Elvis Costello Latest News

Elvis Costello, Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow and Apollo, Manchester

The Herald: Keith Bruce: May 14th, 2012

"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."

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"Looking and sounding like Eric Morecambe's impish rock-star nephew"

The Times: Stephen Dalton: May 15th, 2012

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.

Elvis Costello, Liverpool Empire Theatre

Liverpool Echo: May 14th, 2012

"He struts round the stage with a cane and trademark hat as some kind of hybrid of the Joker and the Riddler."

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Elvis Costello, SECC, Glasgow

The Telegraph: Matthew Magee: 14th May, 2012

"Costello’s performance was dark, brooding and movingly intense. These two songs ("Tramp The Dirt Down and "Shipbuilding) 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."

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"Costello channelling the sultry ways of Rihanna"

STV: Kirstin Lynn: May 12th, 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 Fortunate 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, leaving everyone and Oliver's Army wanting him tonight.

Elvis Costello, Glasgow Clyde Auditorium

Scotsman.com: David Pollock: May 12th, 2012

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.

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"It was as much a pleasure to see him channel his inner Tommy Cooper"

Irish Times: Tony Clayton-Lea: May 11th, 2012.

"It was as much a pleasure to see him channel his inner Tommy Cooper and Woody Allen as it was to realise that, in the middle of all the gaiety and wisecracks, he’s still got the nerve and steely self-possession to conclude a lengthy show (it lasted for almost three hours, no intermission) with a guitar-shredding version of I Want You"

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Elvis Costello Reinvents The Wheel! 2012 'Revolver' Spring UK Tour

Elvis Costello will bring the ‘Spectacular Spinning Songbook’ to the UK and Ireland in May 2012. Opening on the 9th in Dublin, the tour concludes in Basingstoke on the 27th of May.

An overture of five uninterrupted rock and roll tunes announces Elvis Costello & the Imposters to the stage, after which members of the audience are invited to spin the gigantic vaudevillian contraption and select the next song.

Tickets on sale now and are available to buy from www.bookingsdirect.com / 0844 338 0000. Prices start at £30. Limited ticket availability at all venues.

Elvis Costello & The Imposters play:

May

Wed 9th DUBLIN, The O2 Dublin

Fri 11th GLASGOW, Clyde Theatre

Sat 12th MANCHESTER, Apollo Theatre SOLD OUT

Sun 13th LIVERPOOL, Empire Theatre

Tue 15th BIRMINGHAM, Symphony Hall SOLD OUT

Wed 16th BRIGHTON, Brighton Centre

Fri 18th NEWCASTLE, Newcastle City Hall

Sat 19th NOTTINGHAM, Royal Concert Hall

Sun 20th BOURNEMOUTH, BIC

Tue 22nd BRISTOL, Colston Hall SOLD OUT

Wed 23rd LONDON, Royal Albert Hall SOLD OUT

Thurs 24th LONDON, Royal Albert Hall

Sat 26th CAMBRIDGE, Corn Exchange SOLD OUT

Sun 27th BASINGSTOKE, The Anvil SOLD OUT

Fortune may deliver hits such as ‘Oliver’s Army’, ‘Everyday I Write The Book’ and ‘Watching The Detectives’ or land on a ‘Jackpot’ selection such as ‘Time’ and ‘Girl’, demanding a sequence of songs, each containing these words.

Such career highlights as ‘Shipbuilding’ or ‘God Give Me Strength’ can spin into view alongside hidden gems from the Costello songbook like, ‘Town Cryer’ or tunes by The Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash and, of course, Bob Dylan’s ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’.

Bolder participants may shake a tailfeather in the Hostage-To-Fortune Go-Go Cage, while the more reserved take a seat in the Society Lounge.

‘The Revolver Tour’ arrives following an acclaimed run of US dates during the Spring and Summer of 2011. Due to popular demand, the tour was extended three times drawing over 10,000 attendees in New York City alone and received rave notices from coast to coast.

Rolling Stone said the show combined, “the kitsch of a game show and lounge act:....when he wasn't singing or slamming at his guitars, Costello worked the stage like a burlesque-club emcee, cracking wise at a mile a minute and spinning a dandy's walking stick.”

Under a by-line, “Singer jams hits, rarities and covers in epic two-and-a-half-hour long show”, another Rolling Stone reported that, “Costello switched from a Fender to a gold Les Paul, howling away and wailing on piercing wah-wah notes. He rocked out even harder to "Uncomplicated," feeding off the energy of a female dancer in the go-go cage shaking maracas.”

The New York Times opined that there was, “no way to keep Mr. Costello’s songs in any shallow entertainment mode. His torrents of words hold desire, rage, wounds and revenge.”

The Los Angeles Times described the show as “the kind of uniquely invigorating experience that warrants a buzzword all of its own; inspiring.”

This acclaim was echoed in review after review:

“Given the gig’s by-pant-seat, chimerical format, Costello’s consummate ability to entertain, his like-wine-aged croon and the band’s master musicianship in meeting him at every step, this was by far one of the most engaging and outright fun shows…” – Nashville Scene

"Unfettered, free-wheeling fun" – Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"The Wheel was the perfect way to shake up a set list with a couple decades' worth of excellent material" – Columbus Dispatch

"Three hours of hilarity, musicality, and unabated joy" – St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"It's hard to imagine any other musician in the world playing the show that Elvis Costello did" – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Elvis Costello has the goods to entertain without relying on props, stunts or tricks. But when he does employ them, it actually turns out to be that much better.” – Oakland Free Press

The Imposters are Steve Nieve (keyboards), Pete Thomas (drums) Davey Faragher (bass)

Elvis Costello’s original wheel tour took place in 1986, opening at the Beverly Theatre, Los Angeles with Tom Waits as a guest M.C. and visiting New York, Paris, Stockholm, Rome, before playing for three nights at the Royal Albert Hall.

Costello donated the original Spinning Songbook wheel to the Hartlepool Museum of Showbusiness Machinery but this new one has been reconstructed from the original blueprints.

Marisol of L.A. band, La Santa Cecilia lends her wonderful voice to "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"

E.C. and the Imposters would like to thank Marisol of L.A. band, La Santa Cecilia for lending her wonderful voice to "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" during our return to The Wiltern Theatre with the "Spectacular Spinning Songbook".

If you should like to hear and find out more about La Santa Cecilia go to:

http://lasantacecilia.com/

Elvis Costello will bring the ‘Spectacular Spinning Songbook’ to the UK and Ireland in May 2012. Opening on the 9th in Dublin, the tour concludes in Basingstoke on the 27th of May. Limited ticket availability at all venues. - www.bookingsdirect.com

Elvis Costello brings rage-steeped tunes to Durham

Newsobserver.com: David Menconi: April 30th, 2012.

"One audience spinner was a young woman in a red dress that appeared to be spray-painted on, and she did an impressive dance routine in the go-go cage along to "Veronica." Another young woman requested "My Funny Valentine," which appeared to just melt her; she sat onstage quietly weeping as Costello played it."

Even with the spinning-wheel format, few of Costello’s standards went missing. By the end of the night, he’d included “Alison,” “Watching the Detectives” and “Everyday I Write the Book.” He made ’em all sound brand new.

Elvis Costello gives Durham crowd a psychedelic performance

TheTimesNews.com: Keren Rivas: April 30th, 2012

Before ending the show with an up-beat finale, Costello delighted the audience with an acoustic rendition of three ballads from his 2010 album “National Ransom,” proving he can still entertain an audience without all the bells and whistles.

Live: In Durham, Elvis Costello becomes his own king

Indyweek.com: Lisa Sorg: April 30th, 2012

Honestly, I lost count after the band reeled out an otherworldly psychedelic jam, complete with theremin and feedback that lifted me from my seat.

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Elvis Costello delivers with an audience-driven tour de force

Jacksonville.com: Heather Lovejoy: April 29th, 2012

"The band found a groove with a great version of Johnny Cash’s “Cry! Cry! Cry!” A few songs later, the rousing “National Ransom” was one of the musical highlights of the show."

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Bringing out the big wheel, Elvis Costello highly entertaining at the Hard Rock

The Palm Beach Post: Andrew Nathanson: April 26th, 2012

"A slight shift in color and sound spectrum brought “Red Shoes” – one attendee named Melissa said she’d been waiting for that song the entire show. Melissa and her boyfriend Alex and a group of friends back from the Wanee festival had extra tickets, and before the gig apparently gave them to several sailors here for Fleet Week; very generous of the group to give to those who sacrifice for our country"

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Smashing all boundaries: The music of Elvis Costello

Jacksonville.com: Heather Lovejoy: April 25th, 2012

To some, Elvis Costello’s 35-year career may come off like a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. When the tail lands on the gut, he unleashes an angry anthem. Near the heart? Time for a ballad. On a hoof? Must be the cue for a ballet. Right on the rear? How boring.

Not knowing what to expect is about the only thing you can expect from Costello. That, and his unmistakable, nasally voice. And a myriad of hats, nerdy glasses and a sardonic wit.

Versatility and a seemingly insatiable artistic curiosity have led the Englishman from new wave to Nashville to pop standards. But Elvis Costello is always Elvis Costello, no matter what he records.

He’s been accused of having repeated identity crises, but perhaps that’s unfair.

Pick up a music geek’s iPod and put it on shuffle. Island calypso might be followed by anarchist British punk, which might then transition to an Appalachian flat-picking masterpiece. It’s not necessarily a sign of uncertainty or lack of opinion, but instead can point to a listener rapt in the wonder of music itself.

As Costello has said as host on his television show, “Spectacle,” he’s simply a guy who really, really loves music. Without limits. Maybe the only difference between him and the music geek with the erratic playlist is that he's not just a listener. He’s also a creator.

He'll share his songs tonight at the Florida Theatre with his band The Imposters.

THE NEW WAVER

Having abandoned his pub-rock roots and birth name, Declan MacManus, he exploded onto the angry youth movement in England in 1977. It was the same year the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” was released, and punk and new wave were rising side-by-side. As the two genres became more defined, Costello’s pop sensibilities aligned him stylistically with new wave. Just as with punk rock, the genre was marked by anti-government sentiments, disgust with societal institutions and what was considered a superficial and consumer-driven culture, expressions of sexual frustration, and an overall radical discontent. Costello, with his band the Attractions, was a major player.

LISTEN TO

“Watching the Detectives” from “My Aim Is True,” 1977
“Pump It Up” from “This Year’s Model” (with the Attractions), 1978
“(What’ So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?” from “Armed Forces” (with the Attractions), 1979

THE BALLADEER

Even as a new waver, Costello was writing slow ballads. His croon crops up throughout his discography, but is most clearly and easily recognized on some of his 1990s efforts, including “All This Useless Beauty” and “Painted From Memory,” the latter being a collaboration with singer/composer Burt Bacharach. He’s never been 100 percent rocker, so while it may seem out of character, it’s really not. Just a few years before the Bacharach album, his cover album included tunes by a couple of king-crooners, Randy Newman and Mose Allison.

LISTEN TO

“Alison” from “My Aim Is True,” 1977
“I’ve Been Wrong Before” from “Kojak Variety,” 1995
“God Give Me Strength” from “Painted From Memory” (with Burt Bacharach), 1998

THE COUNTRY/?BLUEGRASS PICKER

Costello is hardly strictly a bluegrass man. On a couple of albums produced by T-Bone Burnett during the past few years, he displays a slight bluegrass bent, dabbling a bit with musicians who helped provide twangy and jangly picking. But on his album of country music covers, “Almost Blue,” there's a distinct jazziness. Plus, with his non-traditional songwriting, and distinct and decidedly non-bluegrass, non-country sounding voice, every song has an undeniably Costello feel. If you want to hear a true bluegrass album, pick up something by Flatt and Scruggs.

LISTEN TO

“Sweet Dreams” from “Almost Blue,” 1981
“Complicated Shadows" from “Secret, Profane and Sugarcane” (with the Sugarcanes), 2009
“National Ransom” title track, 2010

THE CLASSICAL MUSICIAN

Classical music is a challenge few pop artists dare (or even care to) undertake. Not Costello. His artistic vines grew into chamber music for his project, “The Juliet Letters,” with The Brodsky Quartet providing instrumentation. It was not a one-off classical music experiment. He later composed a chamber music score to back a narration of the children's story “Tom Thumb,” and completed a full-length orchestral work, “Il Sogno,” a ballet inspired by Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night's Dream.” The ballet debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's classical music chart.

LISTEN TO

“I Almost Had a Weakness” from “The Juliet Letters” (with The Brodsky Quartet), 1993
“Hermia and Lysander” from “Il Sogno” (performed by the London Symphony Orchestra), 2004

THE JAZZ MAN

Jazz has been a part of Costello’s life since childhood. His father was a professional singer-trumpeter and his mom a record store employee who took him to jazz and classical concerts. Those early jazz influences can be detected throughout his career, in his work with New Orleans pianist/songwriter Allen Toussaint, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and others. He wrote lyrics to some of Charles Mingus’ compositions, and has performed those songs live with the Mingus Big Band. He’s also a frequent guest singer and writer for The Jazz Passengers.

LISTEN TO
“Stalin Malone” from “Spike” (with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band), 1989
“Aubergine” from The Jazz Passengers’ “Individually Twisted,” 1996
“Someone Took the Words Away” from “North,” 2003

Sources: “Complicated Shadows: The Life and Music of Elvis Costello,” by Graeme Thomson; elviscostello.com; allmusic.com; “Elvis Costello to Music Critics: “National Ransom' is not a bluegrass album,” by Jenny Charlesworth for spinner.com; “Costello’s Jazz Jones” by Christopher Porter for jazztimes.com.

Can you beat the 'Price is Right' wheel?

SunSentinel.com: Ben Crandell: April 25th, 2012

“If I spun the wheel 100 times, I would expect a normal distribution of speeds with a standard deviation of 0.1 radians per second. This is essentially what is done with the Monte Carlo method for uncertainty. … Oh, let me just say that I want to start with an initial angular speed of two radians per second.”

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Elvis Costello Extends Critically Acclaimed Tour

American Rock Scene: LittleQueen: April 25th, 2012

Elvis Costello will be playing at The Florida Theater, located in Jacksonville, on April 27 and he’s bringing his interactive show, complete with a spinning set list wheel along with him. Members of the audience will be invited to spin the gigantic vaudevillian contraption and select the next song Costello plays on the set list. Costello’s website gave the following description of the show:

For the first time in 25 years, Costello will let the fans rule the repertoire. In the return of the Spinning Songbook, an oversized Wheel of Fortune takes center stage and leaves the performance of Costello classics and musical genius to chance. The good news is that there are no losers in this playful interactive show.

Costello’s creativity connects with the audience. And, once again this iconic and versatile artist delivers a legendary performance that is not to be missed.

The interactive show is part of Costello’s current ‘Revolver Tour’, which arrives following an acclaimed run of US dates during the Spring and Summer of 2011. Due to popular demand a flood of rave reviews, the tour was extended three times drawing over 10,000 attendees in New York City alone and received rave notices from coast to coast. Rolling Stone Magazine gave the following review of the show:

“The show combined the kitsch of a game show and lounge act:….when he wasn’t singing or slamming at his guitars, Costello worked the stage like a burlesque-club emcee, cracking wise at a mile a minute and spinning a dandy’s walking stick.”

Under a by-line, “Singer jams hits, rarities and covers in epic two-and-a-half-hour long show”, another Rolling Stone reported that, “Costello switched from a Fender to a gold Les Paul, howling away and wailing on piercing wah-wah notes. He rocked out even harder to “Uncomplicated,” feeding off the energy of a female dancer in the go-go cage shaking maracas.”

Buy Tickets For The Florida Theater.

The ageless punk

Tampa Bay Times: Sean Daly: April 25th, 2012

"Costello dared the audience to keep up. Stomping on effects pedals, he'd follow the whims of his audience (Clubland, Everyday I Write the Book) with his own fanciful wanderings. During a solo acoustic intermission (as his band "put on makeup for the big glam-rock finish") he covered the the Flying Burrito Brothers' Hot Burrito #1, to honor that band's recently fallen bassist Chris Ethridge."

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Costello dusts off surprises at Caesars Windsor

The Windsor Star: Ted Shaw: April 23rd, 2012

In typical Costello style, most of the songs were short and to the point. There were some notable exceptions, like I Want You, from the Blood and Chocolate album. The slashing guitar solos by Costello and the echoey vocals were underpinned by Steve Nieve's luscious keyboards.

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Elvis Costello at King Center for the Performing Arts

Orlando Sentinel: Jim Abbott: April 24th, 2012

When the wheel landed on another wild-card, “Allen Toussaint,” Costello responded with the Big Easy legend’s “Nearer to You.” That soulful ballad took Costello into his expressive falsetto — and to the balcony, where he snagged yet more folks to spin for the next song.

The Revolver Tour - Where Spinning Equals Winning Every Time!

Tango Diva.Com: April 16th, 2012

The master showman does it again. A spectacular music event where “on demand” takes on new meaning!

Costello’s creativity connects with the audience. And, once again this iconic and versatile artist delivers a legendary performance that is not to be missed.

For die-hard fans – like this Diva – the tour is a truly a gift from the music gods!

A Grammy Award Winner and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductee, Elvis Costello has few rivals in the realm of talent. Timeless ballads like “Alison” and powerful poetic songs the likes of “Peace, Love and Understanding” set the bar high…heavenly high in a world often cluttered with senseless noise.
You still have four show dates left this month to see the Elvis and his faithful band at work stateside… before the tour crosses the pond in May.

North Florida is graced with a performance in late April.
Location: The Florida Theatre, Jacksonville, Florida
Date: Friday; April 27
Time: 8p.m.
Tickets: $33.50+
Order online at www.floridatheater.com or call 904-355-2787

Additional Southeast U.S. Tour Dates:

Clearwater, Florida – Ruth Eckerd Hall; 4/24

Hollywood, Florida – Seminole Hard Rock Hotel; 4/25

Durham, North Carolina - Durham Performing Arts Center; 4/29

For the full tour schedule, visit the official Elvis Costello website – www.elviscostello.com

"Muchas Gracias, Marisol, Merci Beaucoup, Vanessa"

The show was also lit up by the appearance of our friend, Vanessa Paradis, trading lines on "Alison" in French, singing harmony on "Out Of Time" and taking the lead on a lovely song originally recorded by The Zombies, "This Will Be Our Year".

It was a gas to share the stage with you both.

As if we were not already fortunate sons, our pals, Vicki and Debbie Peterson of The Bangles appeared at closing time to once again lend their voices to "(What's So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding".

It was later rumoured that Mr. Costello went home with the great looking gal who was playing the killer piano during this finale number.

If you should like to hear and find out more about La Santa Cecilia go to:

http://lasantacecilia.com/

Ask for their latest release at your favourite record emporium or find it at this address:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/el-valor-ep/id508848829

Or catch this glimpse from your place in the stalls:

RAMBLE ON, LEVON

We were heading out to Casinorama, at Rama, Ontario when the news about Levon arrived.

They tell me this is "Gord Country" - as in "Lightfoot" - but I suppose it might once have been "Hawks County".

It was very strange to see our friend Larry Campbell's name on the BBC news, as the spokesman for the family but I imagine right now he is a strong right arm just as he has been producer and musical cohort during Levon’s most recent recording and performing adventures.

Those thoughts that are like prayers go out at a time like this. Some are of praise, while others can only wish for strength in those who remain, especially, Levon's wife, Sandy, his daughter, Amy, their family and closest friends.

Given the health Levon had suffered a long time and how hard he lived at times and yet come through, it is difficult to accept that he didn't make it this time.

I know I’m not alone in being thankful for all he gave us while he was here and know that it will endure while people still have humour and heart.

The are few more stirring sounds in all recorded music than the drags and press rolls and that announce in the last chorus of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”. No other drummer ever sang with such sadness and longing. Few singers of any kind could manage it.

Very little outside of the recordings of James Brown is as funky as the opening bars of “Up On Cripple Creek”, nothing short of Mae West and Groucho Marx as lusty and mischievous as Levon’s vocals on “Don’t Ya Tell Henry”, “Strawberry Wine” and “Ophelia”.

He had it, he told, he sang and he played it in an unrepeatable, unbeatable fashion. Asked to describe the style of his playing, I once said his time- defying fills sounded like a tap-dancer jumping out of the corner of a rapidly flooding room. I can’t top that this evening.

I feel very fortunate to have shared a stage with him for even a few occasions, finding him to be the marvelous character that I always wondered about after hearing him sing and play, spending those hours staring at those impenetrable pictures on "The Band" album cover.

We first met at the Lone Star Café in New York City, some foggy time in the 80s. He and Rick Danko were performing, I’m not sure if they were billed under their own names or that of “The Band” but the music was as vivid as I could have wished.

Now, the previous time I’d seen them perform was from the field of a crowded Wembley Stadium in the summer of ’74, in brilliant sunshine that seemed at odds with their songs.

I suppose the tide was out a little further by the time they played the Lone Star but I was so overcome at meeting Levon and Rick that I’m not sure if I talked like a fool or talked at all, rather just found them open and welcoming.

Our paths next crossed in Boston when the Attractions and I pitched up in the same hotel as the Ringo Starr and His All-Stars Band. Levon and Rick were part of the troupe and living the life of riley, as they say and we were more than happy to join them for a minute or two.

Although these encounters were thrilling and great tales to be told, it was only in recent years that I actually had the chance to play music with Levon.

The fame of “The Midnight Ramble”, shows held in the barn attached to his house in Woodstock, attracted both guest artists and a loyal and gathering audience that saw the show transplanted to the Beacon Theatre, the Ryman Auditorium and many other venues as Levon’s health rallied and vocal strength returned, also allowing him to record the great albums, “Dirt Farmer” and “Electric Dirt”.

It was my great fortune to be invited to make a “Ramble” guest appearance on the same evening as Allen Toussaint.

Now A.T. and Levon had not been in each other’s company since the preparations for The Band’s “Rock Of Ages” live album in 1971 for which Allen had traveled up from New Orleans with a suitcase of horn charts, which he promptly left in a taxi and then had to re-write on location.

They picked up as if they had been talking just a week earlier and the welcome I received was equally generous.

Being a fan of Levon’s daughter Amy, from her work with Ollabelle, I was delighted to hear preparations to open the evening with an acoustic set of stringband numbers. I asked if I could sit in.

“On which number”, father and daughter asked.

“All of them”, I replied and then read their hands for the changes for everything from a Stanley Brothers number to Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City”

Meanwhile, Allen Toussaint was sitting quietly in a chair in the den that served as a dressing room, while musicians tuned and prepared around him. He was sketching out impromptu horn parts for the then unreleased song, “The River In Reverse”, which we proceeded to perform with Levon laying down the drums after hearing the song once backstage.

Once he was behind the kit, things really moved up a gear. Levon sang “Don’t Ya Tell Henry” and we all pitched in on “I Don’t Want To Hang Up My Rock And Roll Shoes”.

Snow was falling hard all the time we were playing. It turned out to be the worst storm since 1947, so if we’d all ended up trapped there for days, at least we would have had songs to sing.

As it was just ten days later, I found myself in another band with Levon at a Howlin’ Wolf tribute at “B.B. King’s” on 42nd St. featuring Hubert Sumlin. That night everything was just as it should be in the drum department, which is not always the case when heavy hands batter the blues.

Now given what I’d witnessed at The Ramble, it seemed natural to invite Levon and Allen to be part of an edition of the “Spectacle” television programme that I hosted for two seasons.

The official premise for the show was that we were constructing a one-time-only band. In reality, all of the participants knew that we were really saluting Levon but I feared that he might not agree to take part if it were put to him that way.

I plotted out a four-act show.

Richard Thompson would open the show backed by the Imposters rhythm section. Then Allen Toussaint would join us at the piano, before Nick Lowe took over the bass chair.

We picked out numbers that could introduce each songwriter in turn and they would come together as an ensemble for a finale with everything pointing in Levon’s direction.

Richard, Allen and Nick each had rich and affectionate things to say about the influence of The Band and particularly Levon’s contribution to the group but it was the fourth act that threatened to be problematic.

I had heard in advance that Levon was again suffering from vocal strain and would be unlikely to be able to sing. Although this was disappointing, his vocal well-being was far more important than any T.V. show and we had plenty of vocalists on hand to cover the musical selections. But I didn’t anticipate what Levon would tell me when I greeted him at the Apollo Theatre.

“I’d like to help you out but I can’t sing. I CAN’T TALK!!!”

Despite the fact that Levon was actually doing rather more talking backstage than he probably should have done, while greeting his cohorts, it was clear that he shouldn't speak under the strain of stage lights and cameras.

This might have made for a three-legged beast but fortunately I arrived at a solution that seemed to appeal to Levon’s sense of humour. I would list drummers who I imagined featured in his personal hit parade, if he would respond with a drum fill.

So, we began our “Mister Ed” act…

“Earl Palmer” received an enthusiastic roll around the toms.

“Ziggy Modeliste”, triggered a funky little hi-hat fill.

"Peck Curtis" received a press roll and a cymbal smash that sounded like a round of applause but then Levon had purchased and preserved Mr. Curtis' hand painted kit from his days playing with Sonny Boy Williamson on the "King Biscuit Time" radio show on KFFA and put it on display in the Delta Cultural Center in Helena, Arkansas.

“Jimmy Lee Keltner”, as Levon called him, brought another affectionate rimshot and tom tattoo, followed by an expression of surprise at the unexpected inclusion in the list of Lightning Hopkins’ drummer “Spider Kilpatrick”.

The drums were all that Levon needed to speak to the crowd.

In the end, the notion of an integral four-piece band was sacrificed to the joy there was to be had in all playing together.

Levon insisted that Pete Thomas play alongside him through the finale and Nick Lowe handed the bass back to Davey Faragher after one tune and picked up a guitar and with Larry Campbell augmenting on electric alongside Richard Thompson, we set about playing some music.

Ray Lamontagne, who had taped an edition of the show earlier in the week, had stayed in town specifically to see Levon perform and agreed to join us in the closing performance of “The Weight” which brought the show to just exactly the sort of wonderfully chaotic and joyful climax that seemed so suited to it’s honouree.

The last time I sang with Levon was in the summer of 2010, when I sat in with his band at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver. He was back singing a little, sharing the vocal duties with the members of the ensemble but playing drums and mandolin with such command.

The songs we played that night, the Grateful Dead’s “Tennessee Jed” – which might have been written for him to sing – “I Shall Be Released” and “The Weight” never felt better.

However, the memory that will always live with me was of singing “Tears Of Rage”. There seemed to be so much space between each backbeat without the song ever dragging. I finally understood from the inside out, how much Levon’s drumming must have liberated, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko’s singing - two more of the marvels of the recorded era.

I’ve sung this beautiful song since I was 17 years old, coming in time after time to an appreciation of its mystery and sorrows or at least my own comprehension of them.

Needless to say, we played "Tears Of Rage" again tonight at the Casinorama. Next to the surreal experience of singing it in an acoustic duo with the author of its lyric in St Louis, a few years back, the Vancouver rendition would be hard to top but tonight’s performance was certainly heartfelt.

Pete Thomas told me that he switched to an underhand grip such as Levon employed for that number and it was then that the emotion of playing the song came flooding in. He and Levon got on famously, as drummers do.

Yet it seemed wrong, even presumptuous to end on such a somber note, even if life is so terribly brief, even at 71, so we played "Peace Love and Understanding" to raise the roof and then closed with the Dead's "Ramble On Rose".

We'd learned this song just a week ago for a San Francisco surprise and reprised it when the Boston Celtics' legendary Deadhead, Bill Walton came up to spin the Wheel in San Diego three nights ago, but which, for this evening's purposes, was dedicated, if not sung as, "Ramble On, Levon".

And "Amen" to that...

Elvis Costello's spontaneous 'Spinning Songbook'

Los Angeles Times: Randy Lewis: April 18th, 2012

Hand it to Elvis Costello: With his delightfully zany “Spectacular Spinning Songbook” conceit, the indefatigable British singer and songwriter has created a musical game show in which he not only gets to host but also cheat, and the audience often hopes he’ll do so.

Read More…

Elvis Costello - The Wiltern

LA Weekly: Daniel Kohn: 18th April, 2012

"Costello turned the Wiltern into his own bizarre funhouse"

Read More…

Elvis Costello and the Imposters Spin Their Wheel at the Warfield

SF Weekly: Jonathan Kiefer: April 16th, 2012

Costello to orchestra section, after having visited balcony section: "Up in that balcony they're all high as a kite."

Read More…

Ticket Sales Reach A Worrying Low

Oh I Just Don't Know Where to Begin...

The Stranger: David Schmader: April 13th, 2012

Last night, Elvis Costello and the Imposters brought their Spectacular Spinning Songbook show to the Paramount, and it was wonderful. As I mentioned in my Preview Piece:

What I learned last night: the cage-dancers are, more often than not, the lucky wheel-spinners themselves, and I am happy to report that despite our region's reputation for not dancing at rock shows, last night's audience-participation cage dancers totally brought it. I don't know if I've ever been more proud of my city. (I'm looking at you, Freaky Steve, and also at you, couple that's been married for 26 years and shimmied together in the cage to "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding?".)

The band: amazing. Keyboardist Steve Nieve remains Costello's greatest not-so-secret weapon, fleshing out the melodies with simultaneously high-drama/low-cheese touches. Costello is a ridiculous charming showman, veering between enthusiastic carnival barker-isms and wry self-deprecation. And, somehow, Costello's contentious singing voice sounds better and less-strained live than it does on record (or at least than it has on recent records).

Highlights: the aforementioned "Peace, Love, and Understanding," "Girls Talk," "Accidents Will Happen," "Man Called Uncle," "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea," and covers of the Beatles' "Please Please Me" and Chuck Berry's "No Particular Place to Go." Also, a slamming version of "Waiting for the End of the World" that made me wish Costello & co would deign to do a full re-recording of My Aim Is True, the thin, flat sound of which has always been slightly at odds with the brilliant compositions.

Dashed Hopes: The wheel never landed on Imperial Bedroom's "Man Out of Time" or King of America's "Suit of Lights."

Spectacular Spinning Songbook dishes out happy surprises at the Schnitz

The Oregonian: Marty Hughley: April 14th, 2012

"The wheel never did land on the jackpot strip marked “Happy.” But you’d never have known that by looking at the crowd."

Read More...

Elvis Costello spins rock 'n' roll wheel at Paramount

The Seattle Times: Gene Stout: 13th April, 2012

"The show rocked pretty hard for most of its 2 ½ hours, but Costello was often at his best when he cooled things down for ballads, such as "A Slow Drag With Josephine" and "Veronica" or the moving, a cappella "Jimmie Standing in the Rain."

Read More…

Elvis Costello's 'Ransom' a nice surprise

Bangor Daily News: Kevin Steeves: April 13th, 2012

Costello goes farther back into history than the 1960s and comfortably lands in the 1940s with a collection of songs that serve as a refresher course in Costello’s musical encyclopedia — and hopefully causes listeners to give the artist’s often overlooked output of the last 20 years another listen.

Read More…

Listen To "National Ransom"

Elvis Costello: The Hall-Of-Famer

Seattle Weekly: David Stoesz:

"There are whole other decades of great Elvis music to discover. It's definitely time to join Team Costello. Especially since so many of you are already wearing the uniform."

Read More…

Show Reveals Surprisingly Aggressive Anti-East Coast Sentiment Among Seattleites

Seattle Weekly: Mike Seely: April 13th, 2012

" a long-married couple named Chuck and Mary Lou jumped in the cage, it was clear that Chuck's moves never quite advanced beyond the "mercilessly grind your groin into the hot cheerleader's rump and pretend you're not wearing jeans" phase."

Elvis Costello spins his hits to a captivated audience

The Globe And Mail: Fiona Morrow: April 11th, 2012

"A heartbreaking rendition of his anti-Falklands War ode Shipbuilding, for instance, was made more poignant with the backdrop of current events revisiting the islands’ sovereignty, while an acoustic interlude of songs from the T-Bone-Burnett-produced 2010 album National Ransom was captivating."

Read More...

Elvis Costello spins a fine show in Vancouver

The Vancouver Sun: Francois Marchand: April 10th, 2012

"Costello was smart enough to know when to take matters into his own hands...spinning himself a "Joker" slot to do I've Been Wrong and The Comedians, where Nieve shone on keys."

Read More...

Inspired Lunacy

CTV News: Robert Collins: April 11th, 2012.

"The Imposters swaggered back on stage, which cued an avalanche of hits – "Alison," "(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea," Chuck Berry's "No Particular Place To Go" and "Pump It Up." During the onslaught Costello wandered back into the crowd and brought up his wife, Diana Krall, for a spin of the wheel, who in turn was offered the seat of the brilliant Steve Naïve on keyboards for the grand finale of "(What's So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding."

Read More...

Critic's pick: Elvis Costello and the Imposters, 'The Return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook!!!'

Kentucky.com: Walter Tunis: April 9th, 2012

"Get a hold of it, Brian, and spin it and don't let the fact that these people's happiness in the next five minutes is completely in your hands. Spin that wheel!"

So says Elvis Costello to an audience volunteer who has been ushered to the stage for a crack at the Spectacular Spinning Songbook, a Wheel of Fortune for the post-New Wave generation — and a magnificent stage prop that ignited in 2011 one of the most courageously fun rock tours since, well, the last time Costello took this traveling pop carnival on the road some 25 years ago.

Hence the title The Return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook!!!, a new CD/DVD set that presents Costello and his long-running band, the Imposters (the same lineup as the Attractions but with bassist Davey Faragher replacing Bruce Thomas), in onstage action.

This is a riot of a live album that displays Costello with all of his pop rambunctiousness intact. Just hear the way he and the Imposters rip through the show-opening I Hope You're Happy Now (whose hullabaloo backbeat is one of Songbook's most immediate delights), Nick Lowe's Rockpile-era nugget Heart of the City, Mystery Dance and Radio Radio in rapid succession. This is the sound of Costello in pure rock 'n' roll splendor, channeling the punkish charge of his past into a wholly new brand of combustible dance-pop that is in no way retro.

But the real party atmosphere of Songbook emerges on the DVD, where we glimpse the visual fun of the tour. The stage sports a go-go cage on stage right and the big wheel at stage left. A hostess named Katerina picks contestants from the audience, the wheel spins and Costello merrily ad-libs as his carnival barker alter-ego, Napoleon Dynamite (sorry geeky-grunge film hounds, the singer co-opted the name over 15 years before the movie came out).

Sadly, the CD and DVD sports a running time that is only half the length of Costello's stage shows on the tour. But compensation comes in the form of differing set lists that provide exclusives for the two discs, like a regal solo version of Slow Drag With Josephine ("rock and roll like I imagined it to be in 1921") for the DVD and a volcanic Lipstick Vogue with keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas in full vigor for the CD. Luckily, both discs boast an absolutely incinerating reading of I Want You and a patient, pop-soul cover of the Rolling Stones' Out of Time.

Part vaudeville, part post-punk sideshow, Songbook is a living concert snapshot of a master pop stylist relishing the spotlight but letting his audience very much in on the fun.

