Elvis Costello: Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink

LIKE A HANDFUL of rock stars I have encountered along the way – among them Townshend, Bowie and Zappa – Elvis Costello would have made a first-rate rock critic. I suspect he knows it too, which perhaps explains why he has adopted a rather disdainful attitude towards us for much of his career – especially when he started out, or at least when Declan McManus, the folkie-country-pub-rocker, became Elvis Costello, the cutthroat singer-songwriter masquerading as a bandy-legged punk.