Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

Pretty self-explanatory
johnfoyle
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

Post by johnfoyle »

http://entertainment.stv.tv/music/30647 ... -costello/

Good night for Elvis Costello

Review: Bursting onto a concoction of a game show and the Austin Powers inspired 60's, Elvis Costello & The Imposters were in Glasgow for a one of a kind show as part of The Revolver Tour.

By Kirstin Lynn


12 May 2012


With a flapper girl, go-go dancer, and as much chance as a game of Russian roulette, nauseating circus colours and a real live version of his Spectacular Spinning Songbook both decorated the stage, and decided the fate of Elvis Costello's quick fire set.

With trilby style hats all round, I Hope You're Happy Now put the boogie into action, though in comparison to the garish colours of the backdrop, the star's vocal was low in the mix, not doing any favours for the slightly mature crowd of the Clyde Auditorium.

Forward rolling through their first four tracks with no stops, the Grammy Award winner, now in his late 50's showed no signs of fatigue with hip twists and stage roaming to the Hammond organ whirl of his rock'n'roll.

Having a quick pause for breath and a change into top hat and cane, our ringmaster adopted his Napoleon Dynamite persona and a New York accent, to introduce his big wheel (much like the Wheel Of Fortune that lies dormant in a dark cupboard of STV, vomited in new colours). Getting the audience participation factor into full swing, Costello's flapper girl, Caterina, selected one lucky fan to spin the wheel, resulting in a down-tempo Good Year For The Roses.

During the track, the audience member was kept in a holding bay/ lounge bar at the side of the stage to sway through her song choice before her ejection and subsequent replacement. The same format continued, through a young couple and Sheila's Wheels style sisters with upbeat, and often hilarious chat from Costello between numbers. With much focus on the Leveson enquiry, and a particular disdain for Rupert Murdoch, his sarcastic sense of humour suited the Scottish crowd.

Getting out his Gibson Super 400 to perform Chuck Berry's No Particular Place To Go as he did in a tribute to Mr Berry at a prestigious award ceremony earlier in the year, the ongoing tales of Costello act as reminders of his incredible career.

A medley of Bob Dylan's This Wheel's On Fire, Allen Toussaint collaboration The River In Reverse and Gil Scott-Heron's I'll Take Care Of You, showcased the stars versatility as he ambled from one track to the next and back again, with ease and character, as if the songs were his very own. The smoky jazz lounge rendition of I'll take Care Of You was particularly impressive, with Costello channelling the sultry ways of Rihanna in a potent infusion with the wisdom of Scott-Heron.

A microphone change saw the volume of the show finally being a bit more obnoxious for Chelsea, before the London born musician visited his Irish heritage, inviting his younger brother and accompanying folk band onstage. Playing a song about their grandfather, before reverting into a series of jigs and reels, the show that just kept giving threw something else into the big box of tricks.

Leaning into best loved tracks as he played past his second hour of performance, Costello teased more and more fans to their feet with Tramp The Dirt Down, Shipbuilding and the much anticipated I Want You.

Like his last album and songbook, spectacular is just what Costello was live, with old school entertainment value and prestige rarely seen today. With that, it's no wonder everyone and Oliver's Army wanted him tonight.
johnfoyle
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/inde ... _19_gf.jpg

Looking at the photos from last night I'm reminded of an aspect of the Dublin show. Just like, it seems , in Glasgow, it was alarming to watch Elvis' grey suit getting darker as the evening went on, the perspiration really coming through!
Azmuda
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

Post by Azmuda »

(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding? -- with Ronan MacManus, BibleCode Sundays and Brigid Kaelin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rFS7-vxH8c
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krm
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

Post by krm »

Azmuda wrote:(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding? -- with Ronan MacManus, BibleCode Sundays and Brigid Kaelin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rFS7-vxH8c

...and do not miss Psycho at 3.00....
johnfoyle
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

Post by johnfoyle »

Elvis Costello, Tramp The Dirt Down , mp3, Glasgow 2012 http://t.co/fB0tIYJy
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

Post by Man out of Time »

snapyou wrote:Tramp The Dirt Down("a song i didnt think i'd play again")preceded by a heartfelt rant against Murdoch et al was the highlight.
Elvis had not played "Tramp The Dirt Down" since a solo appearance at the Cambridge Folk Festival in July 1995. Just to put that in perspective, he was still touring with the Attractions that year. Part of me hopes that spending time in the UK and the North of England particularly over the next few weeks will inspire him to write a few more "protest songs" as good as this or "Shipbuilding". Will we hear "Fish 'N' Chip Paper" or "Satellite", on this tour?