"The Spectacular Spinning Songbook - The Results"

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Birmingham, England
May 15th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

"Joanna" Jackpot - Spin 1

Talking In The Dark
She

"Numbers" Jackpot - Spin 2

Less Than Zero
Two Little HItlers
My Three Sons

So Like Candy - Spin 3

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - IMPROMPTU

"Girl" Jackpot - Spin 4

This Year's Girl
Party Girl
Girls Talk

"King's Ransom" Jackpot - Spin 5

Poisoned Rose
Suit Of Lights
All These Strangers

The Hammer Of Songs

Motel Matches - Swinger's Request

Bedlam - Swinger's Request

No Particular Place To Go - IMPROMPTU

I've Been Wrong Before - IMPROMPTU

"Beauty Or Beast" Jackpot - Spin 6

All This Useless Beauty
Rocking Horse Road
King Horse

I Want You - Spinner's Request

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine - Napoleon Solo

Who's The Meanest Girl In Town, Josephine - Napoleon "Ukulele" Solo

Jimmie Standing In The Rain - Napoleon Solo

Tramp The Dirt Down - with the Imposters

Oliver's Army

Shipbuilding

Finale

Watching The Detectives

Chelsea

Peace, Love And Understanding

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Liverpool, England
May 13th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

"King's Ransom" - Jackpot - Spin 1

Brilliant Mistake
Poisoned Rose
The Stations Of The Cross

Temptation - IMPROMPTU

Everyday I Write The Book - Spin 2

Accidents Will Happen - Spin 3

Tiny Steps/Ferry 'Cross The Mersey - Spin 4 - with Ian Prowse

Shipbuilding - IMPROMPTU

Watching The Detectives - Spin 5

Oliver's Army - Spin 6

Alison - Spin 7

Chelsea - IMPROMPTU

"Joanna" Jackpot - Napoleon's Spin

I Still Have That Other Girl
Talking In The Dark
She

The Hammer Of Songs

Please Please Me/Be My Baby/No Dancing/Be My Baby

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine - Napoleon Solo

Jimmie Standing In The Rain - Napoleon Solo

Tramp The Dirt Down - with the Imposters

National Ransom No. 9

Finale

Beyond Belief

Tokyo Storm Warning - Spin 8

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down

High Fidelity

Pump It Up

Peace, Love And Understanding/Rosalita - for Rosalita Prowse with Ian Prowse

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Manchester, England
May 12th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Joker - Spin 1

Everyday I Write The Book

Accidents Will Happen - Spin 2

Deep Dark Truthful Mirror - Spinner's Request

Joker - Spin 3

Alison

Shabby Doll - IMPROMPTU

Beyond Belief - Spin 4

Clubland - IMPROMPTU

Chelsea - Spin 5

I've Been Wrong Before - Spin 6

"Joanna" - Jackpot - Napoleon's Spin

Talking In The Dark
She

The Hammer Of Songs

Watching The Detectives/Help Me

"Time" - Jackpot - Spin 7

Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Out Of Time

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine - Napoleon Solo

Jimmie Standing In The Rain - Napoleon Solo

Who's The Meanest Girl In Town, Josephine - Napoleon "Ukulele" Solo

Tramp The Dirt Down

Shipbuilding

National Ransom No. 9

Finale

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down

High Fidelity

Peace, Love And Understanding - Spin 8

Oliver's Army

Pump It Up

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Glasgow, Scotland
May 11th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Good Year For The Roses - Spin 1

"King's Ransom" Jackpot - Spin 2

The Stations Of The Cross
Poisoned Rose
Brilliant Mistake

No Particular Place To Go - Spin 3

Payday - IMPROMPTU

This Wheels On Fire/The River In Reverse/I'll Take Care Of You - Spin 4

Man Out Of Time - Spin 5

Chelsea - Spin 6

American Without Tears - Spin 7 - Ms. Valentine's Choice - duet with Ronan MacManus and Bible Code Sundays

Little Palaces - Set of Jig and Reels - with Bible Code Sundays - Paddy Franklin - fiddle, Andy Nolan - button accordion, Ronan MacManus - guitar and Carlton Hunt - floor tom

Tramp The Dirt Down - IMPROMPTU - with the Imposters

Shipbuilding - IMPROMPTU

Bedlam - IMPROMPTU

The Hammer Of Songs

I Want You

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine - Napoleon Solo

Jimmie Standing In The Rain - Napoleon Solo

Who's The Meanest Girl In Town, Josephine - Napoleon "Ukulele" Solo

Finale

Indoor Fireworks - with the Imposters

Mr. Feathers/God's Comic - the Imposters with Brigid Kaelin on the musical saw

Watching The Detectives/Help Me

Oliver's Army - Spin 8

Pump It Up - the Imposters with Biblecode Sundays and Brigid Kaelin on piano accordion

Peace, Love And Understanding - duet with Ronan MacManus with Biblecode Sundays and Brigid Kaelin on piano accordion

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Dublin, Ireland
May 9th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

"Happy" Jackpot - Spin 1

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity
Five Gears In Reverse
King Horse

Chelsea - Spin 2

Good Year For The Roses - Spinner's Request

"Cash" - Spin 3

Cry Cry Cry

Motel Matches - Spin 4

Please Please Me - IMPROMPTU

Alison - Spin 5 - Double Spin

Beyond Belief - Spin 5 - Double Spin

Watching The Detectives/Help Me - IMPROMPTU

The Hammer Of Songs

Oliver's Army

"Joanna" Jackpot - Spin 6

I Still Have That Other Girl

She

Everyday I Write The Book - Spinner's Request

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine - Napoleon Solo

Jimmie Standing In The Rain - Napoleon Solo

Who's The Meanest Girl In Town, Josephine - Napoleon "Ukulele" Solo

Suit Of Lights - IMPROMPTU

Veronica - IMPROMPTU

National Ransom No. 9 - IMPROMPTU

Finale

Pump It Up

Peace, Love And Understanding - Spin 7

His Latest Flame

Uncomplicated/Purple Rain

I Want You

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook - The Results

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Durham, NC
April 29th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

No Particular Place To Go - Spin 1

"Happy" Jackpot - Spin 2

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity
Possession

Temptation - IMPROMPTU

Veronica - Spinner's Request

Bedlam - Spin 3

Country Darkness - Spin 4

Payday - IMPROMPTU

"Cash" - Spin 5

Cry Cry Cry

Oliver's Army - Spin 6

Watching The Detectives/Help Me

The Hammer Of Songs

My Funny Valentine - (acapella) - Strike One

Alison - Strike Two

Everyday I Write The Book - Strike Three

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine - Napoleon Solo

Jimmie Standing In The Rain - Napoleon Solo

(Who's The Meanest Gal In Town) Josephine - Napoleon "Ukulele" Solo

Indoor Fireworks - IMPROMPTU

New Lace Sleeves - Request

"Time" Jackpot - Spin 7

Crying Time
Strict Time
Night Time
Out Of Time

"Girl" - Jackpot - Spin 8

Girls Talk
This Year's Girl

Beyond Belief - IMPROMPTU

National Ransom No.9 - IMPROMPTU

Clubland - Spin 9

Finale

Peace, Love And Understanding
Pump It Up
Please Please Me

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Jacksonville, FL
April 27th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Radio, Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Peace, Love And Understanding - Spin 1

"Time" Jackpot - Spin 2

Clowntime Is Over
Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Out Of Time

Oliver's Army - Spin 3

No Particular Place To Go - IMPROMPTU

Monkey To Man - Spin 4

"Cash" - Spin 5

Cry, Cry, Cry

"King's Ransom" Jackpot - Spin 6

Poisoned Rose
Brilliant Mistake
National Ransom No.9

Everyday I Write The Book - Spin 7

The Hammer Of Songs

So Like Candy/Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - Strike 1

Veronica - Strike 2

Chelsea - IMPROMPTU

I Want You - Strike 3

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine - Napoleon Solo

Alison - Unamplified

(Who's The Meanest Gal In Town) Josephine - Ukulele Solo

Watching The Detectives/Help Me - IMPROMPTU

"Girl" Jackpot - Spin 8

Girls Talk
This Year's Girl

Finale

Pump It Up
Uncomplicated
I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity
Red Shoes/Purple Rain

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Hollywood, FL
April 25th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

Pump It Up
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Chelsea – Spin 1

Beyond Belief – Spinner’s Request

Waiting For The End Of The World – IMPROMPTU

I Want You – Spin 2

“Numbers” Jackpot – Spin 3

Less Than Zero
Two Little Hitlers
45
Five Gears In Reverse

King Horse – IMPROMPTU

Peace, Love And Understanding – Spin 4

Watching The Detectives/Help Me – IMPROMPTU

The Hammer Of Songs – Double Swing

Please Please Me – Strike One

Everyday I Write The Book - IMPROMPTU

Alison – Strike Two

Interlude

No Particular Place To Go

Finale

“Happy” Jackpot – Spin 5 – Ms. Valentine’s Spin

I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity

Uncomplicated – IMPROMPTU

“Joker” – Spin 6

Red Shoes – Spinner’s Request

Purple Rain

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Clearwater, FL
April 24th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You’re Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Miracle Man
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

“Happy” Jackpot – Spin 1

I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity
Five Gears In Reverse
King Horse

“Numbers” – Jackpot – Spin 2

Less Than Zero
Secondary Modern/Watch Your Step
One Bell Ringing

Detectives vs Hoover Factory – Spin 3

Watching The Detectives – Unanimous Decision

I Want You – Spin 4

Everyday I Write The Book – Spin 5

The Hammer Of Songs

Clubland

Stella Hurt – IMPROMPTU

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain
I’m Your Toy

Shipbuilding – Request

Alison – Spin 6

Uncomplicated – IMPROMPTU

Chelsea – IMPROMPTU

National Ransom – Spin 7

Peace, Love And Understanding – Spin 8

Pump It Up - Finale

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Melbourne, FL
April 23rd, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

"I Can SIng A Rainbow" - Jackpot - Spin 1

Greenshirt
Red Shoes
Almost Blue

So Like Candy - Spin 2

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - IMPROMPTU

"Time" - Jackpot - Spin 3

Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Out Of Time

"Toussaint" -

Nearer To You - Spin 4

"Crime and Punishment" - Jackpot - Spin 5

Condemned Man
Alibi
Watching The Detectives/Help Me

Alison - Spin 6

Everyday I Write The Book - IMPROMPTU

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain
Church Underground - Napoleon Solo

"Joanna" Jackpot - Spin 7

I Still Have That Other Girl
Talking In The Dark

The Hammer Of Songs

Episode Of Blonde
Pump It Up
Peace, Love And Understanding/Substitute/Peace, Love And Understanding

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Windsor, ON
April 21st, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

"Time" - Jackpot - Spin 1

Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Crying Time
Out Of Time

Pump It Up - Spin 2

Stella Hurt - Spin 3

I Want You - Spinner's Request

"Happy" - Jackpot - Spin 4

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity
Five Gears In Reverse
King Horse

"Big Boo Small Hoo" - Jackpot - Spin 5

Town Cryer
Cry Cry Cry

"Numbers" - Jackpot - Spin 6

Less Than Zero
Watch Your Step - IMPROMPTU
Secondary Modern

Watching The Detectives/ Help Me - Joker - Spin 7

Alison - Spin 8

Everyday I Write The Book - Spin 9

Red Shoes/Purple Rain - IMPROMPTU

Finale

Tears Of Rage
Peace, Love And Understanding

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Los Angeles, CA
April 17th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

Pump It Up
Heart Of The City
Lipstick Vogue
Watching The Detectives / Help Me

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Riot Act - Spin 1

No Particular Place To Go - Spin 2

"Cash" - Spin 3

Cry Cry Cry

So Like Candy - Spin 4

You're No Good/Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - duet with Marisol of Santa Cecilia - IMPROMPTU

"Happy" - Jackpot Spin 5

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity
Five Gears In Reverse
King Horse

I've Been Wrong Before - IMPROMPTU

Accidents Will Happen - Spin 6

The Hammer Of Songs

Everyday I Write The Book

Please Please Me - IMPROMPTU

Interlude

Quiet About It - Solo - Jesse Winchester song for Levon Helm

A Slow Drag With Josephine - Napoleon Solo

Alison - duet with Vanessa Paradis in French

"I Walked With A Zombie" Ms. Valentines's Spin

This Will Be Our Year - lead vocal Vanessa Paradis

Out Of Time - duet with Vanessa Paradis

Finale

"Joanna" - Jackpot

I Still Have That Other Girl
Talking In The Dark

Chelsea - Spin 7

Radio Radio
Beyond Belief
Tokyo Storm Warning
Peace, Love And Understanding - with Vicki and Debbie Peterson of The Bangles and Diana Krall on piano

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
San Diego, CA
April 16th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You’re Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Deep Dark Truthful Mirror – Spin 1

Watching The Detectives – Spin 2

Everyday I Write The Book – Spin 3

Toussaint - Nearer To You – Spin 4

“I Can Sing A Rainbow” Jackpot – Spin 5

Greenshirt
Red Shoes
Purple Rain

Harry Worth – Spin 6

The Hammer Of Songs

Alison

Pump It Up - Spin 7 – Bill Walton

You Belong To Me - IMPROMPTU

Radio Radio – IMPROMPTU

Ramble On Rose – Bill’s Request

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain

The Comedians - IMPROMPTU

Veronica – Spinner's Request - IMPROMPTU

“Girl” Jackpot – Spin 8

This Year’s Girl,
Girls Talk
Chelsea

Finale

Peace, Love And Understanding

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
San Francisco, CA
April 15th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

Lipstick Vogue
Watching The Detectives/Help Me

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Turpentine - Spin 1

"Big Boo Small Hoo" - Jackpot - Spin 2

Big Tears
Town Cryer
Little Triggers

Everyday I Write The Book - Spin 3

Episode Of Blonde - Spin 4

"Time" - Jackpot - Spin 5

Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Out Of Time

Beyond Belief - Spin 6

Stella Hurt - Spin 7

No Particular Place To Go - Spin 8

Country Darkness - IMPROMPTU

His Latest Flame - IMPROMPTU

Bedlam - Spin 9

Deep Dark Truthful Mirror - Spin 10

Motel Matches - IMPROMPTU

Please Please Me - IMPROMPTU

Interlude

I've Been Wrong Before

The Hammer Of Songs

"Happy" - Jackpot

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity

Mystery Dance - IMPROMPTU

Uncomplicated - IMPROMPTU

Radio Radio - IMPROMPTU

Chelsea - IMPROMPTU

"Roses" - Spin 11 - Napoleon's Spin

Good Year For The Roses
Poisoned Rose
Ramble On Rose

Finale

Peace, Love And Understanding

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Portland, OR
April 13th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

Pump It Up
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

I Want You - Spin 1

"Time" Jackpot - Spin 2

Strict Time
Clowntime Is Over
Out Of Time
Man Out Of Time

No Particular Place To Go - Spin 3

Stella Hurt - Spin 4

"Joanna" Jackpot - Spin 5

Just A Memory
Talking In The Dark

Clubland - Spin 6

"Cash" - Spin 7

Cry Cry Cry

Brilliant Mistake - IMPROMPTU

The Hammer Of Songs - Birthday Edition

Watching The Detectives - Strike 1
Veronica - Strike 2
One Bell Ringing - Strike 3

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain

Alison IMPROMPTU

Please Please Me - IMPROMPTU

Finale

Lipstick Vogue
Beyond Belief
Chelsea

Oliver's Army - Spin 8

Peace, Love And Understanding

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Seattle, WA
April 12th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

"Beauty Or Beast?" Jackpot - Spin 1

Monkey To Man
Rocking Horse Road/Wild Thing
Men Called Uncle
All This Useless Beauty/Do You Know What I'm Saying?

Turpentine - Spin 2

Accidents Will Happen - Spin 3

Chelsea - IMPROMPTU

Waiting For The End Of The World - Spin 4

Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over) - IMPROMPTU

No Particular Place To Go - IMPROMPTU

Peace, Love And Understanding - Spin 5

"Girl" Jackpot - Spin 6

Girls Talk
This Year's Girl
Party Girl

Shipbuilding - Napoleon's Spin 7

Talking In The Dark - IMPROMPTU

The Hammer Of Songs

Deep Dark Truthful Mirror - Songs Of Sneer

Please Please Me - IMPROMPTU

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain
Veronica

Finale

Watching The Detectives - Spin 8

This Wheels On Fire/The River In Reverse/I'll Take Care Of You/This Wheel's On Fire - Spin 9

Everyday I Write The Book - Spin 10

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Vancouver
April 10th, 2012

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

New Lace Sleeves - Spin 1

"Cash" Cry Cry Cry - Spin 2

Clubland - Spin 3

Detectives/Help Me - Spin 4

"Time" - Jackpot - Spin 5

Strict Time
Out Of Time
Man Out Of Time

Shipbuilding - Spin 6

The Hammer Of Songs - Songs Of Sneer

Accidents Will Happen

Beyond Belief - Spin 8

You Belong To Me - IMPROMPTU

Radio Radio - IMPROMPTU

"Joker" - Napoleon's Spin

I've Been Wrong Before

The Comedians - IMPROMPTU

Secondary Modern - Watch Your Step - Spin 10

"Happy" Jackpot - Napoleon's Spin

Five Gears In Reverse
King Horse

Everyday I Write The Book - IMPROMPTU

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain

Alison - IMPROMPTU

Finale

Chelsea - Spin 12

No Particular Place To Go

Pump It Up

"King's Ransom" Jackpot - Mrs. Dynamites' Spin

One Bell Ringing

Peace, Love and Understanding - the Imposters with DIana Krall on piano

Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello & the Imposters today announce new West Coast dates for the unpredictable, uninhibited Spectacular Spinning Songbook tour in 2012, including stops in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, San Diego and Windsor, ON.

With set lists that in total have boasted over 200 different songs, the tour hit more than 30 cities in 2011, garnering acclaim at every turn – from the "fun and irreverence" incited in Indianapolis, to the "hilarity, musicality, and unabated joy" in St. Louis, and on to the "frantic energy" that filled the house in Nashville.

At each performance, select fans are invited onstage to spin the Wheel, helping to create new sets at each performance from a collection of 40 banners including hits, rarities, and a few surprises. This tour marks the Wheel's first appearance in 25 years and includes an on-stage go-go cage and "Society Lounge" in addition to the monumental game-show wheel.

2012 Spectacular Spinning Songbook Tour Dates:

4/10 – Vancouver, BC – Orpheum Theatre
4/12 – Seattle, WA – Paramount Theatre *NEW DATE
4/13 – Portland, OR – Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall *NEW DATE
4/15 – San Francisco, CA – Warfield Theatre **NEW DATE
4/16 – San Diego, CA – Humphreys *NEW DATE
4/17 – Los Angeles, CA – The Wiltern
4/21 – Windsor, ON – Colosseum at Caesars Windsor ***NEW DATE
4/23 – Melbourne, FL – King Center
4/24 – Clearwater, FL – Ruth Eckerd Hall
4/25 – Hollywood, FL – Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino
4/27 – Jacksonville, FL – Florida Theatre
4/29 – Durham, NC – Durham PAC

   * on sale 1/14
   ** on sale 1/13
   *** on sale 1/21

The Imposters are: Steve Nieve (keyboards), Pete Thomas (drums), and Davey Faragher (bass).

Elvis Costello

On April 3rd, 2012, Universal Music Enterprises (UMe) will release the
deluxe edition of Elvis Costello & The Imposters: The Return Of The
Spectacular Spinning Songbook!!! The digipak includes a CD, DVD and 28
page booklet filled with musings from Napoleon Dynamite (aka Elvis
Costello), the emcee of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook show.

The CD and DVD will also be available separately.

Recorded over a 2-night stand at The Wiltern in Los Angeles on May 11
and 12, 2011, the first disc is a CD recording culled from both nights’
performances, shows which The Los Angeles Times said were “the kind of
uniquely invigorating experience that warrants a buzzword all its own:
inspiring.”

The DVD is from Costello’s show on May 12, 2011, including
a special guest appearance by The Bangles. The DVD contains bonus
footage including an alternate intro by Napoleon Dynamite and
behind-the-scenes moments captured with the Imposters— Steve Nieve
(keyboards), Pete Thomas (drums), and Davey Faragher (bass)—as well as
extra performances not included in the main set of the show.

“The Spectacular Spinning Songbook” made its first appearance in 1986 at the Beverly Theatre in Los Angeles during the “Costello Sings Again Tour.”
Last year, Elvis Costello and the Imposters set out on The Revolver Tour
and, for the first time in 25 years, Costello once again allowed his
set-list to be chosen by "The Spectacular Spinning Songbook,” a
monumental game-show type wheel spun by select fans and featuring songs from his latest critically acclaimed release National Ransom, plus new
renditions of hits, rarities and very unexpected covers. Expanded from
its initial short run in the spring to encompass summer and fall dates,
the tour was greeted by popular acclaim and rave notice across the
country, with Rolling Stone reporting, “Costello worked the stage like a
burlesque-club emcee, cracking wise at a mile a minute and spinning a
dandy's walking stick.”

Elvis Costello & The Imposters: The Return Of The Spectacular Spinning
Songbook!!!

Disc One/CD
The Music
•    I Hope You’re Happy Now
•    Heart Of The City (Nick Lowe)
•    Mystery Dance
•    Radio Radio
•    Everyday I Write The Book
•    God Give Me Strength
•    Watching The Detectives
•    Tear Off Your Own Head (It’s A Doll Revolution) featuring Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles
•    Out Of Time (Mick Jagger-Keith Richards)
•    I Want You
•    Stella Hurt
•    All Grown Up
•    Lipstick Vogue
•    Man Out Of Time
•    National Ransom
•    (What’s So Funny‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding

Recorded Live at The Wiltern, Los Angeles, CA, May 11 & 12, 2011

Disc Two/DVD
The Film
•    I Hope You’re Happy Now
•    Heart Of The City (Nick Lowe)
•    Mystery Dance
•    Radio Radio
•    Clubland
•    God Give Me Strength
•    Tear Off Your Own Head (It’s A Doll Revolution) featuring Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles
•    Out Of Time (Mick Jagger-Keith Richards)
•    I Want You
•    Everyday I Write The Book
•    Stella Hurt
•    A Slow Drag With Josephine
•    Jimmie Standing In The Rain
•    Alison
•    Earthbound
•    (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding

Bonus Tracks
•    Uncomplicated
•    Watching The Detectives
•    Monkey To Man

Filmed Live at The Wiltern, Los Angeles, CA, May 12, 2011

Available from Amazon US & Amazon UK

"I always dreamed of stepping into the boots of Albert Stubbins"

The Guardian: Caroline Davies: April 2nd, 2012

New faces on Sgt Pepper album cover for artist Peter Blake's 80th birthday

British pop artist Sir Peter Blake has taken inspiration from his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures he most admires as he marks his 80th birthday.

Twiggy, Amy Winehouse, Grayson Perry, JK Rowling, and even Monty Python's emblematic foot all feature in a reworked version of the 1967 cover created for his birthday celebrations.

Blake, often called the godfather of the British pop art scene, said: "I've chosen people I admire, great people and some who are dear friends.
"I had a very long list of people who I wanted to go in but couldn't fit everyone in – I think that shows how strong British culture and its legacy of the last six decades is."

Singer Noel Gallagher, formerly of Oasis, was "chuffed" to be included. "To be on there with the likes of Vivienne Westwood, Mick Jagger and Paul Weller, just those three people alone, is amazing for me as I wouldn't put myself up with any of those," he said.

Rowling said: "Given that I've devoted quite a lot of time to gazing at the original Sgt Pepper album cover, you can perhaps imagine what it means to me to be featured."

Playwright Tom Stoppard said his inclusion was "an honour that outdoes delirium" while singer Elvis Costello said: "I always dreamed that I might one day stand in the boots of [Liverpool footballer] Albert Stubbins."

The original 1967 artwork also featured James Dean, Bob Dylan, Karl Marx and Marilyn Monroe.

The new version has been created for a special birthday celebration of Blake's life at Wayne Hemingway's Vintage Festival at Boughton House, Northamptonshire, in July.

Hemingway, co-founder of the Red or Dead fashion brand, said: "The new artwork is a tribute to Britain's standing as the world's leading creative nation."

It was "an incredible honour" for Blake to "reimagine such an iconic work of art", he said, adding: "We are proud to be dedicating the Sunday at Vintage this year to celebrate his 80th birthday and creative and cultural legacy."

Terry Jones, the actor, director and original Python, said: "Monty Python is flattered to have had his foot selected, but there are better parts of his body available at very little cost."

The foot itself was borrowed by Terry Gilliam from Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, a work by 16th century Florentine painter Bronzino.

His Python co-star, Michael Palin, added: "It's a great tribute to a fine foot – just don't tell Bronzino or he'll want royalties."

Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello & The Imposters will be performing at the Cornbury Fesitval, Great Tew Park, Oxfordshire, England on Saturday June 30th, 2012.

Tickets on sale now and are available from the Cornbury Festival website.

"The Cornbury Festival is one-of-a-kind: an eclectic and eccentric musical carnival - a dynamic summer festival disguised as a country fayre - a lovingly crafted, top notch, very English open air party, tailor-made for the whole family"

'Robert Johnson at 100' at the Apollo Theater

New York Times: Nate Chinen: March 7th , 2012.

Elvis Costello took a different tack, paring down to acoustic guitar and percussion for a leisurely, conversational “From Four Until Late,” drawing his listeners toward him.

"Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" Honors Bruce Springsteen With A Week Of Musical Tributes

Thursday, March 1st , 2012 – “ Elvis Costello backed by Fallon’s house band the Roots performed “Brilliant Disguise” from Springsteen’s album “Tunnel of Love” . Elvis Costello also perfomed Bruce Springsteens "Fire".

Click on links below to watch video.

"Brilliant Disguise"

"Fire"

Chuck Berry, Leonard Cohen Get First PEN Songwriting Awards

Rolling Stone: James Sullivan: February 27th, 2012.

Keith Richards, Elvis Costello, Paul Simon pay tribute at JFK Library

Midway through Paul Simon's praise of Chuck Berry, who was honored alongside Leonard Cohen as the first two recipients of PEN New England's Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence Award Sunday at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, Berry beckoned Simon to lean over so he could whisper in his ear.

The presenter returned to the microphone laughing. Berry, he said, told him he had a bad ear and couldn't hear a word he was saying.

Yet fans of Berry and Cohen, unquestionably two of the most original writers the rock & roll era has produced, have been listening very closely from the beginning. Addressing a tony crowd of writers and rock fans, Salman Rushdie presented Cohen's award, and Elvis Costello and surprise guest Keith Richards (introduced as "the best-selling author in this room") performed in tribute to Berry.

Given the intent of the Song Lyrics award, the event was peppered with references to great writers. In an email read by organizer Bill Flanagan, Bob Dylan called Berry "the Shakespeare of rock & roll" and Cohen "the Kafka of the blues." Cohen, accepting his award, compared Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven" to Walt Whitman's joyful noise – his "barbaric yawp."

"If Beethoven hadn't rolled over," he said, "there'd be no room for any of us."

After quoting key lines from Cohen's "Bird on the Wire" – "Like a bird on the wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir/ I have tried, in my way, to be free" – the author Rushdie, a former president of PEN American Center, said, "Put simply, if I could write like that, I would."

Last year the New England chapter of the world's oldest literary and human rights organization convened a panel to select the first recipients of the new songwriters' award. The panel included Costello, Simon, Rushdie, Bono, Rosanne Cash, Smokey Robinson and poet Paul Muldoon. After opening remarks from Caroline Kennedy, who spoke of her father's conviction that "the artist has a special responsibility in our democracy," PEN New England Chairman Richard Hoffman explained the symbolism of the oversize image of a lyre projected above the stage. It was a reminder, he said, that through most of history, "literature was sung."

After Shawn Colvin sang Cohen's "Come Healing" from his new album Old Ideas, Costello took the stage to pay tribute to Berry. "This is one of the more intimidating things you'll do," he joked – "play a Chuck Berry song in front of Chuck Berry, without a band." But his characteristically tweaked version of "No Particular Place to Go" drew smiles and finger-points from the master, who, at 85, looked the same as ever in his sailor's cap and string tie.

Rather than take the microphone to make an acceptance speech, Berry surprised the event organizers by indicating he'd just as soon take Costello's hollow-body guitar off his hands. After fumbling with some feedback, he played a muted version of "Johnny B. Goode."

"That's the way rock & roll is," he said when he finished. "It's funky. Is that too bad a word to say?"

For the event's final surprise, Richards, who famously squabbled with his guitar hero during the filming of Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, stepped out of the front row and onto the stage, where he took Costello's guitar and joined him – Costello grabbing an acoustic – on an unrehearsed romp through Berry's cross-country yarn "Promised Land."

"We have a Mount Rushmore thing going on here," as Flanagan noted earlier in the program. The guests of honor were, of course, united in rock.

Elvis Costello, Keith Richards, Paul Simon, Salman Rushdie pay tribute to Chuck Berry and Leonard Cohen at JFK Library

The Boston Phoenix: Carly Carioli: February 26th, 2012.

"At the end, it was Costello with Keith Richards clanging guitars together on stage at the John F. Kennedy Library, playing a suitably sloppy and euphoric version of Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" as a shit-ton of famous talent -- almost as much in the audience as made it onstage -- gathered to see Berry and Leonard Cohen receive the first annual PEN New England Awards for Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence."

Friday February 17th at 4pm EST Jim Del Balzo

Tune in to hear former record company executive Jim Del Balzo and Elvis Costello discuss their experiences working and performing with Bruce Springsteen, which includes a world premier of Elvis Costello & The Imposters playing a Springsteen classic.

Tune in....

World Cafe Looks Back: Elvis Costello - Rebroadcast today for one day only.

Monday's session of World Cafe is dedicated to Elvis Costello a London native who's been reinventing what it means to be a rock musician since 1970. Spanning punk, new wave, underground rock and even bluegrass, Costello has more than 30 studio albums to his name, and has collaborated with many of the world's most talented musicians.

Today, David Dye looks at a 2009 interview following the release of Costello's T-Bone Burnett produced album Secret, Profane and Sugarcane; a 2006 interview with Costello and Allen Toussaint about their post-Katrina album The River in Reverse; segments from sessions in 2003 and 2002; and a 1993 session with Costello and his keyboardist Steve Nieve.

In the span of Costello's articulate interviews on this episode, listen for his take on the "humbling" experience of singing with Johnny Cash in 1979, the way his vocal collaboration in Toussaint's "Nearer to You" changed the song's meaning, and the influence and encouragement of his father, trumpeter-turned-vocalist Day Costello.

Listen Now....

Chimes of Freedom - The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International

"To celebrate the North American release of Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International, Amnesty is streaming all 76 tracks, including Elvis Costello's version of "License To Kill", on their Facebook page. Click the link below to listen to and order this amazing collection http://on.fb.me/uVj6Tb."

American Songwriter: Evan Schlansky: 9th January 2012
"So what works? Dierks Bentley and Steve Earle shine on their respective remakes (“Senor” and “One More Cup Of Coffee”). You’d think the lyrics and the song “License To Kill” belonged to Costello – it’s never sounded better.

Read More...

"And Now A Word From Our Georgia Correspondents"

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"When We Were Cruel No.99"

25 things to look forward to in 2012 - The Irish Times

The Irish Times - December 31, 2011

6 Elvis Costello and the Imposters -

O2, Dublin

As befits someone with the nickname the Beloved Entertainer, Elvis Costello is bringing over from the US his acclaimed Revolver Tour. We get the reference to his Liverpudlian background, but this revolver has a twist, if not a twirl. The show, on May 9th, is the return of the Spinning Songbook, a vastly enjoyable concept Costello previously brought to the Olympia Theatre in Dublin in 1986. Audience members spin a wheel with song names instead of numbers. For all the risk you might imagine could be involved, with Costello’s estimable back catalogue to dig into, this is one safe bet.

Ottawa's Top Concerts in 2011

Ottawa Citizen: Lynn Saxberg: 30th December 2011

Elvis Costello, Ottawa International Jazz Festival, June 24
Singer-songwriter Elvis Costello will be remembered for giving what was probably the most rocking concert ever witnessed at the venerable jazz festival. He was a ball of energy, putting his band through their paces while he handled the guitar work. The song selection spanned almost 40 years of pop, and showed that Costello is still a vital force in music.

Our correspondent's list of best St. Louis concerts of the year

stltoday.com: Daniel Durchholz: 29th December 2011

1. Elvis Costello & the Imposters at the Pageant, July 1: Costello chose the set list via his "Spectacular Spinning Songbook" game-show wheel, injecting an element of chance into a show that was otherwise a sure thing. Added bonus: a surprise appearance by Eddie Vedder.

Red Cotton

“It’s only money
It’s only numbers
Maybe it is time to put away these fictitious wonders”

Red Cotton...

National Ransom

“Woe betide all this hocus pocus
They’re running us ragged at the first attempt
Around the time the killing stopped on Wall St.
You couldn’t hold me, baby, with anything but contempt"

National Ransom...

The Scarlet Tide

“Man goes beyond his own decision
Gets caught up in the mechanism
Of swindlers who act like kings
And brokers who break everything”

The Scarlet Tide...

A Voice In The Dark

“King’s reign beneath umbrellas
Hide pennies down in cellars
And money pours down and yet
Not everyone gets soaking wet”

A Voice In The Dark...

American Gangster Time

“Next week there’ll be some fashionable new sin
For each harlot and each puritan
Pull off their wings, stick ‘em on a pin
And just watch the money roll in”

American Gangster Time...

Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello is proud to announce the return of the “Spectacular
Spinning Songbook” to Los Angeles on the heels of 2 triumphant sold out
shows at LA's famed Wiltern Theatre last spring. Fans who missed these
shows will be able to see it live on April 17th.

The tour also makes its 2012 Canadian debut at The Orpheum Theatre in
Vancouver, BC on April 10th.

With set-lists boasting over 200 different songs, the tour hit more than
30 cities in 2011, garnering acclaim at every turn; from the "fun and
irreverence" incited in Indianapolis, to the "hilarity, musicality, and
unabated joy" in St. Louis, and on to the "frantic energy" that filled
the house in Nashville.

These shows precede the Spinning Songbook dates in the Southeast US
later on in April, with more to be announced soon.

Spring 2012 North American Tour Dates:

4/10 – Vancouver, BC – Orpheum*
4/17 – Los Angeles, CA – The Wiltern*
4/23 – Melbourne, FL – King Center
4/24 – Clearwater, FL – Ruth Eckerd Hall
4/25 – Hollywood, FL – Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino
4/27 – Jacksonville, FL – Florida Theatre
4/29 – Durham, NC – Durham Performing Arts Center

*on sale 12/9

The Imposters are: Steve Nieve (keyboards), Pete Thomas (drums), and
Davey Faragher (bass).

"A second-generation Dylan who doesn't mind doubling on stage as a third-generation Rickles"

The Wrap: Chris Willman.

"Eternally full of vinegar, but also quite willing to take the piss out of himself, Costello’s a second-generation Dylan who doesn’t mind doubling on stage as a third-generation Rickles."

Read More...

Described by the Sunday Times as a "phenomenal live album", the music and DVD from "The Return Of Spectacular Spinning Songbook" will be available at a more affordable price early in 2012.

Louis Armstrong fans flock to Queens for 'Satchmo: Ambassador of Jazz' limited edition CD box set

NYDaily News

The wonderful world of Louis Armstrong is captured in a new box-set package — and jazz fans will have to trek to Queens to snag a copy.

"On Broadway"

Talk Tunesworld.com: 30th November 2011

"The Louis Armstrong House Museum recently purchased every remaining copy from its North American distributor and has become the only place where you can walk in and buy this acclaimed collection for $149.99."

It is with profound sorrow that we announce the passing of Ross MacManus at the age of 84.

It is with profound sorrow that we announce the passing of Ross MacManus at the age of 84.
He had a rich and remarkable life.
Ross passed peacefully after a long illness.
He was surrounded by love at the end.
The family are deeply grateful for the care and kindness he received from the doctors and nursing staff and for the kindness and support of their friends.

"Let's make things sparkling clear"

We at www.elviscostello.com find ourselves unable to recommend “The Return Of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook” as the price appears to be either a misprint or a satire.

All our attempts to have this number revised have been fruitless so we are taking the following unusual step.

If you want to buy something special for your loved one at this time of seasonal giving, we suggest, “Ambassador Of Jazz” - a cute little imitation suitcase containing ten re-mastered albums by one of the most beautiful and loving revolutionaries who ever lived – Louis Armstrong.

The box should be available for under one hundred and fifty American dollars and includes a number of other tricks and treats.

Frankly the music is vastly superior.

If you should still want the component items in the above mentioned elaborate hoax, they will be available separately at a more affordable price in the New Year, unless you are one of those pirates who imagines they are evangelists or that other people’s rights absolve their own thievery, in which case this is between you and your dim conscience.

Tickets are currently on-sale for the Spectacular Spinning Songbook appearances in the U.S., U.K. and Europe during April, May and June of Spring of 2012. More dates will be announced in the very near future.

Steal This Record

A Pastoral Address From The Right Reverend Jimmy Quickly

There was a time when the release of a new title by your favourite record artist was a cause for excitement and rejoicing but sadly no more.

6th December 2011 sees the issue of “The Return Of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook” by Elvis Costello and the Imposters.

This beautifully designed compendium contains all manner of whimsical scribblings, photographs and cartoons, together with some rock and roll music and vaudevillian ballads.

Tape and celluloid were rolling at the Wiltern Theater, Los Angeles in April this year and present a vivid snapshot of the early days of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook show on “The Revolver Tour” of 2011.

The live recording finds the Imposters in rare form, while the accompanying motion picture blueprints the wilder possibilities of the show, as it made its acclaimed progress across the United States throughout the year.

Unfortunately, we at www.elviscostello.com find ourselves unable to recommend this lovely item to you as the price appears to be either a misprint or a satire.

All our attempts to have this number revised have been fruitless but rather than detain you with tedious arguments about morality, panache and book-keeping - when there are really bigger fish to filet these days - we are taking the following unusual step.

If you should really want to buy something special for your loved one at this time of seasonal giving, we can whole-heartedly recommend, “Ambassador Of Jazz” - a cute little imitation suitcase, covered in travel stickers and embossed with the name “Satchmo” but more importantly containing TEN re-mastered albums by one of the most beautiful and loving revolutionaries who ever lived – Louis Armstrong.

The box should be available for under one hundred and fifty American dollars and includes a number of other tricks and treats. Frankly, the music is vastly superior.

If on the other hand you should still want to hear and view the component parts of the above mentioned elaborate hoax, then those items will be available separately at a more affordable price in the New Year, assuming that you have not already obtained them by more unconventional means.

Tickets are currently on-sale for the Spectacular Spinning Songbook appearances in the U.S., U.K. and Europe during April, May and June in the Spring of 2012. More dates will be announced in the very near future.

Elvis Costello European Tour Postponement Announcement

It is with the deepest regret that Elvis Costello has to postpone the following dates on his current European Solo Tour.

Sunday November 13, Stockholm Sweden, Rival
Monday November 14, Malmoe Sweden, Nojesteatren
Thursday November 17, Brussels Belgium, Cirque Royal
Friday November 18, Eindhoven Netherlands, Muziekgebouw
Monday November 21, Reykjavik Iceland, Harpa

This course of action is unavoidable and necessary due to a grave deterioration of his father’s health and the need to return to England without delay.

Elvis Costello appreciates all the good wishes he has received in this regard and wants to express his thanks for understanding at this extremely difficult time.

It is hoped that it will be possible to reschedule these shows in 2012.

Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello and the Imposters today announce the first Spectacular
Spinning Songbook dates of 2012 with shows in the Southeast
US this April. Stay tuned for more Spinning Songbook dates coming soon.

The tour hit more than 30 cities in 2011, garnering acclaim at every
turn – from the "fun and irreverence" incited in Indianapolis, to the
"hilarity, musicality, and unabated joy" in St. Louis, and on to the
"frantic energy" that filled the house in Nashville.

At each performance, select fans are invited onstage to spin the Wheel,
helping to create new sets at each performance from a collection of 40
banners including hits, rarities, and a few surprises. This tour marks
the Wheel's first appearance in 25 years and includes an on-stage go-go
cage and "Society Lounge" in addition to the monumental game-show wheel.

Spring 2012 Tour Dates:

4/23 – Melbourne, FL – King Center*
4/24 – Clearwater, FL – Ruth Eckerd Hall**
4/25 – Hollywood, FL – Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino**
4/27 – Jacksonville, FL – Florida Theatre**
4/29 – Durham, NC – Durham Performing Arts Center**

*Tickets for September 2011's canceled show at Bob Carr PAC in Orlando can be refunded at point of purchase. Purchasers will have the opportunity to buy tickets for the Melbourne, FL performance prior to the general public on sale in December.
** Rescheduled from September 2011, please visit your local box office for further details.

The Imposters are: Steve Nieve (keyboards), Pete Thomas (drums), and
Davey Faragher (bass).

"Elvis Costello In Antwerp: "Sonic Youth reminding noise-version of 'Watching The Detectives""

DeMorgan.be: Bart Steenhaut: 10th November 2011.

Halverwege zijn al maanden uitverkochte concert in de Elisabethzaal doet
Elvis Costello een bekentenis. "Het nummer dat ik nu ga spelen haat ik
écht", zegt hij. Wat volgt is een bloedstollende versie van 'Everyday I
Write The Book', een van de grootste hits uit zijn carrière. Het was
maar een van de vele hoogtepunten uit het soloconcert dat hem
gisteravond naar Antwerpen bracht.

Costello Solo. Dat was, in België, althans, al van 1989 geleden. Toen
speelde hij in zijn eentje de hele affiche van Torhout-Werchter naar
huis met een akoestische set die bij iedereen die er toen bij was op het
netvlies staat gebrand.

Het optreden is Antwerpen was compleet anders, maar haast even magisch.
Dat heeft uiteraard alles te maken met het feit dat Costello niet alleen
een meesterlijk songschrijver is, maar ook een bevlogen performer. En
ook al stond hij solo op het podium, toch suggereerde het arsenaal
instrumenten op het podium dat er elk moment een heuse band uit de
coulissen kon stappen. Dat gebeurde ook, want Larkin Poe, dat op
uitnodiging van de zanger het voorprogramma had verzorgd, dubbelde
tijdens een paar nummers als begeleidingsband voor onze beloved
entertainer. De eerlijkheid gebiedt me te zeggen dat dat niet meteen de
beste passages waren. De twee zangeressen van deze Amerikaanse
bluegrassband pasten que stemtimbre niet écht bij Costello, maar het
spelplezier - en langs de kant van het publiek: het gevoel dat je iets
unieks meemaakte - compenseerde veel.

Maar het beste was Costello uiteraard als hij moederziel alleen op het
podium stond en schijnbaar nonchalant grasduinde door zijn
indrukwekkende repertoire. Hij strooide met hits zoals een kippenboer
met maïskorrels. De set begon sterk met 'Oliver's Army', en in een mum
van tijd had hij ook 'Good Year For The Roses' en het samen met Paul
McCartney geschreven 'Veronica' prijsgegeven. Opmerkelijk trouwens hoe
Costello songs die hij al duizenden keren live had uitgevoerd toch met
een buitengewoon inlevingsvermorgen bleef vertolken. Niet allen dat,
maar op de koop toe wist hij in 'Alison' en het verschroeiende 'I Want
You' ook nog invalshoeken bloot te leggen die tot nog toe onaangeroerd
waren gebleven. Geen geringe verdienste.

Daarnaast diepte Costello - naargelang de inspiratie van het moment -
ook wat covers op. The Beatles ('You've Got To Hide Your Love Away'!)
Charles Aznavour (het op applaus onthaalde 'She'), de onlangs overleden
Bert Jansch ('It Don't Bother Me'),... allemaal vertolkten ze
gastrolletjes in een eclectische set die bleef verrassen. Ook wanneer
Costello plots achter de piano ging zitten voor een bloedstollende
versie van 'Shipbuilding', of een aan Sonic Youth herinnerende
noise-versie van 'Watching The Detectives' uit de snaren kneep, stond je
keer op keer perplex van zoveel veelzijdigheid.

