UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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

Post by sweetest punch »

There is also a spanish translation: https://www.amazon.com/Música-infiel-ti ... 1_1&sr=8-1
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

Only available, it seems , on Kindle.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

There are many reviews appearing of the Spanish & Italian editions. Linking & translating them would take too much time. I like this image -

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http://rockthebestmusic.com/2016/06/elv ... tml#309892

At the merchandise table in Zurich the last signed copy of the Italian edition was selling for 45 Swiss franks - no thanks!

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myaimistrue91
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by myaimistrue91 »

johnfoyle wrote:There are many reviews appearing of the Spanish & Italian editions. Linking & translating them would take too much time. I like this image -

At the merchandise table in Zurich the last signed copy of the Italian edition was selling for 45 Swiss franks - no thanks!

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45 Swiss Franks? What? They're crazy. ! I bought the italian edition signed copy for 30 euro at the merchandise table in Florence. And on Amazon italy everyone can buy it without sign for 19 euro.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by InvisibleMan »

30? I spent 40€ for the signed one in Padova. :x
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by Man out of Time »

Hardback edition in Spanish. 778 pages, weighs in at 1.158 kg on my kitchen scales. Translation by Damia Alou, Rocio Gomez de los Riscos and Antonio Padilla.
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MOOT
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

A review from last October somehow eluded our attention. Would anyone here have access and get the text?

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/book ... 584602.ece

Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello

Will Hodgkinson
Published at 12:07AM, October 17 2015
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by myaimistrue91 »

InvisibleMan wrote:30? I spent 40€ for the signed one in Padova. :x
Italian or English one?
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by myaimistrue91 »

Another Review:

Elvis Costello: Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

Chris Charlesworth, Just Backdated, November 2015

LIKE A HANDFUL of rock stars I have encountered along the way – among them Townshend, Bowie and Zappa – Elvis Costello would have made a first-rate rock critic. I suspect he knows it too, which perhaps explains why he has adopted a rather disdainful attitude towards us for much of his career – especially when he started out, or at least when Declan McManus, the folkie-country-pub-rocker, became Elvis Costello, the cutthroat singer-songwriter masquerading as a bandy-legged punk.

So over and above the captivating walk-on parts by just about every musician of note you care to name (of which much more later), this absorbing, entertaining and very literate book is about music: the music that Declan/Elvis heard as a boy, the music that inspired him, the music he loves and the music he has pilfered to enhance his own songs. By the end of its 670 pages I came away with the feeling that Elvis Costello is a walking encyclopaedia of popular music, a true child of Tin Pan Alley – his birth notice appeared in NME and is reproduced on page 406 – suckled by a music-loving family until he became so absorbed in it that absolutely nothing else would ever matter to him.

It's also apparent that he has immaculate taste, ticking off all the right boxes in the music he adores, all top-quality stuff, not necessarily commercial but always hitting the right spot with connoisseurs. I lost count of the times I found myself nodding in agreement at his opinions, and from the outset realised I was tuning in to the thoughts of a deeply scholastic musicologist whose way with words was that of a great lyricist. After all, only someone steeped in it would write a paragraph like, "By the time we got to Phoenix, it had started to dawn on me that we could be driving up and down the road from Tucson to Tucumcari for years and never break on through to America. So we headed for California with the intention of going back to high school or at least making some Do Re Mi."

Elvis tends not to dwell on that which he doesn't much like – though Led Zeppelin are sneeringly dismissed as a "hot air balloon" – and instead moves from the music his father Ross performed with the Joe Loss Orchestra through to rock'n'roll, the Beatles, R&B, soul, country, singer-songwriters, ska and everything of merit you'd expect, avoiding the flash and sticking to what's honest, always music of integrity and authenticity.

Not necessarily in that order, though. Unfaithful Music... is not a linear autobiography, by any means, more a cherry-picked flight of the bumble-bee that lurches back and forth so that moving episodes about impoverished Irish ancestors are slipped into tales of working with the likes of Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen. Somehow he makes it work, and at times it's a bit like a rollercoaster, moving slowly uphill as he painstakingly illuminates the craft of song writing with particular attention to his lyrics, then tumbling downhill fast as he bemoans the seamier side of his profession, the pros and cons of having a confrontational image, and falls in and out of love with the Attractions and a handful of women who pierce the armour and – like the very best music – touch his surprisingly susceptible heart.

