Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, March 31, 2024

[sweetest punch]

https://tour.elviscostello.com/?utm_sou ... =australia

[sweetest punch]

https://www.elviscostello.com/bluesfest ... 2023-tour/

BLUESFEST TOURING ANNOUNCES ELVIS COSTELLO & THE IMPOSTERS 2023 TOUR
14 September 2022

Elvis Costello & The Imposters will return to Australia in 2023, headlining shows in Sydney and Melbourne, following their appearance at the 34th Annual Bluesfest in Byron Bay over the Easter Long Weekend.

“It’s been twelve years since our first appearance at the Byron Bay Bluesfest – when we shared an evening bill with Bob Dylan, and I got to sit in with Mavis Staples. I see a number of friends and favourites are on this year’s bill, so who knows what thrills, spills and encounters may take place.

There is nothing that jolts a show alive so much as stack of strong new songs but we recorded ‘The Boy Named If’ while locked away in our lairs and hideaways, so bringing those songs to the stage has made the hits and highlights of the songbook ring out anew.

The Imposters will make their Sydney Opera House bow 39 years after I made my solo debut at that legendary venue.

The very name of the venue probably should have got my attention when I first arrived in Melbourne in 1978, pursued by a press posse after a slight dust-up in Sydney.

After all, the ‘Hammersmith Palais’ was my dad’s place of work for most of my childhood. It seems I am destined and disposed to return to venues called the “Palais”, like a homing pigeon or some other more tuneful bird. The proximity to the seaside and a fun-fair only adds the thrill.

The Imposters and I are not bringing any vaudevillian contraptions with us on this occasion, but we will be joined by our guest guitarist, Charlie Sexton and a stack strong recently recorded songs that have caused the hits and headlines of the repertoire to either ring out anew or fight for their place in the show. “We are ready as anybody can be and look forward to seeing you there.” – Elvis Costello

[And No Coffee Table]

A third show has been added on April 11.
https://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/events ... sters.html

[sweetest punch]

https://www.elviscostello.com/australia ... d-to-2024/

Sydney Opera House: Sunday, 31 March 2024 (Easter Sunday)
Sydney Opera House: Monday, 1 April 2024 (Easter Monday)
Sydney Opera House: Tuesday, 2 April 2024
The Palais, Melbourne: Thursday, 4 April

Your current tickets will be valid for these performances. Ticket providers will be in contact.

A note from Elvis Costello:

“We are so disappointed not to be returning to the stages at Byron Bay, where we had plans to surprise you with a few friends joining the show. It is maddening these unfortunate but unavoidable circumstances mean that our three sold-out nights at Sydney Opera House and a return to the Palais in St. Kilda, which was also sold out, must also be rescheduled. We are sorry for any inconvenience and hope that the wait will seem worthwhile when we return. Yours through music.” Elvis Costello & The Imposters (and their pal, Charlie Sexton).

Refunds will be available should you not wish to attend the rescheduled performances. Bluesfest only refunds one-day tickets for up to 30 days after the event.

[Offshoreram]

I’m in Perth, WA at the moment and fly to Sydney on Saturday with tickets for the Sunday and Monday shows at the Opera House.
I had already planned to be in Australia but swapped flights and accommodation when the tour dates were announced. I suppose that is the risk with going abroad to see any event is the costs if the show is cancelled. I must have lost £500 just on the Vegas show being cancelled last year.

Still I’ve managed to get a ticket to Larkin Poe in Sydney on Sunday.

The big question now is do I start to plan another trip to Australia next year?

[Fishfinger king]

Very bad luck. Having met you in New York I’m sure the answer is yes - you should plan another trip next year. Giving in to one’s whims and crackpot plans is always the best thing to do, isn’t it!!!?? I’d be up for it if tickets become available!!
Already booked Dublin & Oslo.

[Offshoreram]

I’m sitting in an Air BnB apartment across from Sydney Opera House. It’s a wonderful location and the weather is perfect.
Ah well, I’m off to the Metro Theatre in Sydney in about 4 hours to see Larkin Poe. Luckily it’s only a 20 minute walk to the Metro as opposed to the 11 minute walk to the Opera House.