De bisrondes, goed voor een tiental extra's, puilden uit met nog meer
moois - we onthouden een rauwe, door een megafoon gezongen versie van
'National Ransom' die het beste van Tom Waits naar de kroon stak' en het
als ultieme uitsmijter geserveerde 'A Voice In The Dark'. Een stem in de
duisternis, inderdaad. Maar wát voor één. Op zijn zevenenvijftigste
blijft Elvis Costello - nog steeds met die zwarte hoornen bril en dat
eeuwige strooien hoedje - een categorie apart. En wat beter is: hij
vertoont niet de minste tekenen van slijtage.

Elvis Costello komt op 17 november naar het Koninklijk Circus te Brussel
voor een extra concert. Info op www.greenhousetalent.be

Beyond The Melkweg

Elvis Costello:
Amsterdam: Rabozaal: 10th November 2011

Greenshirt
Bullets For The New-Born King
Rocking Horse Road/Wild Thing
Good Year For The Roses
New Amsterdam/You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
Everyday I Write The Book
The Stations Of The Cross
All Or Nothing At All
Radio Silence
She
A Slow Drag With Josephine
Who's The Meanest Gal In Town, Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain
Blame It On Cain
Love Field
I Turn Around
Red Shoes

Watching The Detectives
Alison/Suffering Face
After The Fall
Oliver's Army
I Want You

National Ransom No.5
Shipbuilding
Chelsea
Peace, Love And Understanding
The Crooked Line
Brilliant Mistake

The Scarlet Tide

Tour Dates:

November 12 – Sentrum Scene – Oslo, Norway - SOLD OUT
November 13 – Rival – Stockholm, Sweden - Buy Tickets
November 14 – Nojesteatren – Malmoe, Sweden - Buy Tickets
November 17 – Cirque Royal – Brussels, Belgium - Buy Tickets
November 18 – Muziekgebouw – Eindhoven, Netherlands - Buy Tickets
November 21 – Concert House – Reykjavik, Iceland - SOLD OUT

"Like A Broken Bassoon" - Touched For The Very First Time

Berliner Morgenpost: 8th November 2011.

It's the ultimate test for a musician, when he introduces himself without a band to his fans. Elvis Costello mastered the challenge of Germany in his only concert bravura. With changing guitars he entertained the more than 3000 listeners in the Tempodrom in Berlin two and a half hours. Whether "Alison", "Watching the Detectives" or the Charles Aznavour classic "She", which he sang a decade ago for the film "Notting Hill": hardly a hit was missing.

Costello, Declan Patrick McManus bourgeois, has been experimenting in his more than 30 years in the music business with a variety of directions. As a punk rocker he started, in the meantime he played everything from piano ballads to rock and roll. There were plates with opera singer Anne Sofie von Otter, Evergreen's composer Burt Bacharach, the songwriter-legend T Bone Burnett. Most recently, Costello said, matching the current turbulence in the atmosphere of the Great Depression of the '20s and made it a year ago, the album "National Ransom."

In Berlin, Costello was more of a rocker, also alone. In suit and a hat over his black horn-rimmed glasses of the typical 57-year-old came on stage, with the first few bars of one of his first songs - "(The Angels Want to Wear My) Red Shoes."

The whole evening was amazing how a man can be forgotten with a guitar, bass, drums or background vocals. Finally Costello's unmistakable voice sounds like an instrument itself: sometimes clear, sometimes husky, sometimes deep, sometimes pressed together like a broken bassoon. Just the voice filled the solidified into concrete circus tent full of the Tempodrom, gave the guitar to the rhythm.

And how can the man play! Costello felt at a point on his beginnings as an entertainer in a bar reminded - and this hard school is unmistakable. Often enough you could almost think that there are really two people fall in the strings, the highlight of the evening, the wistful ballad "I Want You" moaned and boomed the heartbreaking guitar in his hands.

The ballad "Everyday I Write A Book" (Costello, "A song that I really hate") sounded like the strings of crystal clear pinpricks. For "No Wonder" and "Shipbuilding" he sat down at the e-piano, with the early song "Radio Sweetheart" he recruited the audience to the accompaniment. Finally, Costello sang very intimate even without a microphone on stage and urged the audience to come closer to the stage easily.

The only concert in Germany the solo tour is also likely to be the last time being - Costello promised to come back next time with a backing band.

Es ist die ultimative Prüfung für einen Musiker, wenn er sich ohne Band seinen Fans stellt. Elvis Costello meisterte die Herausforderung bei seinem einzigen Deutschland-Konzert bravourös. Mit wechselnden Gitarren unterhielt er die mehr als 3000 Zuhörer im Tempodrom in Berlin zweieinhalb Stunden lang. Ob „Alison“, „Watching the Detectives“ oder der Charles-Aznavour-Klassiker „She“, den er vor gut zehn Jahren für den Film „Notting Hill“ einsang: Kaum ein Hit fehlte.

Costello, bürgerlich Declan Patrick McManus, hat in seinen mehr als 30 Jahren im Musikgeschäft mit unterschiedlichsten Richtungen experimentiert. Als Punk-Rocker fing er an, inzwischen spielte er alles von Rock'n'Roll bis Klavier-Balladen. Es gab Platten mit der Opernsängerin Anne Sofie von Otter, dem Evergreen-Komponisten Burt Bacharach, der Songwriter-Legende T Bone Burnett. Zuletzt versetzte sich Costello, passend zu den heutigen Turbulenzen, in die Stimmung der großen Wirtschaftskrise der 20er-Jahre und machte daraus vor einem Jahr das Album „National Ransom“.

In Berlin war Costello eher der Rocker, auch allein. In Anzug und mit einem Hut über seiner typischen schwarzen Hornbrille kam der 57-Jährige auf die Bühne, mit den ersten Takten eines seiner ersten Songs – „(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes“.

Den ganzen Abend war es erstaunlich, wie ein Mann mit einer Gitarre Bass, Schlagzeug oder Background-Sänger vergessen lassen kann. Schließlich klingt Costellos unverkennbare Stimme selbst wie ein Instrument: mal klar, mal heiser, mal tief, mal zusammengepresst wie ein kaputtes Fagott. Allein schon die Stimme füllte das in Beton erstarrte Zirkuszelt des Tempodroms voll aus, dazu gab die Gitarre den Rhythmus vor.

Und wie kann der Mann spielen! Costello fühlte sich an einem Punkt an seine Anfänge als Alleinunterhalter in einer Bar erinnert – und diese harte Schule ist unverkennbar. Oft genug konnte man fast denken, dass da in Wirklichkeit zwei Leute in die Saiten greifen, beim Höhepunkt des Abends, der wehmütigen Ballade „I Want You“ stöhnte und dröhnte die E-Gitarre in seinen Händen herzzerreißend.

Zur Ballade „Everyday I Write A Book“ (Costello: „Ein Song, den ich wirklich hasse“) klangen die Saiten wie kristallklare Nadelstiche. Für „No Wonder“ oder „Shipbuilding“ setzte er sich ans E-Klavier, beim frühen Song „Radio Sweetheart“ rekrutierte er das Publikum zur Begleitung. Zum Schluss sang Costello sogar ganz intim ohne Mikrofon am Bühnenrand und rief das Publikum auf, einfach näher zur Bühne zu kommen.

Das einzige Deutschland Konzert der Solo-Tour dürfte auch vorerst das letzte bleiben – Costello versprach, nächstes Mal mit einer Begleitband wiederzukommen.

Schnappschuss von Berlin

Elvis Costello
Berlin: Tempodrome: 7th November 2011.

Red Shoes
Either Side Of The Same Town
Veronica
Good Year For The Roses
New Amsterdam/You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
Bullets For The New-Born King
The Stations Of The Cross
Everyday I Write The Book
Bedlam
Radio Silence
All Or Nothing At All
She
No Wonder
Watching The Detectives
Radio Sweetheart
God's Comic
Alison/In Another Room

Don't Bother Me/It Don't Bother Me
A Slow Drag With Josephine
Who's The Meanest Gal In Town Josephine - Creamer/Brown/Ackerly
Jimmie Standing In The Rain
Brilliant Mistake
I Want You

National Ransom No.5
Shipbuilding
Peace, Love And Understanding
All These Strangers
A Voice In The Dark

Tour Dates:
November 7 – Tempodrome – Berlin, Germany -
November 8 – Oosterpoort – Groningen, Netherlands - Buy Tickets
November 9 – Queen Elisabeth Hall – Antwerp, Belgium - SOLD OUT
November 10 – Rabozaal – Amsterdam, Netherlands - SOLD OUT
November 12 – Sentrum Scene – Oslo, Norway - SOLD OUT
November 13 – Rival – Stockholm, Sweden - Buy Tickets
November 14 – Nojesteatren – Malmoe, Sweden - Buy Tickets
November 17 – Cirque Royal – Brussels, Belgium - Buy Tickets
November 18 – Muziekgebouw – Eindhoven, Netherlands - Buy Tickets
November 21 – Concert House – Reykjavik, Iceland - SOLD OUT

"Elvis Costello Plays Prague Tonight"

"Playing a catchy pop with dank strands of reggae and a cool mod look...his latest, folk-based incarnation is only the most - The Prague Post"

Buy Tickets.....

"All These Strangers Tour - Another Snapshot"

Elvis Costello
Bucharest : Sala Palatului: 3rd November 2011.

Red Shoes
Either Side Of The Same Town
Veronica
Inch By Inch
New Amsterdam/You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
Everyday I Write The Book
Bedlam
She's Pulling Out The Pin
After The Fall
All Or Nothing At All
She
A Slow Drag With Josephine
Watching The Detectives
Radio Sweetheart
Alison

Don't Bother Me/It Don't Bother Me
I Want You

National Ransom No.5
Shipbuilding
Peace, Love And Understanding
Pump It Up

Tour Dates:

November 4 – Congress Center – Prague, Czech Republic - Buy Tickets
November 7 – Tempodrome – Berlin, Germany - Buy Tickets
November 8 – Oosterpoort – Groningen, Netherlands - Buy Tickets
November 9 – Queen Elisabeth Hall – Antwerp, Belgium - SOLD OUT
November 10 – Rabozaal – Amsterdam, Netherlands - SOLD OUT
November 12 – Sentrum Scene – Oslo, Norway - SOLD OUT
November 13 – Rival – Stockholm, Sweden - Buy Tickets
November 14 – Nojesteatren – Malmoe, Sweden - Buy Tickets
November 17 – Cirque Royal – Brussels, Belgium - Buy Tickets
November 18 – Muziekgebouw – Eindhoven, Netherlands - Buy Tickets
November 21 – Concert House – Reykjavik, Iceland - SOLD OUT

Six Guitars And A Hat: Elvis Costello Shines At The Vienna Konzerthaus

"For our German-speaking readers: Rave Notices For Vienna Concert Hall Show"

Kurier: 01.11.2011: Elvis Costello: Sechs Gitarren und ein Hut

Kritik: Der britische Singer/Songwriter Elvis Costello begeisterte mit einer Solo-Performance im Wiener Konzerthaus. Lesen Sie mehr......

Die Presse.com: 01.11.2011: Costello-Solo: Weises Vergnügen

Wiener Konzerthaus: Elvis Costello wechselte zwischen fünf Gitarren und überzeugte mit Humor, Spielwitz und wunderbar geölter Stimme. Lesen Sie mehr......

Kleine Zeitung: 01.11.2011: Elvis Costello brilliert im Wiener Konzerthaus Lesen Sie mehr......

Vienna Online: 01.11.2011: Elvis Costello begeisterte im Wiener Konzerthaus

Wohlverdienten Applaus heimste der britische Musiker Elvis Costello am Montag Abend bei seinem Solo-Auftritt im Großen Saal des Konzerthauses in Wien ein. Lesen Sie mehr......

"The All These Strangers Tour"

"In his generous set – I counted 25 songs and it runs 25 minutes over – the highlights include an exquisite, stripped-down "Good Year for the Roses", sung like it belongs in a David Lynch/Wim Wenders film, a suitably vicious ("though it nearly took a miracle to get you to stay/ It only took my little fingers to blow you away") "Watching the Detectives" and the gorgeous lament "Alison". The Independent

Tour Dates:

October 26 – Megaron – Athens, Greece - Buy Tickets
October 28 – Festival at Queens – Belfast, Ireland - Buy Tickets
October 29 – Sligo Live Music Festival – Sligo, Ireland - SOLD OUT
October 31 – Konzerthaus – Vienna, Austria - Buy Tickets
November 2 – TIM Show Center – Istanbul, Turkey - Buy Tickets
November 3 – Sala Palatului – Bucharest, Romania - Buy Tickets
November 4 – Congress Center – Prague, Czech Republic - Buy Tickets
November 7 – Tempodrome – Berlin, Germany - Buy Tickets
November 8 – Oosterpoort – Groningen, Netherlands - Buy Tickets
November 9 – Queen Elisabeth Hall – Antwerp, Belgium - SOLD OUT
November 10 – Rabozaal – Amsterdam, Netherlands - SOLD OUT
November 12 – Sentrum Scene – Oslo, Norway - SOLD OUT
November 13 – Rival – Stockholm, Sweden - Buy Tickets
November 14 – Nojesteatren – Malmoe, Sweden - Buy Tickets
November 17 – Cirque Royal – Brussels, Belgium - Buy Tickets
November 18 – Muziekgebouw – Eindhoven, Netherlands - Buy Tickets
November 21 – Concert House – Reykjavik, Iceland - SOLD OUT

"In a remarkable solo performance in the Cultural Centre last night, Elvis - Elvis Costello that is - showed his songs are just as sharp, his lyrics as biting and his voice as powerful as they were when the British singer-songwriter burst onto the scene as the angry young man of pop more than three decades ago." - South China Morning Post

Al Kooper on "When Green Eyes Turn Blue"

The Morton Report: Al Kooper: 28th October, 2011

Who knew when I was enjoying “Tiny Steps,” “Alison,” and “So Like Candy” that THAT guy could sing like THIS? I guess that amazing Bacharach album was a real tipoff, but there’s no Burt to count on here. Elvis wrote the song, the arrangements and co-produced this inclusion from the 2003 "North" album. Kevin Killen was his producing partner and engineered and mixed this brilliantly. Someday, I wanna hear him duet with Tony Bennett on this song. Meanwhile I’m content hearing him Krall-ing around on this version. And a sumptuous way to calm down this week's shenanigans as well. Will I see you in November? Happy Halloween!"

Check out all of Mr Kooper reports and recommendations:

Purchase "North" UK

Purchase "North" US

"No, I Eat Both Vegetables And Humans"

Elvis Costello
Athens: Megaron: 26th October 2011

Bullets For The New-Born King
Accidents Will Happen
Veronica
Either Side Of The Same Town
New Amsterdam
Last Boat Leaving
Everyday I Write The Book
Bedlam
Don't Bother Me/It Don't Bother Me
She
Watching The Detectives
A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain
Alison

Almost Blue
Shot With His Own Gun
A Voice In The Dark
I Want You

National Ransom No.5
Shipbuilding
Peace, Love And Understanding
Oliver's Army
All These Strangers

Tour Dates:

October 26 – Megaron – Athens, Greece

October 28 – Festival at Queens – Belfast, Ireland

October 29 – Sligo Live Music Festival – Sligo, Ireland

October 31 – Konzerthaus – Vienna, Austria - Buy Tickets

November 2 – TIM Show Center – Istanbul, Turkey - Buy Tickets

November 3 – Sala Palatului – Bucharest, Romania - Buy Tickets

November 4 – Congress Center – Prague, Czech Republic - Buy Tickets

November 7 – Tempodrome – Berlin, Germany - Buy Tickets

November 8 – Oosterpoort – Groningen, Netherlands - Buy Tickets

November 9 – Queen Elisabeth Hall – Antwerp, Belgium - SOLD OUT

November 10 – Rabozaal – Amsterdam, Netherlands - SOLD OUT

November 12 – Sentrum Scene – Oslo, Norway - SOLD OUT

November 13 – Rival – Stockholm, Sweden - Buy Tickets

November 14 – Nojesteatren – Malmoe, Sweden - Buy Tickets

November 17 – Cirque Royal – Brussels, Belgium - Buy Tickets

November 18 – Muziekgebouw – Eindhoven, Netherlands - Buy Tickets

November 21 – Concert House – Reykjavik, Iceland - SOLD OUT

"Monster Went And Ate My Red 2"

Elvis Costello sings "Monster Went And Ate My Red 2" with Sesame Street's Elmo and Cookie Monster. Episode "Baby Bear's Doll" which Airs on PBS Kids on Friday 21st October.

'Sesame Street's' latest victim: Elvis Costello

Los Angeles Times: Todd Martens: 18th October, 2011

It's never too early to get the young'uns comfortable with the idea that at some point between the ages of 15 and 20 a significant other will most likely instill in them a lesson in absolutely brutal heartbreak.

So when some folks in The Times' office squealed with joy at the sight of Elvis Costello singing along wtih Elmo, it seemed like a fine time to applaud "Sesame Street" for easing kids into what will surely be an inevitable cynicism toward love by rewriting Costello's she-left-me-for-another-man staple "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes" into "Monster Went and Ate My Red 2."

There are furry puppets and missing numbers instead of girls and their lame boyfriends, and the "Sesame Street" tune ends on a rather upbeat note. But just because there's a giant No. 2 that's on the loose, the metaphor still comes across loud and clear. It's about girls, right?

Watch The Video......

Exclusive performance of Elvis Costello's "Jimmie Standing in the Rain"

Exclusive performance of Elvis Costello's “Jimmie Standing in the Rain” now available on the T Bone Presents The Speaking Clock Revue album, which is the Amazon MP3 “Daily Deal” – Get it today for only $3.99!

In October 2010, T Bone Burnett organized an impressive group of musicians, dubbed The Speaking Clock Revue, and joined with Participant Media for concerts benefiting arts education. The Speaking Clock Revue was recorded at the Beacon Theater in New York, and featured a house band made up of musicians from many T Bone-produced recordings and led by music director and guitarist Marc Ribot. The resulting album contains 11 previously unreleased performances by Elton John and Leon Russell, Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp, Gregg Allman, Ralph Stanley, Jeff Bridges, Neko Case, Yim Yames, Punch Brothers, Karen Elson, and The Secret Sisters.

T Bone was inspired to do the fundraising concerts after attending an early screening of Participant's documentary Waiting for Superman, from Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud), which focused on the troubled state of public education in the U.S., following a handful of promising students through a U.S. public school system and offering creative new approaches to education reform. Proceeds from the sale of the album benefit arts and music education in public schools.

"Get Well Hubert"

Best wishes for a speedy recovery go to Hubert Sumlin who recently joined us at the Wellmont Theatre, Montclair for a run of songs that he first performed with Howlin’ Wolf.

Hubert’s spirit and humour are undimmed by less robust health and it was a gas for us to share the stage with him and heartening to see him get the acclaim that he received from those in attendance.

Photo: Toni-Ann Mamary

The Last Revolution 2011

We cannot close here without tipping our hat to Hubert Sumlin who joined us at the Wellmont Theatre, Montclair for a run of songs that he first performed with Howlin’ Wolf.

Hubert’s spirit and humour are undimmed by less robust health and it was a gas for us to share the stage with him and heartening to see him get the acclaim that he received from those in attendance.

If such institutions as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are to have any meaning, Hubert has to be in there in the “Sideman” category (along with Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant but don’t get me started on that one).

To do otherwise is to make a nonsense of the other ennoblements. I urge you to write to your congressman to get this fixed. It’s not as if they have anything else to do.

The Last Revolution 2011

So, as we say farewell to the Spectacular Spinning Songbook for the year of 2011, we’d like to thank all of those who attended, span, swung the hammer and tripped the light fantastic…

I would especially like to thank the Imposters both for their remarkable playing and for being sterling fellows, especially as the current melancholy situation made it uncertain whether I would be able to complete these dates.

This show has always been about the balance between vaudeville nonsense and the very large number of songs that we have in our hands. We got to play many of them this year and there are many more still to be performed.

There are many stories to be assembled from the existing fragments, whether determined by chance or not. Recording and even composing is not a matter of urgency to me right now. There are more important matters to which I must attend.

We cannot close here without tipping our hat to Hubert Sumlin who joined us at the Wellmont Theatre, Montclair for a run of songs that he first performed with Howlin’ Wolf.

To do otherwise is to make a nonsense of the other ennoblements. I urge you to write to your congressman to get this fixed. It’s not as if they have anything else to do.

If all is well or for as long as it is possible, a European solo tour will commence on the 26th of October in Athens.

The grave uncertainty over my father’s health made it necessary to regretfully cancel two shows, in order that I be free to visit him at regular intervals.

It has truthfully been as difficult to take to the stage with a light heart recently, as it has been welcome to lose myself in song.

I would like to thank those who have sent their good wishes without knowing the real circumstances and grateful for the understanding of those for whom we have been unable to perform.

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook will return in 2012. We hope to revisit as many of the U.S towns to which we were recently unable to journey as will welcome us back and a few more besides, before the Wheel travels to Europe in the Spring of next year.

Until then, I hope you will be practicing your steps for The Frug, The Continentel and the Loddy-Lo.

Photo: Joe Papeo.www.irocktheshot.com

The Romance of Travel

It says much about how far we’ve traveled from those heady days of flying on Pan-Am, Braniff and Allegeny Airlines, that a curling iron or Alexander Graham Bell’s less attached cousin could be mistaken for a “suspicious object” and cause such a fright.

The Imposters were on their way to hitch a ride to their last engagement of 2011, only to find that upon landing in Columbus, the plane taxied to a remote corner of the airfield and was immediately attended by fire engines and people wearing a variety of uniforms and Hazmat suits.

Now, if you ever happen to be involved in an evacuation such as this, I suspect that being asked to stand for forty minutes, in blazing sun of the mosquito-infested grass at the edge of the tarmac, just two hundred yards from a large metal tube full of petrol is going to be about as much use as being told to “duck and cover” during a nuclear attack.

Fortunately, help was on the way, it just didn’t have a very loud voice or a terribly clear message.

After a short scenic drive and a very nice massage from some uniformed people in rubber gloves, our happy band of travelers was welcomed to Ohio with a generous feast of stale chocolate and warm Dasani, water with all the unpleasant water taste taken out.

For the next three and a half hours we got to watch the competing authorities from the airline, the TSA and local law officers, all the way up to FBI, as they sprang into action like previously-caged panthers.

Several passengers were now reading aloud from their mobile devices. The local news was quoting an airport authority spokesman as stating that the “alert” was over, the runways back open and everything was under control.

So it was never very clear what was to be achieved in holding us in this secure transit lounge, cooled by a faulty air-conditioning unit, most effective in drowning out the low murmur of incoherent explanations and lowering expectations.

The passengers in the vicinity of Row 17 had apparently walked the short distance from being customers to being suspects and were being taken off for questioning in groups of four or five.

People will tell you these are the times in which we live and that it is better to be safe than sorry but that is an awful lot easier to believe when those providing this flimsy, discourteous, sometimes belligerent illusion of security are using common sense and not just checking off the steps of a laminated agenda. In this case it was enough to make you want to grab someone and shake them, although that would probably not be the thing to do in the circumstances.

That those who least need to feel threatened or anxious are those who have just been, or are about to be, catapulted into the sky often seems to get lost.

As the third hour slipped into the fourth, any thought of the band reaching a soundcheck evaporated along with one young woman’s plan to attend a wedding. People missed their connections and a couple of them required medical attention. A few folks even started to get a little testy at being held against their will.

I suspect that if we’d been there another forty five minutes we might have all been painting our faces green and roasting that courtesy can of chicken salad over a roaring campfire of discarded boarding passes, like the kids in “Lord Of The Flies”.

Then all at once, a law officer with an immaculate coiffure announced that our personal belongings would be arriving along a small conveyor belt.

We made the show in Huntington with twenty minutes to spare.

Elvis Costello Rocks the Keith

Huntington News: 10th October, 2011

Huntington, WV (HNN) - Arriving in Huntington 20 minutes before show time, British music icon Elvis Costello once again proved the value of the Keith Albee Performing Arts Center and the Marshall Artists Series. Costello and his band almost did not make their first West Virginia appearance --- they were held up for four hours in Columbus, Ohio, by members of the TSA which had found a curling iron in the jet’s overhead bin. His show opens with the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine tastefully go-go dancing in a gilded cage before Costello and his band unleash a session of five rapid firing classics --- “I Hope You’re Happy Now,” “Heart of the City,” “Mystery Dance,” “Uncomplicated” and “Radio Radio.”

Providing a vaudeville magician appearance (complete with top hat and walking stick) with a giant “Wheel of Fortune” containing the names of his songs, Costello calling himself Napoleon ("We got all these hits") Dynamite hosts an out of the box routine where guests mount the stage and have a spin of the Spectacular Singing Songbook.

Challenging the audience, Costello croons the aisles selecting lucky "are you man or woman enough to spin the wheel" contestants. Before long, the stage rocks with pure serendipity and it’s obvious that Costello loves every minute of it, too. Among those on the Keith Albee Performing Arts Center stage were Kerry Nessel and family members.

Costello’s one hell of a jack hammering guitarist, and he's the latest world renown "star" to grace the Spanish Moorish themed house of the grand Keith Albee. Normally, eclectic acts fail to stop in Huntington in favor of a glam-rock chart toppers that guarantee a large mainstream audience. If not for the MAS and it's sponsors,

Actually, the British musician and The Imposters are fortunate to be added to the list of Keith Albee performers, especially considering that the elegant Thomas Lamb designed theatre palace has survived two fiery close calls and the abrupt closure a year after Pullman Square opened. Huntington residents came together and Costello had a regal venue in which to entertain, and a restored vertical sign coming soon.

Elvis At The Wellmont

Baristanet: Erika Bleiberg: 6th October, 2011

"One of my favorite moments — and I was in good company in my appreciation, based on the cheering — was when he was alone on the stage and stepped away from the microphone. Costello’s vocals carried unassisted through the venue, and his rendition of A Slow Drag With Josephine was memorable in its simplicity.

And yes, Elvis, since you asked, it was well worth the wait."

Read More.....

What goes around comes around better for Elvis Costello

Cliffview Pilot.com: Jerry Demarco: 6th October, 2011:

The diabolical “I Want You” smoldered, as it should, building in vicious intensity, with Costello jack-hammering the guitar and Pete Thomas – as muscular and lightning-fast as ever -- snapping the skins. It was almost as if John Lennon was fronting Crazy Horse, in a fitting end to the regular set.

Read More.....

"The Imposters are on point to deliver a killer show, and they're doing it on a nightly basis"

Hippiesaredead.com: 4th October, 2011

The highlight of the evening came when Costello invited the crowd to leave the venues seating chary behind and rush the stage. Only at that point did it truly come together and feel like a rock show. Surrounded by an adoring fanbase, the band delivered the last 30 minutes of the show in true style, with Costello prowling the perimeter of the stage, and delivering a "quiet" set with Steve Nieve before delving into the band's full encore, which seemed close to endless. At the end of the night, we were damned tired, so it's hard to imagine how Costello was feeling. Suffice it to say: the Imposters are on point to deliver a killer show, and they're doing it on a nightly basis.

Read More......

Elvis Costello

Examiner: Jim Bessman: 3rd October, 2011

"One other wheel-spinner merits special mention: the lovely Mary Louise Parker. She may not have survived last week's Weeds' season-ending cliffhanger, but she was certainly alive here, responding to Costello's "feel free to shake a tail feather" permit by doing just that in the go-go cage after her spin landed on *"Monkey To Man." He rewarded her with an impromptu version of the other Elvis's "(Marie's The Name) His Latest Flame," then ushered her over to the "Society Lounge" in front of Nieve's keyboard fortress--where the "solid gold chairs," he said, were a present from Rick Perry."

Read More......

"The Spectacular Spinning Songbook - The Results"

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Huntington, WV
October 8th, 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Clubland - Spin 1

This Wheel's On Fire/The River In Reverse/On Your Way Down/I'll Take Care Of You - Spin 2

Alibi - Spin 3

Brilliant Mistake - Spin 4

The Hammer Of Songs

Peace, Love and Understanding
Substitute

"I Can Sing A Rainbow" Jackpot - Napoleon's Choice - Spin 6

Greenshirt
Red Shoes
Purple Rain

Everyday I Write The Book - Spin 7

Watching The Detectives/Help Me - IMPROMPTU

"Happy" Jackpot - Spin 8

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity

"Time" Jackpot - Ms. Valentine's Choice

Strict Time
Out Of Time

Chelsea - IMPROMPTU

"Happy" - Spin 9

Motel Matches

I Want You - Spin 10

Pump It Up - Spin 11

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine

Sweet Dreams - with the Imposters

Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down

Cry Cry Cry

Finale

Alison

National Ransom

Pump It Up

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Montclair
October 6th, 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

Lipstick Vogue
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Honey, Are You Straight Or Are You Blind?
Watching The Detectives/Help Me

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Pump It Up - Spin 1

Everyday I Write The Book - Spin 2

Brilliant Mistake - Spin 3

"Joanna" Jackpot - Spin 4

Why Can't A Man Stand Alone?
Talking In The Dark

Kid About It - IMPROMPTU

Oliver's Army - Spin 5

"Cash" - Spin 6

Cry Cry Cry

The Hammer Of Songs - Songs Of Sneer

Alibi

Riot Act - Spin 7

Interlude

Commit A Crime - with Hubert Sumlin and the Imposters

Hidden Charms - with Hubert Sumlin and the Imposters

Killin' Floor/Shake For Me - with Hubert Sumlin, T Blade and the Imposters

"Napoleon Solo"

Poison Moon
Pennies From Heaven/A Voice In The Dark

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Chelsea - IMPROMPTU

Inch By Inch/Fever - Spin 8

Alison - Spin 9

"Joker" - Spin 10

Radio Radio

Finale

American Gangster Time
Red Shoes
Purple Rain
National Ransom
Peace, Love and Understanding

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Montclair
October 5th, 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Blue Chair
Miracle Man
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

"Time" Jackpot - Spin 1

Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Out Of Time

Inch By Inch - Spin 2

Payday - IMPROMPTU

Sulky Girl - Spin 3

Love Field - IMPROMPTU

"Joker" - Spin 4

Peace, Love and Understanding

Slow Down - IMPROMPTU

Chelsea - Spin 5

"Imperial Chocolate" - Spin 6

Shabby Doll
Town Cryer
You Little Fool
Uncomplicated
I Want You

Interlude

Commit A Crime - Chester Burnett

The Hammer Of Songs - Songs Of Sneer

Bedlam

"Joanna" Jackpot - Napoleon's Choice

Still
I'm In The Mood Again
Pills And Soap

New Lace Sleeves - Spin 8

Riot Act - Spin 9

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine

Finale

Alison
Everyday I Write The Book
Pump It Up

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Red Bank
October 3rd, 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity
Heart Of The City
Welcome To The Working Week
Uncomplicated

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Let Him Dangle - Spin 1

Condemned Man - IMPROMPTU

"Cash"

Cry Cry Cry - Spin 2

Monkey To Man - Spin 3

Country Darkness - IMPROMPTU

Peace, Love and Understanding - Spin 4

"Girl" Jackpot - Ms. Valentine's Choice - Spin 5

Girls Talk
This Year's Girl
Sulky Girl

"Joker" - Spin 6

Pump It Up

Spooky Girlfriend - IMPROMPTU

Alibi - IMPROMPTU

Watching The Detectives/Help Me

"The Hammer Of Songs" - Songs Of Sneer

Alison

Interlude

Veronica - Napoleon Solo
I'm A Mess - Napoleon Solo

"Joanna" Jackpot - Napoleon's Choice - Spin 7

Poor Fractured Atlas
Talking In The Dark
My Three Sons

Finale

Lipstick Vogue
Beyond Belief
Chelsea
I Want You

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
New York
October 1st, 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

Alison
Lipstick Vogue
Watching The Detectives/Help Me

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

The Judgement - SPIN 1

Everyday I Write The Book - SPIN 2

"Cash" - SPIN 3

Cry, Cry Cry
I Still Miss Someone

Stella Hurt - SPIN 4

Monkey To Man - SPIN 5 - Mary-Louise Parker

His Latest Flame - IMPROMPTU

Waiting For The End Of The World/I Can Only Give You Everything - SPIN 6

You Little Fool - SPIN 7

Town Cryer - IMPROMPTU

New Lace Sleeves - SPIN 8

"Time" Jackpot - SPIN 9

Clowntime Is Over
Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Out Of Time (Jagger/Richards)

Chelsea - SPIN 10

Pump It Up - SPIN 11

Heart Of The City
Radio Radio
Red Shoes
Purple Rain/Rain

Interlude

"Joanna" Jackpot - Napoleon's Choice

I'm In The Mood Again
I Still Have That Other Girl

Suit Of Lights - with the Imposters

"Commercial Break"

The Stations Of The Cross

"The Hammer Of Songs" - Songs Of Sneer

Watch Your Step
Secondary Modern

Finale

National Ransom
Peace, Love and Understanding
Wheels (Gram Parsons/Chris Hillman)

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Huntington
September 30th, 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
No Action
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Everyday I Write The Book - Spin 1

Accidents Will Happen - Spin 2

And Your Bird Can Sing - IMPROMPTU

Pump It Up - Spin 3

"Joker" - Spin 4

I Want You

Payday - IMPROMPTU

Monkey To Man - Spin 5

Long Honeymoon - Napoleon's Spin

Detectives vs Hoover Factory - Spin 6

Watching The Detectives - UNANIMOUS DECISION

"The Hammer Of Songs"

Peace, Love and Understanding

Waiting For The End Of The World/I Can Only Give You Everything - IMPROMPTU

Interlude

Condemned Man

Chelsea - IMPROMPTU

"King's Ransom" - Spin 7

Sleep Of The Just

A Slow Drag With Josephine - Napoleon Solo

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Washington
September 29th, 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

Lipstick Vogue
Watching The Detectives

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

So Like Candy - SPIN 1

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - IMPROMPTU

Other End Of The Telescope - SPIN 2

My All Time Doll - IMPROMPTU

I Want You - SPIN 3 (HELD)

"Time" Jackpot - SPIN 4

Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Next Time Round
Out Of Time

"Cash" - SPIN 5

Cry, Cry, Cry
I Still Miss Someone

Town Cryer - SPIN 6

You Little Fool - SPIN 7

The Hammer Of Songs - Songs Of Sneer

Pump It Up

Heart Of The City - IMPROMPTU

Chelsea - IMPROMPTU

I Want You - SPIN 3 PERFORMED

Interlude

All These Strangers - Napoleon Solo

A Slow Drag With Josephine - Napoleon Solo

Bullets For The New-Born King - Napoleon Solo

Sleep Of The Just - with the Imposters

Finale

Welcome To The Working Week
No Action
Uncomplicated

"Double Joker" - SPIN 8

Beyond Belief

"Joker" - SPIN 9

New Lace Sleeves

National Ransom - IMPROMPTU

Peace, Love and Understanding - SECOND JOKER

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Indianapolis
September 26th, 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Stella Hurt - SPIN 1

You Bowed Down - SPIN 2

Shabby Doll - IMPROMPTU

"Happy" Jackpot - SPIN 3

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity
Secondary Modern

Watch Your Step - IMPROMPTU

"King's Ransom" - Jackpot - SPIN 4

Brilliant Mistake
Stations Of The Cross
American Without Tears
National Ransom

Peace, Love And Understanding - SPIN 5

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Veronica

The Hammer Of Songs - Requests

Red Shoes

Purple Rain - IMPROMPTU

Pump It Up

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

"Time" Jackpot - Napoleon's Choice

Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Out Of Time

Finale

Quiet About It - Jesse Winchester
Alison
I Hope - Bobby Charles

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Nashville
September 25th, 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity
Heart Of The City
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

You Bowed Down - SPIN 1

"King's Ransom" Jackpot - SPIN 2

The Spell That You Cast
Indoor Fireworks
Stations Of The Cross
Brilliant Mistake
National Ransom

The Hammer Of Songs - Request

Almost Blue

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Detectives vs Hoover Factory - SPIN 3 - UNANIMOUS DECISION

Watching The Detectives

Monkey To Man - SPIN 4

Payday - IMPROMPTU

His Latest Flame - IMPROMPTU

Clubland - SPIN 5

Everyday I Write The Book - SPIN 6

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine

Jimmie Standing In The Rain

This Wheel's On Fire/The River In Reverse/On Your Way Down/I'll Take Care Of You - IMPROMPTU

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Chelsea - SPIN 7

Joker - SPIN 8

I Want You

Finale

Pump It Up

Peace, Love and Understanding

Substitute

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Atlanta
September 24th, 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

"Cash" - Cry Cry Cry - SPIN 1

Town Cryer - SPIN 2

Alison - SPIN 3

Stella Hurt - SPIN 4

Watch Your Step - SPIN 5

Secondary Modern - IMPROMPTU

"I Can Sing A Rainbow" Jackpot - SPIN 6

Greenshirt
Red Shoes
Purple Rain

"Joanna" - Jackpot - Napoleon's Choice

Poor Fractured Atlas
Talking In The Dark

Payday - IMPROMPTU

His Latest Flame - IMPROMPTU

Beyond Belief - SPIN 8

Accidents Will Happen - SPIN 9

And Your Bird Can Sing - IMPROMPTU

Everyday I Write The Book - SPIN 10

Interlude

Condemned Man - IMPROMPTU

Watching The Detectives - IMPROMPTU

Finale

Peace, Love And Understanding - SPIN 11

Elvis Costello

Newsday: Glenn Gamboa: 30th September, 2011

"When people started screaming for “Alison” in the middle of the song, he simply walked to the mic and finished it up and then walked off the stage. He did not return, ending what was still a wonderful opening night for The Paramount.

Costello was right to walk off the way he did."

Read More…..

"Elvis Costello Warner Theatre Concert Curiosities"

Washington City Paper: Chris Klimek: September 30th, 2011

The Imposters returned to the stage to join him on “Sleep of the Just,” a ballad from 1986’s King of America that felt of-a-piece with National Ransom’s caravan of weary hustlers, deserters, and entertainers.

Read More……

Elvis Costello and the Imposters at The Ryman

Nashville Scene: The Spin: 25th September, 2011

How ‘bout getting show highlights like a smooth “Watching the Detectives,” which saw Costello singing walking around the theater floor? Or a captivating, slow-drawn take on Bob Dylan & The Band’s “This Wheel's on Fire” that the word “transcendent” couldn’t even begin to describe?

Read More….

Elvis Costello and the Imposters sold a few vowels at Chastain

Creative Loafing: James Kelly: September 26th, 2011

In spite of his well-documented disdain for the somewhat stuffy Chastain Park vibe, Costello was a gentleman throughout the set, opening with a four-song roar, then donning his top hat and becoming the slightly demented host

Read More……

Fun, irreverence rule Elvis Costello show

Indystar.com: David Lindquist: September 27th, 2011

As the 57-year-old applied smooth vocals to cinematically narrate 1981's "Watch Your Step," it became clear rock 'n' roll got lucky when Costello made the genre his main vocation.

Read More……

Elvis Costello At The Ryman Auditorium

American Songwriter: Blake Boldt: September 26th, 2011

This wasn’t a night to be predicting anything. Elvis Costello’s stop at the Ryman Sunday night was most notable for its wacky format: A part of his Spectacular Spinning Songbook Tour, the performance established him as suave ringmaster to this musical circus. Excitable fans were invited onstage to spin a multi-colored wheel, featuring 40 song titles that include classic hits, obscure album cuts and a few well-known covers. The 2 1/2 hour seminar in pop music enabled its star to express his disregard for tradition and dig into his expansive catalog. Nonplussed by the pressures of the wheel, Costello addressed each quandary with a smile and a series of terrific guitar licks.

