Background detail is highly descriptive and evocative (“when I was old enough to first view the surreal dream canvases of Giorgio de Chirico, they looked just like our old backyard”.) and he writes especially moving passages about his relationships with his parents and his first wife, Galway-born Mary Burgoyne.

Trust and broken relationships

In an admirable admission of failure, Costello recalls the late 1970s as a time when he knew he “could become estranged from all that I held dear: vows I’d made, homes that had and would soon be broken, trust that I could betray, in hotel rooms in which I merely lodged, rehearsing lies to say”. His second long-term relationship (“seventeen or so years”) with former Pogues bassist, Cait O’Riordan, is described in equally honest if far more scornful terms (“I tolerated it all much longer than I should have” is one of several lacerating recollections.)

Now in his early 60s, married to musician Diana Krall, and a recent father to twins, Dexter and Frank, there is no sign he’s losing interest or slowing down (although he references his age and the tender years of his twin sons thus: “I live with the electricity of their imagination and the fear of time, air and water running out”). Indeed, this vivid, lyrical book – bound to take its place as one of rock music’s very best autobiographies – is but one step away from his next move, which could be any number of creative ventures.

“Once you peel the label off the jar,” he writes of albums, “they are all just vessels containing the entrails from experiments, the measure of ideas and feelings. It’s only music. There’s nothing to stop it.”

Tony Clayton-Lea writes on pop culture/arts topics for The Irish Times
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/book ... iewed.html

When He Was Cruel

Elvis Costello’s memoir is most potent when it wrestles with the sins of the past—and his relationship with his bandleader father.


It was 1977, the scabrous peak of punk and the heyday of the British music tabloids. Elvis Costello was doing press (frequently drunk) to promote his debut, My Aim Is True. Soon, New Musical Express had a scoop. It reprinted a publicity photo of “Day Costello,” who in 1970 had released a soon-forgotten cover of the Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road.”

NME claimed, as Costello recalls in his new memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, that the picture was “evidence of my previous, failed tilt at pop stardom and that I was lying about my age and not actually twenty-two as I claimed but really over thirty and had just got myself some New Wave threads and a short haircut.”

The report was tongue-in-cheek. The shot was of Costello’s father, the well-known singer and bandleader Ross MacManus, who often adopted pseudonyms for his commercial knockoff singles. He chose “Costello” for the same reason Declan Patrick MacManus later would: It was Ross’ granny’s maiden name. On other occasions he was “Hal Prince” or “Frank Bacon and the Baconeers”—no wonder his son was unfazed when his own manager suggested an outlandish showbiz sobriquet.

Yet the NME’s fib pointed at a truth most Costello fans never fully assimilated. Watch this YouTube clip of the single in question, including the same photo (I assume). See the horn-rimmed glasses, the munificent Irish nose. Hear the vibrato on the sustained notes. It’s the spitting image, albeit without his heir’s spitting diction.

The resemblance also ran deeper, in ways both lucky and nasty. If there is any center to the sprawling, 670-page Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink—which free-associates on themes from Costello’s life without any obvious throughline, perhaps on the model of Bob Dylan’s Chronicles—it is that inheritance. Ross MacManus died of Parkinson’s and dementia four years ago, and the book seems driven by a desire both to honor him and to reckon with his legacy and in turn the one Costello, now 61, will leave to his own offspring.

Growing up in the 1980s, I thought of the singer of “Oliver’s Army” and “Beyond Belief” as my Bob Dylan. He was nearly as acute in transmuting language into music and back again but more electrically skeptical and more socially and sexually insecure, as suited the times. Later, as his star dipped (or, in North America, never quite dawned), he extended into other vocabularies, from country to soul to baroque pop and string quartets, as if reaching for historical handholds against the growing will to cultural acceleration and amnesia. (Which much of punk, in retrospect, seems to endorse unwittingly.)

Before long, Costello’s catalogue had built into a pileup as unwieldy as one of his most notoriously crammed multisyllabic lines. The highlights became a matter of any listener’s opinion. It became harder to follow his tangents, though the music often rewarded the attention, especially onstage, where he remains as compelling a performer as there is.

I can’t help seeing that transition as a bit of a mystery: Once, he had been the one who brought societal bulletins with a backbeat, less protest singer than human thermometer, lyrics loaded with flash points like a search-tag cloud. Then the nervy urgency of that first decade of undeniable albums (from My Aim is True to Blood and Chocolate) began evolving (with the still-great Spike) into the persona of “beloved entertainer” and musical connoisseur he radiates today.

Over most of that time, I was aware that Costello’s dad had been a singer and trumpeter but for some reason thought that fact incidental, merely indicating that he came from a musical family—perhaps by day his old man was a teacher, or a delivery man, or an industrial merchant, like his later collaborator Paul McCartney’s father, who likewise played in Liverpool jazz bands. What becomes clear in Unfaithful Music is that Ross MacManus was in fact a complete pro, one of the main featured vocalists of one of England’s most successful stage combos of the time, the Glenn Miller–styled Joe Loss Orchestra. He met Costello’s mother when she was working in a music shop, having heard that she was a jazz enthusiast too. (She even ran an illicit American bebop record smuggling ring.)

Ross was on radio and TV regularly and played the same 1963 Royal Command Performance where John Lennon famously told the “cheap seats” to clap their hands and the aristocrats to rattle their jewelry: Ross sang his calypsoed-up version of Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer,” to the pleasure of the Queen Mother, “who was very fond of work songs,” Costello writes, “never having had a job of her own.”