MOOT
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

Post by snapyou »

johnfoyle wrote:Elvis Costello, Tramp The Dirt Down , mp3, Glasgow 2012 http://t.co/fB0tIYJy
Thank you Sir John of Foyle !

Great quality.Any more from the show?
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And No Coffee Table
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

Post by And No Coffee Table »

I wonder if the revival of "Tramp the Dirt Down" was inspired by a false report two days earlier that Thatcher had died.
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

Post by snapyou »

And No Coffee Table wrote:I wonder if the revival of "Tramp the Dirt Down" was inspired by a false report two days earlier that Thatcher had died.
Judging by his preamble,i think it was the Murdoch scandal.
sweetest punch
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/musi ... eview.html


Elvis Costello, SECC, Glasgow: review

Showman Elvis Costello spins his big hits to thrilling effect.

With one of the best back catalogues in pop, Elvis Costello has a problem: what songs to perform, and what to leave out.

Enter the “Spectacular Spinning Songbook”, a 15ft wheel of more than 30 of his hits, plus some multi-song jackpots on themes such as “time” or “happy”.

Costello revelled in the carnival atmosphere created by the big wheel. Part showground huckster with hat and cane, part lounge lizard, he mixed bullish, self-aggrandising patter with dry, self-deprecating asides.

Audience members were chosen to spin the wheel by his young, attractive assistant. Slightly creepily, the chosen few were also mostly all young, attractive blondes, and Costello fully revelled in the sleazy showman persona that he louchely poured himself into for the show.

All that showmanship, though, had to stand in for some missing musical muscle on louder, faster songs. Costello’s throaty ebullience was lost in a swirl of drums and keyboard flourishes and he was least convincing in the post-punk bounces that made his name, such as Oliver’s Army and Pump It Up.

He lacked the energy and conviction that the numbers needed, but had it in spades on more introspective songs.

Costello’s capriciousness and preternatural confidence meant that he was never going to stick solely to what the wheel threw up. His caustic, anti-Thatcher cri de coeur, Tramp the Dirt Down, was paired with a searing Shipbuilding in a selection that was personal to him and specific to this show. The songs were a tribute to Glasgow, a city where memories of Thatcherism and the death of Clyde industry are still raw.

Costello’s performance was dark, brooding and movingly intense. These two songs were delivered with a malevolent passion that felt specific to this time, this place, these people. It was powerful, polemical and personal, all the more moving for being sandwiched between slices of shallow showground playfulness.

Costello was at his best when he was most interested. Not in Oliver’s Army or Peace, Love and Understanding, but very much in the 1920s-style solo acoustic guitar and ukulele encore, from a recent American roots album, or in an impressively inventive cover of This Wheel’s On Fire.

A lacklustre air in the big songs just emphasised how thrilling the rest of the show was, as Costello reacted to the wheel or made his own instant demands of a band that had to be ready to turn on a sixpence to keep up.

The thrill of touring can pall after 30 years. Costello looks to have found a way of making sure that boredom never afflicts him, or his audiences.

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Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
GCM
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

Post by GCM »

From Monday's Glasgow herald, Keith Bruce reviews the Glasgow and Manchester gigs, giving them 5 stars.


READERS will want to know just how much variety there is in the reinvention of the Golden Age of Variety that is The Revolver Tour, in which the Spectacular Spinning Songbook, which allows audience members to select the music Costello and The Imposters will play, is only one element.

