UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK - Oct. 2015

[verbal gymnastics]

Oh yes it was!

[krm]

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

https://twitter.com/WaterstonesUxbr/sta ... 4690200576

The copy I bought at Foyles at the southbank was signed!

[WindUpWorld]

Postby verbal gymnastics » Tue Oct 13, 2015 11:25 pm

Oh yes it was!

Blmey I walked in that one - in a wishee washee kind of way

[verbal gymnastics]

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

https://twitter.com/WaterstonesUxbr/sta ... 4690200576

The copy I bought at Foyles at the southbank was signed!

I bought the exclusive Waterstones version at Charing Cross. There were no signed ones there.

[sheeptotheslaughter]

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.

I bought this yesterday £22 only 3 pound off. The bookseller said he was surprised Elvis was so long writing a book. He said it will sell really well. Lets hope so. The WH Smith's in Liverpool Street wasn't selling it though yesterday too busy punting Martina Cole (the C##ts)

So far I am enjoying it its quite refreshing he is very honest. Especially about his father.

[johnfoyle]

Interview on Chicago radio -

http://thebigwakeupcall.com/elvis-costello/

[johnfoyle]

Photos tweeted from the recording sessions for the audio edition -

[johnfoyle]

From the e-edition -

[Man out of Time]

New book signing announced: Tuesday 27 October, 12.30pm at W H Smiths in the Arndale Centre in Manchester.

http://events.whsmith.co.uk/event/unfai ... aring-ink/

" ‘Elvis Costello’ Signing Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink
Elvis Costello will be signing copies of his new book, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

Signing Schedule
WHSmith Arndale Centre, Manchester Tuesday 27th October from 12:30pm Telephone 0161 834 8300

Terms And Conditions
This will be a wristbanded event. Wristbands and books are available from the WHSmith stores hosting the event from Tuesday 13th October. To queue for this event you must purchase a copy of Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink from a WHSmith store and collect your wristband from the store hosting the event. Queuing for this event opens an hour before the event. Anyone arriving earlier will be asked to return at the correct time. Proof of purchase from WHSmith WILL be required. Please keep this in a safe place. Wristbands will be given out on a first come, first served basis. Please be prepared to wait in the queue. To avoid disappointment, we cannot guarantee entry after the signing start time. Anyone under the age of 14 years must be accompanied by an adult. Any accompanying adults will not need a wristband. Due to time and space limitations only one child can only be accompanied by one parent. Those without a book and wristband will not be permitted to join the queue unless they are a parent or guardian of anyone under 14 years of age. Your wristband entitles you to one place in the queue to get your book signed by Elvis Costello. Only copies bought from WHSmith will be accepted. Only the book will be signed. No other merchandise will be signed. No posed photos. You are free to take pictures whilst Elvis is signing. Unfortunately no dedications will be possible due to the anticipated turn out for the event. The time at which the event ends will be determined by the promoters on the day."

and presumably "don't pass out now, there's no refund" either.

MOOT

[johnfoyle]

http://booktrib.com/2015/10/review-elvi ... in-memoir/

[blureu]

Elvis Costello: 'There Is No Absolute Right And Wrong About Music':

http://www.npr.org/2015/10/13/447225480 ... bout-music

[docinwestchester]

From the e-edition -

Where is this picture? Is it in the deluxe edition photo gallery? I can't find it.

[And No Coffee Table]

Where is this picture? Is it in the deluxe edition photo gallery? I can't find it.

Chapter 10, "Welcome to the Working Week."

It says page 174 for me, but I don't know if page numbers are consistent from device to device.

[docinwestchester]

Where is this picture? Is it in the deluxe edition photo gallery? I can't find it.

Chapter 10, "Welcome to the Working Week."

It says page 174 for me, but I don't know if page numbers are consistent from device to device.

Got it, thanks. I only looked in the photo gallery, not the main text. I'm just starting to read the text today.

[sweetest punch]

http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/- ... -84716348/

Review: 'Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink' by Elvis Costello

First impressions die hard. In the late '70s, Elvis Costello tattooed himself on the consciousness of a group of teenagers huddled in front of a foot-high stage in a bad Milwaukee neighborhood. He looked even nerdier than the audience, with his black horn-rimmed glasses, skinny tie and cheap suit. After about 20 minutes, sweat poured from his sleeves and the oversized glasses fogged, but Costello never even loosened his collar button. He twitched and jerked as if trying to free himself from an invisible straitjacket.

The multi-syllable words poured out in a torrent — I'd never heard anyone use the word "quisling" in a song before, and have never heard anyone use it since. The music seethed and the tempos surged, forcing the words into ever-tighter spaces. Accusations melded into anguish: "Sometimes I think that love is just a tumor/You've got to cut it out."

In his memoir, "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink," the singer born Declan MacManus speculates that he needed "the armor of a new identity and maybe even the jolt of chemicals to scare … (me) into the spotlight."