In writing redolent of the stale and still-smoldering air of postwar Britain, we witness Costello hanging around backstages and dance halls, seeing his Dad go off to work when other kids’ fathers were coming home and hearing him practice all manner of songs to be able to keep up with demand for the latest from the hit parade. Ross learned his way around swing, bebop, folk, rock, pop, easy listening and even Pink Floyd—anticipating his son’s later eclecticism. Ross also provided the vocals (with his son singing backup) for one of the best-known British TV ads of the 1970s, in which a husband sneaks down to the fridge at night crooning about being “a secret lemonade drinker,” which itself sounds like an Elvis Costello line.

In a way, the NME had gotten the story figuratively right: Costello had been performing since around 1970, first as a teenager in a close-harmony acoustic duo and then in what later got termed “pub rock” bands. He was born in 1954 and his experiences of Beatlemania and, later, of hitchhiking to outdoor festivals to see the Band; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Joni Mitchell; and the Grateful Dead mark him as more of a classic boomer than his “angry young man” image gave away. He didn’t subscribe to punk’s no-history/no-future manifestos, and his stage name and glasses (providing a “Superman in reverse” effect) were given to him by his manager; he went along cheerfully because that was showbiz.

At the start he was more adult than his years, and his peers, working a straight suburban job (data entry at an Elizabeth Arden lipstick factory) to support a wife and infant son. It was only success that brought a regression, one that he’d voiced premonitions about in his early songs: “When they told me ’bout my side of the bargain, I knew that I would not refuse/ And I won’t get any older, now the angels wanna wear my red shoes.” He comments now: “I had barely received a hint of encouragement from the world outside, but knew that there was a jealousy and malevolence to the pursuit of fame that would not allow you to get any older once the deal was struck.”

Likewise, when he wrote “Alison,” he was sounding “my fear that I would not be faithful or that my disbelief in happy endings would lead me to kill the love I had longed for.” (His first wife, Mary, was someone he’d fallen for from afar back in high school.) That pessimism about family came from his father’s own trespasses against Costello’s mother, which seem to have been serial and flagrant. In this way, too, Costello would turn out to be a chip off the old block. Or maybe it was just an occupational hazard. Like his boy, Ross was himself the only son of an itinerant musician, an orphaned military and later ocean-liner bandsman. In the book he writes, “[My] Dad and I had also the capacity for selfish cruelties that the solitary child can think routine and acceptable.”

Those cruelties were visited particularly on Mary, whom Costello cheated on promiscuously while he and the Attractions stormed Britain and America in a haze of booze and pills in his brief, early “pop star” years. The book circles again and again to his regrets about his actions, though discreetly and sometimes obliquely—the way he handled such matters in many of his lyrics, in which he often transposed pronouns and mixed carnal and romantic imagery with politics and commerce, for the sake of art but also for a touch of obfuscation. As he writes, this was pop music, not the confessional.

One of the book’s most wrenching moments comes a quarter-century later, when Mary came to see Costello perform for the first time in decades. He was employing his colorful invention, the Spectacular Spinning Songbook, a wheel of fortune full of song titles that audience volunteers would spin to determine the setlist, a way of keeping the performances fresh. That evening, though, “the contraption delivered eight songs in a row that detailed how our life together fell apart—the songs I wrote when I betrayed her, and really broke both of our hearts. It’s hard to describe the mortification that I felt that night.”

Nevertheless, inevitably the most exciting sections of the book, though they’re also the most-previously-rehearsed, are those chapters that chronicle the early Attractions years, with an intensity of both life and art such that every month was packed with incident. The momentum came to a crash, however, late one infamous night in March 1979, when Costello was drinking with members of the Stephen Stills band in Columbus, Ohio. He was winding them up by slandering American music, culminating by dismissing Ray Charles and James Brown in vile racist terms (including the N-word), which set off a fistfight. The next day his arm was in a sling and his still-obscure name all over the press. The tour meant to make his career in America sabotaged it instead.

He deals head on with Columbus here, although he avoids repeating his statements (which, to be fair, he can’t remember saying). He disavows having any hidden racist sentiments, and while no white person should deny that infection so stridently, the evidence of his life and art, before and after, mostly justifies him. Costello doesn’t mention it, but his father wrote a letter to Rolling Stone objecting to his son being characterized as a racist, saying that his own background as an Ulster Catholic led him to despise intolerance and his son was raised the same way.

I think the explanation, beyond a blind-drunk relish for provocation at any cost, is more in the young Costellohim to despBritishness. The American version of racial tension was abstract to him, so he did not grasp the depths of the obscenities he was uttering, however facetiously. (For a much deeper analysis of the incident and its reverberations, as well as Costello’s music in general, read Franklin Bruno’s masterful, compact book on Armed Forces in the 33 ⅓ series.)

What surprises me here is not his self-defense—which he is careful to balance by saying, “There are no excuses”—but that he still feels hounded and haunted by that night. Whenever he meets someone new, he writes, he wonders if they know and are thinking ill of him. Thirty-five years is a long time to carry even a self-inflicted wound.

Yet he also says that night might have “saved my sorry life.” There’s no telling where his excesses were leading, especially if amplified by further fame and fortune. He’s grateful for the “more interesting” life that resulted from “this failure to get into some undeserved and potentially fatal orbit.” Costello didn’t actually stop drinking for another couple of decades, but he does not discuss that here, so thankfully it does not turn into a rehab-and-redemption memoir. The book’s asynchronous structure permits him to omit what he pleases, without the gaps becoming obvious. If he avoids much mention of his 16-year second marriage, to Cait O’Riordan of the Pogues, whether from enmity or respect, that’s fine with me. But the way he handles one other controversy bears scrutiny.