[bronxapostle]

I’m sitting in an Air BnB apartment across from Sydney Opera House. It’s a wonderful location and the weather is perfect.
Ah well, I’m off to the Metro Theatre in Sydney in about 4 hours to see Larkin Poe. Luckily it’s only a 20 minute walk to the Metro as opposed to the 11 minute walk to the Opera House.

So sorry my friend

[Man out of Time]

Elvis has recorded an interview with ABC National Radio talking about his return to play in Sydney:

abc.net.au

He talks to Sarah MacDonald - presenter on Sydney Mornings.

MOOT

[sweetest punch]

https://amp.smh.com.au/culture/music/el ... 5es4h.html
(Behind paywall)

[Man out of Time]

Elvis has recorded an interview with ABC National Radio talking about his return to play in Sydney:

abc.net.au

He talks to Sarah MacDonald - presenter on Sydney Mornings.

Also available as a video clip on YouTube:



MOOT

[johnfoyle]

https://amp.smh.com.au/culture/music/el ... 5es4h.html
(Behind paywall)

The trouble with Elvis Costello, at least according to Bob Dylan, is that he’s “relentless”.

“He exhausted people,” Dylan writes in his recent book The Philosophy of Modern Song. “Too much in his songs for anybody to actually land on. Too many thoughts, way too wordy. Too many ideas that just bang up against themselves.”
Costello chuckles at the criticism.

“Too many words?” he splutters. “Coming from Bob Dylan that’s a pretty good compliment: the man who just wrote a 16-minute song. You know, often there’s an element of humour in the delivery that I think people miss. You have to kind of read it in his voice.”

It is tempting to unpack the juxtaposition of pot and kettle here but there isn’t time. Costello’s relentlessness spills beyond the lyric sheet to the Zoom call, just as it continues to gush in all directions from recording studio to concert hall.

“This has probably, since 2017, been the most productive time in terms of recording since ’77 to ‘82,” he enthuses of his recent output. It includes one solo album, two with his band the Imposters, an EP revisiting collaborations with Paul McCartney and Burt Bacharach, and another with his abandoned ’70s duo Rusty, as well as French, Spanish, Slovenian and sundry other collaborations.

It doesn’t mean that these records are better or more important,” he adds, referring to his defining albums of the post-punk era. “Records, at some point, went from being ephemera to being these big supposedly significant cultural events, and some of them are. But I don’t think you can proceed now with a self-consciousness that that’s what you’re striving for. After all, it’s for other people to decide what they mean to them.

“There are times when you’re in tune with a change in style or scene that you can either work with or against,” he says, alluding to the “new wave” wagon he hitched in the late ’70s, and the confusion that greeted countless later diversions into country, jazz, ballet and more. “I always thought I was in pop music,” he says. “I still think that.”

It’s always been the most malleable pigeonhole, after all. These days it pretty much excludes rock, a genre that never interested the young Declan MacManus anyway.
“I don’t own a record by Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd… I didn’t know anything about Elvis Presley when they [his circa ’77 managers] called me Elvis to start with, because there was nobody in my house who listened to that music. My parents listened to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie — and that’s way hipper.”

The rabbit holes Costello charges down in conversation are dizzying. He jumps from late ’60s Fleetwood Mac (“Man Of the World was the song that made me pick up a guitar”) to classic Stevie Nicks (“it’s just not my thing”) to Tom Petty, Michael Jackson, Chic, Robert Wyatt and some long-forgotten Dutch girl group in a musical stream of consciousness some might call relentless.
His recent albums, from the pandemic-forged Hey Clockface to a Spanish language remix of his Attractions breakthrough This Year’s Model, have each arrived by similar logic: random incidents and meetings given equal weight by an imagination more attuned to “why not?” than anything more culturally significant.