Elvis writes tenderly and with a sense of regret about Mary, his first wife and the mother of his son, a school sweetheart with whom he later became reconnected. "We lost everything to each other that summer," he writes. "In time we lay in the half-light, listening to 'Tenderness', a song by Paul Simon that we both loved." Music invariably brings back poignant memories recalled throughout, though I was a bit surprised that we had to wait until page 512 for Cait O'Riordan to make an entrance, while his relationship with the musician Diana Krall, whom Elvis married in 2003, is mentioned only sparingly in a few pages towards the end. He also writes movingly about his close relationship with his father Ross, not least in the passage about his heartbreaking decline into dementia that erased the wonderful memories of a life in music that his son has now rescued.

There is plenty of droll humour. A memory of the Australian outback soap opera Whiplash, broadcast before Clint Eastwood's starring cowboy series Rawhide, elicits a remark about "a combination that would nowadays suggest an entirely different form of entertainment", while his description of the Daily Mail as having "small-minded, prurient, xenophobic content to titillate and stoke the indignation of the impotent petty fascist" is about as accurate a description of that loathsome rag as I have read anywhere.

Costello's legendary cussedness seems to have been caused by reviewers' constant misinterpretation of his lyrics, being misidentified in a photograph of his dad that appeared in NME not long after he became Elvis, and having had the misfortune to suffer an attack of vertigo on the day he was scheduled to do a number of interviews to promote My Aim Is True, his debut album on Stiff. This rendered him disinclined to answer questions from anyone, especially the Daily Mirror man who wanted to know about "the girls" and a more penetrating interrogation from NME's Nick Kent, unnamed but clearly identifiable from the description. "By accident or through collusion, this conversation effectively invented a character that I would inhabit for the new few years," he writes.

The regrettable racist outburst in Columbus, Ohio, is put down to an excess of alcohol coupled with extreme road weariness. Though it was inexcusable, Elvis is not just contrite but asks reasonably whether "anything else that I've done in the other 59 years and 525,550 minutes suggest I harbour racist beliefs". I forgive him, though I'm not sure Mary did when, on the night his son was born, Elvis chose to attend a Little Feat concert at the Rainbow Theatre that had been eagerly anticipated by both of them. In the event, Matthew arrived a bit late, allowing Elvis to arrive at the hospital with hours to spare.

An admiration for Little Feat, The Band, John Prine, Allen Toussaint and many, many more from the worlds of country, jazz and classics illuminates the book throughout. Elvis is rightly troubled by the phrase "Great American Songbook", which excludes many genres that he loves, and anyone reading the book will surely be charmed by the delight that he takes in having the opportunity to record alongside the band that used to back the other Elvis: Ron Tutt on drums, bassist Jerry Scheff, guitar maestro James Burton and keyboard player Glen D. Hardin. This same crew, along with Springsteen, Tom Waits, Elvis and others gathered to back up Roy Orbison for the now well-known 1987 Black & White Night tribute show that can be found on YouTube. Elvis describes the event in loving detail and I think this remains the highlight of his life. Or maybe it was duetting with Ray Charles, or playing with Springsteen in a tribute to Joe Strummer at the Grammy Awards, or shooting the breeze with Bob Dylan, or getting Chet Baker to contribute that moving trumpet part to 'Shipbuilding', or breakfasting with Van Morrison – who turns out be as laconic as you would expect – or chauffeuring Joni Mitchell to one of his concerts, an anecdote saved until almost the end of the book. Then again it might have been the time he performed 'Penny Lane', the piccolo trumpet solo courtesy of a uniformed US guardsman, in front of Barrack Obama and its composer at the White House on the occasion when Macca won the Gershwin Prize. Extraordinary encounters like this litter Unfaithful Music... like autumn leaves on the lawn in my back garden – castles in the air for folk-singing, music-mad teenager Declan McManus in his chunky striped sweater, seen entertaining a seemingly unimpressed audience of middle-aged matrons on page 116.

The book is illustrated throughout with black and white photographs from Elvis' private collection, including many of his close family, but lacks an index, which – for a book of this length – is in my opinion an oversight. But this is a minor quibble for a memoir that stands alongside Keith Richards' Life as an example of how a rock memoir should be both written and produced. The big difference, of course, is that Richards had a ghostwriter while Unfaithful Music... is all Costello's own work.