In Chapter 13, the one actually titled “Unfaithful Music,” he says that of everything people have said about his music, the most “bewildering” charge to him is misogyny. He points out, I think rightly, that many of the songs marshaled in those accusations, such as “This Year’s Model” and “Party Girl,” are depictions and critiques of misogyny instead. He claims people are projecting or “just weren’t listening very hard.”

He partly blames an early quote from an interview in which he hyperbolically (and drunkenly) said that all his songs were motivated by “revenge and guilt,” which the press never let go. And he even says that because of the gap between his front teeth, everything he sang tended to come out with an unintentional hiss. “If everything you say sounds like the beginning of an argument, it is easy for someone to miss the joke and look for the smart remark, where only the heartfelt word is written.”

While it’s true the “angry” Costello was a caricature, it was one in which he was complicit. (Showbiz, again.) More so, many of his songs are argumentative, which is one of their virtues—unlike a lot of more impressionistic musicians, he has a restless and tenacious mind that likes to pull subjects apart and reassemble them askew. (Contra David Lee Roth, critics don’t love Elvis Costello so much because he looks like them but because he thinks like them.)

And his subjects, especially on his early albums, often involved gender roles and sexual tension—the way that both sides of an amorous exchange objectify, exploit, and commodify each other and weaponize sex for status. He often views sociopolitical problems through a sexual lens as well and always from the masculine side. It all certainly enhanced his art. He shouldn’t be called out more than other male musicians because he confronted these dynamics rather than being oblivious to them. But neither should he expect total absolution.

If I seem to be dwelling on select aspects of the book here, making it seem less lighthearted than it really is, it’s because most reviews and interviews about Unfaithful Music have bypassed the charge of its title and dwelt on the easier bits: his explanations of certain songs, his evocations of family and showbiz history, and all the musicians he’s admired and/or worked with. The last third of the book is heavy on that last element, so maybe it looms largest in reviewers’ impressions afterwards.

Costello is indeed a great raconteur, and the book is a cornucopia of witty anecdotes and musical insights. I particularly relished learning that one of my favorite “minor” songs of his, the 1980 bonus track “Hoover Factory,” dated from years earlier and was actually a turning point in his writing: He borrowed from Jonathan Richman’s “Roadrunner” the notion of simply toasting a mundane spot, an art-deco vacuum factory he saw each day on his way to work in data entry, but then added his own rejoinder, “It’s not a matter of life or death … Who cares? Who cares?”—the first time a shrug, the second time a real question. He says the song took him “through the door to a different, less ingratiating way of speaking.”

As a huge fan of his two-season in-depth musical talk show, Spectacle, I also relished those scenes from backstage. But in more than 600 pages, charming stories, celebrity cameos, and creative exegesis become exhausting without some unifying themes, and Costello is chary about them. I located mine in the mystery of the early Costello versus the late, and the clues are most present in how he deals with the causes, memories, and aftermath of—as he put it in a 2002 album title—When I Was Cruel.

It was after Columbus, his first divorce, and a few wilderness years that he shifted back nearer to his father’s public shape, within his own variation on the entertainment world that whelped him. Perhaps it was in gradual realization of and penance for what his more lone-wolf, hand-biting instincts had wrought. Artistically it was both an expansion and a loss. But it may have been necessary to the peace he seems to find toward the end of the book, in his new family in Vancouver, Canada, with jazz singer Diana Krall and their twin boys. He quotes one of his own songs: “Day is closing/ Old men and infants are dozing/ That’s the kind of life I’ve chosen/ Just see what I’ve become … The humbled father of my three sons.”

He once took his mandate from seeing Neil Young play “Don’t Be Denied” in 1974: “If there is an applecart,” he then understood, “you must do your best to upset it.” If Ross MacManus’ spirit contributed to the way Elvis Costello’s wheels almost came off, he also showed his son there are far less dignified fates than to end up among those who keep the old apple cart rolling, the wood varnished to a gleam.

Carl Wilson is Slate’s music critic.
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sweetest punch
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/bl ... earing-Ink

Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink

A pretty good run of music books lately, the Grace Jones memoir (that I was excited about) was pretty good, fascinating to hear her stories across not only music and film but the fashion/modelling worlds too. And her ghost-writer (the excellent Paul Morley) nailed her voice. You got the arrogance.

The Chrissie Hynde book is good too, nearly finished that one. I'm enjoying the stories around music fandom from her, her passion - so obvious - it's really the tale of how she became who she is, rather than who she is. It's about that rock'n'roll urgency of being a young punk obsessed with (almost) every sound you hear.

About to start Kristin Hersh's book about Vic Chesnutt which will be amazing because it's about Vic Chesnutt and because it's written by Hersh and then there's Patti Smith's new memoir too (Katy's reading that one first).

There are others to come, books I've got lined up - or have added to "the list" (will have to wait until Christmas and hope for a voucher), memoirs by John Fogerty and Peter Garrett and Carrie Brownstein, a new book about Van Halen...

But right now it's all about the Elvis Costello book. It's a pretty great batch of music memoirs leading up to the Silly Season but it's the EC book I care most about. That's the one I've been waiting for.

I'm starting today. And starting with a run through of the accompanying soundtrack CD. Yep, trust Elvis Costello to put together a double soundtrack CD (an alternative greatest hits/best of essentially). Some of the versions here are live or demos, maybe that's frustrating if you already think you have all the EC you need or you're a completist. But I'm enjoying, on first listen, some of the different versions of songs I know (or knew) so well.

I've had two really great chats with Costello - the first around his new album at the time, a half decade ago or so, the second, more recently, around the time of his collaboration with The Roots (great album, that).

