The Comeback: Elvis and the Story of the 68 Special

Lives up to its billing as probably the most original Elvis book ever written' The National

As 1968 dawns, the once King of rock'n'roll faces cultural oblivion. While elsewhere the Sixties are swinging, for Elvis they're sinking- in terrible films, drug addiction, paranoia, religious mania and the mercenary wiles of his psychopathic manager. In the words of the hip young director assigned to his first TV special, Elvis' reputation was "in the toilet."

However the same director, Steve Binder, was now about to save it. Together they would embark on the biggest creative fight of Elvis' life. The Comeback plots the incredible true story of Elvis' fall and rise from Army discharge to iconic black leather resurrection.

Simon Goddard takes the reader inside the life, music and mind of Elvis, isolated from an America unravelling in its own Sixties chaos of war, racism, riots and assassinations, until his world and theirs collide in the greatest performance of his life. A genre-busting modernist rock'n'roll fable unlike any music biography you've ever read, The Comeback is the definitive account of how it took Elvis eight years on the big screen to lose his crown - but just one magical hour to win it back.

First published four years before Baz Luhrmann’s dramatisation of events in the Oscar-nominated 2022biopic Elvis, Simon Goddard’s The Comeback is no less a vividly cinematic, pelvic-thrusting blockbuster.

This Remastered edition includes a foreword from musician and journalist Bob Stanley.

'This fine book more than justifies its existence... Goddard not only knows his Elvis but deftly weaves in the cultural background of the era.' MOJO

'Swerves rock-biog worthiness in favour of exhilarating novelistic daring - a hot and heavy dream of a book' Q Magazine