Blue Suede Studies

Hugh Barnes

• Elvis and Me by Priscilla Beaulieu Presley and Sandra Harman
  Century, 320 pp, £9.95, October 1985, ISBN 0 7126 1131 2
• Are you lonesome tonight? by Alan Bleasdale
  Faber, 95 pp, £3.95, September 1985, ISBN 0 571 13732 6
• Elvis and Gladys by Elaine Dundy
  Weidenfeld, 353 pp, £12.95, April 1985, ISBN 0 297 78210 X
• The Johnny Cash Discography by John Smith
  Greenwood Press, 203 pp, £29.95, May 1985, ISBN 0 313 24654 8
• Horse’s Neck by Pete Townshend
  Faber, 95 pp, £6.95, May 1985, ISBN 0 05 711354 8
• Like Punk Never Happened by Dave Rimmer
  Faber, 191 pp, £4.95, October 1985, ISBN 0 571 13739 3
• Starlust: The Secret Fantasies of Fans by Fred Vermorel and Judy Vermorel
  Comet, 253 pp, £4.95, August 1985, ISBN 0 86379 004 6
• The Beatles by Hunter Davies
  Cape, 498 pp, £12.95, December 1985, ISBN 0 224 02837 5

It has become fashionable to think sagely about Elvis, and to deliver such thoughts in mawkish turns of phrase. His biographers, who set the trend, promote it in order to make sense of themselves. Team spirit is otherwise uncharacteristic of them, and they quarrel passionately about everything except the music, which, for the most part, they ignore. Disagreements are harmless, of course, tokens of scholarship, and it would be churlish to complain. But with each new venture into the field Elvis undergoes modification and change. While his supporters, smarting at unsavoury rumours, maintain he stayed smart to the end, the rest speculate about unsocial behaviour and a diet which consisted primarily of pretzels and pills. So business booms, and eight years after his death Presley has been launched on a fresh and exciting career as the avatar of the good and the not-so-good, still travelling in the wake of Little Richard.