11 Things We Learned About Elvis Costello at his #BNAuthorEvent

Elvis Costello visited the Union Square Barnes & Noble in Manhattan to talk about his new memoir, Unfaithful Music. He shared some secret stuff he didn’t include in it! Read on!
Unfaithful Music is not a typical memoir. “The story is really the way in which three generations of my family’s experience of music is intertwined, and therefore, if you’re looking for a book that begins, ‘I was born…’ this isn’t it.”
He wasn’t born into music. The passage he read described the career he had before he went into music. “You will perhaps realize, when I finish reading, why I am so grateful to be in rock-and-roll.”
“On my third day on the job, I was handed a silver whistle and told to stand outside the bank until the money was delivered. 
‘What’s this for?’ I asked the assistant manager, a seedy looking gent who appeared to have had all the blood drained out of his body in an earlier fight.
‘Just in case,’ he said.
‘Just in case of what?’ I inquired.
‘Just in case of a robbery.’
I must have looked dumbstruck because he widened his red-rimmed eyes, lowered his brow to indicate the object in my outstretched palm and added, ‘You blow it.’ I thought about my job prospects and the likelihood that any hood intent on swiping the cash would probably shoot the idiot with the whistle first and ask questions afterwards.”
He considers Randy Newman a huge influence. “I hoarded his records in the dark when I was twenty, a bit younger than that, certainly younger than that, learned a lot of things. Tried to transpose some things I heard in his piano playing to the guitar. I was inevitably at a disadvantage, having one hand fretting the notes, so it was doomed to failure.”
He sides with The Spice Girls, and that’s why he appeared in Spice World. “I was living in England when they became a sensation, and I was actually being given an award by the PRS, which is the Performing Rights Society. This was a Long Service medal; they were giving me that to get rid of me, really. Said, ‘You’ve had your lot. You’re off now.’ And that year, the Spice Girls were a sensation. They won an award for the most sales in that year. And these old songwriters there booed them because they didn’t think that they had anything to do with the records. And of course, many people who have sung hit tunes, have nothing to do with those records. And I just took offense at that, so when they asked me to be in Spice World, I was on their side.”
He doesn’t really think in genres. “I never really thought of genres as a borderline, if that’s the word for different styles of music. It all became entwined through my experience. It would take a long time—it would take me 670 pages—to describe it. I honestly didn’t understand the boundaries; it was part of my upbringing in a house full of music. Lots of different music was enjoyed. I didn’t, like a lot of my friends, have the situation where the music belonged to me and different music belonged to the parental generation. We liked the same music, lots of it anyway, and as a consequence, I just didn’t see the boundaries until I was told forcefully when I started out. And now I recognize that you need to find your way around—well, first of all, you need to find the record shop that has records in it, and then you need to find your way around the racks. So there needs to be some identifier. I haven’t really had a secret list in my back pocket, like, ‘Maybe I’ll do a polka record next.’ It’s never been like that. It’s just that one thing has led to another. I‘m very lucky to have learnt the things because I didn’t go to college. In fact, I barely went to school. I can’t write.”
He’s collaborated with tons of big musicians, but he doesn’t have a favorite. “Everything that you do in music is to some degree collaborative. The more notable collaborations were fairly head-spinning. If Paul McCartney rings up, or somebody rings up on his behalf, and says, ‘Would you like to write songs?’ It’s very extraordinary. But as I described in this book, what would be the point of showing up in your short pants and your fan club card in your top pocket. He wants you to turn up the songwriter that I was at that time. So that’s really it, so I won’t separate them out, because all of those experiences have been—I could not have anticipated them, and I was grateful of them, and later on I reflected back that perhaps they had been some belated education.”
He waited years to write this book because he wanted to get it right. “I was asked to write a biography when I was 24, which was so absurd, because I hadn’t done anything. They want to put your face on a book and sell it when they’re first given the chance. So I put that away as being a ridiculous proposition. And when I was in my 30s, I was asked again, and I did write a few chapters. But I wasn’t satisfied with what I was writing and I wasn’t ready. Even after I undertook to write this book, I had to start a few times until I really found the way I wanted to speak about the things that are connected up in this book. I said, I knew right away, I didn’t want to write, ‘I did this, I did this. The laughter and the tears, my drug hell, found God.’ There are some very sad things, some of them quite private, some of them that happen to all of us—the loss of family members and other things which are just recognizing that you’re going down the wrong path and there is no, I’m not planning on dying after the book comes out.”

“The first time I played a show here in New York, The Attractions and I tried to get into a yellow cab to try to go to the Bottom Line, outside of our hotel, and the guy said, “You can come in here buddy, I’ve got my 8-track recorder.” And he had an 8-track linked up the stereo system, and he had a little taped notice that said, “Beatle music played on request.” And he played his Beatle songs all the way to the show, and that was our introduction to America. That was pretty great; I thought every cab had that.”

His father sang in a dance band, that “sort of outlived its style.” “They played the hit parade tunes, and every week he would bring a stack of records home to learn. As a consequence, I would be in my bedroom just playing my games, and I would hear his voice in the front room, singing songs over and over, and I paid no attention to them until about 1963, when I heard him singing “Please Please Me.” That was the first song that I remember him singing. I have the feeling of hearing his voice and he had a loud voice like mine, and there was a glass pane in the door to the room and it would vibrate, and I would know whether or not he was working, and I would know not to go in and disturb him. But on this occasion I did go in, and I sat down and watched him rehearsing. He had a stack of sheet music and he had a record player with an arrangement of elastic bands that would trick the record into playing repeatedly, and he would play it over and over until he had memorized it, and on this occasion, he took it off and went to learn the next song in his pile, and I asked him for the record. And he gave it to me. I don’t know who he’d given the other records to, but from then on, I had access to many more records.”
He doesn’t think music innovation is getting better, necessarily. “Physical records are sort of precious to me. That was another form of education. Each new innovation, we’ve been told they sound better or they’re unbreakable, or whatever. My mother used to sell records, and it was her job to demonstrate the seven-inch “unbreakable” records. Well, you can imagine how that went. None of these things are invulnerable to time, and now we know that CDs don’t sound better than vinyl and MP3s sound worse than everything, but you can carry your entire library of music around in your pocket, so we suffer inferior sound for convenience. For myself, the value and the relationship between a vinyl record is still a very different one than a playlist. So it’s your choice, which way you want to listen.”
He enjoys acting even though he doesn’t think he’s good at it—that’s why he appeared on Two and a Half Men. “Most of the things that I get to do, I know what I was doing. I have no idea what I’m doing when I’m acting. But occasionally you get these opportunities and you’d be foolhardy not to have some fun doing them.”
He agreed to allow Stephen Spielberg to use “Accidents Will Happen” in E.T. before he knew anything about E.T. “We got a call from Stephen Spielberg saying that they had a new, very secret movie that was for kids. And nothing was said about the nature of the character—if you remember that film, it was very secret what the appearance of the main character was—so we had no idea until we went to the cinema. We had to undertake to let them use “Accidents Will Happen” in the movie and I went to the theater to see it on the week it opened, when it was already a sensation, not knowing whether the E.T. which by then had been revealed, would tap-dance across the stage, singing, when it was, in fact, Robert playing the teenage brother of Elliot. And in one scene he comes into the kitchen and gets milk or soda from the fridge, and he is mumbling very audibly, and that has been my benchmark for songs in movies.”