UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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

Post by Ulster Boy »

erey wrote:So, one tiny error per 10,000 words, is it? For a homeopathic dilution of one hundred parts per million... ;)
I know, its a bit pedantic! But actually, it lessened the impact of what must have seemed a neat line - Queen's Hall and Queen's soldiers. I could forgive dodgy memory on a venue (which is easily checkable on wiki) yet he went on to correctly relate not only the name of the hotel he stayed in, but also the name of the one he didn't!
sweetest punch
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertai ... story.html

Elvis Costello has a new memoir, and it's even better than Bob Dylan and Keith Richards's books

It’s 1979, and Elvis Costello, not yet 25, is in on a creative roll. With his Buddy Holly glasses and punk rock sneer, he already has established himself as a masterful songwriter, whether crafting torchlight ballads (“Alison”), tortured kiss-offs (“Lipstick Vogue”) or biting protest songs (“Oliver’s Army”) as buttery as anything in ABBA’s catalogue.

Naturally, our hero is also a mess. He’s drinking too much, separated from his wife and embarking on a series of dysfunctional relationships. “I once referred to this process as ‘Messing up my life, so I could write stupid little songs about it,’ ” he says, “and I can’t improve on that description here, but then songs are never exactly taken from life.”

The paragraph, sprung midway through Costello’s sprawling memoir, gets to the heart of what makes “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” so fascinating. We get the artist when he’s old enough to have perspective, but still young enough to remember every detail, down to the shirt his father wore (“embroidered . . . with small mirrors sewn into the fabric over a scoop-necked Mickey Mouse T-shirt”) during a meeting in London more than 40 years ago.

In a world littered with uneven (and largely ghosted) celebrity memoirs, “Disappearing Ink” is a beautifully written revelation. Dare I blaspheme by declaring I liked it even more than the excellent memoirs produced by Bob Dylan and Keith Richards? Costello embraces the basic qualities of good storytelling: the use of detail, tension and humor. At 672 pages, “Disappearing Ink” is actually a breeze.

The book is also a gold mine for Costello obsessives who have spent decades dissecting and analyzing his every lyrical zinger. But it’s not just for fans, more “Angela’s Ashes” than Motley Crue’s “The Dirt.” “Unfaithful Music” is a lyrical tale that stretches across generations, geography and a century of popular song. The book serves as both a musical and personal anthropology. Young Declan MacManus who, in 1963, squirrels away a napkin signed by the Beatles, becomes Elvis Costello, a man enlisted, a quarter-century later, to write songs with Paul McCartney.

George Jones. Solomon Burke. Nick Lowe. Van Morrison. Burt Bacharach. The Brodsky Quartet. The Specials. The Roots. Allen Toussaint. Lee Konitz. Bob Dylan. They’re all here — and not to drop names but to connect the musical dots. After reading of Costello’s more obscure influences, you also might find yourself searching out records by David Ackles, Tim Hardin and Georgie Fame.

Wisely, Costello busts the chronology. His rich family history — much of it centered on his father, Ross, a singer and trumpet player of some prominence — is presented in the context of his creative life. And for a songwriter who could fill the cargo hold of a Boeing 747 with clever puns, it won’t be surprising that Costello, the memoirist, has a gift for the punch line. He fails to score Rolling Stones tickets for a 1971 concert, declaring with teenaged snootiness, “They’re probably past it,” and decides to spend the cash he has saved on a record. “All of which would be a good story if the record I purchased had been something more inspiring and enduring than ‘Volunteers’ by Jefferson Airplane.”

He watches McCartney, during a benefit concert in 1979, curiously instruct his bloated superstar, “Rockestra,” to wear silver top hats and tails, while the well-lubricated Pete Townshend angrily signals his displeasure with a series of windmills. There’s also Costello’s wonderful description of the programmers in the computer lab in which he worked in the summer of 1976. Pynchon or Martin Amis would be comfortable turning out this graph. “Their demeanor said, We are a special breed. They wore eccentric clothes, smoked pipes, and took on airs. One liked to boast of his fine roast goose. Another had an unnatural obsession with the recorded works of Demis Roussos.”

Regrets? Costello has had a few. He’s sorry for the way he treated his first wife, Mary Burgoyne, although not so generous when referring to his second marriage, to the former Pogues bassist Cait O’Riordan, or his late-’70s fling with ex-Playboy model Bebe Buell. (Buell recently took to Facebook to post her dismay with his cold account of the relationship.)

