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There are no gigs, no sound checks and precious few other professional commitments in Elvis Costello's diary, which might explain why the 61-year-old songwriter looks so relaxed. Holding court in the lounge of a Sydney hotel, in familiar hat, dark suit and shades, Costello's only musical concern this week is that his wife, singer Diana Krall, gets to the gig on time during her Australian tour, which continues at Sydney Opera House tonight before travelling interstate. Costello is just along for the ride. Well, not quite.
The singer, a regular visitor to these shores, has been enjoying rave reviews over the past few months, not for his music but for Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, his autobiography published late last year. The book, a mammoth 672 pages, has earned as many plaudits as classic albums Armed Forces, King of America and This Year's Model, to name just a few from a catalogue stretching back to 1977.
It's a great story, one that took several years to write. Yesterday, while on his semi-sabbatical, Costello took the opportunity to talk about it in Australia for the first time.
"I've been asked for a long time, since I was very young, to write something," he says. "I thought it was crazy to be asked to write something at 24. I thought I'd better do something first.
"I did consider it in my 30s and wrote a little bit, and then thought, 'I'm not far enough away from any of this to really get a clear view, and I don't think anybody cares anyway.' "
Leap forward several decades and there is no shortage of material for Costello, who began life as Declan MacManus, to draw on. From his upbringing in London and Liverpool to carving a career in the heat of the London punk scene, through to working with a wealth of music legends from Johnny Cash to Burt Bacharach and Emmylou Harris to Tony Bennett, Costello has a fascinating history and credentials few others can match as a contemporary songwriter. He'd also give Bob Dylan a run for his money as one of the hardest working men in show business.
The book is not a chronological history of his career, although it touches on all points of his life. "The reason I told the story the way I did," he says, "is that it's not really about the things I've done, because you can read about those on Wikipedia. It's about how I felt about what I did and where that came from, which inevitably brings into play my first encounters with music, which leads to my parents' background in music in different ways."
He admits that he's "not very big on nostalgia. I know that's an odd thing to say when you write something that resembles a memoir. I don't long to go back to any period in my life. I'm quite happy to be where I am now. I'm aware of what I've done and I can see there are songs that have stuck with me. You have to be grateful, if not self-satisfied, that people still want to hear them."
There are great vivid passages in the book where Costello delves into scenes of tour buses, of frantic shows, of moments in his life that influenced classic songs, of recording studios and of meetings with many famous people, often in an amusing way. His writing is as sharp as it is in the lyrics that have been such an integral part of his work. Interspersed with these reminiscences is an often moving family history stretching back generations through his father Ross MacManus's Irish roots.
MacManus, a professional singer, had a profound influence on Costello's early development. Costello had his first music experiences hanging around in the stalls in the 1960s as his father sang the hits of the day with the Joe Loss Orchestra in dance halls across Britain. By bringing records home in order to learn the songs, MacManus gave his son his first taste of pop music.
"He was getting all those records from the charts," Costello says, "which was a great boon to me, getting all those singles every couple of weeks, which I never could have afforded. My dad was the most versatile of the three singers in the band so the more anomalous songs that you wouldn't have expected a big band like the Joe Loss Orchestra to even be covering were handed to my father and not the other two singers, who were good at doing the Engelbert (Humperdinck) songs or whatever. My dad got to sing the Four Tops and the Who and Bob Dylan.
"Then after he left the band he remained curious. He listened to a lot of contemporary music. He used that later when he was playing working men's clubs in Wakefield and Middlesbrough. It must have been a shock to a lot of those people expecting Glenn Miller or something like Delilah. Here he is singing 'Simple Song of Freedom' by Tim Hardin, because that's what he believed in."
The influence of his father, who died, aged 84, in 2011, is never far away in Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. The singer's appreciation and knowledge of a wide range of styles, many of which he has tapped into with his music, can be traced back to those dance halls.
There is a wealth of anecdotal material from his recording career, the making of albums My Aim is True (1977) all the way through to National Ransom (2010), but some of the most vivid writing comes from the road with his band the Attractions, which conquered Europe, the US and Australia during the 1970s and 80s. He didn't have to consult diaries or do much research on that, he says, "because I have a pretty good memory."
"I had to check the sequence of some things," he adds, "but the memories of certain rooms are very vivid to me. I didn't write a show-business memoir. There is no mention of record company people or contracts or my current managers, because there is nothing dramatic to say about them.
"It's not that I don't appreciate their work or that of many of the people at record companies, or producers. I haven't gone into that in any great detail because it's on record somewhere, on sleeve notes to my reissued records, for example."
Nor does Costello dwell too much on relationships. His first wife, Mary Burgoyne, is mentioned, but his second, Pogues bassist Cait O'Riordan, is referred to only fleetingly. There are precious few tales of on-the-road dalliances either. He is more forthcoming about his romance with Krall.
"The book is very heavily edited, by me," Costello says. "It's very selective in where the focus is. There are a lot of references to Mary. She doesn't deserve for every little detail of her life to be pored over the way maybe a biographer who has no emotional relationship to the person might do. I chose to put the emphasis where I think it belonged in relation to being in love with her as a teenager and marrying her and then destroying the thing that we had. It gave me material for a lot of my songs, which is kind of a sad story, but it doesn't need to be told in any more detail. It's not going to make it stronger.
"As to the second absence," he says of O'Riordan, "that's all there is to say. There is nothing between us and there is nothing to relate. If you wanted the book to be all-inclusive it would be 1200 pages long."
Among the most entertaining reminiscences are those of his and the Attractions' rise during the early part of their career, when the hits — "Pump It Up," "Watching the Detectives," "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" and "Accidents Will Happen" — were coming thick and fast.
"The references I made to the trivia of show business, like miming on television and appearing at idiotic galas … some people with no imagination thought I was doing that to mention a lot of names," he says. "That's satire. When you've gone through seven years of your career trying to look intense on the BBC, you can't possibly take it too seriously."
Costello is unsure about his next move, as a writer and as a musician, but he's hopeful of returning to Australia soon with his solo Detour show, which was well reviewed in Britain last year. Being on the road has been a constant for Costello and it's the heavy touring back in the day, he says, that has kept him at the top of his game for so long.
"The night-to-night work we did then is the reason I'm here now," he says, "not because of any of those TV shows. Not because of the hits. Not because of radio play. Not because of what any A&R (artists and repertoire) man ever said. They didn't make my reputation. Reviews didn't make my reputation. Playing every night made my reputation; playing good songs with a good band.
"If we played for 45 minutes, people remembered it. If we played for three hours, people remembered it.
"We weren't always great but we were working every night; that's what we did and that's what I learned from my dad."
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