Costello’s willingness to go with the flow is a key aspect of his remarkable run over the last 35 years. Already having acquired a reputation as a masterful writer and performer, he allowed these game show antics to take measure of his prowess. Less seasoned performers would’ve been left struggling to collect their thoughts, but Costello was too busy seducing the audience with such concert staples as the sly “Every Day I Write the Book” and the seductive “I Want You.” From the first spin of the wheel (“You Bowed Down”) to the last (“Chelsea”), Costello’s backing band The Imposters matched the evening’s effervescent spirit with master strokes. The MVP of the evening was Steve Neive, whose theatrical flair on the keyboards accentuated the frantic energy of the moment. Veteran sidemen Pete Thomas (drums) and Davey Faragher (bass) were excellent in their own right.

Costello, clad in a plaid gray suit that stood in contrast to his colorful surroundings, had other buoyant supporters. A pair of scantily-clad hostesses selected audience members and sashayed inside a tall cage lined with string-of-pearl curtains. But the smoothest moves were offered through the music. With their often intricate vocabulary, Costello’s thoughtful songs give voice to the ABCs of life (“Cash,” “Happy,” “Time”) and love (“Alison,” “Joanna,” “Veronica”). Though the mood was mainly upbeat throughout the performance, an acoustic break during the second act offered evidence that Costello is no victim of his own versatility. Hearing his plaintive wail, lonely but not alone, cry out across the venue proved one of his old song titles true: There’s a story in your voice.

In this modern industry, it’s certainly no secret that Costello remains relevant without becoming a relic of the past. In fact, his interpretive skills only seem to improve with time. After a rousing rendition of Nick Lowe’s “Peace, Love and Understanding” towards the end of the evening, fans likely left hoping for a little more of all of the above.

"The Revolver Tour"

"The Revolver Tour" will resume this Saturday at Chastain Park, Atlanta before proceeding to the Ryman Auditorium, Nashville and the Murat Theatre, Indianapolis and beyond.

Thanks go to our friends in Alabama and Florida for their understanding over the urgent need for the postponement of shows and look forward to seeing them as soon as possible in 2012.

It is hoped that the recent and continuing concerns over serious family illness will allow the completion of the remaining dates.

Mr. Costello and his family would also like to send thanks to those who expressed their good wishes and prayers.

Napoleon Dynamite will do his best to see that you have a Spectacular Spinning Songbook time...

'Elmo's Super Heroes' comes to Times-Union Center'

Jacksonville.com: Tom Szarloeta: September 16th, 2011.

Today’s issue of Jack was supposed to be all about Elvis Costello, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who was scheduled to appear at the Florida Theatre next week. But Costello had to postpone his show, leaving us scrambling for something to put in the paper.

Fortunately, his close personal friend, Elmo Monster, happens to be in town this weekend with “Sesame Street Live: Elmo’s Super Heroes.”

Mr. Monster wasn’t available for an interview, so we found someone who knows him well.

Read More.....

Postponement Announcement

It is with regret and sorrow that Elvis Costello announces that he must delay the start of the next leg of "The Spectacular Spinning Songbook Tour" until the 24th of September in Atlanta. This is due to matters pertaining to the very serious illness of a close family member. All shows prior to the 24th will be postponed.

A spokesman for the tour stressed that Mr. Costello's wife and children were in excellent health but declined to elaborate further hoping that people would understand the desire and need for calm and privacy at this difficult time.

Ticket holders for the shows from September 15th through September 22nd should contact the venue box office or ticket broker for further details. It is hoped that all of these dates will be rescheduled as early as possible in 2012.

Elvis Costello

Having begun as a brief two-week stint this spring, the Spinning
Songbook tour soon expanded to include 17 additional cities in June and
July, garnering acclaim at every turn:

"Unfettered, free-wheeling fun" – Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"The Wheel was the perfect way to shake up a set list with a couple decades' worth of excellent material" – Columbus Dispatch

"Three hours of hilarity, musicality, and unabated joy" – St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"It's hard to imagine any other musician in the world playing the show that Elvis Costello did" – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

At each performance, select fans are invited onstage to spin the Wheel,
helping to create new sets at each performance from a collection of 40
banners including hits, rarities, and a few surprises.

Fall 2011 Tour Dates

9/15 – Mobile, AL – Saenger Theatre
9/17 – Clearwater, FL – Ruth Eckerd Hall
9/18 – Hollywood, FL – Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino
9/19 – Orlando, FL – Bob Carr Performing Arts Center
9/21 - Jacksonville, FL - Florida Theatre
9/22 – Durham, NC – Durham Performing Arts Center
9/24 – Atlanta, GA – Chastain Park
9/25 – Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium
9/26 - Indianapolis, IN - Murat Theatre
9/29 – Washington, DC – Warner Theatre
9/30 – Huntington, NY – Paramount Theater
10/1 – New York, NY – United Palace Theatre
10/3 – Red Bank, NJ – Count Basie Theatre
10/5 – Montclair, NJ – The Wellmont Theatre*
10/6 – Montclair, NJ – The Wellmont Theatre
10/8 - Huntington,WV - Marshall University

* rescheduled from 5/18

The Imposters are: Steve Nieve (keyboards), Pete Thomas (drums), and
Davey Faragher (bass).

The New York Times - Another Spin of the Musical Wheel

The New York Times: Jon Pareles: May 24th, 2011

“If I can’t cheat, who can?” he teased.

But the real and gratifying cheat was that there is, in the end, no way to keep Mr. Costello’s songs in any shallow entertainment mode. His torrents of words hold desire, rage, wounds and revenge, from the scathing personal scale of “Alison” to the historical sweep of “Oliver’s Army.” The music converges from all over — punk, soul, British Invasion, Tex-Mex, tango, country — to carry those words and sort out their emotions.

Even in music dating to the 1970s, the Imposters didn’t treat the songs as rote oldies. They were still pushing and pulling at them, putting (for instance) a guitar-scratching funk finale onto “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea.” And Mr. Costello inhabited his characters completely when he sang: all the ache, all the venom. None was more telling than “I Want You,” a slow, seething, self-lacerating and furious confession of passion and need, with jabs of bitter lead guitar. It didn’t feel like show business at all. Maybe that was the real proof of Mr. Costello’s showmanship.

Elvis Costello Rocks Amazing Singing Songbook Set

Rolling Stone: Patrick Doyle: May 24th 2011

"For the final encore, Costello emerged in a gold suit and leopard-print hat and welcomed an audience member who exemplified the downside of a show with such heavy crowd participation. After Costello began the tender classic "Alison," she made her way to the go-go cage and broke out some pole-dancing moves. Then she grinded up against Costello and fell down. He discreetly motioned for a go-go dancer to take her away. "Come and get your girlfriend!" he asked her companion helplessly when she still wouldn't leave.

But the energy only encouraged Costello. He quickly moved into a soul medley including "Tracks of My Tears" "Tears of a Clown," and "Suspicious Minds." He then ripped into a raucous "Purple Rain," inviting T-Bone Burnett busting out some seriously jagged dance moves. He wasn't done yet, performing "Pump it Up," while working in lines of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" – likely in honor of Bob Dylan's birthday today. We can only imagine what kind of tribute Costello will give Dylan tonight."

Spectacle: elvis costello with..... Season Two now showing on Sky Arts UK

Elvis Costello kicks off his new series of intimate interviews and performances with some of the biggest names in music by welcoming Bono and The Edge.

In front of Costello’s live studio audience, the U2 vocalist and guitarist discuss the forming of their band. “We had no history of musicianship,” Bono says. “Remember, we formed a band before we could play.... It’s kind of comedic. We’re looking at all these [more experienced] people, going, ‘OK, we’ll have that and we’ll have that and we’ll have that,’ like you’re walking around with a shopping bag. But somebody else said, ‘You also need the talent bit.’ And it never dawned on us that we mightn’t have any.”

Bono and The Edge also discuss the influence and wisdom of their producer Brian Eno, as well as a time when the former Roxy Music man became so exasperated with their recording of Where The Streets Have No Name, that he tried to erase the song from the album. “A junior engineer had to physically drag him out of the recording studio,” the pair remember. Bono also recalls a time when Paul McCartney came to the studio to give them a pep talk. He slid down the bannisters on the way in and explained how he, Ringo, John and George would begin recording backing tracks at 9am, go for an egg sandwich, pint and cigarette at 12, and then return and finish the songs by five. Inspired by their system, U2 tried a similar strategy that week, Bono explains, yet wound up still in the recording studio at 4am.
In between amusing anecdotes about their albums, charity work and song-writing, Bono and The Edge perform tracks including Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of, rounding things off by performing Pump It Up/Get On Your Boots with Costello.

Over the course of the series, Costello will also welcome artists including Sheryl Crow, Lyle Lovett, Nick Lowe and Bruce Springsteen.

For more information, Video's and TV listings click here.....

"Don't Try This At Home, Kids"

Another Report From Our Georgian Correspondents

"Holy Freaking Flying Monkeys Of Fire - Larkin Poe's P.O.V."

In which Larkin Poe opens for the fantastic Elvis Costello (in Interlochen, Michigan). Holy, freaking, flying monkeys of fire; what an amazing night.... Thank you, thank you to Elvis and all his amazing folk for having us along! For more information about the little ole' opening band, please visit: www.LarkinPoe.com.

"Song of the Day"

Song of the Day: 'Sparkling Day,' Elvis Costello

The Star-ledger: Jay Lustig: 22nd August, 2011

You would have never predicted it during his angry-young-man days, but Elvis Costello should now be considered one of the greatest crooners of his generation. He doesn't often work in a lushly romantic style, but when he does -- as on his 1998 album with Burt Bacharach, "Painted From Memory," or on his underrated 2003 album "North" -- the results have often been exceptional.

Read More.....

"Our Georgian Correspondents Speak Again"

Elvis Costello's original song 'Sparkling Day' will lead the soundtrack of Focus Features August 2011 release 'One Day'

Twenty years. Two people…To be released by Focus Features in theaters nationwide on Friday, August 19th, 2011, One Day stars Academy Award nominee Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe). Directed by Lone Scherfig (director of An Education, Academy Award-nominated for Best Picture), the motion picture One Day is adapted for the screen by David Nicholls from his beloved bestselling novel “One Day.” After one day together – July 15th, 1988, their college graduation – Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess) begin a friendship that will last a lifetime. She is a working-class girl of principle and ambition who dreams of making the world a better place. He is a wealthy charmer who dreams that the world will be his playground. For the next two decades, key moments of their relationship are experienced over several July 15th's in their lives. Together and apart, we see Dex and Em through their friendship and fights, hopes and missed opportunities, laughter and tears. Somewhere along their journey, these two people realize that what they are searching and hoping for has been there for them all along. As the true meaning of that one day back in 1988 is revealed, they come to terms with the nature of love and life itself.

The music featured on the soundtrack One Day bookmarks moments in Dexter and Emma’s lives, mapping out a musical timeline that ties in to the complexity of their ever-evolving relationship.

TRACK LISTING:

1.         Sparkling Day - Elvis Costello
2.         Roll To Me - Del Amitri
3.         Aftermath - Tricky
4.         Reverend Black Grape - Black Grape
5.         Born Of Frustration - James
6.         Rocks - Primal Scream
7.         Praise You - Fatboy Slim
8.         The Rhythm Of The Night - Corona
9.         Angels - Robbie Williams
10.       Life Is A Rollercoaster - Ronan Keating
11.       Sowing The Seeds Of Love - Tears For Fears
12.       Joy - François Feldman
13.       Tear Off Your Own Head (It's A Doll Revolution) - Elvis Costello
14.       One Day - main title - Rachel Portman
15.       Wedding Chorus - Rachel Portman
16.       July 15th - Rachel Portman
17.       We Had Today - Rachel Portman

Buy Now From....

iTunes US

iTunes UK

"Elvis Bridlington?"

Confusion surrounds who now owns the grade II-listed historic pier in Colwyn Bay.

It has been closed since its owner was made bankrupt in July 2008, and it came under the control of a trustee in bankruptcy.

The trustee has now formally given up any interest in the pier because its condition is getting worse.

The pier's former owner, Steve Hunt, said he believed the pier should now come back to him.

Victoria Pier was opened in June 1900, and over the years has hosted performances from artists as diverse as Morecambe and Wise, Harry Secombe and Elvis Costello.

But very little maintenance has been done in the last three years since Mr Hunt was made bankrupt in a dispute with Conwy council over unpaid business rates and council tax.

On 4 August 2011, a panel of the decking broke off and fell onto the promenade.

George Harrison Fund For UNICEF's Month of Giving

On August 1, 1971, George Harrison of The Beatles and Ravi Shankar brought together a star-studded cast of musicians for The Concert for Bangladesh, which became one of the most ambitious humanitarian efforts in music history. In honor of the 40th anniversary of the concert, the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF has designated August as the ‘Month of Giving’ to raise funds for the crisis in the Horn of Africa.

In the humanitarian spirit of George Harrison, to show that musicians and fans can still make an impact around the world, Elvis Costello is asking you to join me in continuing to support the Month of Giving with UNICEF USA. Please visit TheConcertforBangladesh.org where you can watch the latest video, learn more about the original concert, and discover the many ways YOU can get involved to help save children’s lives.

http://bit.ly/4-a-friend

Soundtrack For "One Day", Features New Song From Elvis Costello

On August 16th, 2011, Universal Music Enterprises (UMe) releases digitally the motion picture soundtrack for the new movie One Day, starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess. The soundtrack "One Day" features a brand new track written and composed exclusively for the movie by Elvis Costello; titled “Sparkling Day,” the song is only available on this soundtrack. Also included is a stellar roster of songs by a diverse group of artists from the last two decades; and plus selections from the original film score by Academy Award winner Rachel Portman (Emma, The Cider House Rules, Chocolat).

Twenty years. Two people…To be released by Focus Features in theaters
nationwide on Friday, August 19th, 2011, One Day stars Academy Award nominee Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe). Directed by Lone Scherfig (director of An Education, Academy Award-nominated for Best Picture), the motion picture One Day is adapted for the screen by David Nicholls from his beloved bestselling novel “One Day.” After one day together – July 15th, 1988, their college graduation – Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess) begin a friendship that will last a lifetime. She is a working-class girl of principle and ambition who dreams of making the world a better place. He is a wealthy charmer who dreams that the world will be his playground. For the next two decades, key moments of their relationship are experienced over several July 15th's in their lives. Together and apart, we see Dex and Em through their friendship and fights, hopes and missed opportunities, laughter and tears. Somewhere along their journey, these two people realize that what they are searching and hoping for has been there for them all along. As the true meaning of that one day back in 1988 is revealed, they come to terms with the nature of love and life itself.

The music featured on the soundtrack "One Day" bookmarks moments in Dexter and Emma’s lives, mapping out a musical timeline that ties in to the complexity of their ever-evolving relationship.

TRACK LISTING:

1.         Sparkling Day - Elvis Costello
2.         Roll To Me - Del Amitri
3.         Aftermath - Tricky
4.         Reverend Black Grape - Black Grape
5.         Born Of Frustration - James
6.         Rocks - Primal Scream (*digital version only)
7.         Praise You - Fatboy Slim
8.         The Rhythm Of The Night - Corona
9.         Angels - Robbie Williams
10.       Life Is A Rollercoaster - Ronan Keating
11.       Sowing The Seeds Of Love - Tears For Fears
12.       Joy - François Feldman
13.       Tear Off Your Own Head (It's A Doll Revolution) - Elvis Costello
14.       One Day - main title - Rachel Portman
15.       Wedding Chorus - Rachel Portman
16.       July 15th- Rachel Portman
17.       We Had Today - Rachel Portman

Buy Now From....

iTunes US

iTunes UK

Elvis Costello's original song 'Sparkling Day' will lead the soundtrack of Focus Features August 2011 release 'One Day'

Based on the #1 international bestselling novel and starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, which is scored by Academy Award winner Rachel Portman.

Twenty years. Two people…

Directed by Lone Scherfig (director of An Education, Academy Award-nominated for Best Picture), the motion picture One Day is adapted for the screen by David Nicholls from his beloved bestselling novel One Day.

After one day together – July 15th, 1988, their college graduation – Emma Morley (Academy Award nominee Anne Hathaway) and Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess of Across the Universe) begin a friendship that will last a lifetime. She is a working-class girl of principle and ambition who dreams of making the world a better place. He is a wealthy charmer who dreams that the world will be his playground.

For the next two decades, key moments of their relationship are experienced over several July 15ths in their lives. Together and apart, we see Dex and Em through their friendship and fights, hopes and missed opportunities, laughter and tears. Somewhere along their journey, these two people realize that what they are searching and hoping for has been there for them all along. As the true meaning of that one day back in 1988 is revealed, they come to terms with the nature of love and life itself.

One Day.....

Elvis Has Left The Building

Like The Dew.com: Jeff Cochran; 15th August, 2011

Tuesday, August 16, 1977. It was a scheduled day off, but there I was anyway, at Peaches Records and Tapes in Atlanta, perusing a shipment of Oldie 45s delivered the evening before. I was the store’s singles buyer, a prominent slot. The record companies and radio stations knew we endeavored to stock every 45 available. When items priced at less than a buck made for 3% to 4% of a store’s weekly sales of $100,000 or more, it was obvious we moved a lot of singles. The music industry also knew our store helped to “break” new records, with promo men lurking about to push their new releases. But while it seemed job one was stocking the hits, maintaining our extensive inventory of oldies was just as important. Customers, from way outside the Atlanta area, especially on the weekends, would traverse to Peachtree Road in order to add stacks of Oldie 45s to their collections. When they’d pick one, they’d pick another, and another. They were happy with what they bought. We were happy too. Ca-Ching!

It was a choice shipment of oldies that I’d put out the next day. Since it was Tuesday, they could sit in the stockroom another 24 hours. They’d be on the shelves by lunchtime Wednesday, with many purchased by Sunday. Classics by the Drifters, Buddy Holly, the Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, Hank Williams and a big shipment of Elvis Presley oldies ordered the week before would bolster my department’s share of store sales. The increase would commence tomorrow. It was a day off, after all.

On leaving the stockroom, I noticed an album entitled My Aim IS True by an Elvis Costello. It had only been released in the U.K. the month before but our chain’s Imports buyer, Greg Biggs, had it in our stores already. Elvis Costello? What’s that all about? Something to check out later.

Several hours passed on a rather leisurely day when the news bulletin came in from Memphis. I was visiting my folks at their house, south of Atlanta. Having gotten bad news when TV shows were interrupted several times over the last 10-15 years, we knew the drill. We got real quiet real fast. Elvis Presley was dead.

First there was the pain over losing someone who had made great music, someone who changed music. There was also pain over the sadness and confusion many of us assumed had permeated Presley’s life in recent years. Then something else kicked in: the recollection of several boxes of oldies in the Peaches stockroom. Hurridly I told my folks I needed to get to work. In less than twenty minutes, I made it from I-75 near the State Farmers Market to 2282 Peachtree Road on Atlanta’s north side. Five minutes after walking into the store, the Elvis Presley 45s were in the racks, even as some customers grabbed whatever was in my hands as I walked out of the stockroom.

Our full inventory of Elvis Presley 45s, given the hysteria. wouldn’t last more than an hour or two. A big order was called in to our warehouse in Los Angeles. Amazingly enough, they arrived in two days. Our store got a heavy shipment of Presley albums as well. It didn’t matter to the customers packing the store which albums. They’d just as happily take the soundtrack to Presley’s Speedway movie if all the greatest hits collections were sold out. The Elvis Presley albums and singles that collected dust a month or so before were now hot commodities.

The fascination with all things Presley lasted a few weeks more. As summer turned to autumn, customers who weren’t likely to visit record stores continued to stop by Peaches looking for Elvis Presley records. They were only a few years younger than Elvis was (42 when he passed away) but they seemed quite older and a bit out of place among us long-hairs. The people buying records by “The King of Rock and Roll” didn’t care much for the rock and rollers who, as it turned out, were just discovering another Elvis. Elvis Costello, that is.

Have You Heard The News? . . . A few weeks after Presley’s death a promo guy from Atlantic Records called the store about an impromptu appearance for later that afternoon by teen star Leif Garrett. Word of his appearance would be leaked just in time for a couple of hundred girls, mostly pre-teens, to come to the store, see the 16 year-old Garrett, then jump and scream and jump and scream some more.

Another of the store’s buyers, Jack Redus, and I were informed that we’d be joining Leif Garrett, along with a WQXI disc jockey, a guy from Atlantic and Garrett’s management team for dinner at a Buckhead hotel restaurant, 2-3 miles north of Peaches. Fine. It was part of the job. So even if Garrett’s teeny-bopper product made David Cassidy’s recordings seem profound, if forced to, we could forget that and be gracious guests. We’d make small talk and ask Garrett about his acting roles, like in the Walking Tall films. It would be an evening of steaks, beers (for those of us over 18) and conversation with Buford Pusser’s son.

There wasn’t that much conversation, though. It was, instead, a rather awkward time as Garrett appeared bored and weary over the day’s events. We didn’t get his opinions on Buford Pusser and vigalante justice. He did express interest, though, in watching an exhibition NFL game on TV that evening, thus putting to rest Jack’s idea of sneaking him out to a Randy Bachman (the Guess Who, BTO) concert at the Great Southeast Music Hall. “I felt sorry for the kid, said Jack, “ I thought he might enjoy seeing a rock and roll show with a real musician.”

So upstairs to his hotel room went Leif Garrett. The NFL awaited. But before Garrett left the table, his manager added a new dimension to hyperbole. He laid it on thicker than the steaks before us. “You know, guys,” he told us, grabbing at his heart and looking above, “Elvis is gone. He was the King, but this young man, Leif Garrett, is going to take his place.” OK. Whatever. All of a sudden, getting home to watch the exhibition football game seemed appealing.

My friend Jack shouldn’t have worried over Leif Garrett’s lack of exposure to the rock scene. Garrett would get to see plenty — and then some. The quiet and well-mannered teen, who seemed, like Donny Osmond, a candidate for a Chocks overdose, became a poster boy for bad behavior. A little more than two years after our dinner, Garrett, under the influence of quaaludes and alcohol, crashed his car, leaving his passenger and best friend, Roland Winkler, a paraplegic. At least three drug arrests followed, including two in the last five years for possession of heroin.

Garrett’s troubles hardly registered with us at Peaches. Even just a few days after the dinner, we gave him little thought. His records hardly sold at most Peaches stores. It was at the suburban stores in malls and strip centers that his fans did their music shopping. At Peaches, we were still doing our best to keep a full stock of Presley records and promote the new groups we favored, such as the Dwight Twilley Band and Talking Heads.

Now I Try To Be Amused. . . Also getting a lot of our attention was Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True. In a time in which “corporate rock” was rearing its ugly head, the album served as a revelation. Costello brilliantly coalesced the rebellious spirit of the New Wave movement with an incisive approach to both words and music. Already it seemed a sure-bet that he would continue to create smart and engaging songs, with much of his material calling to mind the Beatles. It wasn’t so much that his songs were Beatlesque, it was just that no other act had shown such a creative spark within the rock idiom since The Beatles. Very quickly Costello lived up to his promise, and even with a few albums (out of more than 30) that disappointed even his most ardent followers over the decades, his has been a brilliant career.

As a recording artist, Elvis Costello has been at it for over 34 years, only 8 years less than the time Elvis Presley spent on this earth. When thinking back to that morning of August 16, 1977, it was obvious by looking at the cover of My Aim Is True that Elvis Costello was a determined young man. On what was a sad day for the world of music, the promise of fresh new sounds was sitting in the Peaches stockroom, waiting to be unwrapped and heard. There’d be good rockin’ for thousands of nights to come.

The Smartest Music Show On T.V

Current: Enrique Lopetegui: 3rd August, 2011.

After a few seconds of a Hammond-driven version of U2’s “Mysterious Ways,” Elvis Costello puts his guitar down, grabs the microphone, and, while the band keeps playing the song, transforms himself into Spectacle’s master of ceremonies. He’s equal parts preacher, rapper, and circus ringmaster.

"Long ago, my friends, giants and monsters walked the Earth,” he yells loudly, delivering each line in sync with the band’s backbeat. “There were Beatles, there were Stones, the Who, the Where, the Why, and a Zeppelin of Led, and the faithful worshipped at their feet. But in time giants grow old. And the people asked, ‘Who shall join their company? Who shall climb up and take their place on the mountain?’ Four lads pushed their way to the top of the mountain and said, ‘Let us try to go up the mountain.’ And the wise among us laughed, ‘Ha!’”

Costello then jumps to the song’s “It’s alright, it’s alright” chorus, but before the “she moves” part, he goes right back to the intro.

“Were they brave? Were they blessed? Or were they simply barmy? Because they kept on climbing, even when their fingers slipped on the dark and howling night, they kept on climbing … Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to the last rock stars … Bono and The Edge!”

Between 2008 and 2010, the two seasons and 20 episodes of Spectacle: Elvis Costello With… (co-produced by Elton John, who was the guest on the first show) was the smartest music show on TV, but chances are you missed it unless your cable company carried the Sundance channel or you are a frequent YouTube surfer. With the release of the show’s complete second — and, as of today, last — season on DVD, you can now discover this gem and even see extras that were not shown on TV. According to the show’s publicists, there won’t be a Season Three (Season One was released on DVD in 2009).

Spectacle was unpredictable, but it usually began with Costello performing his own version of a song by the show’s guest, followed by a hilarious and informative guest introduction, a smart conversation, a song by the guest, and a duet. Despite the notoriety of the guests (besides Elton John, Season One featured, among others, Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright, James Taylor, the Police, Tony Bennett, and even former President Bill Clinton) this wasn’t a star-driven show — the songs themselves, and the things that triggered the artists to write those songs, are the real stars of the show.

“My wanting to sing and play came from being a fan,” Lyle Lovett told Costello, who always found a way to ask simple questions in ways that made the guest dig deeper. “Lucinda Williams, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt … just the great thinking that exists in their songs made me want to try to write something. … They taught me songs could have a narrative quality, that you could paint these wonderful pictures and find yourself inside these stories, living in the song. That’s a very powerful thing.”

Highlights within the consistently gorgeous sound and images of Season Two include Bruce Springsteen and Costello’s funny (and ultimately failed) attempt at Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” an exhilarating version of U2’s “Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” (by Costello, Bono, and The Edge), a not-seen-on-TV bonus version of Costello’s epic “I Want You,” and Ray LaMontagne’s accurate description of the art of creation.

“Writing is such a strange thing,” LaMontagne tells Costello, speaking on songs’ elusiveness in creation. “Oh, they’re tricky, they’re so tricky. … Those little sons of bitches.”

"Spectacle elvis costello with..." Available Now

George Harrison Fund For UNICEF's Month Of Giving

George Harrison was an inspiration to many musicians across the world. In 1971, his friend Ravi Shankar asked him to help the children of Bangladesh. George took action by hosting the Concert for Bangladesh in support of UNICEF. Elvis Costello is proud to join the anniversary celebration and honor George’s legacy by supporting the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF. Please watch the video below and join me in supporting this great cause.

A message to our friends in Richmond, VA.

"We share your regret and disappointment at the recent cancelations in your most excellent town but they were due to circumstances beyond the control of all concerned.

When the original show was postponed due to illness on 20th of July, it was rescheduled with surprising alacrity.

Unfortunately, it seems that this August 1st date did not catch the eye and fancy of the majority of original ticket holders, having made plans to be elsewhere.

Matters of personal well-being, whim or the weather played absolutely no part in the decision to cancel this second show.

It is hoped that we will be able to return to Richmond at a more opportune moment.”

Osheaga - Top Five Acts

Naption Urban Daily: Max Mertens: 2nd August, 2011

Elvis Costello will be turning 57-years-old this month, yet his Saturday headlining set proved that he still has more energy than many bands at Osheaga half his age. Despite having a significantly smaller crowd than Eminem the previous night, the English singer-songwriter seemed unfazed, as he lead his three-piece backing band The Imposters through a tight set. This featured plenty of material from his classic 1977 album My Aim Is True, including Watching The Detectives and Pump It Up. Impeccably dressed in a suit, purple shirt and tie and brimmed hat, Costello had the audience eating from the palm of his hand, as he invited fans onstage, introduced his go-go dancer in a cage and took audience requests. Not bad for a guy old enough to be the grandfather of the majority of festival-goers.

Read More...

40th Anniversary Of The Concert For Bangladesh

Today Elvis Costello is proud to honor the legacy of George Harrison and the very first major music concert for a cause “The Concert for Bangladesh”. Join me in supporting the great work of the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF and their work with the children affected by the famine in Africa.

Newport Folk Festival

The Providence Journal: Rick Massimo: 1st August, 2011

” Elvis Costello, playing with his crack band, The Imposters, though billed as an acoustic performance, included gentle numbers such as “American Without Tears,” “Brilliant Mistake” and “Scarlet Tide” (with a guest appearance by Emmylou Harris). The highlights came when they raged through a cover of Elvis Presley’s “Marie’s the Name (Of His Latest Flame)” and the closing “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding.”

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Elvis Costello leads a bona fide guitar orgy

Hour Community: Kevin Laforest: 31st July, 2011

"Costello seemed to be having a lot of fun, singing with a lot of conviction and proving to be quite the six-string samurai!"

On A Good Night The Mob Doesn't Rule

Montreal Gazette: Markjlepage: 31st July, 2011

"Elvis Costello headlines the central night of Osheaga 2011, and there is moonlight on the ground between the stagefront fans and those sitting in the bleachers."

Elvis Costello still pleases fans from Maine

The Portland Press Herald: Aimsel Ponti: 29th July, 2011

"Lipstick Vogue" from 1978's "This Year's Model" started the show off right with Costello strutting on stage wearing a straw fedora and a three-piece glen plaid suit. "Watching the Detectives" came next, much to the audience's delight and that's when Costello started his shenanigans"

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Danceable Night Of Songs

Cape Cod Times: Doug Fraser: 28th July, 2011

"There was a go-go dancer, dressed in classic Hullabaloo, as well as audience members who also came up on stage to dance in the cage. And it was an extremely danceable night of songs. An up tempo version of the classic put down “Alison” segued into Smokey Robinson’s “Tracks of My Tears.” A speed guitar intro led into “Strict Time” that showed Costello hadn’t moved far from his roots in the early British punk scene. “I Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down, Pump It Up,” a really rocking version of The Byrds’ hit “So You Want to Be A Rock and Roll Star,” and “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace Love and Understanding” had the sold-out crowd on its feet and dancing most of the night"

A Theatre Of 450 Seats

Town & Country: Patrick Galway: 28th July, 2011

A highlight for the evening was the song “Town Cryer”, which is virtually never played live. It was absolutely fantastic!

The reinvention of Elvis Costello

Asbury Park Press: Kelly-Jane Cotter: 28th July, 2011

"Two lovely dancers, who served as Costello’s game-show assistants, also gyrated in the cage and added energy and spunk to the show".

Life On The Ocean Wave

The Hartford Courant: Jack Coraggio: July 25th, 2011

"Elvis Costello and the Imposters brought an unbelievably fantastic show that likely proselytized some New Wave converts. An energetic closer of "Pump It Up" and the fitting "What's So Funny (About Peace, Love and Understanding)" could not be denied brilliance. On "Watching the Detectives," a track that bobs like any anchored boat floating the sound, Costello proved he could host brilliant jam sessions of jungle drumming, scatting and wailing guitars that could easily rival the likes of jam band princes and earlier performer Moe"

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Fashion Notes

Examiner.com: Jim Bessman: 24th July, 2011

"Sky high temperatures being what they were, he did wear less than his usual business attire, doffing the dark suit jacket for long-sleeved shirt and vest. Longtime keyboard ace Steve Nieve at least picked up the sartorial slack, in what appeared to be some sort of Civil War era preacher's black garb."

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Gathering of the Vibes dials up the heat and smoke

SoundSpike: John Voket: 25th July, 2011

"Not without his own brief tribute to Jerry Garcia, Costello's version of "It Must Have Been the Roses," was another highpoint of the show -- perhaps contributing to the best set of the weekend."

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The Gathering Of The Vibes

Connecticut Post: Sean Spillane: 23rd July, 2011

"Costello, in his encore, performed the title track from his album “Sulphur to Sugarcane,” which namechecks Bridgeport, although it’s not certain if he’s talking about the host city of the Vibes.

Anyway, the lyrics say, “Down in Bridgeport, the women will kill you for sport,” so I hope it’s another city of the same name.

Either way, his mentioning Bridgeport drew a loud reaction from the concertgoers, most of which have never heard the song.
Costello even got into the spirit of the Gathering of the Vibes by performing The Grateful Dead’s “It Must Have Been the Roses,” which thrilled the crowd to no end."

Borgata Hotel Casino

Elvis Costello sincerely regrets that due to illness he must postpone his July 22nd Elvis Costello and the Imposters concert date at Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa.

Please click here for updates on ticket refunds and reschedule information.

Costello spins gold at Wolfe Auditorium show

Citizen Times: Tony Kiss: 20th July, 2011

"The first spin of the wheel yielded “This Wheel’s On Fire.” Then came “I Want You,” “Joanna,” “Episode of Blonde,” “Bedlam” and “Girl". Another game gimmick was the “Hammer of Songs,” a sort of strong man routine, in which a contestant pounded a bell-ringing carnival device to determine the next song. That brought “Pump It Up.”

Late in the gig, he brought out (T Bone) Burnett for a couple of tunes, including “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" ("The Wild Side Of Life"). The crowd was into it through the night, jumping to its collective feet again and again. It all made for a memorable musical night."

Innsbrook Pavillion, Richmond, VA. Announcement

Elvis Costello sincerely regrets that due to illness he is postponing his July 20th Elvis Costello and the Imposters concert date at Innsbrook Pavilion in Richmond, VA.

This show has been rescheduled for Monday August 1 and will remain as "An evening with". All tickets purchased for the July 20 date will be honored for the new date.

Any patron seeking a refund may do so at the point of purchase. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you purchased online from Ticketstobuy, you will be contacted directly via email today.

"Elvis Costello's Jackpot Hits"

Charleston City Paper: T. Ballard Lesemann: 19th July, 2011

"Costello's mastery of lyrics, melodies, and arrangements were on full display all night. A bold wit and vaudevillian sense of humor blended with a sweet appreciation of his fans and colleagues as well. Seeing, hearing, and feeling it all was a wonderful experience"

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Revolver Fires Up Again In Charlotte

Charlotte Observer: Courtney Devores: 17th July, 2011

"He appeared solo to begin a quieter, rootsier run of songs that included “Sulphur to Sugarcane” then encored looking fittingly `70s movie thug in a shiny copper leather jacket and leopard print hat for “Watching the Detectives.” After nearly three hours he ended the set with “Everyday I Write the Book” and “Pump It Up.” The latter bookended the wild, punky feel of the beginning."

Costello delivers classics, inventive flair to locals

The Post and Courier: Devin Grant: 19th July, 2011

"Costello definitely gave the audience, estimated at 1,500, its money's worth, showing them that a rock concert doesn't simply have to be a series of songs performed live."

Read More....

Elvis Costello's Spectacular Spinning Songbook Rolls On Into July

Following boffo business at the box office, popular demand and press acclaim, Elvis Costello and the Imposters will be bringing the Spectacular Spinning Songbook to most of their dates during July.

7/16 Belk Theater-Charlotte, NC

7/18 N. Charleston PAC-N. Charleston, SC

7/19 Wolfe Auditorium-Asheville, NC

7/22 Borgata-Atlantic City, NJ

7/24 Westhampton Beach PAC-Westhampton Beach, NY (SOLD OUT)

7/26 Count Basie Theatre-Red Bank, NJ (SOLD OUT)

7/28 State Theatre-Portland, ME (SOLD OUT)

"The Revolver Tour" crossed the United States from Reno to New York City during May, concluding with a sold out three-night stand at that the Beacon Theatre.

As Rolling Stone reported, the evening combines the "kitsch of a game show and lounge act: a bar, a go-go cage with dancer and an Austin Powers-style hostess-dollybird; his own eye-popping selection of fedoras and sport jackets. When he wasn't singing or slamming at his guitars, Costello worked the stage like a burlesque-club emcee, cracking wise at a mile a minute and spinning a dandy's walking stick.”

Despite the carnival elements of the show, The New York Times opined: "There is, in the end, no way to keep Mr. Costello's songs in any shallow entertainment mode...It didn't feel like show business at all. Maybe that was the real proof of Mr. Costello's showmanship."

While the Los Angeles Times called “"The Revolver Tour", A uniquely invigorating experience that warrants a buzzword all its own: inspiring."

The only exceptions to this announcement of further "Revolver" dates are the festival and concert appearances at;

7/20 Innsbrook Pavilion-Richmond, VA

7/23 Gathering of the Vibes-Bridgeport, CT

7/27 Cape Cod Melody Tent-Hyannis, MA

7/30 Osheaga Festival-Montreal, QC

7/31 Newport Folk Festival-Newport, RI

At the multiple act festival dates it would be impossible to construct and install the Wheel on-stage in the time allowed, while in a few other instances safety or production issues have prevented the Wheel from being part of the presentation.

These "Don't Take Your Guns To Town" dates will be free-programmed shows, as Elvis Costello and the Imposters choose from their newly expanded repertoire of favourites, hits of the future and surprising covers.

As for the rest of the summer shows, the Philadelphia Inquirer could not have put it better when they wrote, "The Best Costello show I've seen in an eon. Let's hope it doesn't take 26 years for him to give the Wheel another spin."

It seems it didn't ...

Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello and the Imposters today answer the call of unanimously cheering audiences and critics from coast to coast, announcing a further extension of the massively successful Spinning Songbook tour with a string of fall dates in the Eastern U.S., on sale July 15.

Having begun as a brief two-week stint this spring, the Spinning Songbook tour soon expanded to include 17 additional cities in June and July, garnering acclaim at every turn:

"Unfettered, free-wheeling fun" – Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"The Wheel was the perfect way to shake up a set list with a couple decades' worth of excellent material" – Columbus Dispatch

"Three hours of hilarity, musicality, and unabated joy" – St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"It's hard to imagine any other musician in the world playing the show that Elvis Costello did" – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

At each performance, select fans are invited onstage to spin the Wheel, helping to create new sets at each performance from a collection of 40 banners including hits, rarities, and a few surprises.

Fall 2011 Tour Dates (on sale dates):

9/15 – Mobile, AL – Saenger Theatre (7/15)
9/17 – Clearwater, FL – Ruth Eckerd Hall (7/15)
9/18 – Hollywood, FL – Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino (7/29)
9/19 – Orlando, FL – Bob Carr Performing Arts Center (7/15)
9/22 – Durham, NC – Durham Performing Arts Center (7/15)
9/24 – Atlanta, GA – Chastain Park (on sale now)
9/25 – Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium (7/15)
9/29 – Washington, DC – Warner Theatre (7/15)
9/30 – Huntington, NY – Paramount Theater (8/5)
10/1 – New York, NY – United Palace Theatre (on sale now)
10/3 – Red Bank, NJ – Count Basie Theatre (7/15)
10/5 – Montclair, NJ – The Wellmont Theatre*
10/6 – Montclair, NJ – The Wellmont Theatre (on sale now)

* rescheduled from 5/18

The Imposters are: Steve Nieve (keyboards), Pete Thomas (drums), and Davey Faragher (bass).

Look out for further "Revolver Tour" announcements.

Taken For A Fool

Clashmusic.com: Robin Murray: 8th July, 2011

The Strokes Team Up With Elvis Costello

The Strokes are set to release their duet with Elvis Costello as the B-side of their new single.