Costello also addresses his lowest public moment. In 1979, at a Holiday Inn during a tour stop, he gets into a drunken brawl with members of the Stephen Stills band during which he refers to James Brown and Ray Charles with a racial slur. Here, Costello offers a series of potential defenses, from his poor psychological state to his obvious record of collaboration and admiration for black artists, before conceding “never mind excuses, there are no excuses.”

That humility is important. It’s hard to imagine it coming from the wiry ’70s-era Costello, with the oily mullet, skronky Jazzmaster and raised fists. This Costello is a grown up, grateful for what he has (his boys; his wife, Diana Krall) and blessed by the musical places he has been able to go. The man who sang so harshly about the industrial radio complex when there actually was a viable radio network isn’t about to wallow in nostalgia.

“The danger of regarding any point in the past as the golden age is that you forget that there were just as many crooks, crackpots, and idiots around then, and just as many terrible records,” he writes. “We only recall the ones we love.”


Geoff Edgers is a writer for The Post’s Style section.
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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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

U.S. residents only competition for a signed copy


http://www.penguin.com/welcome/elvis-co ... C-PTWT2015
sweetest punch
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

The new Rolling Stone has an article about EC: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/ ... e-20151007

(...)
Also in this issue: Tim Dickenson on the right-ring rebels who overthrew John Boehner, Jonah Weiner on Joanna Newsom, Damon Tabor on Russia's largest motorcycle gang, Peter Travers on Steve Jobs, plus Madonna's biggest tour ever and 'My Life in 10 Songs' with Elvis Costello.
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 »

The website of the Deluxe edition on Itunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/unfait ... 5811?mt=11

Can anyone read the Deluxe contents (shown in screenshots)?
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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And No Coffee Table
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by And No Coffee Table »

sweetest punch wrote:Can anyone read the Deluxe contents (shown in screenshots)?
Audio: "A White Boy in the Hammersmith Palais," read by the author (7:30)
Audio: "Don't Start Me Talking," read by the author (11:15)
Audio: "Almost Liverpool 8," read by the author (15:56)
Audio: "Welcome to the Working Week," read by the author (11:09)
Audio: "Diving for Dear Life," read by the author (29:21)
Audio: Coffee with Bob Dylan (4:59)
Audio: The Lost Basement Tapes (2:58)
Deluxe Edition Photo Gallery
Audio: Waste Paper Basket Stories (7:11)
sweetest punch
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by sweetest punch »

Thanks!
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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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

A shop in England claims to have signed copies of the book on sale NOW

https://twitter.com/WaterstonesUxbr/sta ... 4690200576
WindUpWorld
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by WindUpWorld »

So I'm a little confused - the deluxe edition, is its audio component all just cribbed from the separately available audio edition or are these 'bonus tracks' not on the audio edition - and is this just a ploy to get us to buy as many editions as possible?

Secondly, for discussion, should none of us buy any of this stuff because if he makes sufficient money from it he won't tour again for ages!
sweetest punch
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/boo ... e26740538/

Review: Elvis Costello trades stage for page with memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

Brad Wheeler

In 1982, Elvis Costello – born Declan MacManus in London in 1954 – sat down with Rolling Stone magazine. During the interview, Costello mentioned his secondary-schooling in Liverpool, and then of meeting Nick Lowe, who would become a hero to him first and later a collaborator. When interviewer Greil Marcus asked the musician about his life as a music fan, Costello neither mentioned Lowe nor Bob Dylan nor any other player or songwriter you would know. Instead, he talked about his father, Ross MacManus, a trumpet-playing crooner who sang with an orchestra led by Joe Loss – “the English Glenn Miller,” Costello supposed.

Costello’s long, idiosyncratic, behind-the-song memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, also begins with a story about his father – more specifically, his dad’s workplace, the Hammersmith Palais ballroom in London, where the young boy soaked up showbiz during matinee performances. “I still had a child’s uncritical ear for the corny bell effect created by the horns on Wheels Cha Cha,” writes Costello, 61, who remembers that his dad might only get one or two spotlights a show. “I became impatient for those moments, kicking my leg against the balcony wall and picking idly at a swivel lid mounted on the tabletop …”

Costello would later hire the deserted ballroom in order to stage a photograph for the album sleeve to 1981’s Trust. By that time, Costello had made it – a rock star with a peculiar voice, with hits Alison, Accidents Will Happen and Pump it Up to his credit. But sitting for the Hammersmith photograph, Costello was “just my father’s son.”

Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink is an oddly sequenced memoir, a love letter to his father that is too lightly edited. Costello’s narrative is twisty and laden with songs and lyrics; he’s a bit gabby, and at times I found myself wishing he’d just shut up. Or, better yet, hire a proper biographer – more context is craved.

We learn about a backstage meeting with Bruce Springsteen in Nashville. The Born to Run icon was gracious and “laughed like a drain” when he saw Costello and his first wife Mary in cowboy clothes. I’m not sure what Mary’s laugh sounded like – Costello doesn’t write about her all that much, and his second wife (of 16 years) gets even less ink. (Third wife, the British Columbia jazz star Diana Krall, is more properly represented)

In her own autobiography (Rebel Heart), seventies rock and roll consort Bebe Buell declared Costello both the love of her life and a fantastic lay. In his own book, Costello gives their affair a steam-free paragraph that ends studiously: “We took to our task enthusiastically and with little concern for anyone else’s opinion.” Oh, behave!

When it comes to collaborations of a musical sort, Costello dishes richer (if occasionally tediously). He has wonderful stories about Paul McCartney, Allen Toussaint, Chet Baker, Johnny Cash, Bonnie Raitt and many others. Costello is clearly a fan of music and musicians – the opposite of the “I just picked up a guitar for the girls” post-Beatles dude. He’d be happy to talk tunes all day.

What he struggles to talk about is the infamous 1979 North American tour with his backing band the Attractions. In those days, promo photos often had a squint-eyed Costello in an affected pigeon-toed pose; his venomous punk-rock demeanour was perhaps just as mannered. An uneasy chapter is given to the tour’s infamous incident, involving racial slurs made to American musicians Bonnie Bramlett and members of the Stephen Stills band about Ray Charles and James Brown that were ugly enough to make Mel Gibson blush. Costello’s explanation is not coherent, but his distress over the event reads as sincere.

Books written by musicians often exhibit an enjoyable rhythm, a cadence that Costello unfortunately has not mastered. Enough with the one-sentence paragraphs. His chapters end with a dramatic, suggestive flair, but the tension-creating trick never seems to deliver on its promise in the following pages. Funny that Costello brings up the sneering question that the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten once asked his audience: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

Then again, Costello, like Dylan, has a made a career of not giving people what they expect. The results – a prodigious, careening and admirable discography that covers varying knacks, styles and genres – speak well of him. He is a generous live performer, and his turn as a television host (with the short-lived Spectacle) was a hit with critics.

But Dylan is better at being enigmatic, and with a truer aim.

Costello writes of following Dylan at a 2008 festival in Australia, where the Tangled Up in Blue singer gave an especially brilliant show. “There you go, I’ve softened ’em up for you,” said Dylan, a gunslinger making a point. Compare Dylan’s quirky and remarkable Chronicles: Volume One memoir with Costello’s much less charismatic tome. There is no contest. “Everyday I write the book,” Costello sang many years ago, but there’s a better bio on him still to be written.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/bo ... 1&referer=

Review: Elvis Costello’s ‘Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink,’ a Memoir

By DWIGHT GARNER

“Songs can be many things,” Elvis Costello writes in his new autobiography: “an education, a seduction, some solace in heartache, a valve for anger, a passport, your undoing, or even a lottery ticket.”

Mr. Costello’s book, “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink,” manages to be all these things, and a pint of Guinness and a bag of chips. It’s streaked with some of the best writing – funny, strange, spiteful, anguished – we’ve ever had from an important musician.

This isn’t a surprise. Mr. Costello has been cagey and word-drunk from the start. Had he not picked up a guitar, and put on the black glasses and porkpie hats, he might easily have been a poet, a Charles Simic or a Paul Muldoon.

All his promise was packed like radiation into his first hit single, “Watching the Detectives” (1977). It started, about a horrible crime, “Nice girls not one with a defect,/Cellophane shrink-wrapped, so correct.” It only got darker, and better.