At first I thought that it would be great to talk to him again - about this book. But actually reading the book is going to be enough I think. That'll be like a third time talking to him. And a fourth, fifth and more - as he recounts all of those collaborations and focusses, no doubt, on the music. All that incredible music. It's nit-picking to dismiss his post-80s work. Sure, there are a few albums there that aren't quite essential, but the depth and breadth of his work, the knowledge of music that he has and the way he uses it in creating new tunes is astounding. To me, anyway.

So I'm off to get lost in the world of this Costello memoir. As soon as I can turn off this soundtrack album - or at least turn it down just a bit...
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 johnfoyle »

The Irish Times review linked earlier is by Tony Clayton-Lea , one time EC biographer.

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books ... -1.2420038

He wryly comments -

'....in this book he unveils a wealth of information that has trumped his many straw-clutching biographers down through the decades.'

Image


I tweeted a comment to Tony -' I daresay the IT put that done to death 'Aim Is True' heading on it. That 'straw-clutching biographers' line - you tried!' . He replied ' True on both counts! '.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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Promo in Germany (Kulturjournal ARD 1): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqbtVC24UaQ
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by Jack of All Parades »

Review to appear in this Sunday's NY Times Book Review section. I like the Updike quote. It is also a fair assessment of the book I think.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/books ... g-ink.html
"....there's a merry song that starts in 'I' and ends in 'You', as many famous pop songs do....'
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by charliestumpy »

... still compiling my Index to share with EC-publishers-everyone ...
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by Otis Westinghouse »

Maybe they'll increase the extent in the paperback with it!
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/n ... iographies

‘The history of punk was always HIS story’: the women rewriting rock

(...)
It was a staggering success for an artist little known outside punk circles, but a similar one had already been achieved by Tracey Thorn – her 2013 memoir Bedsit Disco Queen was a Sunday Times bestseller. This autumn, the female music memoir is everywhere. Many are from major publishers: Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless (Ebury Press), Grace Jones’s I’ll Never Write My Memoirs (Simon and Schuster), Patti Smith’s M Train (Bloomsbury), Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (Virago). In the US music memoir market, the highest print runs are for women’s books: Smith and Hynde are both at 200,000, above Elvis Costello’s eagerly awaited biography at 150,000.
(...)
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/boo ... krrna.html

Review: Elvis Costello memoir is a deep dark truthful mirror


They called him Elvis, but he looked like Declan: a weedy four-eye, intensely vital behind his electric guitar. The talent was clear from the first fiery singles, but longevity less guaranteed. Decades later Costello is an elder statesman of song, the Cole Porter of his generation. He looks back, not with his youthful anger, over a long, fruitful career, a passage from nobody to collaborator with the greats.

Music ran in his family, like the Bachs, travelling musicians for three generations. It meant itchy feet and infidelity: he was raised by his mother, Lil, no player but with excellent musical taste. Costello's songs were all written for his singer father Ross's hearing. Otherwise, their shared experiences were scant: Lil gave him more support. Nonetheless, he found it hard to write after Ross's death.

Unfaithful Music is a songwriter's memoir, focussed on craft. The structure is not temporal, but a life in songs. Creation is ineffable, a whole life brought to bear upon a few minutes. Thus the book flits around, the story of Shipbuilding moving from a small war museum to Chet Baker, to the Belgrano memorial, to his mother. His approach fascinates at its best, but also frustrates. When Costello concentrates, as he does in the chapter on Allen Toussaint, he can be genuinely moving, as well as being an unabashed fanboy.

One revealing encounter is when he asks Dylan how a superstar, shorn of privacy, can freely observe the tiny human interactions which inform great songs. Some of these details surface in the book, like Bebe Buell's matching luggage signalling that she meant him harm. He is a lyricist first, so novelistic insights into character are less frequent than smartarse zingers.

It took a woman to bring me down, he writes, a line made for country music, but referring to Bonnie Bramlett's punch. He asked for it, fight-starting with racist slurs — which he says he was too drunk to recall. Now he thinks the incident saved him, from superstardom and its temptations. "Life eventually became a lot more interesting". He had his own interview show, he became a middle-aged father of twins, he seems content.

Songwriters will read this book narrowly, as will the fans. I wish an editor had. Sure, he writes well, but he needs the kind of editorial process that happens with his songs and their productions, the polishing, the perfection. Nonetheless, much to enjoy.
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.newsobserver.com/entertainme ... 79027.html

Best-sellers

Los Angeles Times
Rankings for hard-cover books sold in Southern California, as reported by selected book stores:
Nonfiction


1."The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up," by Marie Kondo (Ten Speed Press: $16.99) A guru's guide to decluttering your home and simplifying your life.

2."M Train," by Patti Smith (Knopf: $25) A collection of vignettes from the singer-songwriter ruminating on life, travels, coffee and mortality.

3."My Life on the Road," by Gloria Steinem (Random House: $28) The feminist leader and author shares decades of her travels.

4."Killing Reagan," by Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard (Henry Holt: $30) The rise of President Ronald Reagan from actor to the White House and his attempted assassination.

5."The Witches," by Stacy Schiff (Little, Brown: $32) An unveiling of the mystery surrounding the Salem witch trials of 1692.

6."Between the World and Me," by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau: $24) An examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life.

7."Big Magic," by Elizabeth Gilbert (Riverhead: $24.95) The author of "Eat Pray Love" shares her wisdom and unique perspective on creativity.

8."Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl," by Carrie Brownstein (Riverhead: $27.95). A love letter to music and bandmates from the Sleater-Kinney musician

9."Lights Out," by Ted Koppel (Crown: $26) The journalist warns of an imminent cyberattack on the nation's power grids, paralyzing the nation's infrastructure.