So was it all an act that night in Milwaukee? Not exactly. It was more like a drive-by for an artist who saw music as a moving target. To stand still was death. In Elvis Costello, Declan MacManus found a persona that could not be satisfied.

As in most rock 'n' roll tales, pills and booze play a role, but unlike, say, fellow memoir writers Keith Richards or Eric Clapton, Costello doesn't blank out huge portions of his life because he was too out of it to remember. If anything, he remembers too much — the casual fan might easily be daunted by this tome's 600-plus pages of reminiscence and recrimination, analysis and confession.

The writing is occasionally overwrought, and the abundant analysis of his lyrics sometimes dry. But when he's good, he's excellent, as when he describes a post-Katrina New Orleans encounter with the unflappable Allen Toussaint or the staggering influence of George Jones and other country stalwarts on his songwriting. The story unfolds like a movie that jumps across time, more thematic than chronological, as boyhood anecdotes and obsessions intersect with mature songs and adult reckoning.

Costello's dad, Ross, was a crooner and jazz trumpeter who expanded his repertoire by listening to an endless stream of records, and young Declan absorbed everything from be-bop and Tin Pan Alley standards to the pop, R&B and rock 'n' roll songs that his father usually dismissed. He struggled to find his voice and when he finally did, as he famously told one interviewer, it was to express emotions defined by "guilt and revenge."

He got lumped in with punk and new wave as a token "angry young man," but the label didn't stick. Costello loved songs — even early tracks such as "Watching the Detectives" and "The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes" brimmed with sharp images and turns of phrase. As his natural curiosity led him to explore outside the new-wave margins, his fan base began to waver. The 1981 "Almost Blue" album embraced songs written by country artists such as Charlie Rich and Merle Haggard. In between more rock-oriented projects, he also released collaborations with a classical string section (the Brodsky Quartet), a hip-hop crew (the Roots), a jazz pianist (Marian McPartland) and an art-pop songwriter (Burt Bacharach).

"If you intend to build a career in show business, it is necessary to drive people away from time to time, so they can remember why they miss you," he writes.

For Costello, washing off the poison that coated his terrific early albums with country tonic was like a personal cleansing. "I felt as if I'd slipped out of those tricky, bitter little songs that only appealed to a certain kind of creep."

To hear Costello tell it, that creep was often staring back at him from the bathroom mirror. He confronts his misbehaviors and failures, whether they be two collapsed marriages or the infamous, alcohol-fueled bar fight in 1979 in which singer Bonnie Bramlett slapped him for racial insults about Ray Charles and James Brown.

Costello was mortified and deeply apologetic afterward, especially given his love of both artists' music, but he remains thin-skinned about how the incident was handled by the media. A press conference in which he addressed his mistake was populated by "hysterical and indignant liberal journalists … howling for my contrition, if not my blood. What they knew of my heart and soul, let alone music itself, could be written on the head of a pin."

And yet a few pages later Costello complains that a bungled publicity stunt his manager engineered in Japan to promote a new album "merited a news item no bigger than a postage stamp." The media, it seems, just never got Elvis, and the feeling is mutual.

Even amid these petty complaints, though, Costello's enthusiasm for the music that has enriched and educated him remains undimmed. Even his copious name-dropping is less about pop-star preening than a fan's affectionate awe. The book doubles as a selective mini-history of 20th century music, as told by a discerning guide. He addresses artists both towering (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash) and relatively unheralded (David Ackles, Robert Wyatt) with a fan's affection and music scholar's insight.

The most obscure — and likely most important — influence is his father, a traveling musician who played two or three gigs a night in rooms that often came equipped with dodgy sound systems, indifferent backing bands and hostile audiences. One night, a teenage Declan accompanies him, and realizes what's at stake. His father glances at his charge just as they are about to take the stage together: "This isn't a game, this is my work."

Greg Kot is the Tribune's rock critic.

[sweetest punch]

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/ar ... -84713355/

Elvis Costello's aim is truth in memoir 'Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink'

By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic

Partway though Elvis Costello's baggy, often brilliant and wholly idiosyncratic memoir, "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink," there's a moment that echoes like a master metaphor. It's 1995 and our hero is about to accept "an Ivor Novello Award in the company of Van Morrison, Lonnie Donegan, and Don Black," when a BBC exec sidles up to him and says, "Of course, you'd have had a lot more hits if you'd just taken out all the seventh and the minor chords."

That this isn't the best line here is testament, I suppose, to how many good lines "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink" contains. The implication is that Costello should have gone a more predictable route, given the programmers what they wanted — which is antithetical to the ethos of his career.

New wave rocker, country crooner, balladeer, collaborator and showman: Costello has been all of this and more in the course of what is now a 40-year run. Of all the first-generation punkers, he remains (with Patti Smith and possibly David Byrne) among the few who can claim the longevity and diversity of, say, Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell, both of whom appear in this book. Like minds, perhaps, or water seeking its level. Either way, this is the company to which Costello belongs.

