Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | 921 COSTELLO | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 COSTELLO | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 782.4216 COS | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The perfect gift for music lovers and Elvis Costello fans, telling the story behind Elvis Costello's legendary career and his iconic, beloved songs.
Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink provides readers with a master's catalogue of a lifetime of great music. Costello reveals the process behind writing and recording legendary albums like My Aim Is True , This Year's Model , Armed Forces , Almost Blue , Imperial Bedroom , and King of America . He tells the detailed stories, experiences, and emotions behind such beloved songs as "Alison," "Accidents Will Happen," "Watching the Detectives," "Oliver's Army," "Welcome to the Working Week," "Radio Radio," "Shipbuilding," and "Veronica," the last of which is one of a number of songs revealed to connect to the lives of the previous generations of his family.
Costello chronicles his musical apprenticeship, a child's view of his father Ross MacManus' career on radio and in the dancehall; his own initial almost comical steps in folk clubs and cellar dive before his first sessions for Stiff Record, the formation of the Attractions, and his frenetic and ultimately notorious third U.S. tour. He takes readers behind the scenes of Top of the Pops and Saturday Night Live , and his own show, Spectacle , on which he hosted artists such as Lou Reed, Elton John, Levon Helm, Jesse Winchester, Bruce Springsteen, and President Bill Clinton.
The idiosyncratic memoir of a singular man, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink is destined to be a classic.
Author Notes
Elvis Costello was born Declan Patrick MacManus on August 25, 1954 in London, England. He is a Grammy award-winning musician, singer-songwriter, and record producer. His career spans over 40 years from the 1970s to the present. His first recording was as a background singer for his father's television commercial. His first groups were Rusty, a folk duo, and Flip City. He changed his name to D. P. Costello and later his manager suggested the name Elvis Costello. Through the years he has had numerous hit songs, collaborated with famous musicians, and has worked in various musical genres. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. His book, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, was published in 2015.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* This is a big book, literally, by one of the best rockers in the business. Given the singular, and eclectic, nature of his career, it is no surprise that Elvis Costello's anecdotal autobiography is an idiosyncratic journey through his music and the people and places that have inspired him. Born Declan Patrick MacManus, he fondly recalls his father's show-business career in England, the first time he heard the Beatles' Please Please Me (thrilling and confusing), his early gigs, his wide-eyed first time in America, his controversial debut on Saturday Night Live, his collaboration with Paul McCartney, and his marriage to jazz singer-pianist Diana Krall. Costello offers many small delights and revelations. For example, we learn that Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops is one of his heroes and that the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville is his favorite stage in the world. We learn, too, about the inspiration for many of his songs, from Alison to Pump It Up to Watching the Detectives. Despite the name-dropping (Dylan, Springsteen, Bowie, Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis), Costello comes across as the perennial outsider, as someone who is surprised that he has been invited to the party. A must for Costello fans everywhere.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2015 Booklist
Guardian Review
This memoir takes us on a voyage through the vanished world of 1970s Britain, and from the urgency of youth to a comfortable middle age Spotlit on the front of his memoir is the young Elvis Costello of legend: a speccy monochrome scoffer in a run-down motel room. Turn the book over and there is a more recent portrait, in colour and perhaps more in line with the way he sees himself today: rueful smile, tasteful decor, rounded life. The Elvis out front clasps a Fender Jazzmaster to his chest like Lee Harvey Oswald held his mail-order rifle: one man against the world. On the back, 2015 Elvis is looking up and away, as if to a cartoon thought bubble that reads: "Well, just look at me now. Happy, after all these years!" Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink -- it's an odd, clunky title. They're both nice phrases, but together? The testament has not even begun and you're already wondering, is something being overstressed? Ageing pop stars may have many reasons for writing a memoir: score settling, financial need, a feeling of having been misunderstood by their public. But such books also present their writers with a bind. What sells is not gentle music-biz banter or technical bumf, but personal revelation. Even if you've spent your entire career running from icky disclosure, you've still got to reveal something of your hidden life. Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus (AKA Elvis Costello) says he wrote his memoir to give his sons an idea of who he used to be ("It was so much easier / when I was cruel ... "), and how he came to be the man he is now. Which is a lovely idea, but may leave him with rather a lot of explaining to do: not just his mistakes, but the fact that they were made in a completely different world. A world in which we waited all week every week for nibbles of information in the music press; a world in which we had to get local record shops to write away for any LPs we wanted to hear that weren't in the Top 20. Costello is more than equal to the challenge. Part of this book is a must-read account of the frenzied first years of his rise to fame. Typical itinerary: three tours of the US in six months, averaging 27 dates in 30 days. The Attractions arrive at a Texas club just two days after appearances by The Flying Burrito Brothers and Mose Allison. "It felt a little strange," Costello notes, "after seeing your name on a poster with XTC." Nice line, and then a few moments later you get the subtext: the punky, shrunken-suited Attractions started gigging when such groups as the Burritos, founded by the venerated Gram Parsons, were still at large. Costello's un-edgy portrait of the artist as mature craftsman signals: 'This is the easy-going, equable guy I am now' Indeed, the young Declan Mac was an obsessive fan of US/Canadian acts from Parsons to Joni Mitchell to the Band. What's telling is how the 1960s and 70s Britain that Costello recalls for us now feels as strange and distant as the down-home songs that the Band's Robbie Robertson once performed to teenage UK rock fans. You have to remember how startling a figure Costello seemed at the time: rock stars just didn't look like that! Costello's gawky, Burton's-window look was one of the reasons his fling with the model (and mother of Liv Tyler) Bebe Buell, whose previous beaus included Jimmy Page and Todd Rundgren, was so notable. Rock stars also didn't sound like that: he sang with bared teeth rather than sturdy lungs. And rock rarely featured such great lines about the life going on around you in the streets where you lived: "My neighbour's revving up his Vauxhall Viva"; "those daily tranquilisers"; "the mini skirt waddle"; "the boys from the Mersey & the Thames & the Tyne". In the late 1970s, the Attractions played two or three of the best gigs I ever saw. One was an angry, white-knuckle affair in a May Ball marquee set in the manicured grounds of an exclusive Cambridge University college. (I was there as an impossibly young hack.) It felt as if each member of the band had been reading Class War before they came on stage. Then a few years later, in 1980, I saw them again promoting their LP Get Happy!!, and it was all wide-open soul and playful brio and a joyously approximate Tamla backbeat. If there is a problem with this book it may be that, while Costello does a great job of showing us the man (or several men) he was back then, I'm not sure he comes close to explaining what was going on inside him -- why he did what he did and sang what he sang. He admits to copybook blots such as the Bebe Buell affair and the incident, for which he later apologised at a press conference, when he drunkenly referred to James Brown and Ray Charles using the "n" word. While he doesn't try to shirk responsibility, his apologia seems oddly rote. Costello now disavows his best-known old quote ("The only two things that matter to me, the only motivation for me to write all these songs, are revenge and guilt") as a Pernod-stoked PR stunt, but you're left with the feeling of several undefused time bombs in his basement. Unfaithful Music has one great success and one obvious failing; or, one vivid presence and one vexatious absence. The success -- and what's essentially the glad heart of the book -- is the portrait of Costello's father, Ross MacManus: a gifted singer-mimic, studio musician and on-stage vocalist with the once hugely popular Joe Loss Orchestra. (I have a 1970 album he did of songs made famous by the other Elvis.) He was also a saloon bar Orpheus and something of a lady's man, as we used to say, as well as a wily pragmatist, a survivor in the shark-filled tank of mid-level showbiz. Costello obviously loved (or learned to love) his father deeply, but this was a man who left his children in the lurch when the young Declan was only seven. The family business was good old-fashioned songs, properly sung; but Costello also