Returning with their new album 'Angles' The Strokes ended five years of silence. However since then a series of awkward live shows have given rise to claims that the New York outfit could be close to the end.

Yet when the mood strikes them, The Strokes can still raise their game. Taking to the stage in Madison Square Garden earlier this year, the New York outfit were in a confident mood on home turf.

Taking place on April 1st, the show saw Elvis Costello emerge for an impromptu support slot. An important influence on the band, the English songwriter played three tracks to a bemused audience.

Later, Costello was invited to perform with The Strokes with the two running through 'Taken For A Fool'. Captured on film, it now seems that the duet is set to gain an official release later this year.

Available on July 26th, 'Taken For A Fool' is set to gain a full single release. Available as a digital download and on seven inch vinyl, The Strokes are planning to press the Elvis-assisted live cut on the B-side.

Seattle Mariners Baseball is Like an Elvis Costello Album

Bleacher Report: Alex Carson: July 8th, 2011

Sometimes I like to cruise through Wikipedia by using the random article link.

Today, while clicking said link, an Elvis Costello album randomly appeared on my screen. It contained a track listing that made me think quite a bit about the Mariners.

I suppose I could click the random link again, and if I tried hard enough, I could take anything and somehow relate it to the Mariners. Pyramidalis Bertini just isn't going to be as easy as this Costello album, that's all.

So the album is titled Momofuku. It was released in 2008 and I'm sure it's a fine collaboration of musical instruments and the sweet vocal sounds of Mr. Costello. These tracks reminded me of our lovable M's:

"No Hiding Place" - Indeed. The Mariners have hung around in contention, but we all know their weaknesses and they can't hide behind the pitching in a sustainable manner.

"Turpentine" - The Mariners offense is thin. Almost like it was doused with turpentine over and over.

"Flutter and Wow" - A real definition for flutter is "to vibrate in irregular spasms." That's the Mariners offense, and we are all left to just say "wow" each night.

"Go Away" - This makes me think of Chone Figgins mostly. Sometimes Jack Wilson, Carlos Peguero, Brendan Ryan in the two-hole, Adam Kennedy in the three-hole, the Moose and anyone who starts the wave late in a tight game.

Thank you, Mr. Costello. Your music has inspired me without even having listened to it.

Listen to Momofuku...

More about Momofuku....

"The Spectacular Spinning Songbook - The Results"

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
St. Louis
July 1st , 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Substitute - duet with Eddie Vedder

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Pump It Up - SPIN 1 - EDDIE'S SPIN

Human Hands - SPIN 2

Living In Paradise - SPIN 3

"I Can Sing A Rainbow" Jackpot - SPIN 4

Greenshirt
Blue Chair
Red Shoes
Purple Rain

Everyday I Write The Book - SPIN 5

Veronica - SPIN 6

Long Honeymoon - SPIN 7 (HELD)

Alison - SPIN 8

Radio Radio - IMPROMPTU

Mystery Dance - IMPROMPTU

You Belong To Me - - IMPROMPTU

Accidents Will Happen - IMPROMPTU

And Your Bird Can Sing - IMPROMPTU

Turpentine - SPIN 9

Chelsea - SPIN 10

Riot Act - SPIN 11

Watching The Detectives/Help Me - IMPROMPTU

This Wheel's On Fire/The River In Reverse/On Your Way Down/I'll Take Care Of You/This Wheel's On Fire - SPIN 12

Interlude

Lipstick Vogue - IMPROMPTU

Beyond Belief - - IMPROMPTU

Waiting For The End Of The World/I Can Only Give You Everything

Spectacular Spinning Songbook Finale

"Girl" Jackpot - Ms. VALENTINE'S SPIN

This Year's Girl
Spooky Girlfriend

"Happy" Jackpot - Ms. VALENTINE'S SPIN

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity

"Time" Jackpot - Ms. VALENTINE'S SPIN

Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Out Of Time

Peace, Love And Understanding - SPIN 13

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Kansas City
June 30th , 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

"Joanna" Jackpot - SPIN 1

Talking In The Dark

Clubland - SPIN 2

Peace, Love And Understanding - SPIN 3

Earthbound - SPIN 4 (with recitation)

This Wheel's On Fire (SPIN 5) vs Human Hands (SPIN 6)

Human Hands - UNANIMOUS DECISION - REQUEST LIGHT

Watching The Detectives/Help Me - IMPROMPTU

Joker - SPIN 7

Chelsea

"Imperial Chocolate" Jackpot - SPIN 8

Almost Blue
Shabby Doll
I Want You

Birthday Twin Spin Finale

Brilliant Mistake/Happy Birthday - SPIN 9

Joker - SPIN 10

Pump It Up - Mother's Request Shouted From Front Row

Alison/Purple Rain - SPIN 11

Encore

Sulphur To Sugarcane - with Rebecca and Megan Lovell of Larkin Poe on mandolin, dobro and vocals with the Imposters

The Crooked Line - duet with Rebecca Lovell featuring Megan Lovell and the Imposters.

The Scarlet Tide - with Rebecca and Megan Lovell with the Imposters

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Minneapolis
June 29th , 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Joker - SPIN 1

Watching The Detectives/Help Me

Shipbuilding - SPIN 2

God's Comic - SPIN 3

"Time" Jackpot - SPIN 4

Clowntime Is Over
Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Out Of Time

Veronica - SPIN 5

Commercial Break

The Stations Of The Cross

This Wheel's On Fire/The River In Reverse/On Your Way Down/I'll Take Care Of You/This Wheel's On Fire

So Like Candy/Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - SPIN 6

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine - Napoleon Solo

Jimmie Standing In The Rain - Napoleon Solo

Pump It Up In 6/8/ Busted

"Joanna" Jackpot - SPIN 7

All Grown Up
Talking In The Dark

You Tripped At Every Step - SPIN 8

Finale

Chelsea
Beyond Belief
Turpentine
Everyday I Write The Book
Purple Rain
Alison
Peace, Love And Understanding

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Grand Rapids
June 27th , 2011

Overture

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Accidents Will Happen - SPIN 1

"Happy" Jackpot - SPIN 2

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity
I Stand Accused

New Lace Sleeves - SPIN 3

Oliver's Army - SPIN 4

"Joanna" Jackpot - SPIN 5

Black Sails In The Sunset
Talking In The Dark

"Happy" Jackpot (AGAIN) SPIN 6

New Amsterdam - Steve Nieve departs the stage due to severe muscle spasm

Man Out Of Time - SPIN 7 - played as a trio

Pump It Up - REQUEST - played as a trio

Peace, Love And Understanding - SPIN 8 - played as a trio

Interlude - NAPOLEON SOLO

A Slow Drag With Josephine
You Little Fool
Red Shoes
Everyday I Write The Book
Sulphur To Sugarcane
Radio Sweetheart
God's Comic

Finale

"The Elvis Costello Experience" direct from Weatherfield Social Club with former World Motorcross Champion, Miss Cindy Withers.

Chelsea
Less Than Zero
Bedlam
Watching The Detectives/Help Me/Love That Burns
Peace, Love And Understanding

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Toronto
June 23rd , 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Everyday I Write The Book - SPIN 1

"Joanna" Jackpot - SPIN 2

I Still Have That Other Girl

Turpentine - SPIN 3

Long Honeymoon - SPIN 4

I Want You - SPIN 5

Beyond Belief - IMPROMPTU

Big Tears - IMPROMPTU

Shabby Doll - IMPROMPTU

Accidents Will Happen - SPIN 6

Leave My Kitten Alone - IMPROMPTU

Living In Paradise - SPIN 7

"Girl" Jackpot - SPIN 8

Spooky Girlfriend
Party Girl
Girls Talk
Girl

Alison - IMPROMPTU

Commercial Break

The Statation Of The Cross

Shipbuilding

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
For More Tears

Joker - SPIN 9 - (HELD)

Earthbound - SPIN 10

Peace, Love And Understanding (JOKER PAID)

Finale

Chelsea
Waiting For The End Of The World
I Can Only Give You Everything
Pump It Up
Purple Rain
Man Out Of Time
I Hope

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Interlochen
June 21st , 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Hand In Hand - IMPROMPTU - And Your Bird Can Sing - SPIN 1

New Lace Sleeves - SPIN 2

Monkey To Man - SPIN 3

Slow Down - IMPROMPTU

Sulky Girl - SPIN 4

Man Out Of Time - SPIN 5

Joker - SPIN 6

Possession - REQUEST

The Other Side Of Summer - REQUEST

Veronica - NAPOLEON'S SPIN (7)

"Girl" Jackpot - SPIN 8

This Year's Girl
Girl
Spooky Girlfriend

Chelsea - IMPROMPTU

Waiting For The End Of The World/I Can Only Give You Everything - IMPROMPTU

Watching The Detectives - IMPROMPTU

Pump It Up - IMPROMPTU

Alison - IMPROMPTU

Finale

A Slow Drag With Josephine - NAPOLEON SOLO

Sulphur To Sugarcane - The Imposters with Rebecca and Megan Lovell of Larkin Poe on mandolin, dobro and vocals.

The Crooked Line - duet with Rebecca Lovell. Megan Lovell on dobro and vocal harmony

Peace, Love And Understanding - The Imposters with Rebecca and Megan Lovell.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Detroit
June 20th , 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Pump It Up

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Oliver's Army - SPIN 1

Chelsea - SPIN 2

Hand In Hand - IMPROMPTU

And Your Bird Can Sing - SPIN 3

Detectives vs Hoover Factory

Watching The Detectives - SPIN 4 (UNANIMOUS)

Help Me - IMPROMPTU

Joker - SPIN 5

Black And White World

Beyond Belief - IMPROMPTU

Daddy Can I Turn This? - IMPROMPTU

I Want You - SPIN 6

"I Can Sing A Rainbow" Jackpot - NAPOLEON' SPIN (7)

Greenshirt

Doll Revolution - SPIN 8

So Like Candy/Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - SPIN 9

Red Shoes - "I Can Sing A Rainbow" Jackpot (Continued)

Purple Rain - "I Can Sing A Rainbow" Jackpot (Concluded)

Interlude

Pills And Soap - "Joanna" Choice with Steve Nieve

"I Can Sing A Rainbow" Again - Jackpot - SPIN 10

Almost Blue

New Lace Sleeves - REQUEST

Lipstick Vogue - IMPROMPTU

Waiting For The End Of The World/I Can Only Give You Everything - IMPROMPTU

Finale

A Slow Drag With Josephine - NAPOLEON SOLO
Sulphur To Sugarcane
Alison
Peace, Love And Understanding
Substitute

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Columbus
June 19th , 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Bedlam - SPIN 1

Deep Dark Truthful Mirror - SPIN 2

"Happy" Jackpot - SPIN 3 & 5 (Double Spin)

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity
I Stand Accused

Detectives vs Hoover Factory - SPIN 4

Watching The Detectives (UNANIMOUS)

Riot Act - SPIN 5

And Your Bird Can Sing - SPIN 6

Waiting For The End Of The World - IMPROMPTU

Beyond Belief - IMPROMPTU

Chelsea - SPIN 7

Turpentine - IMPROMPTU

Interlude

My Three Sons - "Joanna" Choice with Steve Nieve

Long Honeymoon - SPIN 8

God Give Me Strength - SPIN 9

Less Than Zero - REQUEST

Finale

Indoor Fireworks - REQUEST

Alison - SPIN 10

Everyday I Write The Book - IMPROMPTU

A Slow Drag With Josephine - "Napoleon Solo" choice
Pump It Up/Busted
Peace, Love And Understanding

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Rochester
June 17th , 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Joker - SPIN 1

Everyday I Write The Book

Detectives vs Hoover Factory - SPIN 2

Hoover Factory
Watching The Detectives

"King's Ransom" Jackpot - SPIN 3

The Spell That You Cast
American Without Tears
Brilliant Mistake
National Ransom

Monkey To Man - SPIN 4

Temptation - with Steve Nieve - IMPROMPTU
All Grown Up - with Steve Nieve - IMPROMPTU

Veronica - SPIN 5

45 - IMPROMPTU

Commercial Break

The Stations Of The Cross

Almost Blue - IMPROMPTU
Chelsea - IMPROMPTU
Less Than Zero - IMPROMPTU

Beyond Belief - SPIN 6

Waiting For The End Of The World - IMPROMPTU
You Belong To Me - IMPROMPTU
Next Time Round - IMPROMPTU

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain

Pump It Up/Busted (Harlan Howard) - IMPROMPTU

"Girl" Jackpot - SPIN 7

This Year's Girl
Spooky Girlfriend
Girl (Lennon/McCartney)

Alison - IMPROMPTU

Finale

This Wheel's On Fire/The River In Reverse/On Your Way Down/I'll Take Care Of You/This Wheel's On Fire
Peace, Love And Understanding

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Pittsburgh
June 16th , 2011

Overture - featuring the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

You Tripped At Every Step - SPIN 1
Everyday I Write The Book - SPIN 2

Joker - SPIN 3

Pump It Up
I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down - IMPROMPTU

Joker - SPIN 4

Spooky Girlfriend

"Girl" - Jackpot - NAPOLEON'S SPIN (5)

Party Girl

Sulky Girl - SPIN 6

So Like Candy - REQUEST

Monkey To Man - SPIN 7

Chelsea - IMPROMPTU

All Grown Up - NAPOLEON'S REQUEST

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain
God's Comic

"Time" - Jackpot

Clowntime Is Over
Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Out Of Time

Finale

Peace, Love And Understanding
Substitute
Watching The Detectives
I Want You

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Wolf Trap, Vienna
June 15th , 2011

Overture - featuring the return of the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Pump It Up In 6/8/Busted - SPIN 1

Alison - SPIN 2

"Girl" Jackpot - SPIN 3

This Year's Girl
Party Girl
Girl - Lennon/McCartney

"King's Ransom" Jackpot - SPIN 4

The Spell That You Cast
Indoor Fireworks
Brilliant Mistake
National Ransom

Everyday I Write The Book - SPIN 5

Joker - SPIN 6

Roxanne - IMPROMPTU
I Want You - JOKER CHOICE

Joker - SPIN 7

And Your Bird Can Sing - JOKER CHOICE

Chelsea - IMPROMPTU
Beyond Belief - THE REQUEST LIGHT
Waiting For The End Of The World - IMPROMPTU

So Like Candy - SPIN 8

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - IMPROMPTU

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain

"I Can Sing A Rainbow" Jackpot - SPIN 9

Greenshirt
Red Shoes
Purple Rain

Finale

Honey Are You Straight Or Are You Blind?
Peace, Love And Understanding

Elvis Costello in a gem of a show at the Pageant

stltoday.com: Daniel Durchholz: July 3rd, 2011

Costello interpolated songs like Sonny Boy Williamson's "Help Me," and Them's "I Can Only Give You Everything" into his own tunes, creating something new along the way. The technique was never more effective than when he began Bob Dylan and the Band's apocalyptic "This Wheel's on Fire," then moved into his own impassioned post-Katrina plea for New Orleans, "The River in Reverse."
It was a powerful but sobering moment in a concert that otherwise offered nearly three hours of hilarity, musicality and unabated joy.

Read more...

"He Worked The Room Of Teenagers To 60-Year-Olds Like A Master Of Ceremonies"

3 Minute Record: July 2nd, 2011

Before calling for song three, shouts and applause rose from the audience as out from the shadows walked Eddie Vedder to the stage! In town for his date at the Fabulous Fox Theatre the same night, Vedder helped Costello belt a raucous version of The Who classic “Substitute.” Not sharing the microphone, but standing close with a handheld, Vedder sang along with the ferocious power he’s known for. After the song, Costello called for Vedder to spin the wheel, his result landing on the classic “Pump It Up.” Off to a great start, the night was already special and only the four song of the set had passed.

Read More...

"Pat Sajak Impersonations And A Little Sexy Swiveling?"

Riverfront Times: Christian Schaeffer: July 2nd, 2011

"As Costello and his crew left the stage, drummer Pete Thomas gave an errant spin of the wheel as the house lights came on. It landed on "I Want You," almost certainly Costello's darkest song of violent lust and barely contained sexual rage. Fitting, then, that after a night of excess, the wheel leaves us with a message about insatiable desire. The crowd certainly would have stuck around for one more song, or twenty, but Costello understands that showbiz adage: Always leaving them wanting more"

"We certainly understand the logic of only allowing pretty girls to get up there"

The Larryville Chronicles: July 1st, 2011

"I especially dug the second-encore jamboree with the Southern sisters from the opening act, who added some sweet pedal steel to 'Sulphur to Sugarcane' with Costello vamping it up to lyrics like 'I gave up married women cause I heard it was a sin / Now I'm back in Kansas City I might take em up again." Who doesn't love when singers include the name of the city they're in!"."

Read More....

"Earthworms!!! Run For Your Lives!!!"

The Kansas City Star: Joel Francis: 1st July, 2011

“(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” usually an encore, came up early. So did “Earthworms,” a song Costello wrote for singer Wendy James in the early ‘90s but never recorded himself.

"Like A Phoenix, Touched For The Very First Time"

The Pitch: David Hudnall: July 1st, 2011

Down in front, a night's convention of happily married couples chicken-danced to devilish and desperate songs about the hells of divorce and infidelity. "I Want You," turned the stage lights blood red. In this trial-like song that throws a cheating heart and its victim through an incinerator, he wrenched and wailed some of his sickest lyrics three times over: Did you call his name out as he held you down? The irony was rich, jolly and irreproducible.

Then he sang the lines of the once-TV-banned "Radio, Radio." I wanna bite the hand that feeds me / I wanna bite that hand so badly / I wanna make them wish they'd never seen me. In this bizarre world, Costello's conquest of America turns the would-be gimmick of the Revolver Tour into a rising phoenix...

"Minus The Pickle Juice"

ReviewSTL: Allison: July 1st, 2011

"He selected a preteen who excitedly danced her way onto the stage and spun “Bedlam” as the next song. She jived first in an on-stage lounge and later in the go-go dancer’s cage as the band performed a version that had been slightly slowed down and jazzed up since its release on 2004′s The Delivery Man."

Spinning Wheel, Elvis Keeps On Turning

StarTribune: Jon Bream: June 30th, 2011

The evening actually opened with a shotgun-paced barrage of early Elvis, including a revved-up "Mystery Dance" and a rollicking "Radio Radio." Then it became "Wheel of Fortune" meets "Austin Powers" as Costello's quick wit often offset the ballad-heavy luck of the 40-song roulette spin. At one point, he just took over and, without explanation, offered a medley of the Band's jubilant rocker "This Wheel's on Fire" and the smoldering blues "The River in Reverse." That had to rival the "time" medley for the long night's musical highlights as Costello and the Imposters played a few songs with "time" in the title, ending with the intense "Man Out of Time" with the star strolling through the crowd singing and high-fiving fans.

"Perhaps he was just being a joker all along"

City Pages: Jeff Gage: 30th June 2011

The first member of the audience who got to spin the big wheel sitting on stage at the State last night was a woman named Heidi. She ran up on stage, squealing with delight, and gave Elvis Costello an enormous hug. "My friend and I have been following you for 30 years!" she exclaimed. At that, Costello, dressed in a black top hat, ushered Heidi's friend, Lisa, on stage as well, and the two women spun the wheel together to see what song would be played next.

Read More.....

"The Last Five Minutes On Earth"

StarTribune: Jon Bream: June 30th, 2011

Costello had fun with whomever came onstage to spin his rock roulette wheel. There were two women, best friends since high school who had been listening to Elvis for 30 years; a young woman and her grandmother; a series of married couples, etc. and hurled some political zingers, telling one wheel spinner that the world’s last five minutes of entertainment was in her hands because the Rapture is coming. Said Elvis: "The goal here is that they take Glen Beck and Michele Bachmann first."

"The Spinning State"

The Journal: Jeremy Zoss: 30th June, 2011

With each spin of the wheel, Costello and the band launched into a veritable mini-concert. Each bite-sized set was accompanied by its own theatrics, such as a caged go-go dancer with boundless energy, Costello singing in the aisles and remixed versions of some of his most popular songs The crowds were on their feet at the end of nearly every mini-set – Costello’s voice has lost little over the years and he still plays guitar with more bite and flash than musicians half his age.

"Funnest Show On Earth!"

Torontoist: Jim Kelley: 25th June, 2011

"Costello brings the night to a subdued and dignified close with “I Hope,” a bonus track from the Japanese pressing of his latest, National Ransom. A crowd-pleasing two hours and 40 minutes after it began, the Spectacular Spinning Songbook is over. It feels like the circus has folded up the Big Top and left town. But we got to dance in the lioness’s cage and take the Ringmaster’s wheel for a spin. The Funnest Show on Earth!"

"Steve Nieve Is Completely Well"

"We are pleased to announce that Steve Nieve is completely well, having experienced a severe muscle spasm during the Spectacular Spinning Songbook show in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The episode forced Mr. Nieve from the stage after two stellar piano performances of the songs "Black Sails In The Sunset" and "Talking In The Dark". Thankfully, he is now completely recovered and "The Revolver Tour" will next play the State Theatre in Minneapolis on Wednesday the 29th of June.

"On the eve of the Grand Rapids show, an impromptu decision was made to incorporate the Spectacular Spinning Songbook in the appearance at Meijer Gardens, a beautiful setting not originally thought to be suitable for the presentation, as shows there take place in both broad daylight and are completely open to the elements. Although forecast bad weather did not make an appearance, the show took a rather unexpectedly dramatic turn after about 55 minutes when Mr. Nieve was suddenly unable to continue.

To avoid causing unnecessary alarm while Mr. Nieve was being examined as a standard precaution, Mr. Costello took the decision to continue with the show in solo performance, featuring such songs as "You Little Fool", "Everyday I Write The Book". "Radio Sweetheart" and "Sulphur To Sugarcane".

"The Elvis Costello Experience" then made its first appearance since 1980 in the Channel Islands, playing trio versions of "Chelsea", "Less Than Zero" "Bedlam" and an extended "Watching The Detectives", incorporating verses from "Help Me" and "Love That Burns". These unique renditions seemed to meet with audience approval despite the unfortunate circumstances. Although tonight's total performance lasted more than two and a quarter hours, the entire company look forward to a full return engagement on some future occasion.

Napoleon Dynamite, Elvis Costello and the Imposters would like to extend special thanks to local gal, Keri Larsen Kujala, who, at very short notice, danced the role of "Miss Cindy Withers", in the absence of the originally unscheduled, regular cast member Melisa Valdez ("Dixie De La Fontaine"). Ms Kujala brought an especially lively presence to the void on stage right during the closing numbers. We will always think fondly of her contribution."

"For More Tears"

FOR MORE TEARS

Too many teardrops
And still we’re crying out loud
For more tears
You said that we’d never part
You didn’t take that to your heart

Now dark bells will chime
For our sins and our crimes
96 times
Four more tears

One hundred years have passed
A poppy pinned to your breast
For more tears
They say, “We’ll never forget”
But the earth is thirsty yet

And muffled drums will drag
As they’re folding up the flag
Zipping up the bag
For more tears

Oh, I can’t stop for trying
Oh, so come to now
And don’t delay
There’re too many tears to wipe away
Or be betrayed

Eight angry men and four furies
Surely a hangman's jury
Hung up overnight
Next morning
Read the report of the pistols sold and bought

A tale of long tale of misery
Repeats the same sorry history
Butchers cut them down to size
Spilling out their guts and lies
Soothing breezes and last sighs
For more tears

Oh, I can’t stop for trying
Oh, so come to now
And don’t delay
There’re too many tears to wipe away
Or be betrayed

FIRST PUBLIC PERFORMANCE - TORONTO 23/06/11

"Wah-Wah"

Buffalo News: Jeff Miers: 26th June, 2011

"During a brisk-tempoed take on “Turpentine,” keyboardist Nieve played theremin, and set the stage for a lengthy guitar solo from Costello, who seemed to be fully partaking of the pleasures afforded by an abused wah-wah pedal. He blew another killer solo during an inspired reading of “Clubland,” added significant guitar grit and muscle to the previously clean and neat “Beyond Belief,” and simply burned through a punk-fueled “Stella Hurt.”

Step right up, folks, for the amazing Elvis Costello

The Globe And Mail: Brad Wheeler: 24th June, 2011

To a theatre full of people who adored him, Elvis Costello reflected their good taste and justified their fandom. The big, illuminated and colourful wheel that dominated stage right was the Spectacular Spinning Songbook, a gaudy gyrating résumé for the amazing singing Elvis. “Round and round it goes,” he said like a dandy carnival barker more than once, “where it stops, nobody knows.”

One could say the same thing about Costello, an untiring artist whose remarkableness and charm were in plain sight and pleasing earshot for two hours and more. It was a merry, rocking event, enjoyed by the Cole Porter-loving post-punk onstage and surely everyone else in the building – with non-stop highlights.

I Hope You’re Happy Now, Heart of the City, Mystery Dance, Uncomplicated and Radio Radio Offered with no breaks (other than a “1-2-3-4”) between them, the first numbers were something of a sprint to the starting line. The tempo was uniformly upbeat, the organ sounds were cheesy, a booted booty-shaker go-goed in a cage and the three-piece Imposters raced, rumbled and rolled. On his various keyboards and theremin, Steve Nieve was busier than a one-eyed mole-whacker.

Everyday I Write the Book Finally a breather, as Costello, 56, donned a top hat, picked up a cane and introduced himself as Napoleon Dynamite. A snazzy lady audience-wrangler brought up the night’s first wheel-spinner from the crowd; her modest twirl landed on this 1983 hit done in a slightly funky fashion, with Costello’s Fender Telecaster making scratchy, trebly noises.

Turpentine A percussive track from 2008’s curiously titled Momofuku had audience-member Mary in the go-go cage shaking a pair of maracas and other things with grace and confidence. All the while, wheel-whirlers who gave their names as Allison and Gord enjoyed a cocktail at the onstage “Society Lounge.”

Leave My Kitten Alone Little Willie John’s rockabilly R&B classic was done as you would imagine the Beatles did it in Hamburg (except for the reedy organ bit, of course).

Alison A moving number, with Costello’s distinctive voice breaking affectingly. Audience members helped, their aim true too.

Tracks of My Tears/Tears of a Clown/The Wind Cries Mary/Over the Rainbow/Somewhere Alison segued into a medley of song snippets, offered seamlessly and in a melodic stream of consciousness. One would imagine the musical egghead with the fedora and spectacles could have stretched this out for a hundred tunes, no sweat.

A Slow Drag with Josephine From 2010’s National Ransom, “rock ‘n’ roll, like I imagine it in 1856,” explained Costello, who whistled, strummed an acoustic and rhymed “adieu, my little ballyhoo” with “broke my heart in two” on a bluesy parlour-room shuffle.

(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding and (I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea What’s so funny about filmmaker Bruce McDonald and about 30 others dancing on stage? Nothing, nothing at all.

I Hope After Pump it Up (in 6/8 time), a commendable bit of Prince’s Purple Rain and the country soul of Man Out of Time, Costello left with a sparse breakup ballad. “Keep on dancing and let the music play” is a beaten man’s request. An eloquent winding down, to a stunning evening.

"Costello

canoe.ca: Jane Stevenson: 24th June, 2011

"Whether he realizes it or not, he is cool, talented, charming and often quite sexy, whether he’s crooning a ballad or rocking out intensely."

Costello provides his own thunder at rain-soaked Jazz Festival

Ottawa Citizen: Lynn Saxberg: 24th June, 2011

Ottawa — Singer-songwriter Elvis Costello bounded on to the stage of the TD Ottawa International Jazz Festival and lit into what was probably the most rocking concert ever witnessed at the venerable festival.

Instead of relying on a wheel-driven game of chance to determine the song selection, a gimmick he's been using in other cities on his current tour, Costello played whatever the heck he wanted, and seemed to take the opportunity to let loose. There was a setlist, but he didn't follow it very closely.

Looking trim in a dapper suit and sporting his trademark fedora and thick-rimmed glasses, the 56-year-old Brit kicked things off with a high-octane version of Pump It Up, which immediately commanded the attention of the small but enthusiastic crowd. A torrential downpour earlier in the evening kept many fans away, although the weather cleared in time for Costello's headlining performance, and he started right on time.

"Lovely weather we're having," he commented at one point, "(but) having spent the last six years living in British Columbia, this is a sunny day to us."

The former Declan MacManus was a ball of energy during the entire show, putting his band through their paces early on a taut and speedy Heart of the City before careening back to the mid-70s nugget, Mystery Dance. His band, the Imposters, which consisted of keyboardist Steve Nieve, drummer Pete Thomas and bassist Davey Faragher, was fantastic, effortlessly keeping up with the pace set by their boss.

Costello delivered a show that will be remembered by the 2,500 or so who braved the cool, damp conditions. His voice sounded great and he was a charming frontman, showing little of his famous curmudgeonly streak. The crowd-pleasing performance ended on a high that included a string of familiar songs re-energized by the chemistry of the band. From Watching The Detectives and Alison to Honey Are You Straight? Red Shoes, I Can't Stand Up, High Fidelity, a surprising but fun cover of the Stones song, Out of Time, and Costello's anthem, Peace Love and Understanding, the mood was one of elation as the crowd bopped along.

Costello handled the guitar work, both electric and acoustic, on his own, turning in the sharp, tasty licks that add so much to his music, while keyboardist Nieve was responsible for filling in the spaces with inventive passages that roamed from straightforward piano to outer space and back.

They charged through Strict Time and Clown Strike early on, and then slowed the tempo in the middle for a nice, torchy version of Almost Blue, the title track from Costello's 1981 album with the Attractions. Costello hammed it up for the on-stage video camera, planting a big kiss on the lens. Another ballad highlight was the old-timey A Slow Drag With Josephine, from last year's album, National Ransom.

Back by Popular Demand, Elvis Costello and the Imposters Return to NYC/NJ

Three New Spectacular Spinning Songbook Shows Added, More Anticipated.

Elvis Costello and the Imposters announced additional dates featuring the Spectacular Spinning Songbook, with three new tri-state area shows this fall, on sale Friday, June 24. The shows include Costello's re-scheduled May 18 performance, now set for October 5, as well as two new dates by popular demand:

10/1 – United Palace Theater (New York, NY)

10/5 – The Wellmont Theatre (Montclair, NJ - rescheduled from 5/18*)

10/6 – The Wellmont Theatre (Montclair, NJ)

* All tickets for the original date will be honored for the Oct 5th show only.

Critics nationwide unanimously raved for Costello's spring "Revolver" dates, and nowhere more fervently than in New York. New York Times wrote that "there is, in the end, no way to keep Mr. Costello’s songs in any shallow entertainment mode" and Rolling Stone called the show "epic", heralding the "velocity and challenge" with which he and his band stormed the New York stage.

Lucky audience members will once again be invited up on stage to help create uniquely fated sets on every bill by spinning the enormous Wheel, which includes 40 banners providing hits, rarities, and surprises.
The Imposters are: Steve Nieve (keyboards), Pete Thomas (drums), and Davey Faragher (bass).

Stay tuned for more updates....

Elvis Costello takes fans for a songbook spin in Royal Oak

The Oakland Press: Gary Graff: 21st June, 2011

Highlights included an emotive "I Want You," "Doll Revolution," "So Like Candy" (one of several songs Costello's co-written with Paul McCartney), "New Lace Sleeves" and "Pills and Soap." During one of the encores, meanwhile, he dipped into his recent Americana-flavored releases for the swinging "Sulphur to Sugarcane."

As iconoclastic as he is iconic, Costello's never been one to follow any sort of rules throughout his career. On Monday in Royal Oak, he continued to do it strictly on his own terms — which proved to be the best way indeed.

"A Writer Speaks"

The Writing Life: Katey Schultz: 22nd June, 2011

"The band played for about two hours, effectively nonstop. For the last 40 minutes, 80% of the audience was on their feet, with perhaps 100 folks slammed up against the edge of the stage, bouncing and twitching to the beats"

"Sitting their watching Costello’s entire body vibrate with his art, infusing the crowd of thousands—ten-year-olds to seventy-year-olds—I had to admit that the road life can be pretty good to some artists. That some people make a life of it forever, so that home becomes movement and movement becomes second nature. And so of course, when “Pump It Up” came belting over the speakers in that telltale, sandpaper, distinct voice of his, I had only one thing to do: get up and dance."

Read More....

"Men Knock Upon My Door In Odd And Even Numbers But None Of Them As Wild As I Discovered In Columbus"

My Favorite Songs Of All Time - Elvis Costello "Relationship Status: Uncomplicated"

Colin Gawel.com: JUNE 21, 2011

Among the many, many reasons I love rock n roll so much is that infidelity is strongly encouraged and is in fact essential to maintain a healthy bond. Sure, I may be in a committed long term relationship with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, The Kinks, Cheap Trick and The Replacements ECT.. But I reserve the right to have tawdry affairs whenever my throbbing biological urges become too much to take.

Or put another way, I may fix Lucinda Williams breakfast in bed every Sunday morning for all eternity, but get a few drinks in me on Saturday night and I transform into a rock n roll slut, content to jam (or Ram if you will) my tongue down Judas Priest's throat begging to hear "Electric Eye" at 120 db one more time. "Let me lick the frosting and someone else can have the cake", if you know what I mean. Ah yes, drinking and fooling around, the very essence of rock n roll.

I maintain an open relationship with thousands of bands and we have some harmless fun. Nobody gets hurts. No commitment. No drama. I may not reach out for months or even years and then suddenly bang on the"Rhapsody" door at 3am looking for a nightcap and just one kiss.

However, once in a while, one of these affairs turns into something a little more serious. It's an unsettling feeling falling for somebody new. I start to get a little jealous. Stalking the band on face book, watching endless clips on YouTube, boring my friends to tears with endless talk of how great they are. Suddenly I wake up needy. My other affairs don't mean as much. I stop texting Iron Maiden and blow off my date with Public Enemy just to sit at home wondering what they are doing.

This is where I am at with Elvis Costello. When I saw he was coming to Columbus with the Imposters this June, I knew this was my make or break moment. It was time for me to "Invest" in "us". Truth be told, I have been seeing his album "Blood and Chocolate" on the side now for a couple of years. I find myself sitting in my driveway alone at night listening to "Uncomplicated" and "Battered Old Bird" while my wife is inside asleep in our bed. These two songs are so powerful. So fearless. I find myself returning to them over and over. Yet, I couldn't seem to embrace the rest of Elvis's catalog with the same passion I had for this record.

I knew it wasn't him. He is great. Everybody I respect will vouch for what a great guy Elvis is. He has done so many interesting projects. I knew I was the one to blame for holding our relationship back. Commitment issues. (Again)

So I prepared for this concert. I wanted to build 'us' into something more than stale beer and wrinkled bedsheets. I wanted us to take the next step. I wanted to show Elvis I was serious about this and would be willing to do my part to help us succeed. So I listened and listened to his catalog preparing for our big date. I showed up at the concert with a dozen roses, a head full of Costello tunes and a 40oz draft beer in hand. I was ready to be swept off my feet.

And boy was I. I'm smitten. As he was tearing the roof off the LC with a blistering version of "Uncomplicated", I turned to my friends Brian Phillips and Joe Peppercorn and said, "If my ticket cost $100 and he only played this one song, it would have been worth it". It was that good. So Elvis and I are getting serious. Though officially our status is still "Uncomplicated" . Special shout to Nick Lowe for some of the greatest production in the history of rock n roll. Colin Gawel is a songwriter/baseball fan/drooling fanatic who moonlights as a hack writer and coffee shop owner. He plays in Watershed and fronts the Lonely Bones. Colingawel.com

Wheel Spins A Memorable Evening

The Columbus Dispatch: Gary Budzak: 20th June, 2011

"There were women dancing throughout the show in the go-go cage, and Costello himself even did a stint in it, and it reminded one of something out of Austin Powers or Laugh-In and worked as a gilded bird cage - at one point, Costello sang And Your Bird Can Sing from the Beatles' Revolver album (the name of Costello's tour, appropriately enough, was "The Revolver," on its fourth stop)."

"One of the best shows I have ever seen"

Rochester City Newspaper: Frank De Blase: 18th June, 2011

"After spinning the wheel guests were invited to sit in the mondo cool lounge and sip something blue in fancy stemware or dance in the go-go cage. This included one young lady --- I'm guessing about 14 years old --- that had some moves that I'm sure got her grounded later."

"From Our Cheese And Poetry Correspondent"

Democrat And Chronicle: Jeff Spevak: 18th June 2011

"Today's jazz haiku

In rock, and life too,
the wheel is a funny game
loaded with jokers"

Talented Costello Keeps Crowd Thrilled

Pittsburgh Tribune: Rege Behe: June 17th, 2011

The wheel landed on some rare gems, notably "Silky Girl" and "Party Girl."

All of the audience participants were female -- including an adorable 11-year-old named Lily -- save one guy named Jack from Cleveland who was greeted with a round of boos. He also admitted he skipped out from work to attend the show. Guess what Jack? You're busted, but perhaps his song, "Spooky Girlfriend" was compensation enough.

Read More......

Elvis Costello's Spinning Songbook is a win-win

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Scott Mervis: 17th June, 2011

Then, Elvis ran off, changed and returned in the guise of game-show host Napoleon Dynamite, promising "songs about love, songs about sex, songs about death, and dancing, but not necessarily in that order." The first spin, in the rain, from Katie, came up on the "You Tripped At Every Step," and so it went, with "Every Day I Write the Book" from Haley, and old frat-rock fave "Pump it Up" (a Joker "request" spin from Amy).

In the end, we were all winners of the Spinning Songbook, lucky to witness an artist who, through the course of two and a half hours and 30 songs, managed to be charming, funny, nimble, disturbing and very rock 'n' roll.

"I Wouldn't Talk Down To You"

Even despite the gold lame jacket he sported at the end of the night, Costello can only delve so far into gaudy tastelessness -- the songs are just too good to go there. The wheel brought up "King's Ransom", which led to the country soul of "Indoor Fireworks" and the dry wit of "Brilliant Mistake" from his King of America album. "I Want You" was requested after another spin, and the result was haunting. "Pump It Up" was transformed from a New Wave rocker to a sweaty, bluesy 6/8 grind. Well-executed covers were peppered throughout the show, including "And Your Bird Can Sing" and "Girl" from The Beatles, "Roxanne" (sung for a fortuitously named audience member) and even snippets of Prince's "Purple Rain" during the encore.

Read More....

Elvis Costello's Spectacular Spinning Songbook Rolls On Into June And July Dates

Following boffo business at the box office, popular demand and press acclaim, Elvis Costello and the Imposters announced today that they will be bringing the Spectacular Spinning Songbook to most of their dates during June and July.

6/15 Wolf Trap-Vienna, VA

6/16 Trib Total Media Amphitheatre-Pittsburgh, PA

6/17 Kodak Hall-Rochester, NY

6/19 LC Pavilion-Columbus, OH

6/20 Royal Oak Theatre-Detroit, MI

6/21 Kresge Auditorium-Interlochen, MI

6/23 Sony Centre-Toronto, ON

6/29 State Theatre-Minneapolis, MN

6/30 Crossroads-Kansas City, MO

7/1 The Pageant-St. Louis, MO

7/16 Belk Theater-Charlotte, NC

7/18 N. Charleston PAC-N. Charleston, SC

7/19 Wolfe Auditorium-Asheville, NC

7/22 Borgata-Atlantic City, NJ

7/24 Westhampton Beach PAC-Westhampton Beach, NY

7/26 Count Basie Theatre-Red Bank, NJ

7/28 State Theatre-Portland, ME

"The Revolver Tour" crossed the United States from Reno to New York City during May, concluding with a sold out three-night stand at that the Beacon Theatre.

While the Los Angeles Times called “"The Revolver Tour", A uniquely invigorating experience that warrants a buzzword all its own: inspiring."

