Start the music and listen while you read the text…
Video Links:
Radio Radio, Saturday Night Live
Elvis Costello and Attractions at the Rockpalast, Cologne
I just finished reading Elvis Costello’s autobiography, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. I have always liked Elvis Costello’s music and know that’s not a universal opinion. “That pigeon toed thing,” “The avenging dork,” (Village Voice), “Don’t take off the glasses!” (manager Jake Riviera), those many long albums, that Ray Charles thing (he apologizes profusely and at length). On the other side a masterful, varied, much admired and prolific song writer, head of a great band, a great voice and admirable (and again varied) musical knowledge. He starts his career wildly aggressive and very slowly moves to more lyrical music with more complex (but still rocking) arrangements and then to a reflective style with many stellar collaborations (Burt Bacharach, George Jones, Chet Baker, Brodsky Quartet, Questlove, Macca, T-Bone Burnett, others). At heart, I think, he has always been a romantic: many of his best songs are ballads and his politics are fundamentally Fenian (“God saving the queen hadn’t always seemed like good idea in our house”), progressive (Rock Against Racism during the punk thing), and on display (Oliver’s Army, Green Shirt, Shipbuilding, White Knuckles, What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace Love and Understanding (which he didn’t write but everyone thinks he did)….but ultimately also deeply romantic.
You’re curious going into it about the writing—after all, he’s one of the most prolific popular musicians with eight great almost all original albums (My Aim is True, This Years Model, Armed Forces, Get Happy, Punch the Clock, Trust, Imperial Bedroom, Blood and Chocolate). In the book, the writing’s good but doesn’t call attention to itself. There are many quotes of lyrics and like most quotes of lyrics they make you realize how important the musical part is, accenting the good lines, covering the weak ones. Song writing is his main craft (he was originally signed to Stiff records as a songwriter rather than performer) and that affects the book’s writing style which is elliptical in sometimes confusing ways, but more often flatters the reader into thinking how hip s/he is to get it.
The autobiography is unique in the music bios I’ve read in that it is at once historical and not, that is it is closely tied to Costello’s (and his family’s) history but is so broken up by asides and leaps to other times that it is able to avoid that dread “and when I went to my first soccer game with my friend Rod Stewart” thing. It’s a measure of his cleverness and wit that he manages this very well (he wrote without a ghost). He’s also disarming in his modesty and enlightening in his many references to his family and especially his Dad who was a singer (thanks for the voice Dad!) and who clearly influenced him. Both the advantages and the problems with having a Dad in show business are there: some writer writes “Cool dad aging snazzily,” meeting many people and seeing musicians as musicians rather than stars, but also the philandering (his mom! Who comes up almost only in this context!), also homologue to his own life once he gets to a place where girls are swooning over “Alison” (and he is married and father to his own young lad).
And that’s a disturbing business he frequently returns to, when he found that his father was not faithful to his mother, in fact was a “ladies man,” and just a bit later, realizing that he himself was now also guilty of this, that shadow darkened by his knowledge of how his Dad’s philandering had hurt his mother. Elvis skates over it, but is obviously very very very guilty about his own unfaithfulness towards women (as he reminds us, it’s in the book’s title). It’s our national pastime to psychoanalyze celebrities and he gives us plenty of material: his infrequent mentions of his mother (he writes more about his grandmother, grandfather and certainly his father), his status as a single child. He writes of his long affair (or marriage?) to Cait O’Riordan of the Pogues. Outside the book (there’s more outside than inside on the affairs), an interview with O’Riordan in the Irish Independent goes like this:
“You know Pat Henry, [the fitness guru] don’t you? He has told me he knows couples right now where very plainly the man is punishing himself for being successful through his choice of woman. That really resonates with me. I think we can punish ourselves. We can use people to punish ourselves.”
“Was that the need Elvis was fulfilling with you?
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Is that what you felt?
“I hope it is not true, but it seems, just from my experience, that it might be true.”
This not from him, but the partner. Costello was raised, of course, Catholic. We expect him to be a little fucked up, we allow him to be. He is now happily married to Diana Krall with two sons.
Formerly famously dismissive of his band’s importance (and feuding with Bruce Thomas, his stellar bass player about it), here he goes out of his way to write about the many ways in which they were fabulous. He realized late what a gem keyboardist Steve Nieve was and gives him much specific praise for album orchestrations and on stage performances: “We could play anyone off the stage.” One of the great joys of the book is his many shout outs to music (Dave Bartholomew, “That’s What Got You Killed Last Time”) and performances by both his band and others (see below). He is generous, an attractive trait, but not one that had always been on view. And he really knows music.
I only started noting quotes half way through, this first one on his legendarily writing “Watching the Detectives” after hearing the Clash’s first album, “I was trying to work out why the flimsy but furious sound of this record, with its siren guitars and square, dry drumming, could come across as so powerful.” This passage opens a couple of pages on where his song came from (film noir mostly) and a new literary style for him (hard-boiled) that seems apropos to his entry with the Attractions onto the world stage. This is half way through the longish book, but your (my—Amazon reviewers are not always kind on this point) interest has not flagged.
A few more quotes:
My only luggage was a notebook with a confederate flag on the cover. It was hard to explain but harder still to lose.
Ray Brown leaned into the microphone and said, “Nobody play any ideas.”
They’ve got men building fences to keep other men out
Ignore him if he whimpers and kill him if he shouts
Allen Toussaint
I’d asked a local cabdriver what people did for fun in the nearby village, and he’d replied, “Oh it’s all wife-swapping and witchcraft around here.”