The answer is that what the great songsmith promises, in the character of Napoleon Dynamite, urbane emcee with top hat and cane, he delivers. Manchester heard a set at least 50% different from the one in Glasgow on Friday, including the pop soul of I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down and High Fidelity and a piano feature with Steve Nieve of the rarely heard Talking in the Dark and Charles Aznavour's She from the soundtrack of Notting Hill.

However, the Apollo was also comparatively shortchanged with a concert that came in at just two-and-a-half hours without a break.

The added attractions to the bill in Glasgow included a folk-punk quartet led by Costello's younger brother, Ronan McManus, fresh from their own gig at Parkhead stadium, a comely wench adding the odd gloss of musical saw to a few numbers, and many more his country and Americana songs.

All the echoes of an earlier era of music hall not only suits Costello's recent material – particularly in a later solo section that ends with a spot of ukulele strumming – but allows him to dip into any era of his career, as well as including reference to the recent death of his big-band singer father, and some sharp barbs about Leveson and the Government. In both cities, the song that brought the audience roaring to its feet was the Spike album's anticipation of the death of Margaret Thatcher, Tramp the Dirt Down.
johnfoyle
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

Post by johnfoyle »

From Keith Bruce's review -

http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents ... r.17580909

The added attractions to the bill in Glasgow included a folk-punk quartet led by Costello's younger brother, Ronan McManus, fresh from their own gig at Parkhead stadium, a comely wench adding the odd gloss of musical saw to a few numbers, and many more his country and Americana songs.

The 'wench' is , of course, Brigid Kaelin and she was delighted when I tweeted the review to her -

love it! "comely wench" -- hilarious. thanks for the link!!



http://brigidkaelin.blogspot.com/
GCM
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

Post by GCM »

Here's a 4 star review from Stephen Dalton in The Times...

Looking and sounding like Eric Morecambe’s impish rock-star nephew, Elvis Costello revealed his hitherto untapped talents as a music-hall comedian at the first British date of his Revolver tour. Based on a live format from the veteran post-punk singer’s 1980s heyday, first revived on a US tour last year, much of the marathon set list was decided by inviting audience members on stage to operate the Spectacular Spinning Songbook, a giant wheel featuring the names of dozens of Costello songs. A people-powered search engine 20ft tall, this was interactive entertainment at its most hands-on.

Costello’s elaborate stage set resembled a cross between a Victorian fairground and a Sixties TV game show, complete with cocktail bar and burlesque go-go dancers. Fronting a trio that included two of his trusted longtime collaborators, the keyboard player Steve Nieve and the drummer Pete Thomas, the 57-year-old singer performed in a vintage three-piece suit, jaunty straw boater and occasional top hat. Roll up, roll up for the wisecracking ringmaster of vaudevillian rock.

While the Spectacular Spinning Songbook was an impressive visual gimmick, Costello soon made it clear that some choices were rigged, and largely abandoned it during the second half. Instead, he digressed into solo numbers and more rootsy interludes, including a guest appearance by his younger brother Ronan MacManus, together with his Celtic folk band Biblecode Sundays. The singing siblings duetted delicately on American Without Tears and Little Palaces, paying tender tribute in the process to their late father, the trumpet player Ross MacManus.

Costello also briefly put his comic persona on hold to revisit his political protest-singer past. Tramp the Dirt Down, an impassioned hate song unapologetically relishing the prospect of Margaret Thatcher’s death, earned a riotous standing ovation. Glasgow clearly does not forgive and forget. The mournful Falklands war requiem Shipbuilding, wrapped in a silken jazzy arrangement and warm vibrato vocal, was more understated but all the more powerful for it.

On stage for almost three sweat-soaked hours, Costello’s style-hopping versatility and Springsteen-style stamina levels were extraordinary, even if he sometimes seemed to be overwhelming us with quantity over quality. A few too many meandering plodders weighed down the show’s first half, including an ungainly reworking of Chuck Berry’s No Particular Place to Go.