And yet, if "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink" has anything to tell us, it is that its author remains a fan. Here he is, for instance, on his first experience singing with Paul McCartney, a rehearsal duet on "All My Loving": "I locked on to the vocal harmony the second time around, as I'd done a thousand times before while singing along to the record. It never really occurred to me that learning to sing either vocal part on a Beatles record was any kind of musical education. I was just a kid singing along with the radio in our front room." Or this, recalling a good-natured cutting contest, trading lyrics with Bob Dylan: "It was just fun to be in the ring with the champ for a minute or two."

Indeed, one of the most essential impressions with which "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink" leaves us is that of wonder, or at least gratitude, at having been, in so many ways, in exactly the right place at the right time. "I see now that I was lucky to work in the record business during that brief interlude between the time when they bought your songs outright from you for fifty bucks or the keys to a Cadillac, and now, when everything is supposed to be free," Costello explains in the closing pages. "It's strange to recall that I wrote songs that I imagined might be sung by George Jones, Dusty Springfield, and Chet Baker and had that dream fulfilled. It is nearly impossible to explain almost anything else."

Of course, Costello is too smart to fall prey to false nostalgia; "The danger of regarding any point in the past as the golden age," he writes, "is that you forget that there were just as many crooks, crackpots and idiots around then, and just as many terrible records." For this reason, perhaps, "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink" eschews straight chronology, moving around in time and place.

It begins with the musician's father, Ross MacManus, himself a musician, who sang with the Joe Loss Orchestra, among England's "most successful dance bands." Costello's earliest memories include watching his father perform from the balcony of the Hammersmith Palais, at the time a dance hall, later a rock venue where Costello played.

This sense of time, or music, cycling back upon itself gives the memoir its most sustaining resonance. Costello's father, after all, is a deeply influential figure, not just as role model (musical or otherwise), but also in offering a portal to another world. It was from him that his son first discovered the Beatles, in the form of acetates and demo discs brought home before their singles hit the shops. "Even though these songs were already on the radio," Costello writes, "the presence of the records in the house felt special, as if the copies had comes from The Beatles themselves."

In that regard, "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink" is less a memoir as we've come to expect it than a kind of creative autobiography, a portrait of the artist from the inside out.

Yes, Costello touches on various points of controversy: his unfortunate remarks about James Brown and Ray Charles during a 1979 Columbus bar brawl with members of Stephen Stills' entourage; his ban from "Saturday Night Live" after performing "Radio, Radio" rather than "Less Than Zero," as had been planned. (His inspiration for this, it turns out, was Jimi Hendrix, who short-circuited a 1969 televised performance of "Hey Joe" in the middle, declaring "I'm going to stop playing this rubbish" before launching into Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love.")

Time overlapping again, influences emerging, which is the story of Costello's creative life. "I'm not given at all to nostalgia," he tells us, which may explain his statement that "[t]he trouble with finishing any autobiographical tome like this is that for every mildly diverting tale or precious memory, you eventually arrive at this thought: I don't much care for the subject." Still, if it's not clear to whom that "I" is referring, him or us, it's the honesty that lingers, that makes "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink" work.

This is especially true when it comes to his composing. Costello takes us through the creation of dozens of songs, from loose lines in notebooks to final cuts. "Our musical cues should have been obvious to anyone," he admits of his early material. " 'You Belong to Me' turned the guitar lick from 'The Last Time' back to front. … 'Pump It Up' obviously took more than a little bit from 'Subterranean Homesick Blues.'"

Yes, but isn't this the nature of pop? "If I had wanted to be a poet," Costello insists, "I'd have needed to be a damn sight more accurate with my word choices, but I didn't, and still do not, necessarily see poetry as a higher, superior calling to that of the lyricist." He's absolutely right. Think of "Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink," then, less as memoir than extended riff, not a poem but a song cycle, lyrics written in a notebook over 40 years.

[sweetest punch]

http://www.gq.com/story/elvis-costello-memoir-interview

Elvis Costello Wrote the Perfect Campaign Song for Donald Trump

By Michael Hainey

It’s no surprise that Elvis Costello’s memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, is as wide and deep, as laced with references known and unknown, and vibrating with so many levels of language and metaphor and poetry, as his albums. It’s tender and gritty; soaring and melancholic; it runs across forty years of rock music and stands alongside the great rock autobiographies (see Dylan; see Richards).

I met up with him in a spare sound booth in New York, where he had just completed an interview for the radio (which is still a sound salvation, cleaning up the nation). He’s 61 now, on his third marriage (to singer Diana Krall), and on his second go-round as a father. (He has an adult son from his first marriage, and twin 8-year-old sons.)

