In his memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, Elvis Costello deviates from the rock star bio template, and resists recounting history in a straight line. Instead, Costello works circuitously about subjects near and dear, telling stories in bits and pieces with plenty of interludes, quips, and deviations thrown in. At points he works in circles around the Beatles, who make more appearances than anyone save for Costello’s father, orbiting handed down singles to autograph books to buying their first EP to recording Imperial Bedroom with George Martin to singing backup with Paul McCartney in his later years. Except not in that order.
In due time he does the same with the Nazis, with his love life and with his musical influences. One of the more remarkable tales is the epic journey of how "Shipbuilding" became a song, from the story of his father’s home being bombed in WWII to the death of Chet Baker, who played trumpet on his recording of the track, with multiple digressions in between.
Costello does create a structure around pockets of his professional life, stringing you along on the unending tours behind his first three albums, as well as the surplus of pills and alcohol that drove it, but the unveiling (at last!) of his true references while writing those songs is what will capture the attention of his devoted fans. When it comes to his most notorious moment, the drunken and infamous evening he dropped the n-bomb and all that came after it, Costello recounts nothing in detail, claiming a memory destroyed by drink that night. Instead he takes a page out of the memoir of Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s early girlfriend (Dylan being the second most mentioned musician in this book), and gives the reader raw emotion, trying not to be defensive and failing but seeming all the more human for it, as though assuming you’re already familiar with the scene enough to not need any setting of it.
The puns, insults, and metaphors present in his work as a lyricist don’t go missing in the memoir. Lines like, "His girlfriend, Toots, looked like a bag of old clothes that had been abandoned when the Shangri-Las left town and seemed to take offense at the slightest thing," ring out as true Costello-isms. They’re punctuated with sardonic and self-aware truths like, "You don’t really need musical notation for rock and roll. I always said it was all hand signals and threats, I just didn’t specify who was doing the threatening." Costello presents himself, like always, as a man who is aware he’s one of the smartest people in the room but entirely unwilling to be serious about it. One thing he is not, perhaps to the chagrin of his young self, is brief. At nearly 700 pages, he touches on highlights from every one of the five decades of his career and the array of influences that shaped it. It’s fun to read him being a fan, almost as much fun as it is to read him taking the piss.