But the final hour was pure joy, from the Cole Porter-style ditties of the singer’s most recent album, National Ransom, to the thunderous closing stampede of Costello classics, including Oliver’s Army and Pump it Up. As the exhausted Glasgow crowd filed out afterwards, Eric and Ernie crooned Bring me Sunshine over the venue sound system. The perfect coda to a funny, boisterous, big-hearted musical-hall variety show.
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

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A review by DAVID POLLOCK in in today's Independent ; this is scanned from the print edition since it doesn't seem to be on the 'papers site -


“Some people are taking this show seriously,” giggled Elvis Costello as his latest plucked-from the audience participant, a rather excitable woman called Hannah, launched an awe-struck hug around his shoulders. His Revolver tour is an involved experience casting Costello as a trilby-wearing carnival barker hustling members of his audience into appearing alongside him. On one side of the stage stood the towering wheel of fortune from which was chosen a large part of the setlist,on the other was the “hostage to fortune go-go cage” in which the spinners danced to their selections.

In the event, Hannah wanted “Man out of Time” and she got it. “If you can’t cheat in Glasgow, where can you cheat?”
harrumphed Costello, pressing his glasses into the bridge of his nose in Eric Morecambe fashion. Such end-of-the- pier gimmickry told only a fraction of the story, however. With around 40 choices on the wheel and many more already pre-destined , Costello drew not only from his own catalogue (“A Good Year for the Roses” “Brilliant Disguise” and '( I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea' all emerged) but also on a range of staples in an exercise in both deft proficiency and Jools Holland-style reverence.

A dual selection of chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go” and Dylan and The Band’s “This Wheel’s on Fire”, for example, was stretched into an expansive medley incorporating his own “Payday” and “The River in Reverse” and Gil
Scott-Heron’s “I’ll Take Care of You”. The appearance of Costello the musicologist was welcome, but the emergence of
Costello the still angry politico was where the show stopped going through deftlywrought motions and became some thing more breathtakingly personal.

First, his brother Ronan MacManus’s band The Biblecode Sundays emerged for tearsome folk versions of 'American
Without Tears” and “Little Palaces”, then the mood became fleetingly but markedly sombre for a diptych of 'Tramp
the Dirt Down” and “Shipbuilding”.

“I never thought I’d sing this song again,” said Costello of the former and his bitter dedication of it to Rupert
Murdoch didn’t defuse the still raw anger of sections of the crowd towards its original target, Margaret Thatcher.
To hear the latter sung metres from the edge of the Clyde, meanwhile, felt like a gentle exorcism.
As the show galloped to a close, the mood lightened once more and the wheel was rigged to allow us a grand finale that included “Watching the Detectives’, “Oliver’s Army” and “Pump It Up”. Almost three hours, a still-enthused singer and a crowd who must have seen and heard all they’d hoped for and more:that’s showbiz, right enough.


This would appear to be by the same writer, appearing in The Scotsman on May 12th -

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/music ... -1-2290509


Even to one with a catalogue as extensive as Elvis Costello’s, the routine of heading out on the road yet again and working your way through the staples must seem an onerous task on occasion.

So for his Revolver tour, Costello has spiced things up by jettisoning the setlist and instead deploying what he calls a “showbiz model” – a large fairground-style rotating wheel decorated with the names of about 40 songs, with crowd members invited up to spin it and dance to their own random selections in the “go-go cage”.

It’s a set-up, at the very least, which required fluent versatility from Costello and his three-piece band, both in terms of the volume of his own songs and the number of covers learned. Under this arrangement, for example, a young couple chose Chuck Berry’s No Particilar Place to Go and Bob Dylan and the Band’s This Wheel’s on Fire, and heard them played as a medley featuring extended segments of Costello’s own Payday and The River in Reverse. Also necessary was an easy sense of interaction with his crowd, and Costello played the part of fairground ringmaster well, stepping into the cage to dance along with fans, strolling through the audience to holler the lean funk of Bedlam and introducing his brother Ronan MacManus’ band BibleCode Sundays for the tender folk of American Without Tears and Little Palaces.

The machine fortunately found itself rigged continually towards the end of the show, allowing Watching the Detectives and Oliver’s Army to make a necessary appearance, while the powerful politics of Tramp the Dirt Down and Shipbuilding were removed from the lottery. Their presence was not only necessary, but breathtakingly effective.
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Re: Elvis/Imposters, Glasgow, May 11 '12

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