Do you think you’ve achieved peace, in your music life?
I’m not wasting any more time on that argument, on where music is going. I know there are people stealing from you all the time. In life. In one way or another. Sometimes they think they are doing you a favor. They film you with a camera and put that up [on the Internet], and they think they’re evangelizing. Of course, they’re not. It’s just a bad picture of something that doesn’t sound very good. I’m not interested in the free stuff.

In the book, you share all the countless musical influences and sources that have shaped you and that you have reacted to. But it seems like one of the only places you have not gone musically is hip-hop.
I don’t know about that. I made a record with The Roots, who came out of hip-hop. I wasn’t saying, “I’m now going to make my hip-hop record,” but I don’t think the techniques of that record would have been familiar to me when I was recording in 1977. Because the gadgets we had to exchange our ideas were the gadgets of hip-hop and dub reggae. A loop. Something else layered over it. Then you cut it up and move it around. That type of recording is the more familiar language of hip-hop. Nothing to do with what I am doing. I mean, it would sound absurd for me to suddenly adopt that delivery. But there are songs on that record that are more declaimed songs.

But would it really sound that absurd? Is it absurd for a white kid in London in 1963 to be singing in the style of a Mississippi blues guy?But somehow it sounded real when some people did it. When Peter Green sang a B.B. King song, it sounded great.

So it wouldn’t be right for you?
I think you can take cues from records and not be so literal-minded and make something original. I can hear the sources of certain kinds of records. My song “Pills and Soap” was directly influenced by hip-hop. I can remember hearing the first hip-hop records and saying, “I need to make a record that speaks for me, like this speaks for these people.”

What were those songs?
“The Message” (by Grandmaster Flash). I’ll always remember when I heard it. I was in a record shop when I heard it.

Do you have a song picked out for your memorial service?
Absolutely. Same piece I got married to—“Keeping Out of Mischief.” I want Louis Armstrong singing “Keeping Out of Mischief.” Because I will be.

Graham Parker has said, “I’ve had a career in reverse.” Does that thought ever strike you?
I don’t give a lot of thought to it. It’s all for the business page. I’m done with it all. I’m the age I am. There’s nothing more they can do to me. Now I’m writing songs for the theater. For musical productions. But they also have their obstacles. They are collaborative. There’s a lot of rewriting.

What are you working on now?
For several years, I’ve been working with Burt Bacharach on a musical, Painted from Memory. I was going to collaborate with T Bone Burnett and Sarah Ruhl about WHER, the all-female radio station in Memphis run by Becky Phillips, Sam Phillips’s wife. It was the world’s first easy-listening station. It’s a great story. We were trying to tell the tale. Fantastic story and subject matter. I started to sketch a few songs. Then we heard there was a Million Dollar Quartet musical and then the musical Memphis. Now, how many musicals about Memphis in the ’50s can there be on Broadway at one time? The answer is two, not three. So that’s just the breaks.

When you were younger, you were more political. You were involved with the Concert for Kampuchea. And recently you were involved with Katrina relief. Do you still see yourself in that sphere?
There is the delusion that you are effecting change with a song. But then there are some songs that have to be sung. I will say that “Free Nelson Mandela”—Jerry Dammers wrote and I produced—I really do think it did some good… And, you know, someone like Mighty Sparrow in Trinidad can still sway an election. But that’s not likely to happen here in America. We’re more likely to say to a candidate, “Don’t play my song as walk-on music.” I can think of a lot of songs of mine that I can recommend to them. For Donald Trump: “Hurry Down Doomsday (the Bugs are Taking Over).” Trump can play that any time he wants when he wants to walk onstage.

What about for Hillary?
I have no idea. But I have the spinning wheel. I could revive it. I think I should do that.

Joe Biden?
Did that happen? Is he running?

Not yet. But maybe he needs a song.
It’s maybe the only thing holding him back. He could do Tammy Wynette’s “Almost Persuaded.”

Michael Hainey (@michaelhainey) is GQ’s editor at large and the author of the memoir After Visiting Friends: A Son’s Story.

[sweetest punch]

http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Unf ... 571222.php

‘Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink,’ by Elvis Costello

By James Sullivan

Deep into his droll, hefty new autobiography, the British songwriter who long ago dubbed himself Elvis Costello recalls a chance mid-’80s meeting on a New York City fire escape with Rick Danko and Levon Helm of The Band, one of his favorite groups.

“Dumbstruck in their presence, running off at the mouth,” he recalls, “the way people sometimes do when they are excited.”

When it comes to music — virtually any kind of music, from pop and punk to honky-tonk, jazz balladry and art song — Costello is never not excited. For interviewers, squeezing a single question into his stream of music-history consciousness can be as elusive as a glimpse of the dapper entertainer without a hat on.

