Elvis plays Sydney, Oct. 15 '09

[johnfoyle]

Anyone here going?

[E*C*RIDER]

Elvis? At The Enmore?

Yeah, i reckon i might go and have a look at that!

x

[johnfoyle]

John E. posts to listserv-

Here is tonight's show. Crowd went just bananas over Elvis, and he gave back
to them equally.

1. Red Shoes
2. Either Side
3. Harry Worth
4. Veronica
5. Down Among The Wines
6. 5 Small Words/Not Fade Away
7. Good Year
8. Brilliant Disguise (spine tingling!)
9. Everyday
10. Black Ladder
11. Bedlam
12. She Handed Me The Wirror - last verse off mic
13. Complicated Shadow
14. Condemned Man
15. Watching The Detectives
16. Radio Sweetheart / JWS
17. God's Comic / Mr Feathers
18. Alison
19 In Another Room
Encore
20. Sulphur To Sugarcane
21. She Was No Good
22. All Or Nothing At All
23. She
24. Skin & Bone
25 I Want You

In Another Room is sooooo good, Brilliant Disguise was spine tingling as was
I Want You. A few too many SPAS and Momofuku numbers, was the general
consensus. Good Year for The Roses was anothewr favourite.

We got some albums covers and tickets signed after the show - most of the
album covers got smudged. E looks so thin and worn out.

Rest day tomorrow.

[Jeremy Dylan]

This was my first experience of EC live, and it was quite a show. I disagree with those who thought the set lent too heavily on SP&S. It is his current album after all. In fact, I thought Complicated Shadows and Sulphur to Sugarcane were the highlights of the set. Bedlam was fantastic, although weird hearing it acoustically. Not Fade Away really kicked arse, and I loved it when he went off mike and really brought all the force of his voice out. Great version of Drum & Bone.
Of course there were plenty of tunes he didn't play I would've loved to hear: You Belong To Me, Six Fingered Man, Monkey to Man, Wave A White Flag, I'm Not Angry, etc. But a great set nonetheless.
And he seemed in a good mood, very playful with the crowd and quite chatty. Now he just needs to come back with the Imposters, Sugarcanes, Confederates, Steve Nieve and Allen Toussaint. He could do his own festival.

[Jeremy Dylan]

And btw, got a copy of the setlist from the sound guys:

RED SHOES
EITHER SIDE OF THE SAME TOWN
HARRY WORTH
VERONICA
DOWN AMONG THE WINE AND SPIRITS
BRILLIANT MISTAKE/FIVE SMALL WORDS
ROSES/MOTEL MATCHES
EVERYDAY I WRITE THE BOOK
BEDLAM
SHE WAS NO GOOD
COMPLICATED SHADOWS
CONDEMNED MAN
BASEMENT KISS/HIGH FIDELITY
WATCHING THE DETECTIVES
RADIO SWEETHEART
GOD'S COMIC/MR. FEATHERS
ALISON/IN ANOTHER ROOM

SULPHUR TO SUGARCANE
ALL OF NOTHING AT ALL/ROPE
SHE
DRUM AND BONE

PEACE, LOVE & UNDERSTANDING
I WANT YOU

[snapyou]

Great to see "I WANT YOU" as the final song .
how was it?

[Jeremy Dylan]

Great to see "I WANT YOU" as the final song .
how was it?

He skipped the intro section, but otherwise pretty cool. Real wild grungy chunky tone out of the Gibson Super 400.

[johnfoyle]

A preview article/interview -

http://www.timeoutsydney.com.au/music/e ... rland.aspx


Sept 24 '09


Andrew P Street

A few years ago Elvis Costello announced that he wasn't sure if he'd ever make a record again. Discouraged by declining sales for CDs and bored with the industry, he started playing all-new songs with his regular band, the Imposters, and declared that if his fans wanted to hear new material they'd have to pay for a ticket. Thankfully his retirement from physical product was brief, since otherwise we'd have missed out on last year's rocktacular Momofuku and the new country-acoustic Sacred, Profane & Sugarcane. Both were recorded quickly which Costello sees as being the way of the future.

"Records have a slightly different role to play in our working life now," he explains. "We're having more fun making them because they're not necessarily going to be the agenda for the next couple of years of your life. It's about following the way that you're feeling at that moment. You know, I can find merit in all the records I've made: some people like more than others and I can see their point about some that they have problems with. But I was following my own train of thought, and that's actually what you are being paid to do."

He also accepts that many fans have their favourite era – an inevitable response to the fact that his albums range wildly, from the spiky urgency of his late 70s albums like This Year's Model and Armed Forces to the country rock of 2004's The Delivery Man, the experimental 1993 Brodsky Quartet collaboration The Juliet Letters, his 2004 opera Il Sogno, the loose rock of 1994's Brutal Youth and the lush torch ballads of 2003's North. It's not as though there's an easy-to-pigeonhole Elvis Costello Sound.

"There is just my voice and it has its limitations," he shrugs. "Writing a very concentrated group of songs isn't an affectation. For example, I don't hear bluegrass on this record but I accept that the instrumentation is that some sort of bluegrass band, or at least some sort of country band. Obviously North was written on the piano with my orchestrations and it was a record written from experience and transformation of the heart [covering the end of his long-term relationship with former Pogues bassist Cait O'Riordan and the beginning of his new life with jazz singer Diana Krall] it wasn't like 'an exercise in writing'. It was completely raw."

But surely it's understandable that some people saw North as being something of a genre experiment with...

"I've never made one single genre experiment," he spits. "I can make that statement very clearly. When I see that expression, I think it's kind of like critical shorthand for 'I can't understand this' or 'It isn't something that [con]forms to my narrow idea of who this person is'. And it's not just me, it's lots of people that are treated that way. I have never done anything as an exercise."

Not even the Painted from Memory albums with Burt Bacharach? That wasn't a chance to try writing with one of the all-time great melodists?

"Definitely not!" he insists. "That wasn't an exercise, except in that was a way in which it to exercise your imagination and your ability to respond to somebody with that kind of vivid and singular musical language."

On the subject of at the past, one of ...Sugarcane's highlights is a new version of 'Complicated Shadows'. Certainly the rollicking country strum lifts the song compared with the leaden rock arrangement on 1996's All this Useless Beauty.

"Well, thank you. The song was written much closer to the way we play it [on the new album]. I mean, it was originally intended for Johnny Cash. I think at first it probably sounded a little bit too much like a Johnny Cash song, and I didn't want to record it leaning that way with [his band] the Attractions." A bark of a laugh. "But about four people bought [All this Useless Beauty]. The only people who remark on whether it's a good or a bad thing, or even whether I have recorded this song twice, are obviously people who are following my career very carefully."

Costello's never been afraid to rearrange his older songs, and reveals that he's been working up some surprises for his solo acoustic visit. "I could play two completely different shows," he enthuses of his Sydney dates. "There are enough songs that are reasonably well enough known that you could structure it that way. And of course, even if you stay on stage for six hours, people will come up to you and say, 'well, you know, you didn't play that.'"

[johnfoyle]

http://www.daylife.com/photo/0bH5es36sMcNu


Musician Elvis Costello performs on stage at the Enmore Theatre on October 15, 2009 in Sydney, Australia.

[Jeremy Dylan]

Found this when cleaning up my hard drive last night. EC and I backstage before the show (he is truly the man of a hundred scarves). The real kicker I noticed looking back on this photo, is that he'd changed hats by the time he came out to play...