I only ever met him once, one evening in 1980 at a flat in Dalling Road in Shepherds Bush that was occupied by my friend Glen, Costello's PR at the time. He'd sublet it from Bruce Thomas, the Attractions' bass player, and I was staying there temporarily, dossing down on a mattress on the living room floor. Elvis sat disconsolately in the corner strumming my Gibson acoustic guitar while a pretty girl of my acquaintance, who worked for Columbia Records in New York, made eyes at him that suggested a sexual advance wouldn't be rebuffed. Elvis was probably unaware that the room we were in was my bedroom and that this was the reason I stuck around, thereby inhibiting his congress with Sheri. In the circumstances I suppose it was not unreasonable for him to be vexed but I still thought that his image as a bit of a moody bugger was spot-on.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

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Just got this on eBay - as if I don't have enough editions. Considering how delightfully unruly the finished book has seemed to some it'll be interesting to see what a uncorrected proof will look like.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

A review from last October that was missed is now up on wiki -

http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/inde ... r_17,_2015
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

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I got the German edition of The Book. The photographic reproduction is the best of I've seen of the editions I have. Some comparisons of these photos by Chalkie Davies.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

The promo edition I got via eBay arrived. Heavens knows when I'll get the time to sit down & make page by page comparisons with the finished text. For the moment here are some examples of parts of it. I presume 8/5/15 is August 5th 2015. I don't know , yet, if the handwritten note I spotted is by a reader or Elvis. Now I have to go buy a book shelf for the collection.


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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by verbal gymnastics »

Hi John

I look forward to reading the subtle nuances between the English and German editions.

Perhaps you'll need a German sense of humour...
Who’s this kid with his mumbo jumbo?
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

This review form last November doesn't seem to have been noted here. Nick on f/book spotted it. The drawing is pretty special.


http://www.buffalonews.com/life-arts/bo ... r-20151101#


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Adam Zyglis/Buffalo News


Elvis Costello’s brilliant memoir spares no one, including its author

By Jeff Miers

November 1, 2015


“A lot of people have got spoilt and ruined by sudden success and pushing too hard. I thought I was an exception but I wasn’t as smart or in control as I pretended to be.”

This is Elvis Costello, writing in his memoir “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink,” in a style that permeates the remarkable book – confident, assured, but self-deprecating and self-aware, almost to a fault.

Costello made it as punk gave way to the more artistic new wave in the U.K. of the late-70s. Yet he was never punk or new wave, really. Rather he acted as an interloper – a balladeer with a deep strain of music-hall and a family history that included big band jazz and swing; a man who once claimed, disingenuously, that all of his songs were motivated by revenge and guilt, when they were really more inclined to ruminate on the more complicated shadows cast by love; a married man with a deep romantic streak who failed to maintain his self-image as a faithful partner impervious to the allures of the rock ’n’ roll touring life; an intellectual who worked a “straight” job as a computer programmer in the daytime, and indulged in alcoholic excess by night.

Costello, born Declan Patrick MacManus in 1954 and raised in London and Liverpool, writes eloquently of his life in music, but he spares no one, including himself, from his unflinching critical eye. Costello has his failures, and he asks no one to gloss over them. Lord knows he has no intention of doing so himself.

The man who wrote “Every Day I Write the Book” finally got around to writing his own, despite being one of the most-likely-to-do-so among his generation for decades. Unsurprisingly, it’s a wordy, erudite, passionate and hypercritical affair - touched by humor, striving for something resembling grace, and eager to set the record straight. It’s not at all unlike a great Costello song, then.

Though “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” does indeed trace the arc of Costello’s remarkable – and remarkably consistent – career, it is in many ways also a tribute to the author’s father, Ross MacManus, a jazz trumpeter and unabashed Lothario, who left Costello’s mother when the boy was still young, after carrying on one affair too many. The elder MacManus hangs above the proceedings like the ghost of Hamlet’s father – though for much of Costello’s life, he is but an intermittent presence, it is clear that his figure looms large. Costello, though he never states as much explicitly, seems to judge his musical capabilities in terms of his father’s. Despite the pain caused him (and his mother) by his father’s unfaithfulness, he ends up repeating many of his old man’s mistakes, and enjoying none of them.

In this age of rampant anti-intellectualism and “get to the point in 140 characters or less” mania, some might find Costello’s gorgeously verbose scribblings infuriating. He writes like a man who loves language and is in no hurry to get to the point or to make things easy for the reader. He suffers no fools, particularly when he’s the one being the fool. The infamous incident that involved a hyper-inebriated and pill-laden young Costello mumbling racial slurs in a hotel bar is dealt with head-on and, it must be said, brutally. (A sober and mature Costello took full responsibility for this one-off display of racial insensitivity in a 2013 interview with Questlove.)