On the crowded shelf of musicians’ memoirs, Costello’s “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” claims the same kind of real estate as does his long, confounding catalog of records. It stubbornly refuses to conform to convention, toying with sequence like the targets in a shooting gallery. It’s chatty, in an ostentatious way: One of the many laugh-out-loud moments comes when the singer recalls Bob Dylan’s reaction when Costello casually drops the word “amanuensis” in conversation. It takes sudden detours into unexpected styles, drifting into disjointed reverie and quoting chunks of the author’s short fiction.

“Unfaithful Music” is often exasperating, but then so is its subject. The trouble with writing autobiographically, Costello writes, “is that for every mildly diverting tale or precious memory, you eventually arrive at this thought: I don’t much care for the subject.”

Ah, but that’s where he redeems himself. Just when it seems as though the incomparably talented, undeniably egotistical Costello has worn out his welcome, he draws the reader back in with one of his patented bouts of self-loathing. It’s a charming trick that has served his exquisitely barbed music especially well over his four-plus decades in the business.

Costello is not the sort of recording artist who attracts many fair-weather fans, but for those who know “Alison” and “Everyday I Write the Book” and not much else, the rudiments are mostly here: his rise from Britain’s punk and pub-rock scenes as the razor-witted wordsmith who made some memorable mischief on an early episode of “Saturday Night Live”; the restless stylist who collaborated with George Jones, Chet Baker, the Brodsky Quartet and many more; the encyclopedic raconteur who hosted the highly touted television series “Spectacle” and once subbed for David Letterman.

He recalls the first time he put on his iconic thick glasses, “like Superman in reverse.” He recounts some of the production work he did in the service of other acts (such as the Pogues: “I produced the only good and truthful-sounding record they ever made”), and a long visit as a guest DJ at KSAN, where he and Bonnie Simmons stayed on the air so long “that people thought we were stoned or in love.”

Befitting a consummate lyricist — this is, after all, the man who once rhymed “America” with “hysterical” — the writing in “Unfaithful Music” often soars high above the typical rock ’n’ roll rehash. Recalling a boyhood trip to Spain, Costello riffs on the fragmentary nature of holiday memories: “The sky as seen on a certain day through a viewfinder; the taste of seawater swallowed by accident … my Irish complexion turning tight and pink, then angry red.”

The book has some touching words for Costello’s father, Ross MacManus, a well-known big-band singer in England (from whose stage name the younger performer takes the back end of his own alter ego), his longtime accompanist Steve Nieve, and his third wife, the pianist and jazz singer Diana Krall. It also contains what the author claims will be “almost my last word” on an ugly, widely publicized incident in the early 1980s, when he capped a drunken argument with some ill-chosen, racially charged language that has stalked him ever since.

About another matter entirely, the 1981 country-covers album “Almost Blue,” Costello’s first real departure from his spiky new-wave image, he writes, “If you intend to have a long career in show business, it is necessary to drive people away from time to time, so they can remember why they miss you.” It’s been his MO ever since, God bless him.

If he’s hopscotched from nightclub grottoes to grand concert halls over the years, he’s always retained one premise: “If there is an applecart, you must do your best to upset it.”

There’s evidently only one thing sacred in this upsetter’s life, and that is the church of the music. “Songs can be many things,” he muses: “an education, a seduction, some solace in heartache, a valve for anger, a passport, your undoing, or even a lottery ticket.”

If you’re a fan of Costello’s kind of pop savvy, his book features at least a few bars of each of those things.

[sweetest punch]

http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2015/10/14/elv ... out-music/

Elvis Costello: ‘There Is No Absolute Right And Wrong About Music’

By NPR Staff / Kelly McEvers

When Declan Patrick MacManus was just 7, his father — a musician of Irish descent, with thick glasses and tousled black hair — left home. The boy grew up to be Elvis Costello, and throughout his career-spanning 674-page memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, the singer-songwriter grapples with that relationship and the parallels in their lives.

Costello and NPR’s Kelly McEvers recently discussed those familial similarities, the gap in his teeth and why Lorne Michaels will probably take the truth of Costello’s infamous Saturday Night Live performance to his grave.

Both you and your dad wear glasses. At one point, you’re wearing the same kind of boots. You borrow his equipment. You know, his tape recorder, and at one point —

I was just a thief, really. That’s the truth of it. [Both laugh.]

At one point, you guys are even living in the same building. He’s remarried and you’re married, and you’re living up and downstairs from each other.

That’s right.

So you’re together a lot.

Actually, you know, the poignant thing about it is, towards the end of his life, he enjoyed the robust health of a man who knew about the restorative powers of Bushmills whiskey, and never took an aspirin until he was about 79 and then developed Parkinson’s. And when he was in his last illness, I sat and tried to talk to him and keep him in the present, because dementia was developing rapidly. And when I actually tried to recall our times together, I ran out of experiences very quickly. In fact, I may have written all of them down in the book. That’s how few there were.