10."Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink," by Elvis Costello (Blue Rider Press: $30) A poetic memoir of the new wave rocker's 40-year run.
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.echo-online.de/freizeit/kuns ... 379532.htm

Elvis Costello: Immer auf dem Sprung

Szenen, Texte und Töne eines bewegten Lebens: Das britische Songwriter-Genie veröffentlicht seine Biografie samt opulentem Soundtrack-Album

„Ich denke nie daran, ob das, was ich mache, nun New Wave, Alternative, Americana oder sonst etwas ist", hat Elvis Costello mal gesagt. So einer kommt rum im Leben. In 30 Alben hat der Mann, 1954 als Declan MacManus in London geboren, mit so unterschiedlichen Musikern wie Paul McCartney, Kris Kristofferson, dem Brodsky Quartett und dem Edelschnulzen-König Burt Bacharach Musik gemacht. Und wenn man denkt, jetzt hat er seine musikalische Heimat gefunden, ist er schon wieder eine Ecke weiter getanzt, Gitarre auf den Knien, einen lustigen Hut in die Stirn gezogen, keckes Grinsen im Gesicht.

Die Drehs und Wendungen dieses Pop-Genies kann man nun in Text und Tönen nachverfolgen - und darf staunen über seine kreative Rastlosigkeit. Die gedruckte Biografie "Unfaithful Music" (Berlin Verlag) und das gleichnamige Doppelalbum (Universal Music) ergänzen sich dabei ideal: Hier liest man in schillernden Details von den Anfängen des jungen Musikers in London, von den ersten Lektionen an Vaters Klavier, von durchwachten Nächten am Radio, von Bandproben in rattenverseuchten Kirchenkellern und den ersten Auftritten mit den "Attractions"; dort hört man die schneidende Stimme des zornigen jungen Mannes, der Margaret Thatcher zynische Texte und unverschämt schöne Pop-Harmonien vor die Füße wirft. Das ist nur der Anfang der Reise.

Klar, dass weder Album noch Buch eine schön chronologisch erzählte Lebensgeschichte hergeben. Sprunghaft wie der Künstler wirkt auch das, was er zwischen die Buchdeckel und auf zwei CDs gepresst hat. Das ist kein Best-of-Album, sondern eine Sammlung von Widersprüchen, von kleinen Experimenten und großen Würfen. Der ästhetische Bruch ist das vorherrschende Stilprinzip - man könnte auch sagen: Der Mann kann sich einfach von nichts trennen. Und warum sollte er auch? Alles hat ja eigene Klasse.

Die harsch in die Klaviertasten gehämmerten Akkorde in "Accidents Will Happen", dem frühen Chart-Hit der "Attractions"; der fatalistische Trauergesang in der Pop-Ballade "Shipbuilding"; vom zarten Liebeslied "Veronica" gibt's eine wunderschön geschraddelte Demo-Version ohne McCartney im Hintergrund; existenzielle Wucht und Country-Pathos verströmt gegen Ende der Song "April 5th", wo - unglaublich - der Crooner Costello mit den Country-Urgesteinen Roseanne Cash und Kris Kristofferson gemeinsame Sache macht. Letzteres ist ein bis dato unveröffentlichtes Kleinod aus Costellos Schatzkästlein - doch wer glaubt, der Mann sei nun im Establishment des US-Entertainment angekommen, der irrt gewaltig.
Ein großer Unterhalter war er ja immer. Aber um sich auf einen Stil festzulegen, ist seine Welt einfach zu bunt. Mal sehen, wohin es ihn als nächstes zieht - zuletzt hat der ungelenk wirkende Musiker ja sogar mit dem Funk geflirtet.

Der letzte Track des Doppelalbums - Numer 38 - heißt denn auch "I Can't Turn It Off". Da erzählt er mit sonorer, ironiesatter Stimme Anekdoten seines Lebens. Nein, abschalten kann der Mann ganz sicher nicht. Was dabei an Menge und Qualität rauskommt, mag den Hörer und Leser schon mal überfordern. Ein großes Vergnügen ist es allemal.
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.nachrichten.at/nachrichten/k ... 72,2025072

Mit herrlich lakonischem Humor zieht Elvis Costello seine Lebensbilanz

"Unfaithful Music. Mein Leben" ist der Glücksfall einer brillanten Musiker-Autobiografie.

Eines ist sicher: Elvis Costello hat jede einzelne Zeile seiner Autobiografie "Unfaithful Music. Mein Leben" selbst geschrieben. Denn jeder Ghostwriter oder Lektor, der etwas auf sich hält, hätte angesichts der elliptischen und episodenhaften Erzählweise des britisch-irischen Musikers weinend das Handtuch geworfen.

In Kontrast zum Großteil der auf dem Markt befindlichen Rockstar-Memoiren ist Costellos Buch keine chronologische Aneinanderreihung von Suff-Eskapaden, Backstage-Vögeleien und verspäteten Abrechnungen mit Kollegen. Nein, "Unfaithful Music" funktioniert wie ein auf 784 Seiten ausgebreiteter Costello-Song: wortgewaltig, scharf beobachtet, gespickt mit lakonischem Humor, frei assoziierend.

Rasant springt Costello, mit bürgerlichem Namen Declan Patrick MacManus, zwischen den Stationen seines bewegten Lebens hin und her: das Aufwachsen in grauen Vorstädten, die Begegnung mit Paul McCartney, erste Gehversuche als Songwriter, die politisch extrem aufgeladene Thatcher-Ära, der Ruhm, Erinnerungen an die geliebte Großmutter.