Fashionably late by 50 years, The Resurrection of Rust EP is another example. Allan Mayes, his partner in aborted pre-Attractions country duo Rusty, “wanted to make a cassette,” Costello says. “I said, ‘I don’t think that’s gonna reach many people… Let’s just make the record we would have made if they’d let us’.

“To make a record of our repertoire then was good fun. And it was in the good spirit of something to mark 50 years that we had known one another. And the next thing we’re on The Tonight Show with Madonna. That was great.”
The only problem with this gleefully freewheeling approach to genre and repertoire comes at showtime. Over the decades, Costello has often resorted to an ingeniously theatrical live selection system he calls the Spectacular Spinning Songbook. But even 40 titles on a giant raffle wheel is far too limiting these days.

“At the beginning of this year, I did a 10-night stand at the Gramercy Theatre [New York] which I billed as 100 songs in 10 nights,” he says, “knowing that I had 10 other songs in my mind that would complete each night. I usually play upwards of 20…

“I printed the song lists like a classical program, so people knew which show to come to and they could probably guess the disposition of the show from those titles. But what they didn’t know was I had also planned to bring other musicians that weren’t billed…”

So begins another relentless explosion of rabbit holes: uilleann pipes, accordion, musical saw, violin, double bass and mandolins; live sampling and vaudeville; Bob Dylan’s bassist, Rebecca Lovell from Larkin Poe, Eleanor Whitmore from the Mastersons; a medieval literature lecturer from upstate New York, an eight-piece vocal chorus from “this Broadway musical I’ve been working on” and … well, much more.

“Too many thoughts,” some might say. “Too many ideas that just bang up against themselves.” But “it’s not indulgence because the audience went with it,” Costello counters. “It goes to show that the more daring you maintain in what you’re doing, the more satisfying it’s going to be.”
But don’t panic, Attractions fans. A survey of this year’s setlists indicates that on most nights crowdpleasers such as Pump It Up and other smash hits from the old world remain well within the Imposters’ elastic horizons.

“[But] I do think I owe it to the audience to earn the right to get to that song by it being emotionally vivid to me, so I don’t give them some kind of poor facsimile,” Costello says. “I want it to matter. I want it all to matter.”

Elvis Costello plays Bluesfest, Byron Bay, March 28 - 29; Sydney Opera House March 31 - April 2; Palais Theatre, Melbourne, April 4.

[sulky lad]

Really good interview without resorting to the old hackneyed clichés - just shows antipodeans don't need to resort to nostalgia based lazy journalism!

[sweetest punch]

Interview with EC: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/ ... /103292006

[thepopeofpop]

I'll be at the April 1 show. I didn't buy tickets for the other shows because at the time (2023) I was going to be seeing EC in Iceland in May - which did happen. I could go to Bluesfest but I'm getting a bit old for that festival stuff.

[sweetest punch]

Anyone going?

[johnfoyle]

PLU

https://twitter.com/OurNewHomecoach/sta ... -EV0g&s=19

[And No Coffee Table]

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/elvis-co ... bb6ee.html

01. Hetty O'Hara Confidential
02. Watch Your Step
03. Mystery Dance
04. Radio, Radio
05. My Baby Just Squeals (You Heel)
06. Like Licorice On Your Tongue
07. Country Darkness
08. Waiting For The End Of The World
09. A Town Called Riddle
10. Clown Around Town
11. Accidents Will Happen
12. Mistook Me For A Friend
13. Watching The Detectives
14. A Face In The Crowd
15. Blood & Hot Sauce
16. Everybody's Crying Mercy
17. Brilliant Mistake
18. Clubland
19. Wonder Woman
20. Everyday I Write The Book
Encore 1
21. I Still Have That Other Girl
22. (I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea
23. Magnificent Hurt
24. Pump It Up
25. Alison
26. (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding?

[johnfoyle]

https://www.smh.com.au/culture/music/wo ... 5fgic.html


MUSIC
Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Opera House, March 31
★★½
Reviewed by Bernard Zuel
Sydney Morning Herald

There is no point pussyfooting around, this was not a good show. This was in many ways a terrible show. The worst I’ve seen in 42 years and 40+ gigs watching Elvis Costello in various incarnations.