There’s a chapter in the book that’s called “Unfaithful Music,” and that’s part of the title of this book. This chapter is about that great song of yours, “Alison,” and I was wondering if you could read Page 187. There’s two short paragraphs.

“I believed that ‘Alison’ was a work of fiction taking the sad face of a beautiful girl glimpsed by chance and imagining her life unraveling before her. It was a premonition, my fear that I would not be faithful, or that my disbelief in happy endings would lead me to kill the love that I had longed for.”

So, you have said that the sad face of this beautiful girl was somebody you saw in a supermarket.

That — I just supposed I had a momentary crush on this girl, but in a way, the song became a premonition of my own ability to be constant.

I mean, basically, you’re talking about being unfaithful to your wife; to your family?

Yes.

Yeah, and your dad wasn’t faithful, either.

No.

Do you think that in some ways you were bound to be like him?

No, I really don’t. That makes it less forgivable, because I don’t — I’m not inclined to say, “Like father, like son,” or that because I came from a gently broken home that I would inevitably break one up myself. I can acknowledge what’s in the past. You can’t go back and change it.

So, this was the late ’70s and you were making this very, in some ways, very catchy pop music. But there was, of course, a lot of other stuff going on in the ’70s in music with punk and rock. You weren’t necessarily the glamorous type — you weren’t doing the Ziggy Stardust shiny-jumpsuit thing.

I worked for Elizabeth Arden for a while.

Yes, you did!

I did for several years, and I could get cheap lipstick and cheap mascara, and I still never made it in glam rock.

[Laughs.] So, I mean, you did later get cast as the angry type.

I’ve explained that very clearly in the book.

You have.

I have. It’s because I have a gap in my teeth. And although this makes people such as Jerry Lewis and Jane Birkin sex symbols, it just makes me sound aggressive. A lot of air gets pressed out between that gap, and it makes everything I say sound like a provocation or a threat, and quite often — I mean, that’s really true. I’m making a joke, obviously, because there were things in the songs that I said emphatically and things I meant, and there was just something about my face that made people think they read them this way. And I certainly didn’t help myself by going along to my couple early interviews very drunk.

You know, I think Americans might remember you — the sort of angry you — from an episode in 1977. You were appearing on Saturday Night Live; you were supposed to play your latest single called “Less than Zero,” but then you played “Radio Radio.”

My argument was not really with SNL; my argument was with my own record company, because they were just going on at me to do this song. And I said, “I’m not sure people even know what this song is about in America, because it was written about very specific English circumstances.” I had a brand-new song ready to go that I thought was the one we should play — and I did play — and because I didn’t tell the producers about it, it was a little bit of a stink, as they say. A kerfuffle. And we were told we would never work on American television again. There was a period where I didn’t appear on TV in America — about three years. It was 12 years before Lorne Michaels let me back in the building.

We read somewhere that Lorne Michaels was giving you the finger from the booth. Is that true?

I’m not going to say that’s true. Bill Murray told me that at the 25th-anniversary party. He said, “Don’t let Lorne tell you he was in on the joke. I remember him doing that.” So I’m not saying it; Bill is saying it. Lorne can take it up with Bill. I don’t know.

Your dad, he died in 2011. He had Parkinson’s, and then he had a brain tumor, and you write in the book that at one point you thought you couldn’t bear to write any more songs if you couldn’t play them for your father.

No, not write them so much as record them, because it was the taking the record home. I always used to like playing the record and seeing what he took out of it. He would always listen in and find the center of it for him, and I was always encouraged by that, because I know there is no one way to listen. There is no absolute right and wrong about music.

So, you write that you couldn’t record another song if you couldn’t play it —

No, not for a while. No. And then I stumbled into a recording collaboration with The Roots and the oddest thing happened: Quest[love] and a keyboard player who plays with The Roots sometimes, Ray Angry, sent me a composition, and within an hour or so I had written this song called “A Puppet Has Cut His Strings,” which was almost like a moment-by-moment recitation of my dad’s passing. And I told myself I wasn’t ready to write about that, or I would never write about it, but it just came out. In the end, music was playing in the room when my father left this earth, and I suppose that something that I returned to throughout the book [is] thinking about how music has served me as being my companion. It’s got me into all kinds of trouble, but also got me all sorts of things, as well; all sorts of experiences that I wouldn’t trade.

[sweetest punch]

http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/e ... on-stardom

Costello's book on stardom

British artist Elvis Costello charts his unlikely rise to pop stardom, in spite of not having "good looks and animal magnetism"

For more than four decades, Elvis Costello has been a pop music icon known for his literary wordplay, but he owes his career in part to a base stunt.

Frustrated that his music had not found a label in the United States, the British artist in 1977 took an electric guitar and battery- powered amplifier to the London hotel where CBS Records executives were holding a convention.