Das Verzetteln ist Programm

"Unfaithful Music" ist – im positiven Sinne – das literarische Äquivalent zu einem Thekengespräch nach Mitternacht, wenn der Wermutbruder am Hocker daneben beginnt, seine Lebensgeschichte zu erzählen. Die Konversation kommt ständig vom Hundertsten ins Tausendste, Schnurre reiht sich an Schnurre, das Verzetteln in bezaubernden Nebenschauplätzen ist Programm. Und irgendwann beginnt der Zuhörer die losen Fäden dieses Erinnerungsstroms miteinander zu verknüpfen, Verbindungen zwischen Realität und Kunst tun sich auf. Besonders berührend sind dabei jene Passagen, in denen Costello die schwierige Beziehung zu seinem Vater, Sänger in einer renommierten Big Band und bekennender Lebemann, aufarbeitet.

Ein Tipp für Fans: Parallel zum Erscheinen von "Unfaithful Music" kommt ein gleichnamiger, höchst empfehlenswerter Soundtrack mit insgesamt 38 Songs auf den Markt. Neben zahlreichen Liedern, deren Entstehungsprozess in Costellos Memoiren nachgezeichnet werden, finden sich darauf auch zwei bis dato unveröffentlichte Nummern.
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sweetest punch
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/el ... _id=336359

Lose Erinnerungen eines Pop-Chamäleons

Elvis Costello, der Meister des Drei-Minuten-Songs, hat nun ein 700-Seiten-Epos vorgelegt. Er überzeugt dabei durchaus mit Sprachwitz, Intelligenz und Leidenschaft. Costello liefert kleine persönliche Geschichten, die zugleich Musik-und Zeitgeschichte der letzten fünf Jahrzehnte transportieren.

Eines der markantesten Kennzeichen von Elvis Costello ist seine stilistische Unberechenbarkeit. Wie ein Chamäleon hat der Brite seit Ende der 1970er Jahre bis heute - solistisch wie auch mit seinen Bands "The Attractions" oder später den "Imposters" - die Klangfarbe seiner Songs immer wieder gewechselt. Von Punk und New Wave, Rock und Pop über Motown-Soul, Jazz und Blues bis hin zu quasi-klassischer Stilistik reicht die Palette an Sounds, die er für seine Songtexte gewählt hat.

Als "treulose Musik" bezeichnet Costello die Freiheit, sich nicht festlegen zu lassen – so wie Musik an sich nicht instrumentalisieren lässt. Mit seinen Memoiren "Unfaithful Music - Mein Leben" legt der 61-Jährige konsequenterweise nun auch ein Buch vor, das sich Freiheiten erlaubt und herkömmliche Erwartungen an eine Autobiographie unterläuft.

Über 700 Seiten erstreckt sich das Mammutwerk, das auf jede Chronologie verzichtet und kreuz und quer durch die Jahrzehnte springt. Dabei unternimmt Costello sogar Ausflüge in Zeiten, die er selbst gar nicht erlebt hat, wenn er etwa mehrere Kapitel dem Leben seines Urgroßvaters und seiner Großeltern und Eltern widmet – und diese wiederum quer über das Buch verstreut platziert.

Eine lose Struktur verleiht Costello seinem Buch durch 36 Kapitel, die in ihren poetisch-assoziativen Titeln angelehnt sind an Songtitel nicht nur des eigenen Werks ("I want to vanish" oder "The River in Reverse"), sondern auch solche von anderen Interpreten.

Pop-enzyklopädische Kennerschaft

Der Titel des Einstiegskapitels "A White Boy in Hammersmith Palais" über seine ersten Konzertbesuche als Kind variiert z.B. den Songtitel "White Man in Hammersmith Palais" von The Clash. Das Spiel mit Worten und vielfältigen Assoziationen erinnert an Costellos altbewährte Fähigkeiten Sprachwitz, Ironie und Kreativität, es verbindet Leben und Musik und es verweist auf die pop-enzyklopädische Kennerschaft des Briten, die ihn über die Jahrzehnte zum vielgefragten Kollaborationspartner von so unterschiedlichen Kollegen wie Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach, Allan Toussaint oder Questlove von der Hiphop-Band The Roots gemacht hat.

Ausführlich berichtet Costello von diesen und anderen Projekten, wie sie zustande gekommen und verlaufen sind – allerdings streckenweise so weitschweifig und penibel, dass sich hier selbst Costello-Fans langweilen müssen.

Kurzweilig lesen sich dagegen diejenigen Passagen, in denen Costello Geschichten erzählt und damit auch ein Stück Zeitgeschichte vermittelt. Warmherzig und extrem viel schreibt er über den Vater Ross MacManus, der als Trompeter und vor allem als Sänger des Joe Loss Orchestras Anfang der 60er-Jahre den kleinen Sohn mit zu seinen Konzerten nahm, die allerneuesten Beatles-Scheiben zum Einstudieren nach Hause trug oder - Großereignis! - einen gemeinsamen Auftritt mit den Beatles vor der Königlichen Familie absolvierte, um dem Neunjährigen anschließend die Autogramme der vier Musiker mitzubringen. Der Sohn schneidet sie kurzerhand auseinander, damit sie in sein kleines Autogramm-Buch passen.