Most rock autobiographies seem tossed off and phoned in: tour souvenirs. Not this one. “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” feels as if it were written during a six-year residency at Yaddo and driven to his publisher on the back of a flatbed truck.

It is enormous. At 674 pages, it’s more than 100 pages longer than Keith Richards’s whacking “Life.” (Unlike Keith, he didn’t employ an amanuensis.) It is a commitment.

This book’s nonchronological bulk, I’ll admit, sometimes seems lashed together with bungee cords. Mr. Costello foolishly tries to cram everything in, all the collaborations (with George Jones, Burt Bacharach, Questlove, Paul McCartney, the Brodsky Quartet and T Bone Burnett, just for starters), the Grammy Awards shows, the Letterman appearances.

There are pages about a TV interview show he hosted from 2008 to 2010 that few remember or care about. Mr. Costello could have used a diabolical editor, a Gordon Lish, to cut the pine from around his black opals.

But dark gems twinkle here in abundance. “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” is highly literate yet hews to its author’s sense of what makes a vivid sound: “You really don’t need musical notation for rock and roll. I always said it was all hand signals and threats.”

Elvis Costello was born Declan Patrick MacManus in London in 1954. He was swaddled in music as much as blankets. His father sang in a popular dance band; his mother sometimes worked in music stores. His paternal grandfather had played trumpet in jazz bands on the White Star Line.

He evokes the music of his early youth with nostalgic sweetness. It’s not entirely a put-down when he says, “You could turn on the wireless in 1961 and believe that it was still 1935.”

He caught a glimpse of his own tangled future in his father who, he writes, “would always attempt to seduce the tallest girl in the room and, failing this, would pick a fight with the tallest man.”

Mr. Costello played in small, sometimes folky bands with names like Rusty and Flip City before pulling together, in the mid-1970s, the musicians who become the Attractions, his first backing band.

He was too skinny and awkward to be a glam-rock leading man. He also knew, he writes about recording his indelible ballad “Alison,” that “I’d never create a beautiful sound, as I was very obviously a mere mortal.” He went for nerve and directness and, as the title of his first record had it, his aim was true.

He became known as a prototypical angry young man. About seeing a ferocious Neil Young performance, he writes: “This was the lesson I took away from that day: If there is an apple cart, you must do your best to upset it.”

This book makes the case, however, that its author was never quite as angry as he seemed. “It seems that the space between my two front teeth, which made Jane Birkin, Ray Davies and Jerry Lewis so appealing,” he writes, “has had the effect of making half of what I say sound like a provocation or an insult.”

Still, “I could be an arrogant bastard back then,” he writes. “Bravado and alcohol made me amplify whatever was roasting my goat.” He adds: “I was looking to get into all sorts of exciting new trouble.”

He’s perplexed that a 1977 “Saturday Night Live” performance, in which he switched songs at the last second, became infamous. He is rueful about another early incident, when he is said to have drunkenly made racist comments about Ray Charles and James Brown in a Holiday Inn bar in Columbus, Ohio:

“I’ll have to take the word of witnesses that I really used such despicable racial slurs in the same sentence as the names of two of the greatest musicians who ever lived, but whatever I did, I did it to provoke a bar fight and finally put the lights out.”

He asks, “Does anything else that I’ve done in the other 59 years and 525,550 minutes suggest that I harbor suppressed racist beliefs?”

There are many women, “reckless and sometimes damaged,” and many long, wasted evenings in “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink.” A typical anecdote: writing the song “Accidents Will Happen” after having sex with an attractive female cabdriver who was taking him to the Mexican border.

He refers to all this as, “Messing up my life, so I could write stupid little songs about it.” The author tossed that existence aside for good, he writes, when he married his third wife, the musician Diana Krall, in 2003. They have twin sons.

We read about the making of many of his records. He sums up friends and collaborators in short, sharp strokes. (Bruce Springsteen “laughed like steam escaping from a radiator.”) He’s honest about his small magpie thefts from other musicians. He speaks about so many of the little-known songs that influenced him that you will begin to make playlists.

Mr. Costello bites off more than he can entirely chew in “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink.” But passport and lottery ticket, this is.

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

Post by verbal gymnastics »

I'm not sure the reviewer's version of the Accidents will happen story is correct, going by the way Elvis has told the story onstage in the last year. Still, I haven't read the book.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

He's a poet and he knows it

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1410895319#books


Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink
by Elvis Costello

Chris Roberts's review Oct 07, 15
1 of 5 stars

Pop & Roll is rapture, times ten, eighth-degree...