recalls a child's uneasiness at his dad being able to sing anything and everything with the same professional "passion" -- one week Jim Reeves, the next week Pink Floyd. Remember the words "unfaithful" and "disappearing" in the book's title: they are at the core of the book -- his father walking out on the family, and then Costello doing the same at the end of his first marriage to Mary Burgoyne. Here is a knot of music and lyrics, fathers and sons, the women they sing to and the women they hurt. The real absence here involves Costello's second marriage of 16 years to ex- Pogue Cait O'Riordan -- by default or design, it is given no more than a shaky outline. Perhaps Costello was warned off by lawyers, or is just trying to exhibit good grace (who knows?), but the reader gets a distinct impression of clenched teeth behind sealed lips. The lack of O'Riordan certainly leaves his retrospection looking lopsided. There is a very moving section on his father's death -- beautiful writing by any standards. It is also the ideal note to finish the book on, a tying-up of various musical, familial and psychological strands. I can't imagine why anyone involved in the publication thought it was a good idea to follow this coup with what almost amounts to a second (and far inferior) book about more recent events in Costello-land. You know those cringe-making kissy-kissy "interview" spots on Jools Holland 's TV show? Imagine them edited into a four-hour "best of": I met Allen Toussaint and he was just lovely and we worked together; I met Burt Bacharach and he was just lovely and we worked together; I met Paul McCartney and ... (The lovely Elton John and David Furnish turn up, as if on cue, to host Costello's 2003 marriage to Diana Krall.) As Steve Martin says in Planes, Trains and Automobiles : "You know, everything is not an anecdote. You have to discriminate." Someone should have made Costello put in another few months' work on these green-room tales, for a separate book along the lines of Donald Fagen's marvellous Eminent Hipsters ; unlike Fagen, Costello hasn't located a handy device to link past and present, his own music and his musical influences. Costello may have his reasons for including all this filler, to do with the arc of darkness to light. His un-edgy portrait of the artist as mature craftsman is perhaps a way of signalling: this is the easy-going, productive, equable guy I am now. The latter half of the book also features a series of ill-advised "short story" excerpts and too many overlong quotations from recent lyrics, as if he saw Auden and Larkin as his real competition, not the fripperies of modern pop music. (I still prefer his early, pun-filled stuff: "You lack lust /you're so lacklustre.") As with the book's conjoined titles and two-sided cover, Costello wants it both ways. He wants to be Elvis and Declan; wants to have pop success, but then reserves the right to be snooty about it. As if the real business of pop was having private dinners with great mates such as McCartney and Bacharach, swooning together over diminished chords, and not some vulgar affair of hit singles by bonkers kids with their egos on fire. You get the feeling Costello may almost be resentful that he is regarded as a great pop star rather than a "real" and versatile singer like his dad. But he just doesn't have that kind of voice; when he tries to cover a classic song such as "She", he sounds less like a rapt lover and more like a Sardinian shepherd calling in the goats. It's also why "Shipbuilding" as sung by Robert Wyatt is more haunting than "Shipbuilding" as sung by Costello, its writer. Pop music just isn't fair: something written in five minutes on the way to the studio, bashed out by a producer with the DTs, and aired by a singer who is a nasty little twerp on nasty accelerator drugs, can still move people 35 years later. Even today, pull together a roomful of folk of a certain age and they will bellow together as one voice: "And I would rather be anywhere else than here today ... " One of the ironies of where Costello is today is that his way of making music appears to have jumped back to a pre-punk, almost pre-rock'n'roll world. Musicians can cruise around the world, lining up all manner of cushy "projects" with one another, and barely even bother with mass popularity. But such developments are probably inevitable in the new digital landscape; Costello hints that he thinks the days of making albums are pretty much over. Unfaithful Music is Costello's mostly spot-on attempt to recall and explain the old ways, their logic and passion and daring. As he himself once sang, in a song called "Black and White World": "It seemed so exciting! / There'll never be days like that again ... " * Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello (Viking, [pound]25). To order a copy for [pound]19.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of [pound]1.99. - Ian Penman.