Its partial redemption, albeit not its resurrection on Easter Sunday, was a set list that over more than two hours ranged across his long career in a manner that might have perplexed newcomers (yes, there were some of them in the room: one of them beside me, another behind me) or those whose knowledge of the catalogue doesn’t extend much beyond Every Day I Write The Book, Pump It Up and Alison (which were played) or Veronica, Shipbuilding and She (which were not), but fascinated and intrigued long-termers who could also find adventure in a deconstructed arthouse approach to Watching The Detectives.

There was a first hour that set a template for the night in a rhythm and blues-centred set rooted in the 1950s, including around better-known cuts such as Mystery Dance and Hetty O’Hara Confidential, unreleased songs My Baby Just Squeals (You Heal) and Like Licorice On Your Tongue that Costello introduced with tall tales of “discovering” them on dusty 45s in a record store only a few days earlier, and which could well have passed for Dave Bartholomew or Allen Toussaint b-sides.

There was a closing double encore (signalled by bows taken rather than the band leaving the stage) that powered up with the likes of Pump It Up, Chelsea and Peace, Love And Understanding – along the way emphasising the far too polite tempos on some of the early career songs at the beginning of the night – the usual inventive brilliance of Steve Nieve on his various keyboards (seemingly everything, from grand piano to melodica), and some amusement from Costello’s rambling, discursive introductions (albeit frequently beginning or ending off-mic, frustrating those not in the early rows who could not hear them well) that played up his Mr Showman side.

Fun, yes. Nonetheless, this show’s original sin was terrible sound that rendered the night a murky chore and far less amusing.

As many have shown in the past couple of years, most recently and thrillingly Wilco a week ago, in its new sound set up the Concert Hall is no longer a sonic deathtrap for electric instruments and there is no ready excuse for poor quality. But here Costello’s voice was buried in the mix and the backing vocals were left underpowered, there was consistent blurring of the keyboards and loss of tone in the early piano songs, while the flattening of Pete Thomas’s drums was matched by Davey Faragher’s electric basses, both upright and regular, often being indistinct.

And exactly what the tour’s guest, guitarist Charlie Sexton, was offering was less a matter of debate as disappointment if you have enjoyed his work as a Bob Dylan sideman. It was only in the show’s dying minutes, as he offered fluid, attractive lines through Alison, that his presence was noticeable.

More fundamental, more disheartening than all of that though was Costello being betrayed by his voice, which is not a “tonight problem” according to reports from Bluesfest and other shows recently, or from anyone who watched online some questionable vocal performances from his residency at the Gramercy Theatre in New York a year ago.

It was more than scratchy: it was rough and ready finding pitch and melody and gave us a mess of a take on Accidents Will Happen. It reached and regularly fell short of key notes. And while when he leant back and belted it could still make the mark, it could be starkly exposed in piano-and-voice songs and an acoustic-based Mose Allison cover.

[Azmuda]

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/elvis-co ... bb6ee.html

They've since added Jack of all Parades and Good Year for the Roses

10 Clown Around Town
11 Jack of all Parades
12 Accidents Will Happen

16 Blood & Hot Sauce
17 A Good Year for the Roses
18 Everybody's Cryin' Mercy

[johnfoyle]

Live Review:



https://themusic.com.au/reviews/elvis-c ... g/02-04-24


Elvis Costello And The Imposters @ Sydney Opera House Concert Hall
2 April 2024

Shaun Colnan

It felt like vintage Costello. It could’ve been the late 70s...


Time can be a painful thing - especially when it’s thrust upon a stage, casting a mirror back out into the audience. The ferocity and force, the raw witticism and spitfire criticism seem to have tempered since the heyday of Punk. But, of course, it has. The world has moved on.

Elvis has moved on. One left the building almost half a century ago while the other, Elvis Costello And The Imposters, filled out the Sydney Opera House’s Concert Hall for a nostalgic romp through an impressive back catalogue.