Far more thrilling are the moments when Costello’s disdainful eye is turned toward more deserving targets. The BBC that was an unavoidable reality for anyone climbing the pop music ladder when Costello first did is skewered in a delightful and wordy fashion that is typical of “Unfaithful Music”.

“To the BBC we were just a bunch of glove puppets… Their contempt and their ignorance was fairly transparent, and it’s not as if it got better with time. In 1995, I was attending the Performing Rights Society event at which I received an Ivor Novello Award in the company of Van Morrison, Lonnie Donegan and (‘Diamonds are Forever’ and ‘To Sir, With Love’) lyricist Don Black… A senior BBC music programmer smarmed up to me and took this opportunity to remind me of my diminished status in his petty universe, ‘Of course, you’d have had a lot more hits if you’d just taken out all the sevenths and minor chords.’

“ I suppose I would have had even more, if I’d only taken out all of the music entirely and most of the words, too.”

This is vintage Costello, full of bemused contempt and able to settle scores without having to try too particularly hard, as long as he’s the one with the pen in his hand.

But this Costello is not the one who controls “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink.” For the past decade-plus, Costello has been married to the jazz pianist and vocalist Diana Krall, and the couple has two sons of their own to add to the brood that includes another son from Costello’s first marriage. Healthy and enduring love, sobriety and fatherhood have done wonders for Costello, as his recent song “My Three Sons” makes plain. (“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 humble father of my three sons,” the song’s lyrics read, in part.)

It’s this version of the man who gets the final word in “Unfaithful Music,” and that’s fitting, for he is the best writer of the bunch. Finding a small epiphany in the realization that his young sons are displaying an aptitude for music, making them potentially the fourth generation of MacManus men to do so, Costello revels in a succinctness of prose.

“The distance between us is now closed by the very same gadgetry that dismantled the record business and keeps me out on the road and away from my family with the fondness of the absent heart and anticipating the thrill of every rendezvous.

“This is what I do.

“There is no way to prove that this disposition for music must run in the blood, except for all the evidence.”
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by Heats101 »

"The drawing is pretty special."
A pretty fine review as well, certainly one I can relate to.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

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http://www.norstedts.se/bocker/utgiven/ ... -inbunden/

A Swedish edition , to be published on August 30th , but a fan there has found it & bought it already.

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My computer automatically translates the title as -
'Shameless Music & fading ink'
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

http://macaudailytimes.com.mo/mdt-exclu ... ities.html

MDT – Why did you want to write your recently published autobiography/memoir, “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink”? What do you want the readers to take away from it?

EC – As the title suggests, memory is not a permanent condition. So I thought it was best to get it on the page while , in case there should ever come a time when I couldn’t remember it as clearly and I regretted not having [written it].

I’m astounded that anybody read it. You know, I can understand if you’re a book reviewer – you kind of have an obligation to at least pretend to have read it – but I have met many people who have clearly read it in quite a lot of detail.

I don’t know that there is one thing to take away from a book that’s 600 pages long. It quite surprised me […] that everyone takes a different thing out of it. That’s the pleasing thing. There isn’t one message as such; it isn’t a fairy tale with “and the moral of the story is…”

It’s a complicated non-linear book and I think some people have probably become exasperated with its [apparent lack of structure]. Its structure is unusual… you’ll have to take my word for it that it does have a structure… and one that was intended!
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

!!!!
https://twitter.com/ronbrooks57/status/ ... 1108880384
'Guess Scout is not a fan of Elvis Costello! '

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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by krm »

Swedish Review from Aftonbladet by Fredrik Virtanen
http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/bokrec ... 3435600.ab
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

KRM shares the all important images showing comparisons between the UK & Swedish editions of the book.


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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by verbal gymnastics »

On a slightly related topic, has there been criticism of Bruce Springsteen not providing an index in his autobiography?
Who’s this kid with his mumbo jumbo?
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by docinwestchester »

verbal gymnastics wrote:On a slightly related topic, has there been criticism of Bruce Springsteen not providing an index in his autobiography?
That's an excellent question. There are dozens of threads about his book at the BTX site but no one has mentioned the lack of an index. I'll post the question there and report back.
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