Enlisting a welcoming commit- tee who waved placards advertising his gig, he played until hotel staff called the police. Hauling him to jail, an officer told him: "Why do you people have to push it so far?"

Costello, 61, writes in his memoirs released on Tuesday: "It was as if they were always arresting people for playing the electric guitar and singing rock 'n' roll outside luxury hotels."

His gimmick got him some press attention and within months, he was signed to an American label, offering a springboard for him to become one of the most critically respected artists of the New Wave and post-punk era.

The nearly 700-page account, Unfaithful Music And Disappearing Ink, charts Costello's career as he created now-classic albums including My Aim Is True and Armed Forces, known for their pithy lyricism but pop sensibility. He developed artistic partnerships with artists ranging from former Beatle Paul McCartney to New Orleans R&B great Allen Toussaint.

Yet Costello voices surprise at the enduring success of a singer sporting nerdy glasses and a gap between his front teeth.

The son of a live musician of Irish heritage, he was born Declan Patrick MacManus and grew up in humble homes in London and Liverpool.

"The decision for me to adopt the Elvis name had always seemed like a mad dare, a stunt conceived by my managers to grab people's attention long enough for the songs to penetrate, as my good looks and animal magnetism were certainly not going to do the job," he writes.

His career in the United States came close to collapse in 1979 when he got into a shouting match about music with folk rocker Stephen Stills at the bar of a Holiday Inn hotel in Columbus, Ohio.

Costello faced a furore after he was overheard using racial slurs to refer to African-American legends James Brown and Ray Charles.

In his memoirs, Costello contends that, fuelled by drink, he sought only to provoke through "unspeakable slanders".

He had played anti-racism rallies and later produced The Specials' song Free Nelson Mandela, and was incredulous about the reaction.

He describes a survival instinct that kicked in during the controversy and kept him going, in what he would later describe as a turning point at a low time in his life.

He wrote: "That Ohio evening may very well have saved my sorry life. I fear an obituary might have appeared not too much later, just a few short lines lamenting my unfulfilled promise on the occasion of a tawdry demise."

While insisting his book is not meant to settle scores, he bristles at some interpretations of his songs, known for a greater literary bent than most pop fare.

He writes with astonishment that many listeners believed that he intended violence to Alison - the drab heroine of one of his best- known songs, in which he sings, "I know this world is killing you."

He writes: "Of all the strange slights and undeserved accolades attached to my name over the years, 'misogynist' is the one term that I find most bewildering."

He also writes of the indignities inflicted by Alzheimer's on his grandmother Molly, whose Catholic confirmation name was Veronica.

Veronica became another of Costello's most recognised songs, in which he sings of an old woman in a care home - "all of the time she laughs at those/who shout her name and steal her clothes".

He writes movingly of how his trumpet-playing father, who would never miss his son's shows in London, was similarly dimmed by Parkinson's disease, dying in late 2011 just days after his second wife died.

Around that time. Costello declared himself to be finished with recording albums, viewing them as a "vanity".

He wrote: "The real reason was that I needed time to imagine how I could bear to write songs and not be able to play them for my father."

[sweetest punch]

http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/books ... his-memoir

How the decline of his father prompted Elvis Costello to write his memoir

Mike Doherty, Special to National Post

In the epigraph to his memoir, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, Elvis Costello quotes his own song, “All the Rage”: “So don’t try to touch my heart / It’s darker than you think / And don’t try to read my mind / Because it’s full of disappearing ink.”

If the darkness alludes to the wayward life the English singer and songwriter once led, the disappearance could be a premonition: Costello’s grandmother and father were both afflicted by dementia. “Maybe that’ll come to me,” he says. He feared that if he didn’t commit his memories to paper, his eight-year-old twin boys with Diana Krall would one day need to look him up in books “written by people with a grudge.” Now, he says, “They can read those books as well if they want to find out how poisoned someone can be, or how lazy.”

Costello accuses himself of “indolence” in Unfaithful Music, but it would be a stretch to call him lazy – witness the 27 studio albums he has released since his 1977 debut, My Aim Is True, and his memoir’s 674 pages. “You think this book is long?” he asks. “Do you want the other 100,000 words that I took out?” On the phone from New York City, where he and Krall live when they’re not in Vancouver, Costello is at once self-deprecating and impassioned.

The book is beguilingly written, as befits a man who grew up reading his father’s collection of Irish plays – there may be a connection with the likes of Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan, he says, “deep down in the very pale green blood I have.” The narrative strays from a straight chronology, as Costello, born Declan MacManus in London, 1954, intertwines his parents’ and grandparents’ stories with his own, and inserts poetic fictional vignettes to capture the mood of a certain scene when, he says, it didn’t matter who was involved; “It was about the dance that was going on.”

