Like a handful of rock stars I have encountered
along the way, among them Townshend, Bowie and Zappa, Elvis Costello would have
made a first-rate rock critic. I suspect he knows it too, which perhaps explains
why he has adopted a rather disdainful attitude towards us for much of his
career, especially when he started out, or at least when Declan McManus, the
folkie-country-pub-rocker, became Elvis Costello, the cutthroat singer songwriter masquerading as a bandy-legged
punk.
So over and above the captivating
walk-on parts by just about every musician of note you care to name, of which much more later, this absorbing,
entertaining and very literate book is about music; the music that Declan/Elvis
heard as a boy, the music that has inspired him, the music that he loves and
the music that he has pilfered to enhance his own songs. By the end of its 670
pages I came away with the feeling that Elvis Costello is a walking encyclopaedia
of popular music, a true child of Tin Pan Alley – his birth notice appeared in NME and is reproduced on page 406 – suckled
by a music-loving family until he became so absorbed in it that absolutely
nothing else would ever matter to him.
It’s also apparent that he has
immaculate taste, ticking off all the right boxes in the music he adores, all
top-quality stuff, not necessarily commercial but which always hits the right
spot with connoisseurs, present company included. I lost count of the times I
found myself nodding in agreement at his opinions, and from the outset realised
I was tuning in to the thoughts of a deeply scholastic musicologist whose way with words was that of a great lyricist. After all,
only someone steeped in it would write a paragraph like, “By the time we got to
Phoenix, it had started to dawn on me that we could be driving up and down the
road from Tucson to Tucumcari for years and never break on through to America.
So we headed for California with the intention of going back to high school or
at least making some Do Re Mi.”
Elvis tends not to dwell on that
which he doesn’t much like – though Led Zeppelin are sneeringly dismissed as a
“hot air balloon” – and instead moves from the music his father Ross performed
with the Joe Loss Orchestra through to rock’n’roll, The Beatles, R&B, soul,
country, singer songwriters, ska and everything of merit you’d expect, avoiding
the flash and sticking to what’s honest, always music of integrity and
authenticity.
Not necessarily in that order though.
Unfaithful Music... is not a linear
autobiography by any means, more a cherry-picked flight of the bumble-bee that
lurches back and forth so that moving episodes about impoverished Irish ancestors
are slipped into tales of working with the likes of Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney,
Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen. Somehow he makes it work, and at times it’s a
bit like a roller coaster, moving slowly uphill as he painstakingly illuminates
the craft of song writing, with particular attention to his lyrics, then
tumbling downhill fast as he bemoans the seamier side of his profession, the
pros and cons of having a confrontational image, and falls in and out of love
with The Attractions and a handful of women who pierced the armour and, like the
very best music, touched his surprisingly susceptible heart.
Elvis writes tenderly and with a
sense of regret about Mary, his first wife and the mother of his son, a school
sweetheart with whom he later became reconnected. “We lost everything to
each other that summer,” he writes. “In time we lay in the half-light,
listening to ‘Tenderness’, a song by Paul Simon that we both loved.” Music
invariably brings back poignant memories recalled throughout, though I was a
bit surprised that we had to wait until page 512 for Cait O’Riordan to make an entrance,
while his relationship with the musician Diana Krall, whom Elvis married in
2003, is mentioned only sparingly, in a few pages towards the end. He also writes
There is plenty of droll humour. A
memory of the Australian outback soap opera Whiplash,
broadcast before Clint Eastwood’s starring cowboy series Rawhide, elicits the comment, “a combination that would nowadays
suggest an entirely different form of entertainment”, which made me chuckle, while
his description of the Daily Mail as
having “small-minded, prurient, xenophobic content to titillate and stoke the
indignation of the impotent petty fascist” is about as accurate a description
of that loathsome rag as I have read anywhere.