Costello wurde 1954 als Declan Patrick MacManus in London geboren, wo er auch aufwuchs. Seine irischen Vorfahren väterlicherseits hatten zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts ein neues Zuhause im Nordwesten Englands gefunden - in Birkenhead nahe Liverpool. Ende der 60er-Jahre markierte der kurzzeitige Umzug des Teenagers in die Nähe der Beatles-Stadt eine Art Ankunft im Epizentrum der Beatlemania und erste eigene Song-Aktivitäten mit dem Folk-Duo Rusty. Nicht zufällig sind der Vater und die Beatles bzw. Paul McCartney die zentralen Figuren dieser Lebenserinnerungen.

Die Entstehungsgeschichte seiner Songs

Einen großen Platz nehmen auch die eigenen Songs ein. Ausführlich gibt Costello – wie er betont, immer mit Notizbuch unterwegs - Auskunft über ihre Entstehungsgeschichte: etwa nach dem Besuch des krisengeschüttelten Belfasts, bei dem er überforderte britische Jung-Soldaten auf Streife erlebte, woraus anschließend beim kurzen Rückflug nach London der größte Charts-Erfolg "Oliver's Army" entstand.

Wenige und kaum schmeichelhafte Worte findet Elvis Costello für seine sechzehnjährige Ehe mit Cait O'Riordan, der Bassistin der Pogues, für die er auch als Produzent gearbeitet hatte. Eher beiläufig wird auch die früh geschlossene erste Ehe mit Costellos Jugendliebe behandelt.

Sie sind Teil des großen Ganzen, denn neben der notorischen Treulosigkeit während langer Tourneen sind Skandale und Peinlichkeiten Ende der 70er/ Anfang der 80er Jahre (von den rassistischen Bemerkungen über Ray Charles bis hin zu diversen Alkohol-Exzessen) ohnehin an der Tagesordnung, Zitat Costello:

"Ich beschrieb diesen Prozess einmal damit, dass ich mir das Leben versaute, um dann dumme kleine Songs darüber zu schreiben und kann dieser Beschreibung hier nichts hinzufügen."

"Elder Statesman" des Pop

Die schwärmerisch kommentierte dritte Ehe 2003 mit Musikerkollegin Diana Krall hat diesen Prozess beendet. Es scheint, dass aus dem "angry young man" ein zur Ruhe gekommener Familienvater kleiner Zwillingssöhne geworden ist. Vor allem aber – und das macht das Buch mit den zahlreich dokumentierten Lobeshymnen anderer Musiker überdeutlich - genießt Costello den Ruf als hochverehrter "Elder Statesman" des Pop.

Auf der Drei-Minuten-Song-Strecke hat Costello immer wieder seine Qualitäten unter Beweis gestellt. Der 700-Seiten-Marathon zeigt einen Autor, der hin und wieder durch Langeweile und Eitelkeiten schwächelt. Dank seiner Leidenschaft und Intelligenz kommt er aber schließlich auch hier ins Ziel.
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The Gentleman
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by The Gentleman »

Given the admiration he expresses for Georgie Fame in the book, I find it disappointing that he doesn't mention the song he wrote for him: "That's What Friends Are For." Anyone have any great quotes from Elvis about the song?

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q ... xykdv4yYww
cwr
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by cwr »

I think this is the only place I've ever seen him talk or write about that song:
http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/inde ... tober_1999
johnfoyle
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

On my travels in the U.S. I couldn't resist taking a few snaps when I spotted the book -

Image

Penn Station, New York


Image

Richmond, VA



Here in Dublin, my brother spotted this winning combination -

Image
sweetest punch
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/bo ... ful-mirror

Review: Elvis Costello memoir a truthful mirror

They called him Elvis, but he looked like Declan: a weedy four-eye, intensely vital behind his electric guitar. The talent was clear from the first fiery singles, but longevity less guaranteed. Decades later Costello is an elder statesman of song, the Cole Porter of his generation. He looks back, not with his youthful anger, over a long, fruitful career, a passage from nobody to collaborator with the greats.

Music ran in his family, like the Bachs, travelling musicians for three generations. It meant itchy feet and infidelity: he was raised by his mother, Lil, no player but with excellent musical taste. Costello's songs were all written for his singer father Ross's hearing. Otherwise, their shared experiences were scant: Lil gave him more support. Nonetheless, he found it hard to write after Ross's death.

Unfaithful Music is a songwriter's memoir, focussed on craft. The structure is not temporal, but a life in songs. Creation is ineffable, a whole life brought to bear upon a few minutes. Thus the book flits around, the story of Shipbuilding moving from a small war museum to Chet Baker, to the Belgrano memorial, to his mother. His approach fascinates at its best, but also frustrates. When Costello concentrates, as he does in the chapter on Allen Toussaint, he can be genuinely moving, as well as being an unabashed fanboy.

One revealing encounter is when he asks Dylan how a superstar, shorn of privacy, can freely observe the tiny human interactions which inform great songs. Some of these details surface in the book, like Bebe Buell's matching luggage signalling that she meant him harm. He is a lyricist first, so novelistic insights into character are less frequent than smartarse zingers.

It took a woman to bring me down, he writes, a line made for country music, but referring to Bonnie Bramlett's punch. He asked for it, fight-starting with racist slurs — which he says he was too drunk to recall. Now he thinks the incident saved him, from superstardom and its temptations. "Life eventually became a lot more interesting". He had his own interview show, he became a middle-aged father of twins, he seems content.

Songwriters will read this book narrowly, as will the fans. I wish an editor had. Sure, he writes well, but he needs the kind of editorial process that happens with his songs and their productions, the polishing, the perfection. Nonetheless, much to enjoy.
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 johnfoyle »

A early version of that New Zealand review had a photo error -


Image
johnfoyle
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

Since I got signed copies of the U.K. & U.S. editions I suppose I better show them off. Now to get cracking on the index...

