“It was obviously a horrifying thing to find words coming out of your mouth that are the exact opposite of what you believe,” he says, putting it down to “youthful arrogance” and the snotty, punkish desire to get a rise out of Stills and other musicians from an older generation.
Article content It was horrifying to find words coming out of your mouth that are the opposite of what you believe This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. He was, he writes, trying “to provoke a bar fight and finally put the lights out.”
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Life, Costello writes, “is full of wrong choices and inconvenient, abandoned responsibilities.” For a while, he seemed determined to push himself into madness: in a drunken encounter in 1979 with Stephen Stills and his band, he appears to have referred to both Ray Charles and James Brown – musicians he held in high regard – using racial slurs.
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Costello does steer away from kiss-and-tell details: “You don’t have the right to drag people out of the shadows into full view because you want to talk about what went on.” But he does, rather decorously, describe various infidelities during his first marriage, among them a spur-of-the-moment assignation with a “quite attractive” American cabdriver who inspired the song “Accidents Will Happen,” and a longer, well-publicized fling with the serial rockstar-dating Bebe Buell. “The uncomfortable thing to accept is that some of the mistakes I made certainly generated songs that people like,” he says. Eventually, he was, with complicated consequences. The book is beguilingly written, as befits a man who grew up reading his father’s collection of Irish plays – there may be a connection with the likes of Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan, he says, “deep down in the very pale green blood I have.” The narrative strays from a straight chronology, as Costello, born Declan MacManus in London, 1954, intertwines his parents’ and grandparents’ stories with his own, and inserts poetic fictional vignettes to capture the mood of a certain scene when, he says, it didn’t matter who was involved “It was about the dance that was going on.”Īs he writes, Costello excavates the inspiration for various songs and lyrics – most famously “Alison,” in which he imagined the life of a “beautiful girl glimpsed by chance” – but also drew out his own fear that he would be unfaithful to “the love that I had longed for,” in this case, his first wife, Mary. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.
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