As he writes, Costello excavates the inspiration for various songs and lyrics – most famously “Alison,” in which he imagined the life of a “beautiful girl glimpsed by chance” – but also drew out his own fear that he would be unfaithful to “the love that I had longed for,” in this case, his first wife, Mary. Eventually, he was, with complicated consequences.

“The uncomfortable thing to accept is that some of the mistakes I made certainly generated songs that people like,” he says. Costello does steer away from kiss-and-tell details: “You don’t have the right to drag people out of the shadows into full view because you want to talk about what went on.” But he does, rather decorously, describe various infidelities during his first marriage, among them a spur-of-the-moment assignation with a “quite attractive” American cabdriver who inspired the song “Accidents Will Happen,” and a longer, well-publicized fling with the serial rockstar-dating Bebe Buell.

Life, Costello writes, “is full of wrong choices and inconvenient, abandoned responsibilities.” For a while, he seemed determined to push himself into madness: in a drunken encounter in 1979 with Stephen Stills and his band, he appears to have referred to both Ray Charles and James Brown – musicians he held in high regard – using racial slurs. He was, he writes, trying “to provoke a bar fight and finally put the lights out.”

“It was obviously a horrifying thing to find words coming out of your mouth that are the exact opposite of what you believe,” he says, putting it down to “youthful arrogance” and the snotty, punkish desire to get a rise out of Stills and other musicians from an older generation. He sounds both contrite and determined to have the last word: “There is actual evil in the world, and as far as I know, I’m not in league with it.”

The rest of the book demonstrates his open-mindedness – he’s consistently challenging his own preconceptions, working against his own methods of lyric-writing, combating his own cleverness and collaborating with everyone from tremendous tunesmith Burt Bacharach to New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint to his own boyhood hero, Paul McCartney. In one of the book’s most affecting passages, he sings harmonies with McCartney at a tribute to the Beatle’s late wife, Linda – an occasion both joyous and “heartrending … It was a very vulnerable moment,” he says. “That level of success doesn’t inoculate you from great tragedies.”

Costello’s relationship with his third wife, Diana Krall, seems to have turned him round: “I realized my old way of living was over,” he writes. Up until then, he says, he was following “self-inflicted transitions” in his life, at times “in pursuit of something that some people might call art.” The songs he wrote could get “pretty grim, and I never signed any contract that said I had to write happy-go-lucky tunes,” but he realized, “I didn’t have to stay like that forever and get gradually bluer” – he could look outside himself and write different kinds of songs.

His father, he says, was happy, and if there’s one figure in this book who looms larger than McCartney, Bowie, Tom Waits, and all of Costello’s famous pals, it’s that of Ross MacManus, nearly his son’s spitting image. A jazz trumpeter in his younger years, Ross ended up singing pop tunes on covers albums that he recorded, like his son, under various aliases – among them Frank Bacon and the Baconeers. Costello says he derived from his father the idea that pop singing is “an absurd job.”

The passages about Ross are at first amusing and then poignant. At the end, Costello describes his father’s decline, during which only songs could reach him.

Costello says his book is, in its unwieldiness, a reflection of his life: “I can’t wish that any of it were really that different.” It’s also “about music being your companion for better or for worse. In the case of my father, it carried him through his whole life and provided for five sons, and music was his companion to his last breath. That’s a very beautiful thing that I’m very lucky to have witnessed.”

[verbal gymnastics]

"Do you want the other 100,000 words that I took out?".

Yes please.

Many of you will know my fondness for the song All the Rage. It's an unbelievable coincidence that Elvis opens the book with my favourite verse from my favourite Elvis song.

To paraphrase Mr Bogart, "Of all the words of all the songs..."

I'm slowly ploughing my way through but I am finding it very easy to read and very entertaining.

[johnfoyle]

I shared this early 1970s ad., from the book, with Linda Thompson on her f/book page - she commented -
Delcan, no wonder he changed it to Elvis. Nobody could spell Declan. I remember telling him he was really good.

[johnfoyle]

https://twitter.com/LauraTrevelyan/stat ... 3620226053

Laura Trevelyan @LauraTrevelyan
Now this was a dream fulfilled. Interviewing @elviscostello for tonight's @BBCWorld broadcast - we talk Allison!

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-radio-and-tv-14563857

[charliestumpy]

As everyone on this site knows, the book (for anyone who has bought into DPAM since 1977-ish) is well worth buying/enjoying.

I eventually bought my Elvis Costello 'UNFAITHFUL MUSIC AND DISAPPEARING INK' for big discount in UK Waterstones 2 days ago/finished it a day later.

Lots of greatly-written bits/a bit of a mess for the first 70-ish pages/absolutely needs a competent INDEX given that it is presented - like his films - all on almost-relevant flashbacks. A discography etc would have been nice too.

But most of us know it all anyway, especially DPAM and interested parties.

Delayed unnecessary dble-CD out in a week - mine's ordered/why I need it I know not ...

I am sure that everyone else has posted - something for them - valid.