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Revision as of 09:36, 10 October 2018
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Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink
Elvis Costello
Clark Collis
It is one of the great wonders of pop culture that the undeniably talented but also bespectacled, politically minded, and — in his youth — acid-tongued Elvis Costello should have become a pop star on both sides of the Atlantic. But equally miraculous is that he lived long enough to achieve songwriting-icon status, given how much booze he and his band the Attractions put away in the '70s and '80s.
Unfaithful Music is at its most vivid when detailing what Costello calls the band's "young and drunk" period. Here is an inebriated Elvis being led from the stage at a show after forgetting the second line of his classic tune "Alison." And here is Attractions drummer Pete Thomas turning up so hungover to record the track "Beyond Belief" that Costello warns him, "You've got one take and then you're going for a little lie-down." Thomas proceeded to unleash a percussive assault of such titanic proportions that, Costello recalls, actress Mary-Louise Parker once told him it made her want to "get drunk and f--- the wrong person." (Note to aspiring drummers: The chances of Thomas' approach working for you may be less than zero.)
If this hefty tome's second half could benefit more from the conciseness of Costello's songwriting, the author remains a winningly droll and good-natured guide to his life and many works through-out. At one point, he notes that the problem with writing an autobiography is that the writer ends up not much caring for his subject. It is a problem Costello fans will not have reading this.
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