Elvis, solo, Harrogate , June 6 2015

[johnfoyle]

Who's going?

[johnanderson]

I am.

And Manchester and Nottingham.

Busy week ahead.

[Mikeh]

I am - 30 years after I first saw him at the same venue!

[Cocktail Murderess]

Me, me, me, me!!!!! Sorry if I sound a little excited

[Bradwellboy]

I just got a mail from Harrogate to say there will be a support act.

?????

[johnanderson]

And you've probably had the subsequent email that says that there won't be.

[Mikeh]

I was getting excited there. I was hoping to see Ronan Macmanus or Larkin Poe. I wonder if someone backed out or what? It sounds like the venue was misinformed or a change of plan?

[verbal gymnastics]

Elvis has tweeted to say he's "On my way to Harrogate. No support so don't be late".

[johnfoyle]

https://manonledge.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/saturday/

[And No Coffee Table]

From setlist.fm:

01. Sneaky Feelings
02. Watch Your Step
03. After The Fall
04. Accidents Will Happen
05. Still Too Soon To Know
06. Harry Worth
07. Good Year For The Roses
08. 45
09. Shipbuilding
10. All Grown Up
11. Stella Hurt
12. The Comedians
13. Walkin' My Baby Back Home
14. Ghost Train
15. Wave A White Flag
16. She
17. Watching The Detectives
18. When I Write The Book - including Everyday I Write The Book
Encore 1
19. TV Is The Thing (This Year)
20. The Last Year Of My Youth
Encore 2
21. Oliver's Army
22. Alison
23. Pump It Up
Encore 3
24. Side By Side
25. I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
26. Jimmie Standing In The Rain - including Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?
27. Who's The Meanest Gal In Town Josephine
28. Not Fade Away
29. Beyond Belief
30. (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding?

[johnfoyle]

Via Twitter

[verbal gymnastics]

Wow again. Not fade away -

[johnanderson]

Hope this works. I've no idea how to embed the images.

https://twitter.com/sib_on/status/607492636522475520

https://twitter.com/sib_on/status/607492710694547456

[johnanderson]

Thoroughly enjoyed the show. It washed away the memory of the Albert Hall last October.

After the Fall, Harry Worth and a gorgeous Stella Hurt.

[johnfoyle]

Thanks johnanderson for the earlier links to his twitter images-









It looks like Elvis has one of these rare replicas of one of Buddy Holly's guitars-

http://www.scottymoore.net/hollyj45.html

[WindUpWorld]

Sounds like a great night and a cracking set list including rarer ones (to me at least) like White Flag and After The Fall. I'm not able to get out until Basingstoke..I know I know, last night of the tour, his voice will probably be shot and he'll have one leg in the departure lounge back to Vancouver...

[verbal gymnastics]

Sounds like a great night and a cracking set list including rarer ones (to me at least) like White Flag and After The Fall. I'm not able to get out until Basingstoke..I know I know, last night of the tour, his voice will probably be shot and he'll have one leg in the departure lounge back to Vancouver...

BUT we'll have Larkin Poe (and I reckon The MacManus Brothers as well) and they'll play a one off song which will never be played again. Trust me

[WindUpWorld]

Placing all my faith in you VG

[johnfoyle]

http://www.harrogateadvertiser.co.uk/wh ... -1-7298122


Review: Elvis Costello’s aim is true at Harrogate

08 June 2015

By Graham Chalmers


The most intelligent man in post-Beatles and Bowie rock history starts the show in front of a giant fake old-fashioned TV screen and ends it more than two hours later inside the same stage prop belting out Oliver’s Army like a video made flesh.

In between, Elvis Costello is, by turns, charming and infuriating, honest and tricksy, down to earth and pretentious, self-indulgent and crowd-pleading, rubbish and brilliant.

Armed only with a piano, a phalanx of guitars and some very nice stage scenery including a video screen showing the occasional clip from his life story, the solo Costello spends the show battling, as ever, with his own personality.

Like a modern day Sinatra, he only seems to have two types of subject matter in one of the biggest back catalogues in pop – loathing and self-loathing.

Early in a typically eclectic set list, the bespectacled, behatted Costello opts for a run of bitter songs seemingly selected more on their obscurity than necessarily their quality.

Clever? Certainly. Enjoyable? For a while it depends on what your definition of fun is.

But eventually Costello loosens up and the hits start to flow, as do the personal anecdotes about his life and career which would be touching if his anecdotes weren’t sometimes delivered in a mock American accent.