A sensory pact between band and audience...

Drummer smoking back beat, skins burning heat...

The ax man whaling an insane, roof-is-exploding lick...

The front man laying waste to the arena...

One echoed line at a time...

Breathe in, exhale rhyme...

Only one chance to play in live time...

Sid Vicious was the inside joke, barely a misdemeanor crime...

And so, the audience buys into the fantasy, that's the kick...

A shared emotional riff, like flying...die sighing...

But not in this memoir...

The storyline is all time slipping...

Back then days, today haze...

Reader mired in the 1970s/1980s craze...

It is all hopelessly weaved together...indecipherable...

The narrator is weak and unreliable in his presentation...

Scorpions! Play days and days, I want to burn...

A Chris Roberts Review
erey
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by erey »

verbal gymnastics wrote:I'm not sure the reviewer's version of the Accidents will happen story is correct, going by the way Elvis has told the story onstage in the last year. Still, I haven't read the book.
I haven't read the book, either, but I think we got the family-friendly version of the story from the stage.

Reminds me of seeing, as an impressionable preteen (if even that), a version of the Peter Bogdanovich movie "The Last Picture Show" in which a scene of two characters' assignation in the front seat of an automobile was made suitable for television by leaving the audio but swapping the entire video of the sequence for a static shot of the car's radio. (True!)
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by verbal gymnastics »

erey wrote:
verbal gymnastics wrote:I'm not sure the reviewer's version of the Accidents will happen story is correct, going by the way Elvis has told the story onstage in the last year. Still, I haven't read the book.
I haven't read the book, either, but I think we got the family-friendly version of the story from the stage
:shock:

In which case, thanks Elvis for keeping my ears and mind clean :D
Who’s this kid with his mumbo jumbo?
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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http://www.jsonline.com/entertainment/b ... 25011.html

Elvis Costello's 'Unfaithful Music': Everyday he wrote the book

Full disclosure: I love Elvis Costello.

Since 1979, I've carried a torch for the man based on songs that were short but complex; and lyrics so biting they touched on paranoia but were always always clever.

His autobiography "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink" only fuels the fire. I'm tempted to write "Mrs. Kathy Costello" in the margins of the book.

The fellow born Declan MacManus chronicles a winding, sometimes improbable, career path from angry young man of New Wave to the song-but-no-dance man who performed his 40-year catalog solo at the Riverside Theater in 2014.

In between, Costello filled out his repertoire by penning orchestral music and opera, acting now and again (we'll just skip, as he does, the 'Two and a Half Men' stint) and collaborating with legends from Burt Bacharach to Bob Dylan.

His affection for music is pronounced. He's starstruck when he meets Diana Krall; awestruck when Aretha Franklin answers her own phone; and dumbstruck when he composes with Bacharach.

The writing isn't linear, but it's easy to follow. His stories about Levon Helm, Johnny Cash or ABBA go back in forth in time in conversational rhythm.

It's confessional in parts, hitting the high, or sometimes low, notes. His father played in a dance-band orchestra and played around. Elvis makes the same mistake. He offers penance to his first wife; barely explains the 17 years he spent with Cait O'Riordan; and clearly has met his love match in Krall.

Taking a page from his Spectacular Spinning Songbook, a musical gimmick in which audience members spin a giant wheel to determine which song is played next, here are a few highlights:

Speaking of that Spinning Songbook, he remembers a newly married couple whose spins — four in total — kept landing on the cheerless song "Long Honeymoon."

He tripped at every step, including the well-documented incident in which he used an unforgivably racist word about Ray Charles and James Brown during an argument with Bonnie Bramlett (although he doesn't name her). "There was some beauty to the fact that it took a woman to knock me down."

Costello gives the crushing event three pages, acknowledging that "It's the kind of stain that lasts forever in a tangle of unqualified facts upon which you may now so easily stumble."

Costello thinks there are "few better songwriters alive than John Prine."

He pens books with the same clever writing that he uses in song. For instance, "Our hotel rooms in the French Quarter had doors that had been kicked in more times than they had been locked."

Or, "I kept a copy of Albrecht Durer's 1514 engraving "Melencolia I" on my music stand to cheer me up."

