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At the 1996 Grammy awards, Elvis Costello and his occasional collaborator, Burt Bacharach, were ushered into a backstage holding pen just as Quincy Jones and Liza Minnelli were leaving. A flurry of kisses passed between Bacharach, "Q" and "Z," while Costello "felt like a spy who had infiltrated Show Business School." By this point in his bulky, circuitous autobiography, however, it feels as though the singer-songwriter is being disingenuous. Early in his career he played the bilious, bug-eyed outsider, spitting out the vinegary words to "Accidents Will Happen" through the gap in his teeth, but these pages provide substantial evidence of his astonishingly effective infiltration of the rock 'n' roll establishment. This is a man who was invited to Bob Dylan's impromptu pool party in Berlin in 1978, and who regularly exchanged gruff greetings with Van Morrison on his morning constitutional.
For all Costello's fire and spite, it is clear why he travelled well with an older generation. While punk contemporaries adopted "that tedious pose that there was no past," Costello was too steeped in the old ways to accept Year Zero. Born in Paddington in 1954, he was the grandson of a cruise-ship trumpeter. His mother worked in music shops and his father, Ross MacManus, sang with the Joe Loss Orchestra. In the first chapter, a small Costello (then Declan MacManus) sits upstairs at the Hammersmith Palais, eating crisps and watching his dad perform. It is a west London version of the vaudeville creation myth, where the baby crawls from the wings on to the stage and never leaves.
As this memoir's heft indicates, Costello is keen to honour the past, sometimes excessively so, combing the 1800s for ancestral stories. None of his generation would have been seen dead on This Is Your Life in 1980, but Costello hid until Eamonn Andrews called him out to salute his father's boss. His odd mixture of reverence and rebellion is echoed in the book's non-chronological structure: he wants to record every project and collaboration for posterity, yet he is too contrary for a simple narrative arc. Warding off uncommitted readers is one thing, but he also makes it hard to trace his development.
It is forgivable, however, when his witty, word-playing voice transmits loud and clear. Emotional and domestic detail is lacking (Costello's first wife and child, left at home while he hits the road and its temptations, are oddly disembodied), but there are smart snapshots of vanished worlds, including his early day-job operating house-sized computers at Midland Bank and Elizabeth Arden. The descriptions of his pop-star pomp (drink, pills, a liaison with a female taxi-driver in Tucson) are rock memoir staples, but Costello gives them a distorted queasiness. He also addresses the notorious incident in 1979 when, in a drunken row with Stephen Stills, Costello apparently used racist language when referring to Ray Charles and James Brown. His horror at what happened is undeniable: "But never mind excuses, there are no excuses."
As a child, making his first confession, Costello announced he was guilty of adultery and coveting his neighbour's ox. Now 61, he no longer needs such invention: all his sins and virtues are displayed in this stylish, astute and occasionally frustrating book. "The trouble with finishing any autobiographical tome like this is that for every mildly diverting tale or precious memory, you eventually arrived at this thought: I don't much care for the subject," he writes. This time, however — not for the first time — he bucks the trend.
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