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Twenty years ago, a BBC executive sidled up to Elvis Costello and told him he could have had more hit songs if he'd "taken out all the sevenths and minor chords" — the implication being that his work was too convoluted for mass appeal. The same dubious accusation could be levelled at this memoir, which sacrifices streamlined immediacy for something more interesting yet undeniably unwieldy.
Running to almost 700 pages, the wildly eccentric structure of Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink mirrors Costello's defiantly non-linear career. As a musician he has ping-ponged from punk to ballet, country to classical; as an author, his instincts are similarly scattershot. To paraphrase Eric Morecambe — one of the few celebrities of the past century denied a cameo here — Costello plays all the right notes, just not always in the right order.
At the heart of a dense book lies a more concise family memoir, dominated by Costello's beloved but wayward father, Ross MacManus, a jobbing musician who died, aged 84, in 2011. It opens in 1961 with the seven-year-old Declan (Costello's real name), lemonade in hand, watching his dad at "his office," otherwise known as London's Hammersmith Palais.
Even now, Costello defines himself as a working musician who entered the family business. In this context, the Pop Star Years' of the late Seventies, when he and his band the Attractions scored hits with "Watching The Detectives" and "Oliver's Army," are portrayed as a blurred blip, frantic but not much fun. Fuelled by gin, cocaine and "little blue pills," Costello proceeds to "mess up my life so I could write stupid little songs about it." Of his abrasively confrontational demeanour in those days, he writes, "it was briefly entertaining to be such a b******," even if much of the bile in his early songs was directed at himself.
He does not shirk his failings. The numerous infidelities that destroyed his first marriage to his childhood sweetheart Mary mirrored his father's, who left the family home when Costello was seven. He recounts the fallout unflinchingly, with lashings of remorse. In contrast, the unhappiness of his subsequent 17-year relationship with former Pogues bassist Cait O'Riordan is covered briefly, in staccato prose. "She could be completely insufferable," he writes. "I tolerated it all much longer than I should have." Reflecting on a notorious incident in 1979 when he described Ray Charles as a "blind, ignorant n***** " during a drunken brawl in Ohio, he weighs up the extent of his culpability before admitting "There are no excuses."
There is plenty of intimate detail about his writing process, from penning "Pump It Up" in a frenzy on a Newcastle fire escape to more considered collaborations with the master of melody, Burt Bacharach, and evocative recollections of recording his best albums.
Costello has been married since 2003 to jazz pianist Diana Krall, with whom he has twin sons, and the latter parts of the book are spun around a series of starry, slightly self-satisfied encounters. The cast list is meaty — Presidents Obama and Clinton, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash — but the anecdotes are largely undernourished. We learn that McCartney keeps Scotch and Coke in a drawer in the back of his Mercedes. When Van Morrison summons Costello to a west London cafe for eggs at seven in the morning, the conversation is so terse and edgy it might have come from a play by Harold Pinter'. A shy Bruce Springsteen laughs "like steam escaping from a radiator." Woven between such trifles are heartfelt lines for his three sons and a very moving account of his father's final descent into dementia.
At its best the writing is as good as you would expect from such an accomplished lyricist. The tone is wise, warm and often rueful, befitting a 61-year-old elder statesman, and the story a compelling one, even if it is told with the zig-zagging logic of a late-night bar-room chinwag. As Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink jumps between stark confession, oblique suggestion, pithy phrase-making and several meandering dead-ends, those familiar with Costello's musical manoeuvres through the decades will feel entirely at home.
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