Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink: Memoir - Softcover

Costello, Elvis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241003474 ISBN 13: 9780241003473

Publisher: Viking, 2015

Synopsis

Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink is the long-awaited memoir from Elvis Costello, one of rock and roll's most iconic stars.

Born Declan Patrick MacManus, Elvis Costello was raised in London and Liverpool, grandson of a trumpet player on the White Star Line and son of a jazz musician who became a successful radio dance band vocalist. Costello went into the family business and had taken the popular music world by storm before he was twenty-four.

Costello continues to add to one of the most intriguing and extensive songbooks of the day. His performances have taken him from a cardboard guitar in his front room to fronting a rock and roll band on your television screen and performing in the world's greatest concert halls in a wild variety of company. Unfaithful Music describes how Costello's career has somehow endured for almost four decades through a combination of dumb luck and animal cunning, even managing the occasional absurd episode of pop stardom.

The memoir, written entirely by Costello himself, offers his unique view of his unlikely and sometimes comical rise to international success, with diversions through the previously undocumented emotional foundations of some of his best known songs and the hits of tomorrow. The book contains many stories and observations about his renowned co-writers and co-conspirators, though Costello also pauses along the way for considerations on the less appealing side of infamy.

Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink is destined to be a classic, idiosyncratic memoir of a singular man.

About this title

Review:

The book is fantastic - maybe the best about music by a musician that I've read....The stuff about the collaborations alone - McCartney, Burt Bacharach, Allen Toussaint, the Roots, the Brodsky Quartet - is riveting (Nick Hornby)

Better written than your average rock memoir ... Costello is one the greatest writers of the 20th Century. It's funny, observant and clear of purpose (Times)

By turns lachrymose, self-flagellating and impassioned. Unsurprisingly, it is beautifully written. It is also often extraordinarily moving. (Dan Cairns Sunday Times)

Streaked with some of the best writing - funny, strange, spiteful, anguished - we've ever had from an important musician ... dark gems twinkle here in abundance. (New York Times)

[Unfaithful Music] is truly remarkable in the way it presents a riveting, honest portrait of the author and the many A-listers he's tread the boards with, while ricocheting through the years at an almost breathless pace ... even the most ardent Costello fan will come away having learned more about the man than any of us ever dared hope to discover (Jeff Slate Rolling Stone)

Long one of music's wittiest, smartest, and most perceptive lyricists, Costello has done his legacy proud with his new book, which, thankfully, goes far beyond his angry-young-man days, most movingly in its frequent reminiscences about the relationship between the singer and his musician father (New York Magazine)

In a world littered with uneven (and largely ghosted) celebrity memoirs, "Disappearing Ink" is a beautifully written revelation ... The book is not just for fans. "Unfaithful Music" is a lyrical tale that stretches across generations, geography and a century of popular song." (Washington Post)

Costello ultimately emerges as a clever, compassionate, self-aware man, brave enough to acknowledge his faults and fortunate enough to have overcome the worst of them (Sunday Telegraph)

Written elliptically, episodically beautiful ... this man's knowledge is breath-taking (Observer)

Every page exudes his deep love and knowledge of modern music (Guardian)

About the Author:

Elvis Costello has written and recorded legendary albums including My Aim Is True, This Year's Model, Armed Forces, Imperial Bedroom, and King of America, and songs including "Alison", "Watching the Detectives", "Oliver's Army", "Almost Blue", "Shipbuilding", "I Want You", "Tramp the Dirt Down" and "Jimmie Standing In The Rain". He has collaborated with The Attractions, Paul McCartney, the Brodsky Quartet, Burt Bacharach, Allen Toussaint and The Roots, and has written songs for George Jones, Chet Baker, Solomon Burke and Johnny Cash. He has enjoyed the acclaim and the infamy that comes with a forty-year career in show business.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0241003474
• ISBN 13: 9780241003473
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 688