Wall Street Journal, October 16, 2015

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Sneaky feelings

Elvis Costello / Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

D.J. Taylor

Drunken early interviews tagged Elvis Costello with the image of a sneering misanthrope.

In his early days as an ornament of popular music's late 1970s New Wave, Elvis Costello had a reputation that went way beyond the rock 'n' roll artist's time-honored rambunctiousness. His first records sounded as if their singer had been spitting tacks into the mixing board between takes. There were abusive run-ins with the stars of a previous era — these included Stephen Stills, whom Mr. Costello, in a nod to his cocaine use, invited to "fuck off, steel nose" — and legendarily abrasive interviews. A celebrated sit-down with the New Musical Express's Nick Kent in 1977, in which Mr. Costello volunteered that "the only two things that matter to me ... are guilt and revenge." involved the subject producing an outsize bent steel nail from his jacket pocket, the assumption being, as Mr. Kent put it, that this "was his chosen weapon of defense." Here in his early 20s, Mr. Costello (born in 1954) was clearly not a man to be trifled with.

Time, not to mention appearances at the White House and invitations to collaborate with Paul McCartney, has a tendency to soften this kind of asperity. And while there are occasional swipes at former sidekicks in his new memoir — one-time bass player Bruce Thomas is described as "pretty funny once" — it's no surprise to discover that a fair part of this long and digressive book is concerned with, as it were, setting the record straight.


It turns out that the young Elvis's natural manner was criminally misunderstood, and that passport-requesting airport officials diagnosed "attitude" where none existed. The New Musical Express interview was apparently a grotesque misreading of his character, and the image-defining "Horn-Rims From Hell" moniker thereby bestowed on him the result of too many pre-interrogation Pernods.

Even that famous Saturday Night Live performance from 1977, when Mr. Costello gave great offense to his hosts by ostentatiously departing from the script, has its retrospective rationale. Told to perform "Less Than Zero" to an American audience who knew nothing of its target (the aged British fascist Oswald Mosley), our man opted instead for "Radio, Radio," with its immortal line about the medium being in the hands of "such a lot of fools trying to anesthetize the way that you feel." The spectacle of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as faux-sanitation men clearing out his dressing room raised not a snicker on Mr. Costello's part, for the star had no idea who they were.

You sense that Mr. Costello is intrigued and at times troubled by these early attempts at persona-brokering, while consoling himself with the fact that, in a musical landscape where "attitude" had become supremely important, they were, at the very least, highly convenient. He remarks of the Pernod-fueled interview debacle that "By accident or through collusion, this conversation effectively invented a character that I would inhabit for the next few years." Certainly, the late-'70s British media were intrigued by the composer of "Oliver's Army," his defiantly un-hip pose symbolized by drain-pipe trousers and ever-present eyewear. (A music magazine once offered a caricature in which Mr. Costello removed his spectacles to reveal only sunken holes.)


As a series of sidelights on a career, rather than an examination of a personal myth, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink has one overriding point of interest. This is the revelation that, like many another racket-merchant from the days of the Carter presidency, Mr. Costello's roots could be found in very different kinds of music from the nervy, snarl-heavy adrenaline rush with which he made his name. His father — the patronym was MacManus and Elvis's baptismal name Declan — was himself a full-time musician who not only sang Tin Pan Alley tunes with the Joe Loss Orchestra but also recorded anonymous covers of the hits of the moment. The son's early forays were into folk music and the West Coast stylings of Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. This grounding was important in professional terms, for it gave him a perspective that, once New Wave had burned itself out, enabled him to expand his repertoire into country and western (see his Nashville homage, Almost Blue) and classical collaborations with the Brodsky Quartet.

If Mr. Costello is always illuminating on the songwriter's craft — note some sagacious remarks on longtime collaborator Burt Bacharach and Paul McCartney's habit of letting the melody line lead the words rather than the other way around — then there are other roots on display here, in particularly a tough-sounding childhood in Liverpool and West London dominated by a Catholic education, a friend's traumatic early death, parental break-up and, once he was married to his childhood sweetheart (there have since been two more Mrs. Costellos, the current spouse being Diana Krall), the struggle to balance music-making with the demands of hearth and home. If not quite as indifferent to the British "Establishment" as his near-exact contemporary, the Sex Pistols' John Lydon, then our Grammy-winning sexagenarian seems much more at ease in the U.S., and certainly keener to play for President Obama than, say, a member of the British royal family.

Fans of the linear rock memoir will possibly be irked by this book's shaky chronological grip and its author's tendency to ramble. On the other hand, Mr. Costello's maternal grandfather, James Ablett, who spent four years as a German POW and took to his bed on each of the two days his daughters married Catholics, and his father, Pat, who at one point started a rock band called Hand-Embroidered Lemon-Peel as a way "to seduce hippy girls," probably each deserve their own memoir.

There is much to be said in Mr. Costello's favor: He clearly wrote the book himself; the ego-burnishing that undermines most exercises in pop career retrieval is of no interest to him; his memories of Beatle-haunted Merseyside and the instrument shops with their Rickenbacker guitars marked "formerly owned by George Harrison" are a treat. But, really, however much his famous orneriness may have been nudged into being by journalists, I could have done with more of the revenge and guilt.

Mr. Taylor has written biographies of George Orwell and William Thackeray. His latest book is a collection of short stories, Wrote for Luck.



Tags: Unfaithful Music & Disappearing InkNew Musical ExpressNick KentSaturday Night LiveRadio, RadioOswald MosleyLess Than ZeroPaul McCartneyBruce ThomasOliver's ArmyTin Pan AlleyRoss MacManusDeclan MacManusJoe Loss OrchestraPat MacManusStephen StillsCrosby, Stills, Nash & YoungJoni MitchellBrodsky QuartetAlmost BlueBurt BacharachDiana KrallSex PistolsJohn LydonGrammy AwardsThe BeatlesMerseysideGeorge HarrisonSneaky Feelings

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Wall Street Journal, October 16, 2015


D.J. Taylor reviews Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink.

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