Showing posts with label Elvis Costello. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elvis Costello. Show all posts

Saturday, April 30, 2016

Elvis Costello / This much I know / ‘Believing you’re being watched or overheard is no longer a paranoid fantasy’

Elvis Costello
Photograph by Mary McCartney
Elvis Costello: ‘Believing you’re being watched or overheard is no longer a paranoid fantasy’

 ‘Growing up, I heard music a little differently from most people’: Elvis Costello
This much I know
The musician, 61, on social media, being British, and his love of curling

Killian Fox
Saturday 30 April 2016 14.00 BST

I don’t have any horror stories about the Catholic church. The nuns who taught me until I was 11 were very kind. I know plenty of people who had traumatic experiences, and I’d disagree with a lot of positions the church takes, but I’m glad that I went to that kind of school. I don’t think I suffered from it. It taught me to read; I can tie my shoelaces.
Growing up, I heard music a little differently from most people. If your parents are in music, it’s obviously going to affect you. For one thing, it made the boundaries that people erect between different styles of music invisible. My father [a singer and trumpet player] was obliged to play all sorts: it was his job to learn the songs of the day.
My wife [jazz musician Diana Krall] and I travel a lot. Juggling, spinning plates – all of those vaudevillian analogies apply. It’s a very fortunate job that we do, but sometimes it stretches our longing to be all together as a family [the couple have nine-year-old twin sons].
When you’re young and foolish, you tend to pursue the same mischief in every town. But as I got older I made better use of the opportunity to travel. Now, on tour, I see more of the daylight hours. My wife was just on a seven-week tour of Australia and Asia and I took our two sons out to see her. I’d never been to Australia before with nothing to do but just be in Australia.
Believing you’re being watched or overheard is no longer a paranoid fantasy. It’s actually the truth. We’d like to think it’s for our safety, but it isn’t always. There are other reasons why information is being gathered about us, whether by gangsters or by governments.
I try to stay off social media. When Taylor Swift stood up to Apple over royalties last year, I commented on it on Twitter. The next day what I said was quoted in the New York Times. I was shocked. I thought: I’d better not do that anymore. You could get into so much mischief.

I never had big ambitions for my career – things just sort of happened. I started out playing in pubs and clubs. Next thing you know, it was the Hammersmith Palais, where I’d watched my dad play as a little boy. Then I find myself at the Royal Albert Hall. I never imagined any of it.
You can’t right the wrongs you did in the past by living differently today, but you can learn from your mistakes. That would be the clearest thing that having children has taught me. When you’re 23 or 24 you think you’re immortal – and that can make you very selfish.

I love curling. I’m fascinated by it. People trying to propel a heavy stone across ice armed only with sweeping brushes – it’s poetry in motion. I’ve no idea how you win the game, but when it’s on TV I can’t stop watching.
I try to plot a different route through my songbook [on stage] from night to night. It keeps things alive.
I’m not particularly nationalistic. I find the closed-mindedness of xenophobes bewildering as well as upsetting. If asked I’ll say I’m British, because that’s what my passport says, but I’m not sure what I actually feel. I just feel like a human – on a good day.



THIS MUCH I KNOW

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Monday, December 7, 2015

The best celebrity memoirs of 2015




The best celebrity memoirs of 2015


From Tom Jones to the green grass of Old Trafford, via Sue Perkins’s diaristic mash-up and Steve Coogan’s entertaining confessional
Viv Groskop
Sunday 6 December 2015 10.00 GMT
R
eports of the death of the celebrity memoir are much exaggerated, if this year’s giant crop is anything to go by. The new trend? The hybrid memoir that is actually a manifesto, a diary, a collection of essays or even a long list of life tips. The best example of this genre is Spectacles by Sue Perkins (Michael Joseph). She takes the quirky route with transcripts of dialogue, short diary entries, a FAQs section and virtually every paragraph punctuated by the spectacles logo. It has a narrative but it doesn’t shove it in your face. She’s honest, real and a decent writer.



Particularly enjoyable is her characterisation of BBC1’s failed game show, Don’t Scare the Hare (for which she provided the voiceover), as a “cluster-fuck omniflop”. And how satisfying to read about just how long it took the producers of Bake Off to realise that “watching nice people make nice cakes is all you need”.


From the more classic autobiographies, it’s worth picking up Steve Coogan’s Easily Distracted (Century) for the 1970s pudding-bowl haircut pictures of him alone. This is a simple, readable confessional – “I was happy with Anna, but had endless flings”; “I went to a party, took two tabs and went bonkers” – interspersed with Coogan’s trademark caustic asides and loads of telly and performance insight. Coke, drink, Spitting Image, Alan Partridge... If you love Coogan, this delivers.
With large print and some beautiful vintage photographs (Elvis and Tom!), Tom Jones: Over the Top and Back (Michael Joseph) is – honestly – a magical journey from Pontypridd to Vegas. Meticulously researched and evocative of a whole era, this is an excellent piece of journalism. (Kudos to the biographer-ghostwriter Giles Smith, who is credited in the acknowledgements for “helping with the words”. Jones’s voice is perfectly captured here.)


For serious music fans? It has to be Elvis Costello’s Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink (Viking). Utterly definitive and clearly, painstakingly penned by Costello himself, who doesn’t want to miss a detail. Patti Smith’s M Train(Bloomsbury) is more novelistic and lyrical (“September was ending and already cold”), complete with a collection of pre-Instagram, personal black and white arty shots. She calls it “a roadmap to my life”. It’s classy, elegant and addictive.
Something completely different? Well, this reviewer is not the target audience for Leading by Alex Ferguson with Michael Moritz (Hodder & Stoughton). However, it’s a gripping enough business/motivational read, in the mould of Alastair Campbell’s Winners and How They Succeed (in which Ferguson was a case study): “Nobody should not look at football for lessons about the way to fire people”; “I have yet to encounter anyone who has achieved massive success without closing themselves off from the demands of others or forgoing pastimes.” The ideal read for football fans who love self-help books. (Is that a large demographic?)


A personal favourite? Dedicated to his Jack Russell, Misty, Brian Blessed’s memoir, Absolute Pandemonium (Macmillan), is exactly what you would expect only louder, taller, bigger and more so. By taller I mean both the tales and the general vibe. “Now, there was a live donkey in this particular pantomime, but because it wasn’t going to be present until the dress rehearsal, somebody had to shout ‘Eee-orr!’ every time it was mentioned in the script... When the first cue arrived, somebody duly shouted ‘Eee-orr!’, and, as they did, [Peter] O’Toole woke up with a jolt. He looked at me, crossed his eyes and said, ‘This is art, love!’” With walk-on parts for Katharine Hepburn, Patrick Stewart, Laurence Olivier, Oliver Reed and Harold Pinter, it’s the quintessential luvvie memoir, pleasingly bonkers and bloody entertaining.



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