Oh, Elvis.

Madison and the Edgewater Hotel get a few paragraphs ending with a waiter explaining to Elvis that the lake he was staring at so glumly wasn't the lake where Otis Redding met his end. "'You're looking for Lake Monona. It's over there,' he said, gesturing past the bacon and waffles."

Costello recounts plenty of moments where he's not only human, but also stupid.

His father, Ross, met The Beatles early in their career and brought a sheet with their autographs home to his son. Elvis dutifully cut apart each one to paste it onto individual pages of his autograph book.

In one page he references Chet Baker and his then-neighbor Van Morrison. He confesses that Bonnie Raitt once tried to get him to do "the bump" with her at a party, but he was too shy.

Costello praises The Attractions, the band of his early years, but it becomes apparent that pianist Steve Nieve is the favorite.

It's a big book: nearly 700 pages. But then it's been a larger-than-life career, one bigger than Declan MacManus seemed to believe possible.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by Pigalle »

I can't find any mention of this but I have just seen UM&DI in Waterstones here in the UK and they have an exclusive edition which contains extra photos compared to the normal edition. They are identifiable by a sticker on the dust jacket.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by scielle »

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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

Post by johnfoyle »

There's a two page feature/review in the culture section of today's Sunday Times (London). I can't relay it here via my 'phone so maybe someone else can do so. Otherwise I'll add it from Dublin on Wednesday.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists ... moirs.html

Dan DeLuca looks at an explosion of rock-and-roll memoirs

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 Germantown- and Deptford Township-raised rock poet Smith. The fourth, and the longest, is Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, the sprawling 670-page volume by Elvis Costello.

The femme-rock trend continues with Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Sleater-Kinney guitarist and Portlandia star Carrie Brownstein, whose Oct. 29 appearance at the Merriam Theater comes with a $60 price tag that includes a signed book.

And there are more: Warren Zanes' Petty: The Biography arrives on Nov. 10, the same day Pulitzer Prize-winning Elvis Presley biographer Peter Guralnick's Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll goes on sale. Already in stores is Ray Benson and David Menconi's tale of a Philadelphia kid turned Texas cowboy: Comin' Right at Ya: How a Jewish Yankee Hippie Went Country, or the Often Outrageous History of Asleep at the Wheel.

But back to the New Wave-era memoirs at hand. Readers of rock books have a jones for juicy tidbits but also seek authentic authorial voices. The Hynde, Smith, and Costello books meet the latter criteria.

Reckless is the most straightforward, starting with Hynde's childhood in Akron, Ohio, and following her to the 1970s London-rock demimonde, ending abruptly with the deaths of two bandmates just two albums into the Pretenders' career.

M Train takes a different approach. It's a series of jewel-box essays without the continuous narrative - or heartbreaking denouement - of Just Kids, about Smith's relationship with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. And Unfaithful Music is what you'd expect of Costello: a bursting-at-the-seams history that takes in his upbringing as the son of a singer and trumpet player through collaborations with Paul McCartney, Anne-Sophie Mutter, and the Roots.

Surprisingly, Jones' I'll Never Write My Memoirs - the title refers to a lyric whose promise the book breaks - is the most conventional bio of the bunch, written with Paul Morley. Which is not to say the life of the Jamaican-born, 67-year-old supermodel, disco diva, and gay icon is the slightest bit dull.

Memoirs is honest and smart about the music business, and it shows how Jones brought fresh attitude to the fashion world. The book also has a highly entertaining pre-Studio 54 interlude in Philadelphia. A college professor urges Jones to join a summer stock theater adaptation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales being performed on campus at St. Joseph's University. Grace Jones and Middle English literature - made for each other!

"It was my first real big-city experience. Once I had a taste of it, I was hooked," she writes of her Philadelphia years. She gets arrested by police, who assume she's a prostitute because she has a white boyfriend; she works as a Playboy bunny and is secretary and social companion to "well-known libertine, bon vivant and man about town" Harry Jay Katz.

At certain points, the memoirs intersect. Jones lives as a nudist and drops acid in Philly and becomes friends with Timothy Leary. Hynde goes to a party in L.A. and runs into a nude, acid-dropping Leary, and while she's recording a cover of future boyfriend Ray Davies' "Stop Your Sobbing" with producer Nick Lowe, Costello turns up to add vocals.