Part British Bob Dylan, part oldfashioned music hall entertainer, at the age of 60 Costello still attacks everything with as much force and energy as he showed when he first came up with the likes of Pump It Up or Alison or Accidents Will Happen in the long gone days of punk in the late 1970s.

Despite not giving the knowledgable Harrogate crowd exactly what they want, they still call him back time after time for a lengthy series of encores lasting nearly 45 minutes.

He even finds time to throw in a bit of Buddy Holly and Al Jolson, this anti-pop pop star who simultaneously embraces and rejects everything.

But it’s a measure of Elvis Costello’s greatness that the series of rousing standing ovations he receives at the end of this remarkable show is entirely deserved.

[Mikeh]

Great show and nice to see Sulky and to meet Cocktail murderess, spirit of curiosity and a couple whose names I forgot sorry. Highlight was All grown up for me! One day I will meet Verbal.... One day

[verbal gymnastics]

I know - I've known you longer than anyone on this board and yet we've never met (although I did pass your house once in Great Horton Road ).

Strangely there are at least 4 people on the board who have said the same thing about wanting to meet me. It's probably best kept that way. You'll be very disappointed if you do meet me. There's less to me than meets the eye!

Glad you all enjoyed the show. Mrs VG went to Take That on Saturday. Now I know what it must be like for her when I bore her about Elvis gigs

[sweetest punch]

http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/leisure/musi ... e__June_6/

Review: Elvis Costello, Detour, Harrogate International Centre, June 6

One man was desperately keen that he left the building before Elvis did. So keen, as he squeezed past your reviewer, that he missed the encores. All 12 songs of them.

"I'll get up for you," I volunteered. "That's OK. As long as I don't have to listen to any more of this noise," he said, brushing past in his urgency to exit Costello's first Harrogate show since the Royal Hall in 1984, wanting the Attractions but encountering too many detractions.

It should be noted that Agitated of Harrogate appeared to be alone in his disquiet, but Costello's set until to that point had been challenging, with the likes of After The Fall, Harry Worth, Stella Hurt and Wave A White Flag testing even the most enthusiastic devotees.

It is the perennial dilemma of a still prolific songwriter that while he wants to flick through all his songbook, the concert-goer craves the hits. When playing solo, as he does on Detour– dat's Scouse for 'the tour', he jokes – the harshness of tune and bitterness of lyric of Costello's later years becomes more exaggerated.

The trouble is, if you were to suggest a substitution, it would always be in favour of bringing in an earlier song, be it Clubland, Pills And Soap, Tramp The Dirt Down, Indoor Fireworks, Tokyo Storm Warning or So Like Candy, all absent from the Harrogate show, as they were from the Birmingham Symphony Hall concert your reviewer had encountered the previous Sunday.

However, as a cursory look at Setlist.fm, will testify, no two shows on the 21-date Detour are the same, allowing the 60-year-old Costello to detour in any direction with 400 songs in his canon, plus a repertoire of unpredictable covers stretching back to the jazz age.

At Birmingham, Elvis's younger brother, Ronan MacManus, had opened the show with his group Brand New Zeros and joined him later for a couple of encores. At Harrogate, it was straight from the career retrospective of promo videos on a giant retro television set to Elvis's entry in a natty navy blue suit and white Stetson.

The TV screen would play its part in a show that had family and reflection at its core, as Elvis switched between guitars, even ukulele and a loudhailer, or sat at a piano stool or in his blue chair, peppering the songs with stories from his life and the musical exploits of his father, Joe Loss's singer Ross MacManus, and his grandfather in the First World War. Watching father Ross looking the spit of Elvis as he sang If I Had A Hammer on TV, "you could see where I got my dance moves from", he said.

The Costello waspish wit had a sting in his tales too, with a dig at David Cameron and some teasing at Harrogate's expense for being the "weird sex capital of Europe".

If the setlist craved indulgence, nevertheless Elvis the showman's skills of musicianship and deep, dark, truthful voice were undimmed. Shipbuilding and a ballad reinvention of I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down stood out on the piano; Watching The Detectives hammered the loop effects pedal into submission; 2014's The Last Year Of My Youth is the veteran's best song in years; and when he turned the TV set into a mini-stage for Oliver's Army, he brought the house down.

A tender rendition of Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away on a special Holly Foundation guitar would surely have delighted even the early departee. Elvis will not be fading way or leaving the building any time soon.