Accidents Won't Happen: The Premeditated Rise Of Elvis Costello

A COUPLE OF days before Christmas, trying to make it home on the London tube before I dropped the bottle of tequila and the Times Atlas of the World I was balancing in one hand while attempting to flip over the evening paper with the other so I could skim the Third and Fourth Division football results, I heard a voice somewhere say "Hello." More a surreptitious rasp than a warm greeting, the disembodied voice could, if my mind had been working that way that evening, have made me think I was being contacted by some especially devious MI5 operative.