Reckless is great fun at points, and also a disappointment. It's filled with incident - while still a teenager in Ohio, Hynde gives David Bowie a postconcert ride in her mother's Oldsmobile - but she tells her story in a hurry, without pausing for much reflection. Her reaction to signing a long-awaited record deal is typical: "I just wanted to get on with it, bypassing any fuss."

Hynde has taken heat for the book's depiction of an incident in Ohio when she was 21 in which she was forced to have sex with a group of "heavy bikers" under threat of violence. The rocker's stance - "If I'm walking around in my underwear and I'm drunk, whose fault can it be?" she told the Times of London - has angered many who rightly consider her a feminist pioneer. But saying she takes full responsibility for her actions is in keeping with the I-look-out-for-myself attitude throughout Reckless, in which she also refuses to be bossed around by men she dismisses with a "sorry, buddy boy" disdain.

Those hoping for dirty rock-and-roll dealings from M Train are reading the wrong book. The slim volume is more of a literary exercise of dreamlike musings fueled by coffee and intellectual curiosity, dotted with references to French and Japanese literature and Smith's favorite TV cop shows. Some, like one in which she sings Buddy Holly songs in Iceland with Bobby Fischer, drift amiably. Others, such as an account of traveling to French Guiana with late husband Fred "Sonic" Smith on a Jean Genet pilgrimage, are expertly executed. Smith will read from M Train at the Free Library of Philadelphia on Nov. 6.

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

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johnfoyle wrote:There's a two page feature/review in the culture section of today's Sunday Times (London). I can't relay it here via my 'phone so maybe someone else can do so. Otherwise I'll add it from Dublin on Wednesday.
And it says the book was written without the aid of a ghostwriter.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/ ... r-20151013

10 Things We Learned From Elvis Costello's Brilliant New Memoir

Songwriter's new book reflects on 'SNL' ban and infamous 1979 tirade, why he won't reveal who Alison is

It's probably no surprise that Elvis Costello's memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, out today, is thoroughly engrossing. Costello's gift for storytelling in song is without question, but like Bob Dylan's Chronicles, his book is truly remarkable in the way it presents a riveting, honest portrait of the author and the many A-listers he's tread the boards with, while ricocheting through the years at an almost breathless pace. In an era of ghostwritten — or, worse, self-serving — memoirs by rock stars at every strata of the pecking order, the nearly 700-page Unfaithful Music is a standout.

While the book is certainly worth of a leisurely, cover-to-cover dive, an even more surprising treat is the companion audiobook, in which the author himself acts out many of his most legendary incidents, delivering spot-on impressions of Dylan and many others, and often sending up himself in the process.

Either way, even the most ardent Costello fan will come away having learned more about the man than any of us ever dared hope to discover. Here are 10 key revelations.

1. Costello's iconic glasses are a nod to the family business.
Costello's father, Ross McManus, a well-known singer in England when Costello was a youngster, is a constant and charismatic figure throughout Unfaithful Music. In fact, it turns out Costello's glasses are no show-biz gimmick, but are rather a tribute to his father. Costello also deftly weaves his family history — including stories of his grandfather, Pat McManus, who performed on the White Star cruise line during the Prohibition Era — in and out of the book, showing the rich artistic thread that reached its peak with Costello's worldwide fame.

2. Costello's 1977 ban from Saturday Night Live is Jimi Hendrix's fault.
As Costello describes in this superb clip from the audiobook of Unfaithful Music, when the Attractions were deputized to perform in place of the Sex Pistols on SNL, he employed a trick Jimi Hendrix had used on Lulu's show in 1969, stopping mid-song to perform a track of his choosing, rather than one approved by Lorne Michaels or his record label.

3. Elvis talked Paul McCartney into using his Hofner bass again and got him to embrace his Beatle-ness.
Costello recounts that when he first began collaborating with Paul McCartney, the former Beatle favored a "super-hi-tech custom" bass that his wife, Linda, had given him for Christmas. It had, much to Costello's horror, five strings. Costello inquired about the Hofner, trying not to sound too much like the Beatle geek that all of us would be in that moment. McCartney then pulled it out of storage, and has been using it as his main instrument ever since.

