True, proper rock 'n' roll. A funny, sad, superbly written saga. This book is great.

The greatest rock 'n' roll story you've never heard: the Hollywood Brats hit the early 70s like a spaceship landing in Victorian London. Matheson's book is as lurid and compelling as the band themselves.

The Hollywood Brats are a folk legend; they were doing what they were doing before anybody. This is one of the great rock 'n' roll hard luck stories, by turns shocking and hilarious, and Andrew Matheson has a terrific eye for comic detail.

Flagrant, addled, highly competitive, the Hollywood Brats predicted Punk in the moribund early seventies. Andrew Matheson’s concise, hilarious memoir tells the pleasure and pain of being an unheralded pioneer.

The best rock 'n' roll memoir you will read all year.

Riotously hilarious story… Might just be the most entertaining music memoir ever written

History is told by the victors, but Andrew Matheson's tale of rock 'n' roll failure is much more compelling than any tired celebrity narrative. Lurid, stupid, crazed and quixotic, the primal adolescent silliness and arrogance of great pop music runs through every page.

The funniest music book I’ve ever read – by some measure.

Rock ’n’ roll at its disastrous best…brilliant. Someone needs to make a film of this immediately.

The Hollywood Brats are the greatest band I’ve ever seen

Britain’s great lost punk band

So colourful, so comical, so damn bitchy... hilarious

Matheson writes with the jagged verve he once sought from his band.

It’s engagingly written [and] stuffed full of amusing anecdotes.

Engaging and accomplished.

One of the most gripping stories of the Cold War.

Monstrous behaviour and vanity suffuse this oral history of Hollywood’s troubled dynasties… Tragedy lurks around the manicured lawns and marbled halls.

The anecdotes come so thick and fast it’s like being machine-gunned with marshmallows. Gradually, though, the mood darkens, the catalogue of vulgarity, cruelty and insanity takes its toll. While the Technicolor tour is relentlessly fascinating, it is reassuring to be shown in black and white that, in La-La Land at least, with the millions comes endless misery.

Jean Stein’s approach to family history is unconventional… Stein weaves them together with immense narrative skill.

The stories are mesmerising… Great for people who want to see beyond the world of make-believe.

A very dark oral history of Hollywood… mesmerising.

Writers like Costello because he's always taken writing seriously. That's obvious to anyone who pays attention to his lyrics, and it's even more apparent to anyone who reads Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, his charming new autobiography. The book is refreshingly free of salacious gossip and needless name-dropping; it's an intelligent self-assessment from a musician who went from angry young man to elder statesman of pop ... a defiantly fun autobiography.

This is a big book, literally, by one of the best rockers in the business. Given the singular, and eclectic, nature of his career, it is no surprise that Elvis Costello's anecdotal autobiography is an idiosyncratic journey through his music and the people and places that have inspired him ... A must for Costello fans everywhere.

Costello's prose cuts with the same spiky wit and observational power as his well-known lyrics ... packed with great lines, vivid anecdotes ... a treat for his many fans.

Plenty of tales to keep the pages turning. Readers will be fascinated by Costello's stories...his book feels like a discussion between friends over a pint.

Often brilliant and wholly idiosyncratic

Revelatory, evocatively crafted, [and] highly entertaining

A winningly droll and good-natured guide to his life and many works throughout

Punctuated with sardonic and self-aware truths

Vivid ... It's not surprising that one of rock's most literate songwriters would pen such a deep, free-form memoir

Elvis Costello delivers an impeccably detailed autobiography. He's often as brilliant at turning a phrase in prose as he is in his lyrics

Enthralling ... This is family history as musical encyclopedia, and to listen to Costello recount his life is to be buttonholed by an enthusiastic fan. Fandom for Costello is inseparable from the compulsion to write songs and, it seems, to understand his own life ... Fortunately for the fan of Costello's music the topic of discussion is often his own songs, and he is, unsurprisingly, a witty and eloquent guide

[Costello] pens books with the same clever writing that he uses in song

Costello['s] book is capacious, clever, and full of heart and soul

The story unfolds like a movie that jumps across time, more thematic than chronological, as boyhood anecdotes and obsessions intersect with mature songs and adult reckoning.... The book doubles as a selective mini-history of 20th century music, as told by a discerning guide. He addresses artists both towering (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash) and relatively unheralded (David Ackles, Robert Wyatt) with a fan's affection and music scholar's insight

With an encyclopedic knowledge and appreciation for, and deep love of, music, and with an expressive power and heart, Costello's memoir will take its place in the highest echelons of the genre

His book is almost essential as an idiosyncratic history of 20th-century pop music

Studded with entertaining anecdotes