The only exceptions to this announcement of further "Revolver" dates are the festival and concert appearances at;

6/24 Ottawa Jazz Fest-Ottawa, ON

6/25 Buffalo Rocks the Place-Buffalo, NY

6/27 Meijer Gardens-Grand Rapids, MI

during the month of June

7/20 Innsbrook Pavilion-Richmond, VA

7/23 Gathering of the Vibes-Bridgeport, CT

7/27 Cape Cod Melody Tent-Hyannis, MA

7/30 Osheaga Festival-Montreal, QC

7/31 Newport Folk Festival-Newport, RI

during the month of July

It seems it didn't ...

Elvis Costello's Tribute to Neil Young

On January 29, 2010, Neil Young was honored as the 2010 MusiCares Person of the Year. At a gala event in Los Angeles, superstar artists paid tribute to the legendary singer, songwriter and performer with inspired versions of some of his most memorable songs.

Elvis Costello's performance of Neil Young’s “(When You’re On) The Losing End” is now on DVD and Blu-ray! A MusiCares Tribute to Neil Young also features such artists as Neko Case, Crosby Stills & Nash, John Fogerty, Ben Harper, Elton John, Dave Matthews, James Taylor and Wilco performing inspired versions of some of Neil’s most memorable songs.

Proceeds from the sale of this release will provide essential support for MusiCares, which ensures that music people have a place to turn to in times of financial, medical and personal need. Available wherever you buy music, DVDs and Blu-ray discs!

More Info....

Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello Perform 'Seeds' On 'Spectacle'

Rolling Stone: Barry Walters: 7th June, 2011

In the fall of 2009 – during downtime on his Working On A Dream Tour – Bruce Springsteen taped an amazing appearance on Elvis Costello's talk show Spectacle. Recorded at Harlem's Apollo Theater, the two artists talked for hours and performed an killer set backed by members of the E Street Band and the Impostors. A DVD of the entire second season of Spectacle hits stores today. Check out this clip of Springsteen and Costello performing Springsteen's lost 1980s classic "Seeds."

Springsteen has kept a very low profile over the past year and a half. There's been the occasional charity gig and guest appearance as well as scattered rumors of recording sessions at his New Jersey home studio, but that's about it. Here's some unsolicited career advice: take a page out of the Prince playbook and announce a 28-night stand at New Jersey's Izod Center. Some markets on the Working On A Dream tour were soft, but that'll never happen in New Jersey. Also, the Nets don't play there anymore – so the venue will bend over backwards to accommodate him.

The second season of Costello's chat show once again features famous songwriters answering serious questions about their craft and performing with Costello's Impostors. Bruce Springsteen's visit is especially fascinating; during two 50-minute segments, he and Costello touch on a vast array of topics, including the musical tastes of Springsteen's three kids (punk, Top 40 and Dylan), and bang through a charged-up medley of Springsteen's "Radio Nowhere" and Costello's "Radio Radio." Also great: the episode featuring Bono and the Edge, where the frontman wails "Two Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad," a rare 1997 track that U2 wrote for Frank Sinatra.

Spectacle: Elvis Costello With ...Season Two To Be Released on Blu-ray and DVD on June 7, 2011

Includes one-time-only performances and rare, in-depth interviews with Bono and the Edge of U2, Bruce Springsteen and many others....

Video Services Corp. (VSC) and MVD Entertainment Group (MVD) will release the Sundance Channel hit, Spectacle: Elvis Costello With... Season Two on June 7th in standard DVD and Blu-ray formats. The two-disc sets feature all seven episodes of the second season of the show, plus over one hour of bonus features.

Viewers will share in the passion of seven intriguing episodes of chords and conversation with superstars and some of the best singers and songwriters in the business, including: Bono and The Edge Of U2, Bruce Springsteen, Neko Case, Sheryl Crow, Ron Sexsmith, Jesse Winchester, Nick Lowe, Richard Thompson, Allen Toussaint, Levon Helm , John Prine, Lyle Lovett, and Ray Lamontagne.

Shot in 2009 at the storied Harlem's Apollo Theater and Toronto’s Masonic Temple, the second season of Spectacle features this amazing line-up of guests and Costello and his band ,The Imposters, wowing their audiences with unforgettable performances and colorful and creative discussions. The press has been rapturous:

“An engaging showcase for a curious mind” (No.1 pick) Time Magazine

“The appeal has much to do with Mr. Costello’s intergenerational coolness.” “Top 10 shows on TV” The New York Times

“We love the show!” Rolling Stone

Costello is thrilled by the caliber of musicians who appear on the show. “Our guests have been faultlessly generous with their time, their reflections and their music,” he says.

Bonus features include: the behind-the-scenes documentary Spectacle: Elvis Costello With...Inside Notes hosted by Executive Producer David Furnish and never-before-released bonus songs from Elvis & The Imposters and guests not seen in the original broadcast versions, including Bono and The Edge performing Costello’s “Alison”.

“The response we've had to the show is so gratifying - not only from people who've seen it, but all the artists who've come on with Elvis have been thrilled to be a part of something that's genuinely – and passionately - about music,” said Executive Producer and guest star Sir Elton John. SPECTACLE is produced by Toronto’s SpyBox Media, Prospero Pictures and Reinvention Entertainment, and by London-based Rocket Pictures, in association with Alex Coletti Productions.

Spectacle: Elvis Costello With… contains fascinating behind-the-scenes stories and unique, intimate performances. It’s a veritable video library of the history of modern music that matters.

“Elvis Costello takes his performances and interviews a step further than most, capturing music history and memorable anecdotes from A-list music legends,” said VSC President Jonathan Gross. "As a DVD boxed set, it works both as an emotionally involving television series and as a must-see episode in the history of popular music."

Elvis Costello Sings With Grover And All The Gang

The Wall Street Journal: Marshall Heyman: 3rd June 2011

One of the things that's frustrating about going to a fund-raiser at Cipriani 42nd Street is that, sitting through speeches and waiting for dinner to be served, you could eat a lot of breadsticks. The perfectly salty Cipriani carbohydrates are usually in the center of the table in water glasses. They're offered in addition to a croissant-like circular roll lying in wait on your bread plate.

In fact, sometimes you're so hungry or bored or both or, let's face it, the breadsticks are just there, that you could plow through them like Cookie Monster eats cookies. Except, as we learned Wednesday at Sesame Workshop's annual benefit there, Cookie Monster doesn't eat so many cookies anymore.

"We helped Cookie Monster deal with his obsessive compulsive disorder," said Gary Knell, the president and CEO of Sesame Workshop. "Now he knows that cookies are a sometime food and not an every time food."

Cookie Monster's diet is just one of the many things "Sesame Street" has changed, world-wide, to help children modify their habits toward healthier living. (Recent adaptations have sprouted in China and Nigeria.) This was the general message of the evening. (Richard T. Clark from Merck and Charles MacCormack from Save the Children were honored, too.)

"We even have Elmo model the correct way to sneeze," added Mr. Knell.

The dinner served to guests, which started with a green- bean salad and moved onto that Cipriani branzino that you can usually request as a substitute for steak, was pointedly healthy. But still there were those pesky breadsticks, which, thankfully, Cookie Monster doesn't appear to enjoy, leaving them for the rest of us, including a table mate who was wearing a tie with Elmo on it. The Sesame Workshop benefit is, apparently, one of the few events in the city where you can safely wear a tie with a red furry creature on it and be complimented.

"Dinner? Oh that my favorite," said the actual Cookie Monster when he appeared on-stage to introduce the meal. The great pleasure of this particular party is that the Muppets mingle with the guests.

With a carrot in his mouth, Mr. Monster reminded everyone that "Cookie is a sometime food and vegetables is an everything food, so me just eat three centerpieces." (On point, centerpieces were made of yellow peppers and green apples.) "But me hope cookies for dessert!"

No such luck, Cookie Monster: It was berries and sorbet in a dark-chocolate basket.

Continuing the preoccupation with taking care of ourselves, after dinner, Grover—emcee with Deborah Roberts—came out in jogging attire. "Come on, everyone, it's jumping-jack time," he said. "Everyone feel the burn. We want furry blue buns of steel."

It's hard enough to get patrons to show up to these events sometime—though the Sesame Workshop benefit certainly ranks up with the best of them—let alone get them to work out in festive dress, so Ms. Roberts quickly calmed Grover down. Instead she introduced the musical guest: Elvis Costello, who blended right in with the rest of the "Sesame Street" denizens on hand.

"Come on, Grover," Mr. Costello said. "Be a cute fuzzy rock star like me and sing along."

Grover, Cookie Monster and Telly Monster joined Mr. Costello for a rousing performance of "Alison." Then Abby Cadabby and Kami (a muppet from the South African "Takalani Sesame") sang backup for "Peace, Love & Understanding." It was pretty thrilling, a throwback to those "Muppet Shows" of our youth.

"This is the hardest I've ever rocked," said Ms. Cadabby, a 3-year-old fairy-in-training.

Napoleon Remembers...

My many years in showbusiness have taught me that the audience is actually a group of individuals who - though deserving of respect and any even affection – may be transformed into an angry beast in the frenzy of the night.

I take the precaution of keeping a whip and chair close at hand, at all times.

So, it was with some trepidation that I picked up my cane, put on the pancake and powder and once again doffed a topper to assume my role as the M.C. of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook.

Could so patently absurd an entertainment as this survive in our Age Of Entitlement?

Well, cynicism be damned!

A rocking good time was had by one and all!

The public absolutely hurled themselves into this show with good humour and untrained limbs.

It was enough to melt my cruel old vaudeville heart.

While some people cavorted in the “Hostage-To-Fortune Go-Go Cage”, others whispered testimonials and personal asides, just shy of the spotlight.

They were both surprising and humbling.

You don’t expect to find such heart in the middle of the circus.

“The Revolver Tour” lit out from Reno on 7th of May, taking in two nights apiece at the Oakland Fox and Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles.

The last of these shows was filmed for a future motion picture release.

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook featured forty banners, both individual song titles and a number of Jackpots prizes.

The operation of the Wheel was scrupulously fair at all times but as you know the house always wins.

This wheel doesn't revolve around the company store.

Neither does it stop exclusively for pirates, brigands or stamp collectors, let alone revenue collectors…

It is The People’s Wheel…

And it costs a pretty penny…

Faithful versions of hits and favourites like “Chelsea” and “The Other Side Of Summer” were heard alongside spanking new arrangements of “Veronica” and “Pump It Up”, the latter running on into a two-keyboard rendition of Harlan Howard’s “Busted”.

The revolution of fortune sometimes offered the chance to introduce the hits of the future like, “Flutter & Wow” and “A Slow Drag With Josephine” or rarely heard songs such as “All Grown Up”, accompanied solely by the grand piano of Steve Nieve.

The proposition “Detectives vs Hoover Factory” was met with a split audience decision on three occasions and both titles were performed, while “Watching the Detectives” prevailed on two other evenings.

The jackpot named, “Time” triggered a sequence of songs with that word in the title, including such tunes as, “Clowntime Is Over”, “Strict Time”, “Man Out Of Time” and the Jagger/Richards composition, “Out Of Time, while the “I Can Sing A Rainbow” jackpot revealed; “Greenshirt”, “Blue Chair”, “Red Shoes” and Prince’s “Purple Rain”.

In the one echo of the original “Costello Sings Again Tour” of 1986, the special guests at the second Wiltern show were once again, The Bangles.

Time has only brought greater beauty to their vocal harmonies.

Their dancing was absolutely groovy and tip-top.

Susanna Hoffs took the lead vocal on “Doll Revolution”, while the ensemble came together for a reprise of the “Blood and Chocolate” tune, “Next Time Around”, first performed at the Beverly Theatre in ‘86, together with completely off-the-cuff harmonies on the Lennon/McCartney song, “Girl”.

“The Revolver Tour” next touched down at Chicago Theatre, where the Wheel gave us a rare performance of “The Element Within Her” and an arrangement of “The River In Reverse” which turned out to incorporate the Bob Dylan/Rick Danko tune, “This Wheel’s On Fire”.

The show pressed on to the Taft Theatre in Cincinnati, against doctor’s orders, borne up against malady by the good people of Ohio and Kentucky and where the finale included a version of The Who’s “Substitute”.

Medical advice meant it was necessary to rest the voice for one evening but we hope that the patrons of the postponed concert in the Wellmont Theatre in New Jersey will be more than happy with the forthcoming announcements.

The tour resumed on the 15th of May in the typical uproar of the Tower Theatre Philadelphia.

This magnificent honky-tonk has been a regular stop since 1978 and the welcome on this occasion did not disappoint.

The MacManus Family made an appearance in Boston, when brothers, Declan and Ronan, harmonized in public for the first time ever, as Biblecode Sundays joined Elvis Costello and the Imposters for performances of “American Without Tears” and “Little Palaces”.

One young man was so overcome by the awesome sight of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook that he dropped to his knees, produced a ring and asked his gal to marry him in front of more than 2000 witnesses.

She accepted…

Then hugged me first…

We wish them every happiness…

As soon as my ordination in the ministry is complete we hope to offer a complete service.

My friend of thirty years or more, Peter Wolf, without whom I quite literally might not have lived to tell the tale, joined the finale of the Boston show for a seductive version of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Help Me” and his song, “Cry One More Time”, which I had not had occasion to perform since 1975.

“Revolver Tour” concluded with a three-night, sold-out stand at the Beacon Theatre in New York City.

Hearts swelled and eyes filled with tears at the sight of the legendary, Xavier Valentine being reunited with his niece, Katarina, Valentina Valentine, who had, until this night, been our sole guide from your place in the stalls to your place in the stars.

The Valentine Family have two estranged branches, one hails from the lace capital of Carrickmacross and the other from the Ukraine.

This was their first appearance together.

Biblecode Sundays, returned in New York to raise the roof on the second evening with a set of traditional fiddle and accordion tunes played off the back of “Little Palaces”.

A second red sparkle drumkit was also in place that night, as Tennessee Thomas joined Pete Thomas in a father and daughter drum corps for the set-closing versions of “Turpentine” and “Uncomplicated” and encore performances of “Pump It Up" and “Peace, Love and Understanding”.

Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys arrived backstage, hotfoot from Ed Sullivan Theatre to rehearse “Lipstick Vogue” in the dressing room, five minutes from showtime and on which he shared the vocal duties during in the finale.

Special guest spinners over the three evenings included, Mike Myers, Willie Garson of “Sex In The City” and “White Collar” fame and Questlove from The Roots, who also manned the drumkit for a totally impromptu rendition of “Black And White World” on the final night.

Jim Lauderdale also joined the company on the last evening for the “King’s Ransom” jackpot, which yielded, “Indoor Fireworks” and “Brilliant Mistake” from “King Of America” and the co-written hit, “I Lost You” from the recently deleted album, “National Ransom”.

This followed a birthday salute to the author in the form of a solo rendition of Bob Dylan’s timely, “License To Kill”.

A secret plan to ask Rachel Ray to make pancakes for the entire audience following a guest spin was only thwarted by a scheduling clash.

And then it was done, the lights dimmed and the wheel rolled out of town.

So, as I return to my own private Elba and The Spectacular Spinning Songbook is dispatched back to the Hartlepool Museum of Showbusiness Machinery, where it will be on exclusive public display until late August, I would like to take a moment to send the following salutations.

Thanks go out to our, mostly locally recruited, official go-go dancers:

The Rt. Hon. Penelope Halfpenny, Ms. Kitty “Meow” McMuffin of “The Lusty Lady”, direct from “The Wookey Hollow”, Belmont Road, Liverpool, Miss Candy Mugglestone, The Tersichorean Stylings of Miss Felicity Sisters, Her Royal Highness, Jacinta Trimble, the Duchess of Lexington, The Baroness Astrid von Koolhaven, Ms Sventlana Smashkahnova, Susie Darling and the former Mother Superior of Our Lady Of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine.

They left not a tail feather unshaken...

We would also like to acknowledge the tireless efforts of all of our production team, crew and drivers.

Without you, we are but stringless puppets...

But thanks go most of all to our participants, contestants, protestants, supplicants and especially to the witnesses who didn’t make it to the stage, for their part in the adventure.

We hope we shall see you again, when the Spectacular Spinning Songbook comes to your town in the near future.

Yours through music and mischief. Napoleon Dynamite.

Elvis Costello's Wheel Of Fortune

Rolling Stone : David Fricke: May 25th 2011

Elvis Costello came out of the gate on May 24th – the last night of a three-show run at New York's Beacon Theater and the final date of his "Revolver Tour" – like he was playing the concert in reverse. The singer-guitarist and his Imposters – drummer Pete Thomas, bassist Davey Faragher and keyboard player Steve Nieve, Costello's long-serving update of the Attractions – jumped into what, on any other evening, would have been a rush of encores: "I Hope You're Happy Now," Nick Lowe's "Heart of the City," "Mystery Dance," "Uncomplicated" and "Radio Radio."

The energy and entertainment went up from there. Costello was celebrating the 25th anniversary of his Spinning Songbook, a giant wheel of fortune he took on the road in 1986, and he came armed with the combined kitsch of a game show and lounge act: a bar, a go-go cage with dancer and an Austin Powers-style hostess-dollybird; his own eye-popping selection of fedoras and sport jackets. When he wasn't singing or slamming at his guitars, Costello worked the stage like a burlesque-club emcee, cracking wise at a mile a minute and spinning a dandy's walking stick.

Fans – and one celebrity, drummer ?uestlove of the Roots – were plucked from the audience to spin the wheel, which featured song titles and album references covering Costello's hits and deeper work. Some labels, with sly references to tunes and topics, allowed the host to have his own fun with the results. When the wheel landed on "Detectives vs. Hoover Factory," Costello told the audience they could vote for "Watching the Detectives" (huge roar) or the early rarely-performed "Hoover Factory" (surprisingly loud cheer). Then he played both, prefacing the latter with memories of riding the bus to his own factory job in London, back in 1973.

Costello pointed out how much time had passed since he last rolled out the Spinning Songbook. He was then touring behind two of his best albums, the solo King of America and the electric Blood and Chocolate, made with the Attractions. But instead of hitting the charts, Costello noted ruefully, "they were buried in a field in Utah." He paused. "Now there is no Columbia Records," he said of his old U.S. label, grinning like a victor. With country singer-guitarist Jim Lauderdale, Costello performed "Indoor Fireworks" and "King of America," both from that album. And earlier, when the wheel came up "Imperial Chocolate," Costello followed a double shot of Imperial Bedroom (including a harrowing "Shabby Doll") with the long slow snarl of Blood and Chocolate's "I Want You," drawing out its obsessive desire and intimidation with a hissing vocal and acidic splashes of Fender twang.

The Spinning Songbook was the treat and centerpiece of the show, but Costello has never worked or traveled without a version of that wheel. His encyclopedic passion for popular music is a vital component of his helter-skelter work rate, as fuel and ideal, and at the Beacon, Costello punched up his loves like numbers on a jukebox. He celebrated Bob Dylan's 70th birthday with a solo reading of "License to Kill" from Infidels and threw a snatch of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" into "Pump It Up." Costello covered Prince ("Purple Rain") and Wings ("Let Me Roll It"), quoted Jimi Hendrix ("The Wind Cries Mary") and paid roundabout tribute to British soul singer Chris Farlowe with a version of the Rolling Stones' "Out of Time" – a British Number One for Farlowe in 1966.

Costello and the Imposters ended the night as they started it, with velocity and challenge: the Who's "Substitute" and Lowe's "(What's so Funny 'bout) Peace Love and Understanding." Before he left the stage, Costello swore to the crowd he'd see them again soon. He may not have the wheel, but he'll have that Songbook in his head, spinning hard.

Elvis Costello Helps West Hartford Man Propose to Girlfriend on Stage

Hartford Courant: Eric R.Danton

Well that's a bold thing: West Hartford resident Mike Youmans proposed to his girlfriend, Hilory Wagner of Glastonbury last Friday on stage at an Elvis Costello concert in Boston.

Costello's set lists this tour are determined by fans spinning a wheel of fortune marked with songs from his catalog. Under the ruse of having been selected to give the wheel a whirl, Youmans brought Wagner on stage and, witih an assist from Costello, popped the question.

"I always envisioned proposing to you in Paris," Youmans began, before Costello made him hunker down on one knee. (See the video below.)

A tearful Wagner, who's also a singer and songwriter, said yes, which is pretty much the outcome you especially hope for when you're proposing in front of a few thousand people. As Wagner accepted a ring and an Eiffel Tower necklace from Youmans, Costello picked the next song by request: "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding," which Youmans suggested.

And what about that trip to Paris?

"Maybe the honeymoon," Wagner says by e-mail.

Elvis Costello Invites ?Uestlove To Jam Onstage

Female First: 26th May 2011

Hip-hop star AHMIR '?UESTLOVE' THOMPSON enjoyed an impromptu jam session with Elvis Costello on Tuesday (24 May 11) when the veteran rocker invited THE ROOTS drummer to join him onstage in New York.

Costello was performing with his band, The Imposters, on the last of three dates at the Beacon Theater when he spotted Thompson in the audience and beckoned him to the platform to spin a wheel to decide on which song to play next.

But his encounter with Costello only got better - he was asked to sit in with The Imposters to give drummer Pete Thomas a quick break as the singer continued with his show.

Thompson was then allowed to take a seat onstage to watch the rest of the concert up close and personal.

Posting a photo of his view from the front on his Twitter.com blog, he wrote, "Best Seat In house!!!"

"Flutter And Wow"

nj.com: Tris McCall: 24th May 2011

When Costello allowed the Spinning Songbook to take its own course, its choices proved inspired. "Black and White World," a track from the soul-rock album "Get Happy!!," gave him an excuse to show off his sensitivity on the sonorous low strings of his electric guitar. "Flutter and Wow," a little-known ballad from the recent "Momofuku" album, was even better — a slow-burning statement of a man surprised by desire. When the needle stopped at "Flutter and Wow," there were a few groans of displeasure; by the time the terrific song was finished, nobody was dissatisfied.

"Songs About Love, Death And Dancing - Though Not Necessarily In That Order."

Boston Globe: Jonathan Perry: May 23rd 2011.

When a songwriter like Elvis Costello takes as many risks, twists, and turns as he does — collaborating with Allen Toussaint and Tony Bennett; writing for Johnny Cash and teaming with Paul McCartney — there’s only one thing left to do: Expect the unexpected.

And then leave it to Costello to brainstorm something else entirely. Like recording with classical musos the Brodsky Quartet, for instance. Or, when the mood strikes him, heading to Nashville to make a country-rock record with Leon Russell and Buddy Miller, as he did on last year’s “National Ransom.’’

After nearly 35 years and nearly as many albums — not to mention more greatest hits collections than the sum total of records most bands muster — it’s tough to be taken totally unawares by this onetime punk instigator-turned-pop institution’s modus operandi.

And yet Friday evening, when Costello brought his band the Imposters, and a carnival-sized wheel of glowing bulbs and game-show gaudiness dubbed “The Spectacular Spinning Songbook’’ to the Wang Theatre for a night of semi-random reverie, there were surprises.

Let’s get the on-stage marriage proposal — by a nice guy named Mike who dropped to one knee to ask his girlfriend Hilary (is that one “L’’ or two, Hillary?) for her hand in front of Elvis and about 2,800 people as witnesses — out of the way first (she said yes). An exultant rendition of “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding’’ marked the moment as the happy couple danced in a go-go cage.

Then there was Costello’s devout duet on “American Without Tears’’ with his brother Ronan MacManus’s fiddle and accordion-accented band, the Biblecode Sundays, plus a walk-on appearance by Peter Wolf. The veteran J. Geils Band frontman joined his old pal for a blues-soaked reading of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Help Me’’ and the Geils Band’s own gospel-tinged “Cry One More Time.’’

The best surprise of all, though, was Costello himself. He appeared to have recovered from a bout of bronchitis that caused him to cancel, earlier in the week, a New Jersey installment of this “Revolver Tour,’’ during which he’s inviting audience members on stage to spin that garish wheel of fortune containing roughly 40 songs (with a few thematically linked “jackpot’’ titles thrown in).

With his trio of Imposters, Costello managed to cram nearly two dozen favorites (an ageless “Alison’’; the dub reggae-tinged “Watching the Detectives’’; the blunted boil of “Pump It Up’’) into a free-wheeling, two hour-plus set spiked with Barnum & Bailey-style banter.

Costello was in fine spitfire voice and convivial form, reeling off a clutch of classics in quick succession — “I Hope You’re Happy Now’’; “Heart of the City’’; “Mystery Dance’’ among them — before donning a top hat, assuming his ringmaster alias, “Napoleon Dynamite,’’ and announcing what was in store: “Songs about love, about death, about dancing — though not necessarily in that order.’’ Ah, the element of surprise, yet again.

Fans Hit The Jackpot

Boston Herald: Jed Gottlied: May 22nd 2011

Elvis Costello & the Imposters began Friday’s packed Citi Wang Theatre gig sprinting through five songs in 16 quick minutes. One of them, “Uncomplicated,” even crammed in three (admittedly clipped) guitar solos.
That was just the beginning. There were 20 more songs in 114 more minutes of mad spectacle, guest stars (Peter Wolf!), go-go cage dancing, one wedding proposal (spoiler: she said “Yes”) and genius rock ’n’ roll.

By the time Costello welcomed Peter Wolf for “Help Me” and “Cry One More Time,” the show was in full-on marathon mode. But that didn’t stop the band from pushing on: A four-song second encore ended with a feverish “Pump It Up.”
It was a final 15 minutes as good as the first 15.

A Terrifically Entertaining Two-Hour Show At The Tower Theatre.

philly.com: Dan DeLuca

The terms fun and Elvis Costello don't necessarily go hand in hand. But on Thursday night, they got up to dance together in a go-go cage during a terrifically entertaining two-hour show at the Tower Theatre.

Costello, ably backed by the Imposters, the crack three-man band of drummer Pete Thomas, bass player and backup singer Davey Faragher, and the great keyboard whiz Steve Nieve, also threw in The Who's "Substitute" during a winningly concise final encore that concluded with a "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding," that featured Nieve making kooky, creepy noises on a theremin. A fittingly nutty ending to the best Costello show I've seen in an eon.

Let's hope it doesn't take another 26 years for him to give the Wheel another spin.

Biblecode Sundays Fire "Revolver" In Boston

Boston Herald: Jed Gottlied: May 22nd 2011

Costello doctored a spin to land on “Napoleon Solo,” did “A Slow Drag With Josephine” on his own then brought out brother Ronan MacManus and band for a pair of duets.

Read More.....

"I Like Cake"

Brown Cat Bakery

Elvis walked off after those two songs, changed into a gold jacket, and came back with the guys for another set. No one spun the wheel. They just played song after song, after song. Then it was over (pouty face.)

I just bought a ticket to see Elvis at the Wolf Trap on June 15th. Woohoo!

"MISTER NAPOLEON SAYS "SEE YOU AT THE TOWER"

The Revolver Tour Resumes At The Tower Theatre at 8pm, Tonight, Thursday the 19th of May.

"The World's Greatest Game Show"

Chris Willman

Susanna Hoffs also took the lead vocal on "Tear Off Your Own Head (Doll Revolution)," a song that Costello gave the Bangles before he recorded it himself. The three lasses stuck around for plenty of Shindig-style shimmying...

Cincinnati Fatback

I doubt any woman could satisfy me sexually to the degree that the Costello show satisfied me as a music fan. He played for two and a half hours and did three encores. He covered Nick Lowe, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones AND The Who. He played at least one song from nearly every single one of the albums in the first ten years of your career. If you have the chance, see him on this tour.

MISTER NAPOLEON REGRETS...

MISTER NAPOLEON REGRETS...

I’m very sorry to have to postpone our date at the Wellmont Theatre but I would rather disappoint our friends and tickets-holders than cheat them with an inferior show.

Having unfortunately contracted bronchitis, the success of the Chicago Theatre show on the 15th of May was in large part thanks to the wonderful crowd and our many willing and good-humoured participants in the Spectacular Spinning Songbook.

They inspired a 2 and 1/2 hour performance well beyond its occasionally audible vocal limitations.

Against the express advice of a doctor but mindful that people had traveled from as far as Cleveland and Lexington for the show in Cincinnati, our show there went ahead on the 16th of May.

We enjoyed an incredible welcome of Taft Theatre crowd, my voice rallied for another show of more than two hours but this was at a cost.

To proceed further without adequate recovery would risk cancellation of the remaining dates of “The Revolver Tour.”

We will make every effort to promptly re-schedule the Wellmont Theatre date when “The Revolver” tour rolls out again in the not too distant future.

Once again, I send my regrets and apologies for any disappointment and inconvenience.

I am looking forward to resuming the tour at the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia on Thursday the 19th of May.

Yours through music. Elvis Costello a.k.a. Napoleon Dynamate – M.C. of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook.

"Viva Las Vegas"

Essential Junk:

Returning to stage later in the night, and always the showman, Costello lamented the missing spinning wheel but joked there’s an app for that. On cue, an i-Pad appeared on stage with a camera trained on its screen as his attractive assistant brought a medley of women on stage to spin the little computer program.

"I Can Sing A Rainbow" was chosen and the band obliged with color songs "Greenshirt", "Red Shoes", and a joyful sing along on Prince’s "Purple Rain" while the women danced happily around Costello. Closing with the favorites "Alison", "Pump It Up", and "Peace Love & Understanding", the atmosphere felt like a party as a few more fans took the stage to dance and sing. One of the finest songwriters to ever play rock and roll, a deep set list, and a spirit of adventure turned the concert into an inspiring celebration of music for both the band and the audience.

"Way cooler than Kravitz..."

At one point, Costello went out into the crowd with a wireless mic and we lost site of him but were still impressed. I've seen a few artists go out into the crowd, most memorably Lenny Kravitz, and I always think it's a cool move. Well, cooler than Kravitz going into the crowd (did I mention he wasn't wearing a shirt?) was when Costello showed up in the balcony. He sang his way up a flight of stairs in the Taft Theater and walked all over the place. I was maybe six feet away from the man!

The Revolver At The Taft

Walter Tunis: The Musical Box.

We always knew there was something of the carnival barker in Elvis Costello. He may forever be viewed as a champion songsmith that has continually taken huge stylistic risks with his music over the past 35 years. But last night at the Taft Theatre in Cincinnati, he left nearly all of his tireless 2 ¼ hour concert beautifully to chance.

The patrons spun the wheel, Costello played the songs it stopped on and a vinyl booted co-hort referred to as “The Duchess of Lexington” (a local lass perhaps?) danced in the stage right “Hostage-to-Fortune Go-Go Cage.” Some of the audience invitees got their turn in the cage, too. Others were allowed to sip drinks in front of Steve Nieve’s keyboard set-up.

"They Can't Take The Competition"

Las Vegas Weekly: Spencer Patterson

“(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea” started intensely, only to devolve into a faux-funk jam session more appropriate for Phishheads than an overwhelmingly older Pearl crowd.
Costello ultimately did produce a wheel … on an iPad screen atop a music stand. A gaggle of ladies came up to “spin it,” then stayed onstage to dance distractingly during the encore. A cliché about insults and injuries comes to mind

The People Speak Once More

El Nino Angeleno

I was around thirteen years old in the eighth grade attending Blessed
Sacrament School two blocks east of Hollywood High School when an up and coming British musician with a iconic American name performed live at
the Hollywood High Auditorium with his backing band, The Attractions. I
was not in the audience that night as I must have been churning out
Pre-Algebra solutions and Hemingway book reports at a record pace during
that time and was oblivious to what was happening down the street on
Highland Avenue. I had no idea of the significance of that Elvis Costello performance back then nor the number of people I would meet in the next thirty three years who claim to have been at that show.
Fast-forward to 2011 to a perfect Los Angeles evening at the deco
masterpiece, Wiltern Theatre where Elvis Costello and 2 of the 3
original Attractions plus a new bass player (now called the Imposters)
performed an unpredictable epic showcase of hits, obscurities and
surprising covers for 2 ½ hours. The show opened with a fast session of
familiar songs including “I Hope Your Happy Now“, “Heart of The City“,
“The Mystery Dance” and “Radio Radio“. At the conclusion of “Radio
Radio“, a song known for its impromptu rebellion way back on a SNL
performance, Elvis changed to a black top hat and introduced the largest
“Attraction” on the stage, a twelve foot, multi-colored spinning wheel
of songs. Elvis’ spinning song wheel first made its debut 25 years ago
on his tour bringing a “request only" concert to the stage way before
its time. Audience members were hand picked by Elvis and his assistant
to spin the wheel and the band performed each song with utmost
precision, while only Elvis’ guitar changed to accommodate each song.
The selected audience members danced on stage during their song(s), with
one memorable “wheel spinner”, a stunning beauty named “Bjork” daring to
enter the Go-Go booth up on the stage during the song performed from her
spin of the wheel. She almost seemed planted to perform in the Go-Go
booth as her hips swayed to the beat of the music while her long hair
waved about the cage, but she was just an adoring fan like the rest of
us. The wheel produced some songs that probably wouldn’t make it to a
regular Elvis show such as “Monkey to Man“, “God Give Me Strength“, “I
Want You” and “Earthbound” but the band was committed to each of the
songs selected with just a little fudging along the way. Somehow the one
song which I wanted to hear the most, “Clubland” from the 1981 album,
"Trust", hit the mark on a slow pitched wheel spin and the song
immediately commenced with the brilliant piano work by the incredible
Steve Naive. Among the hits performed from the song wheel spins were
“Watching The Detectives” and “Everyday I Write the Book“, “Angels Want
to Wear My Red Shoes” and “Tear Off Your own Head ( It’s The Doll
Revolution)”. Elvis brought out Susanna Hoffs, Vicki and Debbie Peterson
from The Bangles to perform the vocals on “Doll Revolution” much like
they did at The Beverly Theater show in 1986. Susanna Hoffs must have
been in a time machine for the last 25 years because she looks much as
she did during her Walk Like An Egyptian Days. Other surprises included
several covers such as “Girl” (The Beatles), “Out of Time” (The Stones),
“Don’t Let me Be Misunderstood” (The Animals) and a surprise encore of
“Purple Rain” (Prince) all performed with unique Elvis interpretations.
Another interesting rendition came with a slowed down and almost
unrecognizable version of “Pump It Up” with Elvis hitting the ivory keys
on his mega famous radio hit.

The four encores were a show within itself. Among the highlights was the
song that started it all for Elvis back in 1977, “Alison“. For the encore, Elvis called back one of the audience wheel spinners who was aptly named Alison , in a moment in time she will remember for eternity. In the midst of “Alison“, Elvis switched over to “Tracks of My Tears” by Smokey Robinson and then beautifully finished his song with every member of the audience singing those soft lyrics, “Aaaaalison…..my aim is true,my aim is true…..”, while the chords quietly came to that famous lyrical end. The final encore couldn’t have been more perfect for this night given the times we live in today , “(What’s So Funny ‘bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” simply could not be followed with drummer Pete Thomas pounding the skins, Elvis wailing on the guitar with the all too familiar riff and the audience in complete euphoria. Thirty three years from now wherever I am or "if" I am at all, I can say I was in the audience for that unforgettable Elvis Costello performance at The Wiltern Theatre way back in the Spring of 2011.

Elvis Costello's wheel of fortunate songs makes for thrilling show

Chicago Tribune: Bob Gendron: May 16th 2011

Add tacky game-show host to the list of Elvis Costello's myriad guises. It's just one of the roles he played Sunday at a nearly sold-out Chicago Theatre, where a giant revolving wheel and audience interaction guided a marathon 140-minute concert loaded with surprise and urgency. Costello debuted the "Spectacular Spinning Songbook" 25 years ago but hasn't used the contraption since. Its return made for inspired entertainment and a welcome revisitation of several of the artist's great albeit seldom-aired album tracks.

Listing the names of dozens of Costello tunes as well as a few categories, the multi-color wheel anchored a kitschy display that included a go-go dancer platform and dumpy cocktail lounge. Plucked out of the crowd by assistants and invited onstage by Costello—embracing his carnival-barker persona by talking like a snake-oil huckster—fans spun the wheel to determine what song would come next. On occasion, Costello manipulated the stopping point. But by and large, he and the Imposters abided by chance.

While it yielded unscripted thrills, the random approach risked thwarting momentum. Yet aside from slogging through a low-key treatment of "The Element Within Her," the band maintained a cohesive flow. Indeed, the quartet established a feisty tone during a set-opening flurry, racing through five fast-paced songs ("Uncomplicated," "Mystery Dance" included) inside of 16 minutes, ripping into each selection with breathless speed and nervous energy. Agitated, aggressive and amplified, the performance contrasted with Costello's acoustic solo appearance last December at the same venue, during which he focused on exploring various genres. Not tonight.With Steve Nieve dialing up everything from sci-fi sound effects to soulful textures on keyboard, Hammond organ and grand piano, and a fist-tight rhythm section providing solid footing, Costello got reacquainted with his harder rock and harmonic pop sides. He buried disappointment amidst big hooks ("Next Time Round"), filtered fuzz-drenched reverb through pounding beats ("Strict Time") and dealt with the detritus of ruined relationships via crescendos that straddled celebration and sadness ("Rocking Horse Road").

Costello also extended bridges and refrains, giving him license to flirt with distorted avant-garde solos that would've been at home in New York's late 70s no-wave scene. Such spontaneous rearrangements and changes often preceded thematic covers ranging from The Band's "This Wheel's On Fire" to the Rolling Stones'"Out of Time" to Prince's "Purple Rain." Having added perspective to his original songs, the seamless transitions and interpretive snippets should convince Costello to permanently drop setlists from his repertoire.

Los Angeles Times: Elvis Costello at the Wiltern Theatre.

Randy Lewis: May 12th 2011

Long before the word “interactive” became an entertainment-industry mantra, Elvis Costello was there with his fabled "Spinning Songbook."

A quarter century after he first cooked up the idea that exponentially amped up the practice of taking requests from the audience, Costello and his band the Imposters have resurrected the concept for a new generation, although the sold-out crowd on hand Wednesday for the first of two nights at the Wiltern Theatre clearly included a good number of those who’d been following him since his first go-round.

The new Revolver tour sees music as a thing of joy -- something of a revolutionary statement in and of itself in these days, when another of big buzzwords in the music business is monetization. This isn’t the garden-variety promotional tour designed primarily to build familiarity with -- and sales of -- an artist’s latest product, although he did manage to cleverly work in a couple of numbers from his most recent release, “National Ransom,” during an extended round of encores after a 2½-hour set.

Rather, Costello, keyboardist Steve Nieve, bassist-vocalist Davey Farragher and drummer Pete Thomas played like guests of honor at the most invigorating kind of living room party where attendees challenge one another in a combination of “Name That Tune” and “Top That!”

The Spinning Songbook wheel itself lends an additional measure of festiveness, allowing the always-engaging Costello to fully inhabit his alter ego as a raconteur and master of ceremonies par excellence, something he showcased regularly on his Sundance cable channel series “Spectacle.”

Without fanfare, Costello and the band strode onstage Wednesday and let loose an initial four-song volley that began with “I Hope You’re Happy Now” from 1986’s “Blood & Chocolate,” segued directly into “Tear Off Your Own Head (It’s a Doll Revolution)” and crested into his freshman and sophomore album songs, “Mystery Dance” and “Radio Radio,” the latter maybe a little too fast and furious for its own good.

But with the take-no-prisoners ambiance established, the host traded his porkpie hat for a dapper silk top hat and quickly obliterated anything resembling a fourth-wall between performer and audience.

