A Bit Of A Contrast

Just finished the Elvis Costello memoir that looked so beguiling when I first spotted it in hardback. A great helter-skelter of a read. The best memoir from a musician I've read so far, excepting, of course, the Bobster's Chronicles which seems to me on quite a different level from anything else in the genre. Mind you, I've not read the stuff from Neil Young, Keith Richard and Bruce Springsteen yet, so maybe Elvis will have some competition there. It'll take a lot to beat the depth of the material on his family, though, especially his extraordinary dad. I vaguely knew about him, the father that is, performing with the Joe Loss Orchestra, but never realised the depth of involvement that implied with the making of music and the impact of this on his son.

I recently made a start on Cormac McCarthy's The Road. A strange contrast to the muso memoir. One with the words and memories pouring out, generally with unstoppably garrulous enthusiasm - especially when it dealt with music and musicians; the other with words harshly chiselled from a place of utter bleakness. Not for the faint-hearted, but then McCarthy never is.