4. There might one day be a McCartney-Costello album.
The pair recorded a series of collaborative demos in the late Eighties. In an outtake from the book called "Sketches From Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink" — included on the excellent companion album Unfaithful Music & Soundtrack Album — Costello recounts a meeting he was called to about 13 years ago by McCartney in which the former Beatle wrote out identical to-do lists for each of them, which listed some tantalizing items: 1. "Listen to demos." 2. "Edit and add to demos." 3. "Write more songs." 4. "Record more songs." 5. "Release those songs." McCartney then tucked his list in a book on the shelf of his office without another word. Costello did the same when he got home ... and claims to have forgotten which book he put the list in.

5. Costello doesn't really hate Bruce Thomas (maybe).
The bad blood between Costello and Attractions bassist Bruce Thomas is legendary, most vividly seen in Thomas' own memoir. But throughout Unfaithful Music, Costello heaps praise on the bassist's playing, especially in the passages recounting the early days of the group, when Thomas, a bit older and more experienced, offered the Attractions a relatively veteran view on arrangement and studio technique.

6. Costello makes no excuses about the infamous James Brown–Ray Charles incident.
Costello doesn't flinch when recounting the potentially career-ending drunken brawl he got into at a Holiday Inn in 1979 with members of Stephen Stills' band, in which he reportedly called James Brown and Ray Charles enough racial slurs to land him his first nationwide media coverage. Like his hero John Lennon — after his "bigger than Jesus" comment in 1966 — Costello faced the press with a ham-fisted apology. It took years for him to live down the incident, but he still carries the scars. He asks the reader if they think he's a racist, and lists a litany of defenses — from his poor mental state at the time while on a grueling tour of the States, to his obvious admiration for and his many collaborations over the years with black artists. In the end he sums it up simply: "Never mind excuses, there are no excuses."

7. Costello is an even deeper music head than we thought.
Throughout Unfaithful Music, Costello namechecks a litany of well-known and not-so-well-known artists that he's drawn inspiration from over the years. In another musician's memoir, the practice might have come across as name-dropping, but as the story unfolds we find Costello collaborating with many of those greats: Paul McCartney, George Jones, Chet Baker, Burt Bacharach and Tony Bennett, to name just a few. And with each encounter, Costello demonstrates a love of all things musical — not mere musicology but something far more personal — that confirms he was the perfect person to have scaled such lofty heights.

8. His memory is a sharp as his songwriting.
At 670 pages, Unfaithful Music is remarkably detailed, delving into Costello's family history, the highs and lows of his career and his creative process. But what's most remarkable is the fact that, while he clearly spent a great deal of time researching the book, he never kept any sort of journals, diaries or notes over the years. Perhaps because he's just old enough to have some perspective, yet still young enough to remember the details of even his wildest days, Costello's storytelling rivals Dylan's Chronicles for putting the reader into the time and place of his tales.

9. Costello is really funny.
Two noteworthy zingers:

"I was born in the same hospital in which Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. I apologize in advance that I have not been the same boon to mankind."

"There are many places in London that offer a sense of belonging: Camden, Stepney, Hampstead, Brixton, and even Shepherd's Bush. Paddington is not one of these, unless you are a fictional bear."

10. He still won't tell us who Alison is.
Costello recounts how he's always claimed that the subject of his best-known song, "Alison," was a checkout girl, and later elaborates that the song was "a work of fiction, taking the sad face of a beautiful girl glimpsed by chance and imagining her life unraveling before her." But don't expect any answers to the many riddles laced within Costello's songs, nor for the direct inspiration for "Alison," if there even was one.

"A book like this might be a tempting opportunity to argue with critical opinions, right perceived wrongs, or have the last word in better forgotten arguments," Costello writes. "I have no intention of doing any such thing." In the end, Costello puts the subject to rest with a simple question: "Would you like a song less or would you like a song more if you knew exactly the identity of ... 'Alison'?"

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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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BBC interview: http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-34517665

Elvis Costello talks to Will Gompertz

Elvis Costello - one of Britain's most prolific singer-songwriters - releases his autobiography this week.

His career began in the 1970s and has spanned a huge range of musical styles, from spiky punk to a classical album with the Brodsky Quartet.

He tells BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz how he stumbled into music before becoming an "overnight success" and why recently turned down the role of Captain Hook in panto.
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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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Big feature in the Guardian today : http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/o ... f-the-pops

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Re: UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

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I hope the kids' Christmas wasn't the only reason he turned down the panto!
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