Things fall apart with time, so we find new means of coping. Costello’s voice lacks the vivacity that previously allowed him to bounce from verbose verse to verbose verse. So, while the band keeps time, his lyric trails behind in the backbeat past the backbeat.

This was certainly apparent in Jack Of All Parades from Elvis’ 1986 record King Of America. The lyric trailed behind the instrumentation, bloated and staggering. Punchlines were pushed into the next bar, an accidental enjambment that haunted each song.

Perhaps that’s always been part of Elvis’ charm: the haphazardness, the chaos of the lyrics, which—due to its loquacity—spills out and breaks down the 4/4 order of the poppier elements that make Elvis’ music unique. On Accidents Will Happen from Costello’s 1979 album Armed Forces, the verses were filibusters butting up against the relatively sparse chorus, making it difficult to sing along to.

Still, the opening line from Elvis’ popular yet retired track, Oliver’s Army - “Don’t start the talking, I could talk all night” - perfectly captures Elvis’ impulse. He filled silences between songs with comments like: “I got this guitar here, so I’m gonna do this song here.”


Costello dove into a few unreleased songs that he wrote for the 2016 musical A Face In The Crowd, based on Budd Schulberg's story originally published as Your Arkansas Traveler. The first, Big Stars Have Tumbled, included a lukewarm call-and-response, featuring the line, “How I made you call my name…” met by a smattering of “Elvisss…” ringing out.

Costello took to the grand piano on the second one to the tune of “Go Elvis, go Elvis!” from a shaky female voice in the crowd. The witty Brit retorted, “I’m singing this one just for you… cause you gotta watch the back of my head.” The title track from that musical, A Face In The Crowd, is a self-described “theme song of a hard drinking, pill popping womaniser.”

Costello provided this preface for the third track from the musical: “If I ever ran for office, I’d need a campaign song and luckily I have one”. Blood & Hot Sauce satirises American patriotism by infusing it with a harangue on American charlatanism, a clever melange meditating on the rotten state of the union.

In keeping with the nostalgia, Costello introduced the track, Mistook Me For A Friend, from his 2022 album, The Boy Named If, in this way: “This is about when I was a young man and I was finding my way around the world. I was in a strange town… it might’ve been Wollongong, or it might’ve been New York… and I was in a club at 2 am, and they were playing that awful New Wave music… and then it was 3 am, and I had keys to a car, but I didn’t drive and keys to a house but it wasn’t mine, and so I wrote this song.”

It felt like vintage Costello. It could’ve been the late 70s if it weren’t for the cracking voice and the awkward harmonies.

It’s easy to see why the concert went for 150 minutes when the band launched into a sprawling version of Watching The Detectives. A cosmic slop of Two Tone and New Wave with heavy bass, messy crying guitar licks and decay on the already decayed vocals. Indigo lights burned while Elvis varied the theme, suddenly packing two lines into one, reversing the trend of elongation in a moment of lyrical lucidity.

Next came an erudite meditation on a cover: acoustic guitar in hand, Costello sat on a stool and quipped, “It’s at times like this when you quote the philosophers… Jean-Luc Godard or Jean-Paul Sartre… Brigitte Bardot… Plato… Socrates… Great in the midfield for Brazil… skip over all of them, and you get to Mose Allison.” This was the welcome mat to Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy from the album The Sage Of Tippo.

Then, Costello held up a trophy and said, “I got this in Texas—what he called “The Jimmy Durante Award.” Continuing the comedy, he remarked, “I’d like to thank the academy…it was on account of resemblance.” This led to the opening track on his 1986 album, Brilliant Mistake.

Good Year For The Roses led into a homage to The Specials with a melodica-heavy rendition of Ghost Town. This seemed to drive the set towards its zenith with Everyday I Write The Book and a five-song encore, which included I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea, Pump It Up and What’s So Funny About Peace, Love And Understanding?