A comely assistant helped choose fans to come onstage and spin the 10- to 12-foot-in-diameter brightly colored wheel with 32 song titles representing Costello classics (“Alison,” “Pump It Up,” “Veronica”) to esoteric (“Flutter & Wow,” “Monkey to Man,” “Stella Hurt”) to a smattering of covers (Paul McCartney’s “Let Me Roll It,” Lennon-McCartney’s “And Your Bird Can Sing” -- do we detect a theme here?).

The wheel also held eight purple “bonus” strips with words such as “Happy,” “Time,” “Girl” and “Napoleon Solo,” the latter, Costello explained when it came up midway into the show, a license for him to choose anything he felt like playing at the moment. (At that moment it was “Leave My Kitten Alone,” a celebrated outtake most famously associated with -- surprise! -- the Beatles.) When the wheel later landed on “Time,” he told the audience it served as a theme for which he’d come up with as many songs mentioning “time” as he could. That yielded a playful set-within-the-set that included “Clown Time Is Over,” “Next Time 'Round,” the Rolling Stones’ “Out of Time” and back to his own “Man Out of Time.”

Costello asked the first wheel spinner which song she most hoped to hear (“I Want You,” she said; “I think that’s a song title,” Costello drolly replied and then let it rip. It landed on “Everyday I Write the Book,” which the band gamely served up as the fan looked on from a stool at a bar in the “Society Lounge” positioned in front of Nieve’s bank of keyboards, a cool drink in her hand supplied by Costello’s lovely assistant. Other selectees took advantage of the “Hostage to Fortune Go-Go Cage” at Costello’s right, flashing their footwork while the band pounded away nearby.

And on it went. The random element certainly helped keep the musicians on their toes and prevented the possibilities of a rote performance from slavish adherence to a set list.

Costello’s his own best friend in that regard, having written himself a stockpile of hundreds of songs over the last 35 years, a remarkably deep storehouse of some of the most pointed, literate and finely crafted songs of the rock era. When he turned near the end to a solo performance of the "National Ransom" song "A Slow Drag With Josephine,"a dazzling marriage of melody, words, rhymes, ideas and acoustic guitar finger-picking, he left no doubt that he’s evolved into a writer every bit the master of song craft as anyone who ever came out of Tin Pan Alley.

In the end, it created an evening that went well beyond merely interactive, the kind of uniquely invigorating experience that warrants a buzzword all its own: inspiring.

Elvis Costello spins an epic at the Wiltern

The Orange County Register
Ben Wener: May 12th 2011

Out of 20-some shows in 20-some years of encountering Elvis Costello live, from suddenly announced club gigs to lavish evenings with Burt Bacharach, I’ve probably seen two or three consistently stronger performances than the one he and his first-rate band The Imposters turned in Wednesday night, their first of two sets at the art-deco Wiltern in Los Angeles this week.

But I don’t think I’ve seen a better one overall, and none have been nearly as memorable -- in part because, like the Bacharach teaming, I know this is something I’ll likely never see again. Surely those who witnessed the debut of this Spectacular Singing Songbook idea at the Beverly Theater in 1986 must have felt the same way: by its very nature, the concept guarantees no other show will be quite the same.

That night, as part of a stretch of themed performances that included a set with the Attractions and another with the Confederates (the one-off group that backed him on the rootsier advances of King of America), Costello unveiled this most crowd-enlivening of his many concert conceits over the years: a stage design adorned with a shimmering go-go cage at one end (guests are welcome to dance) and a giant carnival wheel at the other, covered in yellow and red (and a few purple) wedges, with song titles on each. (At the Wiltern, this scene was further enhanced by an encompassing backdrop of a faded old TV set locked on a color test pattern.)

“The theatrical marvel of the age” was how our host described it with vaudevillian exaggeration Wednesday night, just after a brisk four-song opening that harked back not only to his earliest days (via rips through “Mystery Dance” and “Radio Radio,” as breakneck-paced as ever) but also to the life-changing, career-shifting era from whence the Spinning Wheel emerged. It’s telling that he seems to be opening all of these Revolver Tour engagements (the month-long run began in Reno and ends with three nights at NYC’s Beacon Theatre) with “I Hope Your Happy Now” -- that’s among his fiercest (yet buoyant) attacks on lost love, yet its title sentiment couldn’t be more fitting.

Back in ’86, when the brilliantly thorny Blood & Chocolate was dumped into the marketplace mere months after the heralded King of America, Costello was just beginning to come out of turmoil, divorcing both his first wife and first stateside label, altering course by taking up with (and soon marrying) then- Pouges bassist Cait O’Riordan and moving from Columbia Records (which failed to promote him sufficiently) to Warner Bros. (where he wound up facing the same problem). Seemingly liberated both creatively and romantically, he nonetheless still seemed trapped by the industry.

These days, though record execs still don’t know what to do with him, Costello, 56, is a much happier entity unto himself: revered singer-songwriter, iconic yet iconoclastic Hall of Famer, encyclopedic talk-show host, Mr. Diana Krall. He’s a major-label artist working in independent fashion, issuing genre-hopping projects from a widening array of niche-filling outlets (although lately he’s suggested he may not make another album).

These Wiltern shows ostensibly promote last November’s National Ransom, one of his best assortments. Yet, despite a sublime solo-acoustic first encore comprised of the disc’s two bittersweet tunes that evoke the ’20s and ’30s -- the deceptive swing of “A Slow Drag with Josephine” and the doleful lament “Jimmie Standing in the Rain,” both of which lent some structure to the evening’s play-it-as-it-lays approach -- revisiting the Spinning Songbook right now seems primarily a lark. It’s something fun to do simply because he can.

And to some extent it isn’t as fully rehearsed as you might expect. When the wheel landed on Paul McCartney's “Let Me Roll It,” it was apparent in Costello’s chunky assessment of the song’s signature squiggle riff that he hadn’t attempted it much, nor did the Imposters always know where their bandleader was headed during a striking rethinking of “Pump It Up” that traded the usual thump-thump-thump for a strolling N’awlins piano blues in 6/8.

Even on numbers this bunch has dashed through dozens, maybe hundreds of times -- “Everyday I Write the Book,” “I Want You” -- there was still a sense of winging it, of the band instinctively knowing where to go next yet being confounded when Costello would decide to, say, turn back into a chorus sooner than expected, or scuttle from one dynamic to another.

That’s what I mean about experiencing greater consistency elsewhere: When they know precisely what’s on the setlist, Costello and his group tend to lock in magnificently, maintaining tighter parameters around their expansiveness and explosiveness. But that’s also what I mean about never seeing a show like this again: Costello has rarely been so loose yet still commanding, and so eager to mix in the unexpected. Never mind the McCartney tune -- when else are you likely to hear him consecutively play complete versions of most every tune he has with “Time” in the title?

That’s what happened when he landed on one of eight “Jackpot” wedges, bonuses that produce several songs on a theme. (Unless “Napoleon Solo” comes up, in which he case he chooses whatever he likes -- this time “Leave My Kitten Alone.”) You can tell he favors landing on a few of these during each show, as he cheated the wheel twice to get “Time” and “Girl” to come up at key points.

Hey, it’s his wheel, he can do as he likes. For instance: Isabella, the woman sitting in front of me, got swept away from her boyfriend by Costello as he sauntered across the floor of the Wiltern during “The Long Honeymoon,” then returned to the stage with her on his arm. She wanted to hear “I Want You,” but first the wheel hit “Stella Hurt” and then “New Lace Sleeves.” Costello was undeterred: “You know what? We’re just gonna play ‘I Want You.’ Damn show-business machinery!”

The Jackpot wedges were certainly worth tilting the wheel for, however. “Time,” which he nudged toward instead of “Accidents Will Happen,” yielded first the slow version of “Clowntime Is Over,” then a rollicking “Strict Time” and “Next Time Round,” a singalong for The Rolling Stones' “Out of Time” and finally a suitably mighty “Man Out of Time” to end the main set. (In Oakland, at the Fox Theater, he landed on “I Can Sing a Rainbow” the second night and performed color songs: “Green Shirt,” “Blue Chair,” “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,” a bit of “Purple Rain.”)

“Girl,” on the other hand, which he spun into place after a dramatic reading of “All Grown Up” abetted only by pianist Steve Nieve (the first time they’ve performed that 1996 track), helped build to a roaring third-encore conclusion. It began with a lovely handling of The Beatles' “Girl,” followed by the aptly titled “Spooky Girlfriend” and “Sulky Girl.” (Oakland also got “This Year's Girl” and “Party Girl.”) Then came another clutch of Costello standards: “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea,” “Watching the Detectives,” a rousing “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding.”

He played 18 songs in the main set, more than half of which were chosen by guests (mostly women) who got to admire their wheel selections while sipping martinis at the on-stage bar next to Nieve. Then Costello changed hats and jackets -- now plaid, now gold lamé -- and played another 13 songs in three encores. It was epic, riveting, constantly surprising -- utterly unforgettable.

The People Speak Again

As a special feature of this tour, Elvis had listed a bunch of his songs on the Spectacular Spinning Songbook and was inviting selected members of the audience up to the stage to give it a spin. The song that the wheel landed on would be the song that the band would play. I would've probably pissed myself if I got a chance to go up there and spin it, but I desperately wanted to anyway. As we have learned previously, that night I was more important than 97% of the people in attendance of the concert, but this still left 3% to crush my dreams.

In the weeks leading up to the concert I tried not to think about the possibilities too much. I didn't really think I would get picked, especially if my seat was out in the hall as I feared, but secretly I kept hoping anyway.I even had a song lined up if I spun the wheel and it said I got to request a song. I had absolutely NO knowledge of there being a 'request' section of the wheel, but I thought I'd better be prepared just in case.

I would've requested 'Tokyo Storm Warning'.
or 'I Want You'.
or 'Indoor Fireworks'...
Goddamnit. I could never choose just one.

It turns out that there was a request portion, but the only person who got to make a request was Mr. Costello himself. Well if it isn't gonna be me...

Those goddamn life-ruining shitbird 3% bastards that got to go up on stage, after they spun the wheel, were offered a drink and a seat at a special (not the eating ping-pong balls filled with tuna special, I mean the good kind!) lounge at the side of the stage or they could dance for the crowd in a go-go cage. A surprisingly high percentage of people elected for the cage. Some were funny and awkward, one was beautiful and awkward, and one looked like a drunken cow when she fell out of the cage.

My favorite of the amateur dancers managed to lure Elvis into the cage with her for a brief dalliance before he slyly hopped out the other side. She was charming and funny and somehow managed to cage dance to a slowish tune about a husband cheating on his wife called The Long Honeymoon. When she had originally spun the wheel, people had cheered for the song as it came up because they had been told that it was her fifteenth wedding anniversary, the song obviously had the word honeymoon right in the title, and her husband was somewhere in the crowd. Often lyrics aren't listened to because people are simple.

I feel like I should say more about the music, but my abilities to describe what I heard and how delighted I was are lacking... let's see, um, Great Songs. See what I mean?
Maybe I could explain it a different way.
Elvis played a song that I always love on his live recordings, and don't think I've ever actually heard in person, called God's Comic. It is a beautiful, tragically funny song that has this part where traditionally a live audience is supposed to shout the phrase 'Now I'm dead!' back at Elvis after he sings his line. This is not a hit-single type of song and apparently not a whole lot of people around me knew we were supposed to participate. So on the first time through, almost no one near me, besides me, sang the line. It didn't get any better the second time either. Normally this would encourage me to pipe down and not sing it at all the next time through. I'm definitely not the singing by myself type.

I sang it louder each time because I was so happy that night.

Read More.....

"A Vaudevillian Writes"

This was actually my first time seeing Costello live (in-person that is). I’m perhaps what you might call a “casual fan” of sorts. My wife certainly has a deeper understanding of the catalog than I do. However, that didn’t stop me from having a great time. The music sounded amazing. Sure, there were tracks I recognized, but there were many more that – despite not knowing the words – I still danced and tapped along to the beat. It’s hard not to, the music is just so damn good, it’s practically infectious.

"The Spectacular Spinning Songbook - The Results"

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
New York
May 24th, 2011

Overture - featuring the return of the former Mother Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Torment, Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You’re Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Veronica – SPIN 1

“Joanna” Jackpot – SPIN 3

Pills And Soap

Detectives vs Hoover Factory – SPIN 3 - SPLIT DECISION

Hoover Factory
Watching The Detectives

“Napoleon Solo” Jackpot – SPIN 4 (DEFERRED)

“Imperial Chocolate” Jackpot – SPIN 5 by Questlove of The Roots

Shabby Doll – from “Imperial Bedroom”
Beyond Belief – from “Imperial Bedroom”
I Want You – from “Blood And Chocolate”

Black And White World – TOTAL IMPROMPTU – with Questlove on drums and Pete Thomas on background vocals

Let Me Roll It – IMPROMPTU

Accidents Will Happen – SPIN 6

Chelsea – Spin 7

Hand In Hand - IMPROMPTU
And Your Bird Can Sing – IMPROMPTU

Interlude

License To Kill – “Napoleon Solo”

“King’s Ransom” Jackpot – FIX

Indoor Fireworks – with Jim Lauderdale and the Imposters
I Lost You – with Jim Lauderdale and the Imposters
Brilliant Mistake – with Jim Lauderdale and the Imposters

“Girl” Jackpot – SPIN 8

This Year’s Girl
Earthbound – IMPROMPTU
Alison – IMPROMPTU
Honey, Are You Straight Or Are You Blind? – IMPROMPTU
Party Girl
Purple Rain - IMPROMPTU

Finale

Out Of Time
Pump It Up
Substitute
Peace, Love And Understanding

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
New York
23rd May, 2011

Overture - featuring former free-style rodeo champion, Susie Darling, direct from her engagement at the “Tethered Steed”.

I Hope You’re Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Detectives vs Hoover Factory – SPIN 1

Detectives – UNANIMOUS DECISION

“Time” Jackpot – SPIN 2

Clowntime Is Over
Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Out Of Time

Oliver's Army – SPIN 3

A Slow Drag With Josephine – Napoleon Solo – spun by Willie Garson

American Without Tears - duet with Ronan MacManus with The Biblecode Sundays

Little Palaces/Set Of Traditional Fiddle & Accordion Tunes with The Biblecode Sundays

So Like Candy/Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood – SPIN 4

All Grown Up – IMPROMPTU with Steve Nieve

Turpentine – SPIN 5 – spun by Alexa Chung with Tennessee Thomas on second drum-kit

Uncomplicated – IMPROMPTU - with Tennessee Thomas on second drum-kit

Encore

Lipstick Vogue – duet with Alex Turner of The Arctic Monkeys

Waiting For The End Of The World
Chelsea
I Want You

Finale

Alison – SPIN 6

Red Shoes
Purple Rain
Pump It Up - with Tennessee Thomas on second drum-kit
Peace, Love And Understanding - with Tennessee Thomas on second drum-kit

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
New York
May 22nd, 2011

Overture featuring the former lead singer of "The Hand-Embroidered Mystery", Miss Svetlana Smashkahnova

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Black And White World - SPIN 1

Flutter And Wow – SPIN 2

“Girl” Jackpot - SPIN 3

This Years Girl
Girls Talk
Girl

Veronica - SPIN 4

Alison - SPIN 5

God Give Me Strength – SPIN 6 by Mike Myers

Everyday I Write The Book – SPIN 7

The Long Honeymoon – SPIN 8

“Time” Jackpot - SPIN 9

Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Next Time Around
Out Of Time

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine - Napoleon Solo
Jimmie Standing In The Rain - Napoleon Solo

Pump It Up In 6/8/Busted - IMPROMPTU
God’s Comic - IMPROMPTU

Finale

Chelsea
Waiting For The End Of The World
Watching The Detectives
Clowntime Is Over
Substitute
Peace, Love And Understanding

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Boston
May 20th, 2011

Overture - The Former Mother Superior Of Our Lady Of Perpetual Torment: Dixie De La Fontaine

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

The Other Side Of Summer - SPIN 1

The Other Side Of Summer – SPIN 2

New Lace Sleeves – SPIN 3 (RE-SPIN)

“I Can Sing A Rainbow” Jackpot – SPIN 4

Greenshirt
Blue Chair
Red Shoes
Purple Rain

On-Stage Wedding Proposal – Nothing Left To Chance

Peace, Love And Understanding – First Dance

Napoleon Solo - Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine

American Without Tears – with The Biblecode Sundays duet with Ronan MacManus
Little Palaces/Set Of Fiddle & Accordion Tunes – with The Biblecode Sundays.

Alison – SPIN 5

Detectives vs Hoover Factory – SPIN 6

Hoover Factory
Watching The Detectives

Chelsea – IMPROMPTU

Encore

“Beauty Or Beast?” – SPIN 7

Help Me – with Peter Wolf
Cry One More Time – Peter Wolf

Finale

I Can't Stand Up
High Fidelity
Out Of Time
Pump It Up

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Upper Darby
May 19th, 2011

Overture - featuring The Baroness Astrid Von Koolhaven of Lake Tahoe and Gstaad

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Human Hands - SPIN 1
Living In Paradise - SPIN 2

Shabby Doll - IMPROMPTU

"Napoleon Solo" Jackpot - SPIN 3 (Held)

"Time" Jackpot - SPIN 4

Clowntime Is Over
Strict Time
Man Out Of Time
Out Of Time

Brilliant Mistake - SPIN 5

"Joanna" Jackpot - SPIN 6

Pills & Soap

"Detectives vs Hoover Factory" - SPIN 7

Hoover Factory
Watching The Detectives

Black & White World - SPIN 8

Beyond Belief - IMPROMPTU
Let Me Roll It - IMPROMPTU

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine - Napoleon Solo
Jimmie Standing In The Rain - Napoleon Solo

Finale

Chelsea
Everyday I Write The Book
Pump It Up
Substitute
Peace, Love And Understanding

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Cincinnati
May 16th, 2011

Overture – featuring Her Royal Highness, Jacinta Trimble, The Duchess Of Lexington

I Hope You’re Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Doll Revolution – SPIN 1
Good Year For The Roses – SPIN 2
New Lace Sleeves – SPIN 3
Long Honeymoon – SPIN 4
End Of The World – SPIN 5

Alison – IMPROMPTU

Everyday I Write The Book – SPIN 6

“Girl” Jackpot – SPIN 7 – The Grand Duke Of Lexington, Her Father.

This Years Girl
Girl

“Girl” Jackpot – SPIN 8

Girls Talk

Chelsea/Cincinnati Fatback - IMPROMPTU
Human Hands - REQUEST

“Time” Jackpot – SPIN 9

Clowntime Is Over
Strict Time
Out Of Time

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain

“Model” Jackpot – SPIN 10

Watching The Detectives - IMPROMPTU
Lipstick Vogue

Finale

Substitute
Pump It Up
Peace, Love And Understanding

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Chicago
May 15th, 2011

Overture - featuring The Tersichorean Stylings of Miss Felicity Sisters.

I Hope You’re Happy Now
Doll Revolution
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

45 - SPIN 1
This Wheel’s On Fire/The River In Reverse - SPIN 2
Living In Paradise - SPIN 3
The Other Side Of Summer - SPIN 4
Accidents Will Happen - SPIN 5

“Time” Jackpot - SPIN 6

Strict Time
Out Of Time
Next Time Around
Man Out Of Time

The Element Within Her - SPIN 7

“Girl” Jackpot - SPIN 8

This Years Girl
Girls Talk
Girl

Chelsea - SPIN 9
Beyond Belief - SPIN 10

“Napoleon Solo” Jackpot - SPIN 11

Pump It Up/Busted

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
God's Comic
Alison

“Beauty Or Beast” Jackpot – SPIN 12

Rocking Horse Road/Wild Thing

Finale

Waiting For The End Of The World
Watching The Detectives
Peace, Love And Understanding/Purple Rain/Peace, Love And Understanding

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Las Vegas - "No Revolver Show"
May 13th, 2011

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio
Everyday I Write The Book
Brilliant Mistake
Clownstrike
The Spell That You Cast

The Request Light

So Like Candy/Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood
Watching The Detectives
Chelsea
Clubland
Beyond Belief
Oliver's Army

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
God’s Comic

The Spectacular “Stonehenge” Songbook iPad Application

“I Can Sing A Rainbow” – SPIN 1 – with dancing girls

Greenshirt
Red Shoes
Purple Rain

Alison – IMPROMPTU

Pump It Up – SPIN 2
Peace, Love And Understanding – SPIN 3

---------------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Los Angeles
May 12th, 2011

Overture - featuring Ms. Kitty "Meow McMuffin" of The Lusty Lady

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

I Want You – SPIN 1
Monkey To Man – SPIN 2
God Give Me Strength – SPIN 3
Watching The Detectives – SPIN 4

And Your Bird Can Sing - IMPROMPTU

Clubland – SPIN 5

Doll Revolution - lead vocal, Susanna Hoffs with The Bangles - IMPROMPTU

“Girl” Jackpot – SPIN 6

Girl – E.C. with The Bangles

Next Time 'Round – E.C. with The Bangles - IMPROMPTU
Out Of Time - - Dancing by The Bangles - IMPROMPTU

Everyday I Write The Book – SPIN 7
Stella Hurt – SPIN 8

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain
Pump It Up in 6/8/Busted

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Wheels – SPIN 9
Earthbound – SPIN 10
So Like Candy/Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood – SPIN 11

Encore

Alison

“I Can Sing A Rainbow” Jackpot – “SPIN 12”

Red Shoes
Purple Rain

Finale

Peace, Love And Understanding

-----------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Los Angeles
May 11th, 2011

Overture - featuring direct from "The Wooky Hollow", Belmont Rd., Liverpool, Miss Candy Mugglestone

I Hope You’re Happy Now
Doll Revolution
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Everyday I Write The Book – SPIN 1
Let Me Roll It – SPIN 2

Leave My Kitten Alone – (McCartney) – IMPROMPTU

Pump It Up In 6/8/Busted -(Harlan Howard) – SPIN 3
Brilliant Mistake – SPIN 4
Beyond Belief – SPIN 5
Long Honeymoon – SPIN 6

I Want You – IMPROMPTU

“Time” Jackpot – SPIN 7

Clowntime Is Over
Strict Time
Next Time Around
Out Of Time – (Jagger/Richards)
Man Out Of Time

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Flutter & Wow – SPIN 8
Alison – IMPROMPTU

“Jonna” Interlude – NO SPIN

All Grown Up

Finale - "SPIN 9"

Girl (Lennon/McCartney)
Sulky Girl
Chelsea
Lipstick Vogue
Watching The Detectives

Encore

National Ransom
Peace, Love And Understanding

---------------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Oakland
May 9th, 2011

Overture - featuring Ms. Kitty "Meow McMuffin", soon to be appearing at the "Arched Eybrow"

I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart Of The City
Strict Time
Mystery Dance

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Shipbuilding - SPIN 1

"I Can Sing A Rainbow" Jackpot - SPIN 2

Green Shirt
Blue Chair
Red Shoes/Purple Rain

The Other Side Of Summer - SPIN 3
Chelsea - SPIN 4
This Wheel’s On Fire/River In Reverse - SPIN 5

Monkey To Man - SPIN 6
Counting Darkness - IMPROMPTU

Harry Worth - SPIN 7
Alison/Wind Cried Mary/Somewhere Over The Rainbow/Somewhere - SPIN 8

Interlude

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain
Pump It Up - in 6/8 - Busted

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

"Girl" Jackpot - FINAL SPIN

Girl
This Years Girl
Doll Revolution

Finale

You Belong To Me
Next Time Around
Peace, Love And Understanding

----------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Oakland
May 8th, 2011

Overture - featuring Ms. Kitty "Meow McMuffin", soon to be appearing at the "Arched Eybrow"

I Hope You're Happy Now
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Chelsea
Bedlam
Beyond Belief
The Other Side Of Summer

“Joanna” Jackpot

Temptation – arr. Steve Nieve

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Long Honeymoon
Peace, Love And Understanding
Clubland
God's Comic
You Tripped At Every Step

“Girl” Jackpot

Girl
Spooky Girlfriend
Sulky Girl
This Year's Girl
Party Girl

Finale

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Jimmie Standing In The Rain
Pump it up

“Napoleon Solo” Jackpot

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
High Fidelity

Encore

Alison
--------------------------------------------------

Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Reno
May 7th, 2011

Overture - featuring The Rt. Hon. Penelope Halfpenny of "Maison Sophisticaté"

I Hope You’re Happy Now
Mystery Dance
Radio Radio

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook

Stella Hurt
Greenshirt
Almost Blue
Red Shoes
Veronica
Chelsea
Beyond Belief
Shot With His Own Gun
Girl
Sulky Girl
This Year’s Girl
Party Girl
Clubland
Man Out Of Time
And Your Bird Can Sing
Oliver’s Army

Finale

A Slow Drag With Josephine
Pump It Up
The Other Side Of Summer
Alison
Peace, Love And Understanding

"The Revolver Tour" Receives Ten Standing Ovations In Oakland, Sells Out In Los Angeles"

"The Revolver Tour" receives ten standing ovations in Oakland.

"I Wish I Was In New Orleans"

Consequence Of Sound
Paul de Revere on May 7th

It’s impossible to talk about New Orleans and its music (and broader culture) without talking about the city’s recent strife. Period. So forgive me, apolitical readers, and political ones who flinch at the possibility of bring preached to.

It goes without saying that New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (from which I live about half an hour away in North Florida) has a had a string of shitty luck in the last few years. Maybe “luck” isn’t the right word. Divine improvidence or damning from God, perhaps, if you believe that. However you want to explain it away, it fucking sucks for the Coast and particularly New Orleans, once the thriving commerce and cultural capital of America and The New World.

In short, New Orleans has got the blues.

People, particularly white folks, underestimate the existential, all-encompassing nature of what “the blues” is. Even stylistically, blues applies to artists from the authentic Robert Johnson to the co-opted John Mayer, from as seemingly disparate as Leadbelly to Jimi Hendrix or, hell, Rush. The blues is all-encompassing musically and philosophically. It was, is and forever will be America’s most signature form of music. Jazz evolved from it. The white Alan Lomax may not have understood “the blues” in its primal infancy but he knew it well enough, or knew it to be special enough, to use it to gain opportunity from it, even cravenly profit off of it.

And thank God that Lomax did, otherwise we wouldn’t have Elvis Costello or, for that matter, Allen Toussaint, who orchestrated 2006’s The River in Reverse so utterly perfectly– re-contextualizing songs, rearranging them, reanimating them– it’s as if a hand transcending time and space guided the creation of the record. It’s that good.

To understand the record’s weighty significance, you have to understand where New Orleans is more than where it has been. As someone who just visited New Orleans two consecutive weekends, including Jazz Fest, let me give you my personal encapsulation of where New Orleans is now:

Hurricane Katrina’s clouds still linger over the city in some form. A Jazz Fest publicist told me she was still on “Katrina time” in doubting that press materials dropped into a U.S. Post Office box would get to me in time for my arrival.

And let me hammer this home: If you don’t think The Deepwater Horizon oil spill still gushes like a fresh wound on the traumatized psyche of the city, state and region, you’re out of your mind. British Petroleum still stains the city’s consciousness and inspires some of the most angry, ugly street art I’ve ever seen scrawled.

Speaking of righteous anger, at Jazz Fest, Dr. John mentioned Louisiana’s endangered wetlands, as he does constantly, it’s a pet cause of his, but it’s hard for me to quote him directly. Sometimes, if you clean his words up, his quotes aren’t much of a sentence. For example:

“How much do they expect us to take?” Dr. John asked New York Magazine’s Mark Jacobson. “The inside information is guys on the rig saw rubber and shit, stuff from the blowout protector, coming to the surface back in late February, early March. They were told to keep drilling. Drill, baby, drill. Kill, baby, kill. There ain’t no place in this country that’s been attacked like Louisiana. Forty percent of our coast has been destroyed, washed away. They’re trying to get the rest, the fuckers. The marshes are dead. Dead from greed. When you’re a coon-ass kind?, you eat coon, shrimp, all that. What are you going to eat now? These scumbags are trying to starve us out.”

There’s always trouble to be found in port and river cities: folks getting into trouble (N.O.’s crime rate is infamously high) but also the “troubling of the water” (to paraphrase the slave-song, gopsel refrain that would later evolve into a secular blues one), the same that flooded the city six years ago this summer and the oily mix on the Gulf of Mexico floor. And still, the crescent-shaped city clutches the canal that has given it life, port industry and artistry for so long, and so much misery lately. New Orleans is simultaneously a city in decay and decline, yet still insistently, almost naively, thriving. Like a girlfriend you break ties with because she’s kind of a fuck-up and run into 10 years later… only to find she’s exactly the same.

Former Pantera and supergroup Down front man Phil Anselmo is a New Orleans resident. Anselmo titled one of Down’s songs “New Orleans Is a Dying Whore”. Bassist of essential New Orleans funk band The Meters, George Porter Jr., called New Orleans “an old, fat whore.” This is not a coincidence.

Of course, there’s lots of love in the N.O., too.

At Jazz Fest, I heard strains of “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?” written by Allen Toussaint, who I was chagrined to chat with briefly at the festival. The song is progressive populism in the language of funk. As New Orleans is in one, it needs funk to get out of one.

In the sequence of “River in Reverse”, the track is near the centerpiece of the record: its title track, with a slow, churning New Orleans funk groove where Costello sings, “Here comes the flood if you catch my drift,” a double-meaning kiss off worthy of being put next to “Radio, Radio” or, hell, “London Calling”, in which Joe Strummer sneers that “London is drowning and I live by the river.”

It doesn’t stop there. There’s so many examples of flood and water metaphors and double-meanings not just in this record but throughout human civilization. Awfully wide-lensed, I know, but the subject matter, and album, demands it. When all is said and done, The River in Reverse will, at least, go down as an essential document of post-Katrina New Orleans music.

HAVE BAG. WILL SHAKE. HAVE WIG. WILL OUT.

The Revolver Tour rolls out of Reno in less than a week and our mailbag has been full of enquiries as to how this show is going to work.

The simple answer is that members of the audience will be invited onto the stage to spin the newly constructed, “Spectacular Spinning Songbook” – an almost immense wheel of songs.

Elvis Costello and the Imposters will then play whatever comes up.

This is an entirely different way to shake the bag.

You will hear many of the songs on offer, whether they are hits, rarities or songs by other artistes.

While the curious among you will see a number of famous tunes spinning by, rehearsals have also yielded a number of songs that have rarely, if ever, been heard in concert. As the old song says, a splendid time is guaranteed for all.

We are not in a position to reveal the entire repertoire but can tell you that 34 songs will be named nightly among the forty banners that make up the Spectacular Spinning Songbook. Many of these will change from show to show.

Six additional purple “Jackpot” banners will also be in place.

These may include one that reads: “Happy”.

Should this selection come up, the number of songs performed from the album “Get Happy” will be found in a sealed envelope.

On other nights, these banners may read “Aim”, “Imperial Chocolate”, “Model” or even “King’s Ransom”. We will leave it to your imagination as to what will occur, if these should be selected.

Other Jackpot banners that may be featured include, “I Can Sing A Rainbow”, “Joanna”, allowing for song with accompaniment by Steve Nieve to be chosen spontaneously from a large pile of sheet music and one that simply reads, “Girl”.

Elvis Costello will once again take the role of the M.C. “Napoleon Dynamite” – a showbusiness alias later abducted by aliens. Consequently, it should be easy to guess the significance of the Jackpot banner reading, “Napoleon Solo”.

Contestants will be offered light refreshments in the Society Lounge during the performance of the song that their spin has selected but those of a less nervous disposition may care to shake a tailfeather in Hostage To Fortune Go-Go Cage.

A “Request” light will also be in operation from time to time to further change the scene.

The Spectacular Spinning Songbook was first seen in 1986, when Elvis Costello and the Attractions had only eleven albums in the racks plus a handful of songs by pop giants from Prince to ABBA.

Elvis Costello and the Imposters will be performing songs from more than thirty record albums, including several made by other people, having rehearsed approximately, 157 and a half separate titles prior to this engagement, not including the songs they intend to learn on the night.

Many of you present at those earlier shows will fondly remember the part played by Xavier Valentine - “Your guide from your place in the stalls to your place in the stars”. We are delighted to announce that Xavier’s niece, Katya Valentina Valentine, will be joining the company.

The first rule of this show seems to be that there are no actual rules just some made up stuff.

Elvis Costello and the Imposters reserve the right to play whatever the hell they feel like and will on occasion, cheat, quite shamelessly.

Moon Conway. May Day. By telegraphic wire from the parking lot of the Cal-Neva Lodge.

Dylan delivers, Elvis excels at Bluesfest

Two performing legends proved they can still tell the musical stories their generations of fans want to hear last night.

Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello both delivered powerhouse shows at the Byron Bay Bluesfest proving their advancing years had in no way diminished their extraordinary abilities.

Dylan, nearing 70, and Costello, 56, have sold million of records during long, glittering careers that have seen them pass from young upstarts to icons of the music industry.

Both are now in a position to make the music they want to, regardless of whether it sells or not, or whether it is fashionable or otherwise.

Dylan rarely speaks publicly these days, while Costello interviews musicians as host of his own television show.

But last night both singer-songwriters demonstrated why live shows are the best way for them to keep their stories alive.

Bob Dylan's America is a mix of tangled loves and lovers, of small towns, cars and trains, small cafe jazz and blues, with rockabilly tossed on top as the main dressing.

The folk pioneer has always written rockabilly and early rock and roll songs, fused with the beat-poet lyrics.

Diehard Dylan fans, who had seen him play in Melbourne and Adelaide, said the Byron show was his best yet.

The performance began with the stage going black and Bob, resplendent in stylish white hat, started at the organ, pumping out a new roadtrip rockabilly piece Gonna Change My Way of Thinking before delving back to Don't Think Twice, It's Alright.

The rockabilly returned with The Levee's Gonna Break ahead of an eerie, almost spiritual version of Tangled Up in Blue.

The set list was like a car journey through America's rock and roll heartland, with several different stops and changes in direction.
The rollicking Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum opened the door to the infamous Hard Rain, delivered as a clipped sea shanty like Nick Cave's The Ship Song.

Slap bass heralded the driving Summer Days, again with Bob on organ, before the highlight of the night, a heartfelt rendering of Simple Twist of Fate, one of Dylan's most poignant songs from the Blood on the Tracks album.

Guitarist Charlie Sexton played a gorgeous repeated guitar figure, while the band played the song strongly, but sympathetically.

It was a wonderful moment, with Bob telling how two lovers "would sit together in the park", until "their eyes grew dim and the lights got dark".

It drew a massive response, before Dylan and band pushed on the rockabilly accelerator and delivered a stinging Highway 61.

A note-perfect version of Ballad of Thin Man followed, which stunned and electrified the audience.

"Something is happening, but you don't know what it is," Bob barked.
The encores were Like a Rolling Stone, where the Mojo Tent crowd bellowed the chorus in deafening volume.

Finally, Bob staked his claim and stood his ground with the declarative, gospel piece, Forever Young.

His voice is not as flexible as it was 50 years ago, or even 30 years ago, but Dylan was passionate and engaged, something he hasn't always been on previous visits to Australia.

He received a massive reception before Elvis Costello walked straight on stage and immediately hit the crowd between the eyes with a surging version of Pump It Up.

Elvis never let the pressure ease, pumping out a string of hits including Watching the Detectives, Good Year for the Roses, I Don't Want to Go To Chelsea and Clubland.

The achingly-pretty Alison, morphed into his famous namesake's Suspicious Minds.

He sang some old-style country songs with the Secret Sisters, including an old Hank Williams number, before scorching through encores Oliver's Army and (What's So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding.

Mr Costello was in red-hot form and his band, which included regular members, Pete Thomas on drums and Steve Nieve on keyboards also delivered and then some.

A great show closer from one of the best songwriters of the past two decades.

Sydney Morning Herald: Elvis Costello and the Imposters at the State Theatre

The start was breathless, four songs banging up against each other like late running commuters impatient at the turnstiles: coming through, coming through, make way. I Hope You’re Happy Now noisy and rollicking, Tear Off Your Own Head busy and sneakily poptastic, High Fidelity brisk soul dancing away, Uncomplicated muscular and snappy. Fifteen minutes or so, not a word said, barely a pause between final chord and first drumbeat, corrections made on the run, energy.

But even before the first breath was taken, in the Texas torch song of Either Side Of The Same Town, you could hear the base notes of this night’s show and it wasn’t knock-me-down rock’n’roll. What permeated almost every corner of the next two hours was what has always fed Elvis Costello’s music: country and soul. There was the Chicago groove now underneath Everyday I Write The Book and the deeper well of Flutter & Wow, the usually raucous Why Don’t You Love Like You Used To Do done Opry style followed by a rockabilly take on Luxembourg, and even the sleazy cabaret lounge just behind the veil of New Lace Sleeves picking up a hint of rye rather than cheap scotch blend.

This is one versatile, almost infinitely flexible band of keyboard adventurer Steve Nieve (who was criminally low in the mix for a little too long), seemingly ageless drummer Pete Thomas, loose limbed bassplayer and spot-on backing vocalist Davey Faragher and Costello in some career-best form on guitar. When they want to they can sound dense and dangerous like late ‘70s Attractions or sit back in the song and just point you in the right way.

Mind you, one of the evenings highlights didn’t feature the band (or much country soul) at all as first Costello took a solo, old time radio-style stroll through the comi-tragic tale of Jimmie Standing In The Rain before the seriously charming and winning voices of support act Secret Sisters played chorus line to his neo-Bing Crosby in A Slow Drag With Josephine.

Having cleared a space with these delicacies though, Costello and the Imposters went out the way they came in, bustling through a final triumvirate of National Ransom, Pump It Up and (What's So Funny ‘bout) Peace, Love And Understanding convincing us briefly that our lack of breath was excitement not ageing.

Elvis Costello and the Imposters play at the Byron Bay Blues Festival this weekend.

Elvis Costello seasoned to taste

Slick and sharp as ever, Elvis Costello showed his State Theatre audience that at 56 he may be seasoned but to just about everyone’s taste.
In a 90-minute set that ranged over four decades of his cleverly crafted material, Costello and his band The Imposters moved seamlessly from crowd favourites like Every Day I Write The Book and Tear Off Your Head to more recent songs from his Momofuku and National Ransom albums.

Costello, perhaps the most versatile of rock performers, is no stranger to Sydney, having appeared with the Brodsky Quartet in the 2006 Sydney Festival as well as performing with the Sydney Symphony.

But it’s been a while since he’s been seen here with his amazingly tight band - keyboardist Steve Nieve, bassist Davey Faragher and drummer Pete Thomas.

Looking dapper in one of his trademark hats and a metallic grey suit, Costello zapped through the first six numbers before throwing a hurried “how are you?” to the audience, changing from a Telecaster to his trademark Jazzmaster and launching into the next medley of hits.

The breakneck pace eventually slowed for his heartrending country-style Either Side Of The Same Town. After that there was some banter with the audience before he settled down to an acoustic session, working his way through a battery of guitars including a Guild which had been given to him for a recording gig in 1978 and hadn’t been out of its case since.

He boasted about the qualities of his tenor guitar before singing Monkey To Man, switching back to a solid body for Beautiful played with a distortion so dirty it was close to disintegration.

Always generous to other musicians, he brought on support act, the wonderful Secret Sisters - Laura and Lydia Rogers from Muscle Shoals, Alabama - to join him for a couple of numbers near the end of the set, including the beautiful A Slow Drag With Josephine and an acoustic rendering of Jimmy Standing In The Rain.

This last song he described as the tale of a vaudevillian who travels the world in a straw hat and a book of poems by Dante and who has “chosen the wrong moment to go into cowboy music”.

