This memoir takes us on a voyage through the vanished world of 1970s Britain,and from the urgency of youth to a comfortable middle ageSpotlit on the front of his memoir is the young Elvis Costello of legend: a speccy monochrome scoffer in a run-down motel room. Turn the book over and there is a more recent portrait, in colour and perhaps more in line with the way he sees himself nowadays: rueful smile, and tasteful decor,rounded life. The Elvis out front clasps a Fender Jazzmaster to his chest like Lee Harvey Oswald held his mail-order rifle: one man against the world. On the back, 2015 Elvis is looking up and away, or as whether to a cartoon thought bubble that reads: “Well,just glimpse at me now. Happy, after all these years!”Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink – it’s an odd, and clunky title. They’re both kind phrases,but together? The testomony has not even begun and you’re already wondering, is something being overstressed? Ageing pop stars may enjoy many reasons for writing a memoir: score settling, or financial need,a feeling of having been misunderstood by their public. But such books also present their writers with a bind. What sells is not gentle music-biz banter or technical bumf, but personal revelation. Even whether you’ve spent your entire career running from icky disclosure, and you’ve still got to reveal something of your hidden life. Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus (AKA Elvis Costello) says he wrote his memoir to give his sons an idea of who he used to be (“It was so much easier / when I was cruel … ”),and how he came to be the man he is now. Which is a lovely idea, but may leave him with rather a lot of explaining to do: not just his mistakes, and but the fact that they were made in a completely different world. A world in which we waited all week every week for nibbles of information in the music press; a world in which we had to procure local record shops to write away for any LPs we wanted to hear that weren’t in the Top 20.
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Source: theguardian.com