The photographic endpapers are in the U. S. edition


Image

Image

Image

Image

Image
johnfoyle
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

The Belfast Telegraph highlight a story in Elvis's book. They compound his error in the book in incorrectly saying he played the 'Queens Hall' in 1978 (he played the Ulster Hall) by saying he played a hall in Queens University.

They use a photo from his appearance in Derry in 2013 , repeating a error they used when they used it in '13, saying ' Elvis Costello on stage in Derry in 2013, his first gig in Northern Ireland in 29 years' , forgetting all the many appearances in that time period.

http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/inde ... rn_Ireland



http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/ ... 20180.html

Loyalists sent death threat to The Clash in bid to stop Belfast gig, says Elvis Costello
By Cate McCurry


21/11/2015

In his newly-released memoir, Elvis Costello explains how the letter, written in red ink, left lead singer Joe Strummer shaken-up.

The Clash hero's fears were heightened when he noticed the Belfast postmark.

Costello also explains the inspiration behind his most successful song - Oliver's Army - which he penned hours after his first visit to Belfast in 1978.

In the book, Unfaithful Music And Disappearing Ink, he tells how seeing the "youth of the British soldiers" patrolling the streets of the city triggered the lyrics for the song.

Costello, who performed at the Waterfront in Belfast last year, also linked the song to other troublespots in the former British Empire, but it was while he was travelling with his band The Attractions to the Queen's (now Mandela) Hall that he spotted the squaddies, who he described as "little kids holding machine guns".

"When I had gone to Belfast we couldn't even stay at the Europa Hotel in the city centre as it was under reconstruction after the latest attempt to blow it up," he wrote. "On our way to our show at the Queen's Hall we saw soldiers on patrol. They looked like little kids, but they were little kids holding machine guns.

"You knew they had come from towns that really looked no different from Belfast. It was all so normal, except for the barbed wire, observation towers, the armed cars and the tangle of old hatreds and grievances that you could never imagine being reconciled."

Costello also describes how a man ran on stage and grabbed the microphone during the show. "I thought it was a political statement and left him to it. It turned out it was just a local punk rocker trying to make a name for his band," he said.

"I had written the words of Oliver's Army by the time our plane landed back in our own little safe European home in London. Seeing the youth of the British soldiers patrolling the streets of Belfast with my own eyes had triggered lyrics about the military career opportunity that I thankfully never had to take up."

The musician added that Oliver's Army, which was aired on MTV's first US broadcast day in 1981, was filled with contradictions.

He wrote: "The song was a jumble of ever-shifting allegiances and imperial misadventures, and about how they always get a working-class boy to do the killing, some of them Irishmen who, like my grandfather, wore a British Army uniform.

"It wasn't supposed to read like a coherent political argument, it was pop music."
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

Chris Difford gives Elvis a neat shout out in the latest entry on his blog -


http://chrisdifford.com/blog/elko-not-i ... itinerary/


Elko (not in the tour itinerary)

23rd November 2015 by Chris Difford


Yes a night in Elko Nevada is on the cards, so we pull up at the Casino and the drives get some sleep before heading off for the spare part at first light. Me I’m on the bus, but first some food in the Casino. Inside some rustic looking people stand and sit at the slots, some look connected by their hands possibly there all night. The sound of Buck Owens drifts around the room mixing gentle with the bells and more bells of the machines, and some electronic Yellow Magic Orchestra type sounds, its a soft prickly conveyer belt of harmonics. Four oldish woman gather around a machine, a man about my age stands with his baseball cap round the wrong way sipping a beer. He is clearly the only game in town as they swoon to his every word, to me he looks like a goof, a misfit even. Together they trade laughter and words over some hand gestures and teasing looks, and then the tannoy. The female voice beckons people to play Poker, right next to Starbucks.

Its empty, Sunday night in Elko seems like a quite one. As i walk to the bus in the cold night air i spot three men loading guns into one of the hotel rooms from a pick up truck, they look like they might be in a rush but they pay no attention to me as i waddle by like some distant Alan Whicker figure in the night. In the bus i wonder if I’m safe, i rest on my bed and hope of the best, a very expensive tour bus in a parking lot full of dodgy looking cars and pick up trucks. Im so tired i can’t give a toss. The other bus must be close to Minneapolis, we still have 20 hours to go once this valve is picked up from Salt Lake City in the morning. Im ready for some still, some bed under the sign of the Red Lion Casino. Elko is famous for its surrounding mines, mostly all now closed down, some gold some silver. Its also famous for local prostitution which is legal here in this one horse town. I saw no signs of this as we drove in down the long wide main street, all i saw where cheap motels and shops with not much inside.


I could not be far enough away from home, from the village life and from the ones i love. I might sneak out to dig for some gold in them there hills, and then again i might not. Thinking about it the motels looks very busy back there. Sleep please and a few more chapters of that wonderful Elvis book. I love having him read it to me, its like he is in the room, Jackanory with Elvis Costello.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by docinwestchester »

johnfoyle wrote:Chris Difford gives Elvis a neat shout out in the latest entry on his blog -


http://chrisdifford.com/blog/elko-not-i ... itinerary/


Elko (not in the tour itinerary)

23rd November 2015 by Chris Difford


I could not be far enough away from home, from the village life and from the ones i love. I might sneak out to dig for some gold in them there hills, and then again i might not. Thinking about it the motels looks very busy back there. Sleep please and a few more chapters of that wonderful Elvis book. I love having him read it to me, its like he is in the room, Jackanory with Elvis Costello.
For those (like me) who don't get the reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackanory
'
I can't think of a U.S. equivalent.
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