an enjoyable book… it feels like we’re getting a detailed look at his life

an honest read, chock-full of his outrageous exploits.

My favourite holiday read ... Everything I wanted to know about him & more!

As honest and funny as the man himself

'We’re deep into the golden age of the classic-rock memoir … Testimony ends when its author was still relatively young, but it is packed with incident … His memoir is confident and well oiled. At times it has the mythic sweep of an early Terrence Malick movie … Mr. Dylan blows into this memoir like a blazing tumbleweed … [Robbie Robertson's] writing is wonderfully perceptive.

Well, once I started, I couldn’t put it down. It is such a well-paced, well-structured narrative. Robertson's voice is powerful and strong. He has harnessed vivid language to a clean, elegant, writing style, and the sense of honesty, openness and completeness makes it so very compelling. The personal and the historic that he bears witness to is, of course, extraordinarily special. One of the best documents of our times. And one of the best books on rock 'n' roll ever written.

Nobody tells a story like Robbie Robertson. I can’t think of a memoir that is more compelling, fascinating or rich in history. Across every page you can feel his love, passion and musical genius.

His strong point of view is offset by the tenderness he shows, and his stress on his own experience is set within a craftsman’s effort to tell the story whole . . . The voice comes through loud and clear … He keeps clear of big ideas and period clichés. Instead, he offers his story — his side of the story — in scene after scene . . . There’s so much sound and colour here that the self-exculpating scenes fit right in, vivid and convincing . . . Testimony is high-spirited, hugely enjoyable and generous from start to finish.

Robbie Robertson fancies himself as a storyteller, with good reason. His ability to conjure a mythic America on such songs as the Civil War-inspired ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ testifies to a remarkable imagination ... As with many music autobiographies, it is the formative years that are the most revealing. The on-the-road tales with The Hawks are a rollicking read, full of youthful exuberance and a sense of discovery ... The fledgling Band members – musical equals at this point – are larger-than-life characters ... The style is fluid and pacy, with a cinematographer’s eye for detail. He also enjoys telling a thousand tales with an ever-expanding cast list. There are funny vignettes involving Bo Diddley, Roy Buchanan, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Tiny Tim, Salvadore Dali, Edie Sedgwick and Richard Pryor, to name but a few ... At the very moment you fear Robertson might be losing sense of what makes his story so important, he retrieves the narrative threads and provides a sustained and gripping account of The Band’s collaboration with Dylan during the recording of The Basement Tapes at the Big Pink house in West Saugerties. This is riveting stuff ... He has too much class ever to fall into kiss-and-tell mode and is understandably protective of his reputation ... He closes the book...with a eulogistic account of The Last Waltz. It is a great, uplifting finale.

In Testimony the voice is not in question. Robust, wry, gritty and wise to the vicissitudes of a career in rock 'n' roll, it is just what the reader wants ... Mr Robertson captures the rhythm of rock's mystery train, even in its final lurch to the terminal ... Mr Robertson bears witness to his life in music ... A steel-trap memory and a muddled childhood and you have the makings of a Dickensian bildungsroman ... A bible of road lore, a lurid coming-of-age story that veers wildly between the sweet and the brutal and a how-not-to guide to running a band ... As for Mr Dylan, a key attraction, the book offers a refreshing account ... Here is by far the fullest first-person account of the early electric tours of Mr Dylan ... The account of Mr Dylan's 1966 motorcycle accident is refreshingly lucid, as is that of the subsequent making of The Basement Tapes ... Here Testimony becomes a testimonial, and the effect is redemptive. Generosity suits him, and whatever the truth, Testimony is a graceful epitaph.

It’s a flat-out beautiful ending. Be glad Robertson has written this, there won’t be many more musical lives like it.

The spellbinding, long-awaited, behind-the-scenes memoir from the legendary Canadian who, with The Band and Bob Dylan, created a new popular music that lit up the world and has endured for decades.

[An] elegant, evocative memoir.

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