Elvis’ legendary cussedness seems to
have been caused by reviewers’ constant misinterpretation of his lyrics, being
misidentified in a photograph of his dad that appeared in NME not long after he became Elvis, and having had the misfortune to suffer an attack of vertigo
on the day he was scheduled to do a number of interviews to promote My Aim Is True, his debut album on
Stiff. This rendered him disinclined to answer questions from anyone,
especially the Daily Mirror man who
wanted to know about “the girls” and a more penetrating interrogation from NME’s Nick Kent, unnamed but clearly
identifiable from the description. “By accident or through collusion, this
conversation effectively invented a character that I would inhabit for the new
few years,” he writes.
The regrettable racist outburst in
Columbus Ohio is put down to an excess of alcohol coupled with extreme road
weariness and, though inexcusable, Elvis is not just contrite but asks
reasonably whether “anything else that I’ve done in the other 59 years and
525,550 minutes suggest I harbour racist beliefs.” I forgive him, though I’m
not sure Mary did when, on the night his son was born, Elvis chose to attend a
Little Feat concert at the Rainbow Theatre that had been eagerly anticipated by
both of them. In the event Matthew arrived a bit late, allowing Elvis to arrive
at the hospital with hours to spare.
An admiration for Little Feat, and
The Band, and John Prine, and Allan Toussaint and many many more from the
worlds of country, jazz and classics, illuminates the book throughout. Elvis is
rightly troubled by the phrase ‘Great American Songbook’ which excludes many
genres that he loves, and anyone reading the book will surely be charmed by the
delight that he takes in having the opportunity to record alongside the band
that used to back the other Elvis: Ron Tutt on drums, bassist Jerry Scheff, guitar
maestro James Burton and keyboard player Glen D. Hardin. This same crew, along
with Springsteen, Tom Waits, Elvis and others gathered to back up Roy Orbison
for the now well-known 1987 Black & White Night tribute show that can be
found on YouTube. Elvis describes the event in loving detail and I think this remains
the highlight of his life. Or maybe it was duetting with Ray Charles, or
playing with Springsteen in a tribute to Joe Strummer at the Grammy Awards, or
shooting the breeze with Bob Dylan, or getting Chet Baker to contribute that moving trumpet part to ‘Shipbuilding’, or breakfasting with Van Morrison who turns out be as laconic as you would expect, or chauffeuring Joni Mitchell to one of his concerts, an anecdote saved until almost the end of the book. Then again it might have been the time he
performed ‘Penny Lane’, the piccolo trumpet solo courtesy of a uniformed US guardsman, in front of Barrack Obama and its composer at the White
House on the occasion when Macca won the Gershwin Prize. Extraordinary encounters like this litter Unfaithful Music... like the autumn leaves on the lawn in my back garden; castles in the air for folk
singing, music-mad teenager Declan McManus in his chunky striped sweater, seen entertaining
a seemingly unimpressed audience of middle-aged matrons on page 116.
The book is illustrated throughout
with black and white photographs from Elvis’ private collection, including many of his close
family, but it lacks an index, which, for a book of this length, is an
oversight in my opinion. But this is a minor quibble for a memoir that stands
alongside Keith Richards’ Life as an
example of how a rock memoir should be both written and produced. The big difference, of course, is that Richards had a ghost writer but this is all Costello's own work.
I only ever met Elvis Costello once, one
evening in 1980 at a flat in Dalling Road in Shepherds Bush that was occupied
by my friend Glen who was Elvis’ PR at the time. He’d sublet it from Bruce
Thomas, The Attractions’ bass player, and I was staying there temporarily at
the time, dossing down on a mattress on the living room floor. Elvis sat
disconsolately in the corner strumming my Gibson acoustic guitar while a pretty
girl of my acquaintance who worked for Columbia Records in New York, name of Sheri*, made eyes at him that suggested a
sexual advance wouldn’t be rebuffed. Elvis was probably unaware that the room
we were in was my bedroom and that this was the reason I stuck around, thereby inhibiting
his congress with Sheri. In the circumstances I suppose it was not unreasonable
for him to be vexed but I still thought that his image as a bit of a moody
bugger was spot on, an opinion now much alleviated by having read his book. At
least I now know how it came about in the first place.
Highly recommended.