As well as this, the enduring jilted ballad: Alison, which Costello provided a backstory for: “When I first came to these shores, I followed in the footsteps of many of my ancestors… they said you’ve got 37 minutes of music, and we could get that down to 25 minutes before people start throwing things.

“So, we used to not play this… because it would make it too easy for the girls to like us… but it was actually because I couldn’t play the opening guitar - I didn’t have enough fingers…” What he lacked in fingers and vocal chops, he made up for in unifying an Easter egg-heavy Sunday night crowd.

[johnfoyle]

https://www.reverbstreetpress.com/onlin ... _04tIZpWV3

Sydney Opera House
Sunday 31 March 2024

Photographer / Reviewer : Kevin Bull

Having completed his Bluesfest commitments, Elvis Costello made the trip south to begin his three night stint at the Sydney Opera House last night. Easter Sunday brought with it a full house to the Concert Hall to find a chatty Costello, the wonderful three piece Imposters augmented with special guest Charlie Sexton… and a terribly dead mix that buried Costello’s voice with very little distinction and space for any of the instrumentation. Having been in the same room less than a month ago for Angelique Kidjo, I know what this space can deliver, but tonight it just felt like a muddy dirge at times.

Putting all that aside, and it is kind of hard to do because this is a live music experience, the setlist was long and varied, and not designed for the casual Costello listener. Opening the night with ‘Hetty O’Hara Confidential’, the second single off 2020’s Hey Clockface, it is an upbeat cut punctuated by Steve Neive’s organ and Sexton’s lead guitar, and probably slipped by unrecognisable by most. Three early releases followed with the restrained ‘Watch Your Step’, the ’50 R&R of ‘Mystery Dance’, and the organ intro of ‘Radio, Radio’ putting a spark under the crowd.

You could feel the energy lift, only to be deflated by a couple of unreleased songs that felt they were written in the 1950s. Now I am not one of those “only play the hits” punters, and am quite happy to go with the artist on their tangents, but you could feel that the crowd tonight were possibly not so inclined. Of the 28 songs played tonight, six were unreleased with three coming from the music he has written for the A Face in the Crowd musical, and to be honest, those in attendance tonight were quite restrained, with Costello’s attempts to get them involved having mostly little effect.

The stripped keys and vocal interpretation of ‘Accidents Will Happen’ was a lovely touch, and worked to perfection for such a strong song. The tempo was slowed, it was heartfelt, and the full band climax was a highlight of the night. But for every successful ‘Accidents..’ remake, there is unfortunately those that can only be called questionable, especially when you are playing with ‘Watching The Detectives’ which became quite dark and menacing with a dub ska tone. It was a seven minute meander that bore very little resemblance to what 99% of those here tonight were hoping for. But as I said earlier, with Costello his shows can be indulgent at times, delivering the unexpected for better or worse.

For myself, it was when the volume was reduced and the delivery was more restrained, for songs such as ‘A Good Year for the Roses’, ‘Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy’ and ‘Brilliant Mistake’, that I found that the troublesome sound quality became manageable. There was space for everything to breathe, and I could actually hear Costello’s voice. By this time though, we were deep into the night and the electric guitars came back out for ‘Clubland’, and this only highlighted just how poor the sound was. It simply felt like a solid wall of sound. This did not stop the main set closing on a high with ‘Every Day I Write The Book’ which brought the Concert Hall to its feet.

A six song encore followed, opening with the piano and voice delivered, Costello/Bacharach penned, ‘I Still Have That Other Girl’. It was the quiet before the stormy squall, with ‘(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea’, ‘Magnificent Hurt’ (from 2022’s The Boy Name If) and ‘Pump It Up’ again highlight the messy sound.

Really, it was such a shame. Personally I did enjoy the night simply because I am a longstanding fan of the artist, but I do know I would have enjoyed the night significantly more if I could hear everything clearly. All this being said, and I have been quite reluctant to say anything but positive about such a wonderful musician, I was in full voice as were all around me for possibly Costello’s greatest composition, ‘Alison’.