Kirkus Review
Everything you ever wanted to knowand moreabout hyperliterate songwriter and performer Costello. It becomes immediately clear in this voluminous debut memoir that Costello's prose cuts with the same spiky wit and observational power as his well-known lyricse.g., upon meeting Bruce Springsteen: "he laughed like steam escaping from a radiator." What this memoir could've used was a more proactive editor to rein in its disjointed structure and rambling eccentricities. In one chapter, we learn about Costello's 20-something rise to stardom in 1977; the next chapter covers his birth. Readers will need to forget trying to follow this memoir in a chronological way, which may be appropriate when considering his unconventional songwriting. Whatever the Byzantine structure, certainly there's no part of his life left untouchedfrom his childhood growing up in Liverpool and London watching his father perform as a singer with the Joe Loss Orchestra to getting his first band together and on to becoming the jittery 1970s New Wave answer to Bob Dylan. Although Costello (born Declan MacManus) led a routine, working-class existence in his teens and early 20s, not surprisingly, the most scintillating time in his life to read about is his unlikely rise to fame in the '70s with his band the Attractions and Stiff Records. Costello isn't coy when discussing the origins of his songs and detailing the often surprising musical influences behind them. His writing on his later elder statesman yearsincluding his marriage to Diana Krall and his dabbling with string quartets and orchestrasis pleasantly informative, but his discussions of his middle ages are mostly akin to reading someone's CV. They lack the same thrill of youth that drives the recollection of his hand-to-mouth days as a struggling punk. Overlong but still packed with great lines, vivid anecdotes, and plenty of photos. Certainly a treat for his many fans. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Costello's memoir is a nonlinear exploration of his life and career, weaving stories of his childhood and family history in with tales of rock fame. The author includes the requisite stories of the famous recording artists he's met and worked with but also analyzes his own lyrics, meditates on the absurdities of American and English cultures, and doesn't shy away from his own failings and missteps. Costello's father, a second-generation working musician himself, is at the heart of the book, and the author continually draws connections from his own love of music back to his father's influence. Costello's reading is as expressive, heartfelt and articulate as the text itself, funny, sincere and sad by turns. VERDICT For fans of the author and of thoughtful musical biographies. ["A fascinating, rich, and evocative memoir told with warmth, intelligence, and wit and filled with memorable descriptions and observations": LJ 11/1/15 starred review of the Blue Rider hc.]-Jason Puckett, -Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
. Excerpted from Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| 1 A White Boy in the Hammersmith Palais | p. 1 |
| 2 Then They Expect You to Pick a Career | p. 13 |
| 3 Don't Start Me Talking | p. 31 |
| 4 Ask Me Why | p. 39 |
| 5 Beyond Belief | p. 49 |
| 6 London's Brilliant Parade | p. 81 |
| 7 The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face | p. 99 |
| 8 Roll Up for the Ghost Train | p. 111 |
| 9 Almost Liverpool 8 | p. 131 |
| 10 Welcome to the Working Week | p. 141 |
| 11 No Trams to Lime Street | p. 149 |
| 12 I Hear the Train a-Comin' | p. 163 |
| 13 Unfaithful Music | p. 179 |
| 14 Scene at 6.30 | p. 195 |
| 15 Unfaithful Servant | p. 213 |
| 16 There's a Girl in a Window | p. 217 |
| 17 It Mek | p. 247 |
| 18 America Without Tears | p. 263 |
| 19 Accidents May Happen | p. 287 |
| 20 I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass | p. 313 |
| 21 What Do I Have to Do to Make You Love Me? | p. 335 |
| 22 Talking in the Dark | p. 341 |
| 23 Is He Really Going Out with Her? | p. 361 |
| 24 Diving for Dear Life | p. 381 |
| 25 It's a Wonderful Life | p. 397 |
| 26 The Color of the Blues | p. 419 |
| 27 The Identity Parade | p. 435 |
| 28 The River in Reverse | p. 457 |
| 29 That's When a Thrill Becomes a Hurt | p. 481 |
| 30 I Want to Vanish | p. 501 |
| 31 Put Away Forbidden Playthings | p. 523 |
| 32 They Never Got Me for the Thing I Really Did | p. 551 |
| 33 A Voice in the Dark | p. 571 |
| 34 Country Darkness / Narrow Daylight | p. 593 |
| 35 I'm in the Mood Again | p. 615 |
| 36 Down Among the Wines and Spirits | p. 635 |
| Postscript: The Black Tongue of the North End | p. 663 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 671 |