Finally the band came back for a farewell 20 minutes with the audience up on its feet and singing and dancing to King of America and Nick Lowe’s (What’s So Funny) About Peace, Love and Understanding.

This is the only rock concert I know of where the audience came out to the strains of English comedy duo Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise singing Give Me Sunshine. All part of the Costello experience!

Costello, along with the Secret Sisters, is appearing in the Byron Bay blues festival over the Easter weekend.

Spectacle elvis costello with ... Now showing on Sky Arts UK

In front of an intimate theatre audience, Elvis Costello presents a series of interviews and live performances from some of the biggest names in the music business.

Lou Reed, Elton John, James Taylor, Rufus Wainwright and Norah Jones all grace the stage to discuss their careers, give intimate solo performances and jam with Costello and the other guests. Stewart Copeland and Sting argue about who calls the shots in The Police, and former US President Bill Clinton discusses his early jazz aspirations.

The shows will be on daily from 12 April at 9pm.

   1.      Elton John – 12 April
   2.      Smokey Robinson – 13 April
   3.      Renee Fleming – 14 April
   4.      Bill Clinton – 15 April
   5.      Lou Reed – 16 April
   6.      The Police – 17 April
   7.      Tony Bennett – 18 April
   8.      Rufus Wainwright – 19 April
   9.      Jakob Dylan, Jenny Lewis and She & Him – 20 April
   10.   James Taylor – 21 April
   11.   Diana Krall interviewed by Elton John– 22 April
   12.   Herbie Hancock – 23 April
   13.   Norah Jones, John Mellencamp, Kris Kristofferson & Rosanne Cash – 24 April

http://www.skyarts.co.uk/music/article/spectacle-elvis-costello/

Elvis Costello Plays Three Shows In NYC For April Fools Day ... Again, Joins Strokes...

Back in 1979 Elvis Costello & The Attractions celebrated April Fools’ Day by playing a total of three shows in New York City. Thirty-two years later, Costello has duplicated the feat in spectacular fashion.

Back in 1979 Elvis Costello and The Attractions kicked off April Fools’ Day with a short set at the Lone Star Cafe, moved to The Bottom Line for a 15-song barn-burner and finished the night with a legendary performance at Great Gildersleeves that’s just as well known for the brawl that ended the show as for the music. Who says history never repeats itself?

"My dog he turned to me and he said..."

Elvis Costello Joins Furthur for Band’s Final New York Blowout.

He fronts the band on classics like 'Tennessee Jed' and 'Friend of the Devil

Rolling Stone : By Patrick Doyle March 28, 2011

When Furthur hit the stage for their third consecutive headlining show
at Radio City Music Hall last night (and their eighth show in New York
City this month), surprises were expected. But it's safe to say everyone
was shocked when, after two songs, Elvis Costello sprinted out wearing a
navy checkerboard suit, silver hat and thick-rimmed glasses strapped on
an acoustic guitar and fronted the band on a stomping, joyous rendition
of "Tennessee Jed," trading verses with guest guitarist Larry Campbell
in front of vintage psychedelic visuals. Afterwards, he waved to the
crowd, appearing he was leaving the stage, but simply took a sip of
water and headed back to the mic, where he stayed for the majority of
the first set.

Costello and the Dead may sound like a weird pairing, but
they have some history; Costello and Jerry Garcia sang country songs
together at a 1989 show in Mill Valley, California. Last night, Costello
easily adapted to the band's loose sensibilities. He delivered an
uplifting "Friend of the Devil" and then turned into a balladeer on a
13-minute jam of 1973’s "Ship of Fools," which shifted into the boozy
sing-along "It Must Have Been the Roses," with Larry Campbell adding
soaring fiddle – and then seamlessly moved back to "Ship of Fools."
Costello covered the two songs acoustically on 2000’s Stolen Roses
tribute disc, but hearing him belt over Lesh and Weir’s wall-of-sound
sounded otherworldly. Costello capped the set duetting with wife Diana
Krall on a gorgeous "Ripple."

The 10-song set two was performed without Costello, and included
impassioned performances of "St. Stephen," "UncleJohn’s Band" and
"Morning Dew," delivered excellently by guitarist John Kadlecik. Weir
and Lesh have been playing some of the songs for four decades, but it
was amazing how aggressively they are still willing to break the mold of
the studio recordings. For the encore, about three hours after first
emerging, Costello emerged with Krall and sang the blues classic
"Fever," Costello jabbing screeching high notes out of his black Les
Paul next to Weir. To close out the night, they invited Teresa Williams
out and all harmonized American Beauty’s prayer "Attics of my Life."

My library book is so overdue that I'm expecting to get in a lot of trouble later

Elvis Costello kicks off season three of Public Television's Live From The Artists Den on April 1st, 2011.

New York, NY --The third season of the innovative music series Live from
the Artists Den will premiere nationwide on public television beginning
April 1, 2011 with a special performance by rock icon Elvis Costello
backed by his band, The Sugarcanes, at The New York Public Library’s
world-famous Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. The show airs nationally on
public television. Check local listings or ArtistsDen.com

“My library book is so overdue that I’m expecting to get in a lot of
trouble later,” Elvis Costello said with a smile before his show at The
New York Public Library. He went on to say, “There’s something
definitely different about playing in New York Public Library. There’s
not many venues I play that have big stone lions outside.”

Elvis Costello’s episode is the result of a private concert he performed
on November 2, 2010 for 500 lucky fans in celebration of his new album's
release that day. Within the ornate and awe-inspiring Celeste Bartos
Forum, Costello – along with The Sugarcanes and Pete Thomas on drums –
performed new songs from National Ransom as well as hits spanning his
three-decades-and-counting career.

Live from the Artists Den is an Emmy-nominated TV series connecting
music fans with a curated lineup of icons and rising stars performing in
unique and intimate venues. The exciting new season also features
Robert Plant, Ray LaMontagne, Grace Potter and The Nocturnals, Squeeze,
Daniel Merriweather, A Fine Frenzy, and Lisa Hannigan. A Public
Television Rocks! presentation, the series is a co-production of Artists
Den Entertainment and WLIW21 in association with WNET New York Public
Media and distributed by American Public Television.

The Sugarcanes are: Jerry Douglas (dobro), Stuart Duncan (fiddle), Mike
Compton (mandolin), Jeff Taylor (accordion), Dennis Crouch (double
bass), and Jim Lauderdale (acoustic guitar).

IT'S APRIL FOOLS DAY

So naturally Elvis Costello & The Imposters are doing a special 11:00pm show at the Gramercy Theatre, 127 East 23rd Street, New York, NY!

Tickets on sale Saturday, March 26th at 10:00am. $50 in advance, $75 at the door. Check your local Ticketmaster outlet for the official show listing at 12pm EST Friday – www.ticketmaster.com | www.Livenation.com

Where else might they turn up??

For Our Younger Readers

World Premiere of Rabbit Ears’ Newest Title TOM THUMB Set for March 20, 2011 at International Family Film Festival

Narrated by John Cleese with Music by Elvis Costello

A new version of the classic children’s story, “Tom Thumb,” told by John Cleese with original music by Elvis Costello, will have its world premiere Sunday, March 20, 2011 during the International Family Film Festival at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. This is the first new Rabbit Ears title released in more than a decade.

“Tom Thumb” is the story of Tiny Tom, no larger than his father's thumb, who embarks on a series of fantastical adventures that lead him to King Arthur's court. After saving King Arthur from the clutches of an evil sorcerer he becomes a member of the Knights of the Round Table, and the darling of Queen Guinevere. The tale is narrated hilariously by John Cleese, with music composed and produced by Elvis Costello and illustrations by Tim Gabor. This rollicking story, written by Brad Kessler and directed by Chris Campbell, is produced in hi-def with a digitally recorded soundtrack. Following the premiere it will be available as a DVD or digital download through Rabbit Ears Entertainment’s ecommerce site http://www.rabbitears.com Targeted for ages 5 and up, the story uses gentle dissolve animation and humor, the signature style of the award-winning Rabbit Ears series of timeless children's tales.

“Tom Thumb” is the latest in the Rabbit Ears catalog of “great stories, well told.” The highly-acclaimed library of books, DVDs and CDs began in the 1980s with “The Velveteen Rabbit,” narrated by Meryl Streep with music by George Winston which aired on PBS. Two seasons of Rabbit Ears Radio aired on public radio. Random House Listening Library re-released the entire library on CD in 2006, and Rabbit Ears launched its own ecommerce site in 2007.

The 25-minute film is directed by Chris Campbell. Executive Producers are Mark Sottnick and Chris Campbell. It was edited by David Russell at Palace Digital Studios, South Norwalk, Conn. The audio mix is by Chris Nelson.

“We are delighted to have “Tom Thumb” debut at the International Family Film Festival,” says Campbell. “Rabbit Ears is committed to restoring the lost art of storytelling through our videos, books, and audio recordings, and we think our goal of providing quality family entertainment that respects the intelligence of young and old fits perfectly with the mission of the festival to promote evergreen fare.”

Rabbit Ears was launched by its founders, Mark Sottnick and Doris Wilhousky, with the belief that quality entertainment can inspire children with an appreciation for literature, art and music. The classic children’s stories are brought to life by the world’s most respected narrators, musicians, and illustrators. Narrated by Hollywood’s top celebrities, scored by renowned musicians, and illustrated by well-known artists, the more than 65 programs have earned a reputation for achieving the highest degree of artistic quality. The resulting books, videos, and audio products have garnered many prestigious awards from design, educational, and entertainment organizations, including 2 Grammy Awards, 18 Grammy Award nominations, 21 Parents' Choice Awards, 7 Action for Children's Television awards, a National Education Association Award, and the Humanitas Prize.

HAVE WIG - WILL OUT. Elvis Costello

“HAVE WIG – WILL OUT. Elvis & The Imposters performing in Bridgeport, CT at “The Gathering of the Vibes” music festival on Saturday July 23rd . What Grateful Dead song would you like to hear in the set?”

Mexico and South America Tour Announcement

To all our fans and friends in Mexico and South America we regret to announce that due to circumstances beyond our control we have had to cancel our tour scheduled for early April. We hope to be able to reschedule and return in the near future!

Elvis Costello - Hong Kong Cultural Centre

South China Morning Post

Elvis lives. In a remarkable solo performance in the Cultural Centre last night, Elvis - Elvis Costello that is - showed his songs are just as sharp, his lyrics as biting and his voice as powerful as they were when the British singer-songwriter burst onto the scene as the angry young man of pop more than three decades ago. But my how the rest of us have aged.

When I last saw him perform, on his Punch the Clock tour in 1983, we jumped up and down in front of the stage in a fug of sweat and lager. Last night, I clapped along self-consciously from my seat with middle-aged parents frighteningly like myself in a venue better suited to stage plays and minor orchestral works.

Elvis has hardly changed but we have - and watching his raw energy surge through the Cultural Centre seemed as incongruous as watching a string quartet perform on the main stage at Glastonbury. It was to his great credit that he had most of the 1,000-strong audience onto their feet doing a kind of mystery dance by the end of a gripping two-hour show.

Whippet-thin and strutting and skipping across the stage, with acoustic guitar and no microphone, the 56-year-old took to a bare stage. Perhaps sensing the oddness of the setting, he introduced Beyond Belief with the words: "Allow me to introduce my special guest - It's me."

Slower numbers like Alison, Good Year for the Roses and Shipbuilding were spine-tingling. It was the faster numbers like Oliver's Army and Pump It Up that made us feel our age because we probably all wanted to get up and dance but couldn't because of where we were.

Finally, during the encore, rebellion ripped through the audience and people rose to clap along to an aggressive and magnificent rendition of (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding. Had we been younger, we might have ripped up the seats and charged forward for a proper pogo. Last night, we'd probably have done our backs in.

The Rebel Kind.com

Last night the Elvis Costello show rolled through our clotted metropolis of Hong Kong and put on a spectacle worthy of the ages. Throughout his over two-hour solo performance, Elvis finessed, lathered, charmed and slayed with the ferocity and precision of a matador in the ring. The stage was literally "in the round" with the crowd surrounding Elvis and prompting him at times to stroll the periphery, arm raised in mock self-aggrandisement like Mussolini at Rome's Palazzo Venezia. The only thing missing were chants of "Elvis Is King!"

With a wink to China's surveillance state, he opened with "Green Shirt" from 1979's Armed Forces:
There's a smart young woman on a light blue screen
Who comes into my house every night
And she takes all the red, yellow, orange and green
And she turns them into black and white

From there he dipped deeply into his rich catalogue, stretching from his first-ever recording - "Radio Sweetheart" - to the ragtime-inspired, "A Slow Drag With Josephine" off his most recent, the excellent, National Ransom. Highlights included a genuinely acoustic rendition of "Jimmie Standing in the Rain," done without electricity when he stepped away from the mic and unplugged his guitar; a mash-up of "New Amsterdam" and the Beatles' "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away"; a smoldering "Almost Blue," sung again unplugged as he strolled around the stage; a truly moving version of "Shipbuilding; and "Oliver's Army" with the shout out for us, "Hong Kong is up for grabs!"

http://therebelkind.blogspot.com/2011/03/elvis-in-hong-kong-up-for-grabs.html

Elvis Costello concludes a six-date Asian tour in Singapore.

Time Out Singapore: 05.03.11

Armed with an encyclopaedic musical knowledge, a true wordsmith’s love of language and 35 years’ performing experience, Elvis Costello waxes lyrical on a life in music prior to his MBS show on 7 March

If you’re not busy at the same time, do you and the lady wife [Diana Krall] travel together round the world on tours?

We travel so much that it is the greatest luxury to be at home.

You’ll be the first artist to perform at Marina Bay Sands Grand Theater. According to one weblink I saw, you will ‘gratify audiences from all around the world’. That’ll be nice. Have you seen Marina Bay Sands yet? It’s pretty big. There’s a casino too, if you’re feeling lucky after the gig.

‘Gratifying’ people is what I was made to do. I haven’t seen either the theatre or location but I won’t be a patron of the gambling room. I will wager but never bet odds.

So your Asian tour is stopping off in Hong Kong, Japan and Korea. Is there an Asian city you prefer performing in above all others?

I do not have a favourite. Obviously, I have visited Japan for more than 30 years, while I am making my Korean debut, so comparisons are not really possible.

A lot of people over here know you for your rendition of ‘She’ (it comes up a lot on TV trailers, local radio and love-song compilations) but some are probably a bit young to know your older stuff. For someone who’s written so many originals, does it get on your nerves that one of your most famous tracks is a cover?

There is an old saying: ‘You don’t buy a house if you only like the door.’ I would be surprised if people come to a concert only to hear one song. I’ve had a number of successes [with] other people’s songs, so it would be foolish of me to resent them.What reason do people have for attending the show? They will hear songs from every year and even from the future.

The last album National Ransom was another collaboration with T-Bone Burnett, who produced some of your older records and like yourself is highly prolific and diverse, having worked with a wide range of artists including Counting Crows and Gillian Welch. What is the special quality he brings that makes you two jell?

We have had a great time together. He has never needed to lie about [his] height. He knows the words and which ones to say among musicians. I am in complete agreement with [his] dislike of mp3 and other brittle, insubstantial methods of insulting your ears and brain.

You’ve revived your Spinning Songbook gimmick for the upcoming American tour with The Imposters, and the Singapore gig will be a greatest-hits set too. Is that big wheel coming out over here too?

‘The Spectacular Spinning Songbook’ is not a ‘gimmick’ but a highly sophisticated system of avoiding the obvious and a finely tuned piece of showbusiness machinery that is still under construction at a secret location, so will not appear in Singapore on this occasion.

You’ve been pursuing a country tip of late, but is there any particular period of your career you tend to avoid when you’re playing live – albums where you’re perhaps not so proud of the results, collaborations that didn’t work as well as you’d hoped?

I tend to avoid my infant years.

We’ve got our Mosaic Music Festival just after your gig – the big festival of the year with artists like Aphex Twin, Saint Etienne, The National, Jamie Lidell, Joanna Newsom and The Bad Plus all playing. You’re on an Americana tip at the moment but are known for your eclectic tastes – do any of those names appeal? Which current artists do you prefer?

You like the word ‘tip’, don’t you? Did you win it in a raffle? Seriously though, I very much enjoyed Joanna Newsom’s last release. She is a tremendous artist. Anyone who confidently issues a triple album in these days gets my vote.

I loved your TV show Spectacle: Elvis Costello with…. My favourite episodes were the ones with Bruce Springsteen, Jenny Lewis/She & Him/Jakob Dylan, and Rufus Wainwright with his (sadly now deceased) mother Kate McGarrigle. Who was your favourite guest?

Those were all fine shows. I loved singing [The Miracles’] ‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’ with Smokey Robinson, doing crazy background vocals with Kris Kristofferson for Norah Jones’ setting of an unpublished Hank Williams lyric, twanging the electric guitar on Neko Case’s ‘Prison Girls’ and sharing the last verse of [The Band’s] ‘The Weight’ with Ray LaMontagne in a one-off band with Levon Helm on drums. That was an unbeatable evening. The Imposters gave terrific backing to Bono and The Edge, and Bruce Springsteen could not have been more generous with his time. I think many people’s favourite single performance was that of Jesse Winchester. It completely stopped the show and brought a tear to the eye of several people present.

Will that show be re-commissioned?

Not at the present time.

What do your kids like to listen to – do you play them your own favourite music at home, or do they make their own discoveries?

They like all kinds of music: Nat ‘King’ Cole, The Beatles and Geeta Dutt are current favourites. They are just discovering that sound also comes from those flat, round, black discs of vinyl and shellac. ‘When My Sugar Walks Down the Street’ conjures a completely different picture in the mind of a four-year-old.

The recent album of yours I enjoyed the most was the one you did with Burt Bacharach, Painted from Memory. Is there any chance you two might work together again?

Burt and I wrote two further songs over the last couple of years. I would be happy to work with him any time.

If push came to shove, would you be able to choose your favourite from your own songs that you’ve recorded since 1977?

Like anybody, a favourite song would depend on the mood of the day. I always like the answer that is attributed to Duke Ellington to the question, ‘What is your favourite composition?’. He would apparently reply, ‘My next.’

I last saw you at the Glastonbury Festival in 1995 with The Attractions. You played for about three hours and totally rocked. ‘Pump It Up’ was amazing. Thanks for that.

Three hours? Really? I’m glad you enjoyed the show. See you again soon.

Elvis Costello Announces The Return Of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook For The First Time In 25 Years On "The Revolver Tour"

Elvis Costello and the Imposters have announced “The Revolver Tour” during the merry month of May.

For the first time in 25 years, Costello will let his set-list be chosen by ”The Spectacular Spinning Songbook”, a monumental game-show wheel that features 40 song-titles, including hits, rarities and very unexpected covers.

Audience members will be invited onstage where they may spin "The Wheel" and then be offered a chance to enter the "Hostage to Fortune Go-Go Cage", while their selection is performed.

Alternatively, they may choose to take a seat in the on-stage “Society Lounge”, where light refreshments will be served, during what promises to be a splendid and surprising evening.

The original Wheel was famously donated to the Hartlepool Museum Of Showbusiness Machinery but it has been meticulously reconstructed from the original blueprints.

"The Revolver Tour" includes stops at The Wiltern in Los Angeles May 11 &12, and three nights at New York's Beacon Theatre May 22, 23 & 24.

See below for a complete list of dates.

The Imposters are: Steve Nieve (keyboards); Pete Thomas (drums) and Davey Faragher (bass).

"The Revolver Tour" Dates:
5/7 -    RENO, NV GRAND SIERRA THEATRE
5/8 -    OAKLAND, CA THE FOX
5/9 -    OAKLAND, CA THE FOX
5/11 -   LOS ANGELES, CA THE WILTERN

5/12 - LOS ANGELES, CA THE WILTERN
5/15 - CHICAGO, IL CHICAGO THEATRE

5/16 - CINCINNATI, OH TAFT THEATRE
5/18 -    MONTCLAIR, NJ WELLMONT THEATRE (Sold Out)
5/19 -    UPPER DARBY, PA TOWER THEATRE
5/20 -    BOSTON, MA WANG THEATRE
5/22 -    NEW YORK, NY BEACON THEATRE
5/23 -    NEW YORK, NY BEACON THEATRE

5/24 - NEW YORK, NY BEACON THEATRE

Elvis Costello Live From The Artists Den Season Three Premieres on Public Television Beginning April 1, 2011.

New Season Features Elvis Costello, Ray LaMontagne, Robert Plant and more

The third season of the innovative music series Live from the Artists Den will premiere nationwide on public television beginning April 1, 2011
(check local listings).

The Emmy-nominated show connects music fans with an incredible, curated line up of icons and rising stars performing in unique and intimate venues. The exciting new season features Elvis Costello, Ray LaMontagne, Robert Plant, Grace Potter and The Nocturnals, Squeeze, Daniel Merriweather, A Fine Frenzy, and Lisa Hannigan. A Public Television Rocks! presentation, the series is a co-production of Artists Den Entertainment and WLIW21 in association with WNET New York Public Media and distributed by American Public Television.

Artists Den Creator and Executive Producer Mark Lieberman comments, “Season Three showcases once-in-a-lifetime concert experiences filmed in some of the most imaginative settings in America. Millions of public television viewers are in for a rare treat.

Beginning April 1 – Elvis Costello, backed by his band, The Sugarcanes, at The New York Public Library’s world-famous Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

"Phew. That Was A Near Thing"

Movie City News: Trent Reznor on why Elvis Costello didn't suit Social Network

And Now For Something Completely Different

"Puck 1" an excerpt from Carolina Crowns 2009 production entitled "The Grass is Always Greener." The music is 'Puck 1" from Elvis Costello's Il Sogno.

"Groucho Costello: Fashion Leader and Oracle."

"Groucho Costello: Fashion Leader and Oracle."

"And when you were 15 your life was changed completely by 'Tamla Motown', which song?"

"Bernadette"

"If you had just one sentence to describe 'Spike', what would it be?"

"Totally Brilliant"

To see more of this unique interview with Elvis Costello ... click here.

Elvis Costello Secret Artists Den Show

Elvis Costello and The Sugarcanes’ secret Artists Den show in The New York Public Library’s world-famous Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Full episode to air this Spring 2011 during the third season of “Live from the Artists Den.” This is only available in the USA.

Christmas with Elvis Costello: killing, cold, and a great catalog

Christmas with Elvis Costello: killing, cold, and a great catalog
Chicago Sun Times: Mark Guarino: 22.12.10

Christmas with Elvis Costello evidently does not include chestnuts roasting, sleigh bells ringing or children singing while dressed as Eskimos. Monday night at the Chicago Theatre, he paid homage to the season but in a way more expected from this acerbic rocker: a song about poisoning the family clan over the Christmas ham and another that imagines winter winds as tentacles coming to get you.

The holiday concert was in part an annual promotion for WXRT-FM (93.1) and also a chance for Costello to perform alone, armed with only his charisma and songbook. Both go far.

The single acoustic guitar in Costello’s hands wasn’t the only instrument in the room. The barest of settings illuminated just how potent his voice is, either reaching a high falsetto on songs like “Either Side of the Same Town,” or commanding a hushed authority on “I Hope,” a song from “National Ransom,” a new album. On the former, as well as “A Slow Drag With Josephine,” another new song, he strolled away from the microphone and sang without amplification. To his credit, the entire theater grew quiet and his voice carried all 3,600 seats.

Songs mixed together casually. “New Amsterdam” turned into a tribute to John Lennon’s melancholia, including passages of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” and “I’m a Loser.” “Radio Sweetheart” blended into Van Morrison’s “Jackie Wilson Said,” and “So Like Candy” became “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” by the Animals. Even “Alison,” saved for near the end, borrowed elements from musicals, “Over the Rainbow” and “Somewhere.”

The familiar became less so through versions that strayed from their originals. On “Watching the Detectives,” Costello created digitized loops from his electric guitar, resulting in layers of sound that in the end wasn’t successful but pried the audience away from expectations. More satisfying were “Beyond Belief,” its dizzying flow of words sounding particularly neurotic, and “God’s Comic,” from the days Costello used to write song portraits inked with deadly black humor.

Then there were those Christmas songs. On “St. Stephen’s Day Murders,” a song he co-wrote with Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains, Costello imagined a deadly family dinner the day after Christmas.

But the greatest contribution to the holiday canon may be “Winter Song,” a song Costello introduced from the late British folk-rock songwriter Alan Hull. The song turns the season on its head, connecting the menace of the winter gales to the personal cold front taking place on city sidewalks each day.

“Do you spare a thought for the homeless tramp who wishes he was dead / Or do you pull the bedclothes higher, dream of summertime instead?” Costello sang quietly, while sitting. With each verse, “Winter comes howling in.”

Then, just a half hour later, exiting into State St. as the first snow of an evening storm fell, it did for real.

The many faces of Elvis Costello: The iconic rocker gave the audience a peek at his many personas
Chicago Tribune: Bob Gendron: 21.12.10

As host of the Sundance Channel's "Spectacle," Elvis Costello gets fellow artists to open up about their creative process, and often perform stripped-down versions of beloved songs. The British singer/guitarist followed his television show's cue Monday during a wide-ranging solo concert at the Chicago Theatre, giving a sold-out crowd a rare glimpse into the intricate workings and bare essentials of his own material.

Never short on ideas, Costello has adopted nearly every imaginable musical guise throughout his 33-year career. Many of these flirtations surfaced during a 140-minute, 29-song set dependent on little more than voice, guitar and periodic loops. Keeping banter to a minimum, Costello embraced myriad roles — clowning minstrel, sincere balladeer, backwater bluesman, street busker, blue-eyed crooner, boxcar-hopping folkie, Dixie-whistling vaudevillian. No matter the style, his timbre seemed immune to age. Occasionally Costello walked away from the microphone, his voice still ably projecting, and capable of emphasizing dramatic impact.

Elvis Costello plays career-spanning Holiday acoustic snow in Chicago
Spinner: Anna Deem: 21.12.10

With large snowflakes projected on the curtains behind him, Elvis Costello took the stage at the Chicago Theatre on Monday night for a sold-out solo acoustic show that was billed as a special "career-spanning once-in-a-lifetime event."

Indeed, Costello lived up to his "consummate showman" title as he stood humbled before the massive audience, which gave standing ovations after nearly every song in his two-hour long set. Decked out in a smart dark gray suit and matching hat, Costello wasted little time chatting with the crowd and instead blazed through most of his set. Kicking his performance off with '(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,' Costello mixed in classics such as his set list with classics like 'Alison,' 'New Amsterdam' and 'Green Shirt' with newer fare such as 'A Slow Drag With Josephine,' 'Jimmie Standing in the Rain' and 'The Spell That You Cast' from 2010's 'National Ransom.'

"The last time I was in this theater, there was another singer singing after me and I only sang a few songs," Costello said, finally addressing the crowd. "We'll make up for that tonight." The room cheered and Costello launched into 'Veronica,' a song he penned with Paul McCartney for his 1989 album, 'Spike.' After each song, Costello graciously bowed and raised his glass to the crowd, clearly showing how appreciative he was of their dedication.

"So this is where the people in reindeer sweaters come out and dance," Costello joked as he sat down in front of a music stand. Instead of dancers, Costello played 'St. Stephen's Day Murders,' a tongue-in-cheek Christmas tune he co-wrote with the Chieftains in 1991. Trading in his acoustic guitar for an electric one, Costello tore through 'Watching the Detectives' several songs later, extending the solo and transforming the song's reggae melody into a feedback-laden punk rock affair, much to the crowd's delight as they sang along excitedly.

Their voices carried over into the encore, where Costello played over half a dozen songs, including a classic cover of the Animals' 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood.' Although the holiday season isn't over just yet, it was clear as Costello's set wound down that Christmas came early for fans in Chicago.

"The Future Lies Ahead"

"The Future Lies Ahead"

Elvis Costello has just released his 33^rd studio album… and it might be his last. Feeling that the era of the album was ending, the rock veteran says he threw everything he had into National Ransom, a double-LP, single CD as wildly varied and absolutely intriguing as Costello’s career. With T-Bone Burnett at the helm, Costello recorded both with country music virtuosos as well as his rock band, the Imposters. The sessions also returned the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer to Nashville, the same place he and the Attractions made Almost Blue, nearly 30 years ago. Costello recently took time out of his schedule to chat with Gibson.com about the first time he came to Nashville, his approach to live performances and why he may never make another album.

First, I want to congratulate you for the Grammy nomination for “Kiss Like Your Kiss.”

Somebody sent me a message about that and I said, “What nomination, I’m not even eligible.” [Laughs] So it was kind of a surprise, but I’m very pleased for Lucinda [Williams]. I think it’s one of the most beautiful songs she’s ever written and I just try to stay out of her way. They wanted us both to sing it. Truthfully, it sounds way better on her new record when she sings it alone. No, I’m not being falsely modest. It genuinely does sound better as a solo. But it’s a great song and I’m glad she got acknowledged.

Growing up in England, what was your mental picture of Nashville?

Um, well I don’t know that I had one. I knew that it wasn’t exclusively country music. I did know that because I knew that Dylan had recorded Blonde on Blonde there. I won’t say growing up, but as a young musician, I really loved Charlie Rich. I knew Charlie Rich made records in Nashville and I didn’t really think they were country records even though Billy Sherrill produced a bunch of them, you know? They were kind of like sophisticated R&B records. I guess you’d call it that. Some of them were ballad records. Anyway… and Ray Price, what kind of singer is he? Started out certainly as a country singer, but, I mean, he’s such an elegant singer, there’s all kinds of music. I mean, you know, Hank Garland. Gary Burton, these jazz records. I think it’s just that it’s a rich musical town, that’s the truth. Over the years, there’s been different movements in country music that I’ve retrospectively become aware of. I have my favorites among the recording artists. I have to be honest, of the ones that record in Nashville, I don’t think of so many on the current country charts as being among my favorites, but that’s ever the way, you know? It’s not being made for me to listen to, it’s for somebody else.

When you first came to Nashville, did it meet your expectations?

It did in many ways. I don’t know if you know how it was I first came to Nashville.

No, I don’t.

Well, it was somewhat unusual in that I had released my first album and I think my second album was maybe just out and I was in Europe doing shows. We were probably only playing clubs at that point. And I got a call in Copenhagen to say that I’d been invited to play on a George Jones record, that they were going to cut my song, “Stranger in the House,” which had been an outtake from My Aim is True, my first album. We had left it off the album because, mainly it was a country song in style. And it was reasoned by my managers that it would probably confuse the hell out of the people who had the notion that we were something to do with this new sound that was coming out of London. And I didn’t really care one way or another. I had a ballad on there, “Allison,” so I figured that the record already had a ballad on it, there didn’t necessarily need to be more than one. Most of the songs on the record were up-tempo, mid-tempo, so that seemed to be the right thing, you know? You want to make a nice, clear– I had written all sorts of types of songs before I had started recording, and I had worked out that I probably needed to get my foot in the door with a clear statement of intent. And that was that first record.

So, somebody – well not somebody – an A&R man at Columbia in New York, sent it down to Billy Sherrill. And for whatever reason, they decided I should be included on this duets record. Which was a bold decision on Billy Sherrill’s part, given that I could have been, literally, a flavor of the month. They didn’t know, I could have been around for five minutes with one record out, maybe two records out, my reputation was just starting out. And the next thing I was in the company of Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn and Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and James Taylor and Dr. Hook and the Staple Singers – I mean, it’s an incredible lineup on that record. And I traveled to Nashville to record the vocal and George, for whatever reason, couldn’t make the session. So I ended up playing a guitar solo on the record at Billy Sherrill’s insistence, which was embarrassing for me because I really didn’t rate myself as a guitar player and I didn’t have my guitar with me. I literally got a guitar out of the box and played a solo and Billy Sherrill said he was going to wipe a Pete Drake steel solo to incorporate my– ’cause it was like a split chorus. I forget, I think there might be fiddle on the front of it and then my guitar-kind of thing. So my first appearance on a Nashville record was as a guitar player.

That’s pretty wild.

Very wild, for me. And I went away a little bit disappointed that I didn’t get to meet George and I didn’t think the record– they had cut the track already, so it was all people like “Pig” Robbins and Pete Drake playing on it. It was the A-team and we were in, like, the studio I had read about, B, Columbia B. It turned out then, of course, that it did take quite a while to finish the album. And a year later, I was called and I was back through town and I got to actually do the recording with George. So that was my introduction. It was slightly unusual, you might say, ’cause I suppose there are songwriters who wait their whole life hoping to get covered by George Jones, much less sing on the record with him. I can’t say that I did a sparkling job on the vocal, I did the best I could, you know? And he was great. Still is great.

Well that’s baptism by fire, certainly.

And then I got the idea that I should come back, a couple of years later. I had made five records in quick succession and what was in my heart were songs that were very straight ahead, lyrically. Those were the songs I was writing, and most of the songs I liked at that time happened to be country songs. I didn’t see myself so much as a country singer, but as a ballad singer at that moment, a blue ballad singer. I asked Billy Sherrill to produce the record and we came in ’81 and cut an album in about nine days. We cut about 30 tracks – everything from Stonewall Jackson songs to Johnny Cash songs and Gram Parsons tunes, who had been very instrumental in people like myself, who grew up in England, in appreciating the soulfulness of country music and not just the novelty records that we’d heard on the radio in the ’60s.

That record I did in Studio A at Columbia, because they were refitting B by then. So, really, we could have been anywhere in the world, but Billy was the producer. And I think he was a little bewildered why we wanted to cut all of these old songs, and I think he was also a bit horrified by these kind of pale and trembling young men who would come into the studio in the morning, having stayed up all night doing God knows what. But we certainly managed to cut a record. I didn’t cut it with Nashville musicians, I cut it with– the band was really a band at that point and I wasn’t ready to go and cut a record with anybody else. We brought John McFee from the west coast, who now plays with the Doobie Brothers and played on my first album, to play steel. So we didn’t even use a Nashville steel player. We did have Tommy Jackson, who played fiddle, and there were singers and strings that Billy added. It was sort of our version of country music.

But for you, was it important to make Almost Blue in Nashville, for the sake of the feel of the record?

I think going on location always puts you in the mind. I thought something good would come of it, and it certainly did. We had a big hit record with Jerry Chesnut’s “A Good Year for the Roses” in England, a big, big hit record. The year before we had put out our first album without any single success, Trust. And most people– it was one of the many times we had been written off. It was sort of like, “It’s all over for these guys now.” We had had a pretty unbroken run from late ’77 to early ’80. We’d had three years where everything we made had been in the Top 30 in England and a couple other records that had been near – the second and third singles had had a degree of success. We were pretty much in the pop world in that time.

Of course, we weren’t so well-known in America. We were just getting started. You know, it takes two or three records for people to even known your name in a country so vast. And we spent most of that time touring, probably more far-reaching than most of our contemporaries. We were harder working than most of them. We could play better and we could go further. And people played only on the coasts a lot of the time. They thought they had been to America; they’d only been to New York and Los Angeles. We’d been to Tulsa. We’d been to Biloxi. We went to wherever they would book us, you know? We went right through the middle. On my first tour in ’77, the first date was in San Francisco, the second was in Los Angeles and the third was in New Orleans. And then the second tour, we opened in Austin. We made a point of taking it on, trying to get into the different regions. That way, we saw something of the country that we had heard through music. Of course, it was all different that you had imagined. You couldn’t just look, you couldn’t find the music and I didn’t have any friends to show me where the music was happening. Nashville, perhaps, is a little easier. When we went there, I got to find the stores where you could get the great records and heard a little music. Most of the time, I was probably a little more interested in chasing chambermaids. [Laughs]

Since Almost Blue, you’ve recorded in Nashville a few more times. What brought you back for National Ransom?

I came about five years ago and did a little of the recording for The Delivery Man, which was mostly made in Oxford, Mississippi, to record my version of “The Scarlet Tide” with Emmylou Harris. And then she sang on a song called “Heart Shaped Bruise,” which is my salute to Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. I’ve sung a bunch of those songs with Emmylou in concert. Just recently, I did the Bridge School Benefit and we sang three of the Bryant songs, that were recorded originally by the Everlys. We did “Love Hurts,” “Sleepless Nights” and “Brand New Heartache,” because I had heard them interpreted by Gram and Emmylou, so I loved them twice over.

I came a couple of years ago with T-Bone. We hadn’t made a record together since ’89 with Spike. I had worked a little in the studio with Dennis Crouch and Stuart Duncan on a couple of things that we were doing. I had played at Merlefest with Jerry Douglas and Jim Lauderdale, Sam Bush, Byron House and Larry Campbell in a country lineup. So I kind of tried out the string band lineup in concert – as is often the case, some of the best ideas start out in performance. And then we came and I booked three days at the Sound Emporium with T-Bone and we made the Secret, Profane & Sugarcane album. That was a very deliberately austere record. It was a ballad record, there were a few up-tempo things, but it was mainly ballads, a lot of narrative songs.

But once I took the band out on the road, the following year when the record was issued, of course it turned into a rock and roll band very fast – and because we started adapting some of my older songs to the musical possibilities of that lineup. We had vocal harmonies to a degree that I’d never enjoyed. Davey Faragher in the Imposters sings harmonies, but the Attractions couldn’t sing at all. So, I’d never had vocal harmonies as a major component of my live performance. Obviously, the timbres of those instruments, having soloists like Stuart Duncan and Jerry Douglas and Jeff Taylor on the accordion, and the foundation laid down rhythmically by Dennis Couch and Mike Compton – in some ways the kick and snare of that lineup. And I didn’t miss drums, playing that repertoire with that lineup.

By the end of touring, in ’09, I had written five songs that were recorded in the sessions for National Ransom – two of them written with Jim Lauderdale, I had enjoyed singing with him and we’d come up with those in the last days of the tour. And I called T-Bone and said I’d like to go back in. Then I wrote a bunch more songs which really called for there to be electric guitars and drums and I wanted those people to be Marc Ribot and Steve Thomas and Steve Nieve and, in the end, electric bass called for Davey Faragher as well – so really all of the Imposters and the Sugarcanes were employed in different combinations. And that’s what you hear on the album. It’s not like one band versus the other band, it’s new ensembles, really. You’ve got the Vox Continental organ with the mandolin and the double bass.

As you listen to album, different instruments come together and you might think it’s going this way, but then it goes in a completely different direction.

Obviously, we live in an impatient world where everything is supposed to arrive in single, 99 cent-bite pieces, soundbite kind of thinking. I had seen the end in sight a couple of times. A couple of times I had thought it was the end of the road for recording albums. Not recording, obviously, because we can record willy-nilly. I think it’s certainly true that the album is almost at an end. I figured that was most likely to be the case as we see the end of retail where the thought of stumbling upon an album that’s unknown to you and finding a compendium like you would in a book store. “On this looks interesting,” read the dust jacket, read a few pages, and you’re intrigued enough to buy it – that just doesn’t happen now. I don’t think browsing online does the same thing, because it’s a short step to knowing of its existence to downloading a piece of it, thereby dismantling any structure that was intended. Recorded music will thrive forever more, so long as people have new ideas. But the album compendium is clearly something that’s in some degree has something to do with the medium that it’s riding on, and that medium is now obsolete. I mean, the CD’s been obsolete for… eight, nine years, maybe. There was too much invested in admitting it. And it was way too much swindling in admitting it was a substandard medium to begin with, to which they penalized the artists and willfully overcharged the customer, thereby alienating the customer in the long run.

I think everybody knows in their heart that vinyl is a more attractive entity. It not only sounds better, but you get the artwork, if the artwork is of any consequence, and it’s in a scale that you can read and with scope for the visual design. So, perhaps there will be a case for making collections on vinyl in the future, but I think we’re moving toward instant communication. Or no communication – that’s the other possibility. Come off the grid and just play live. Either way could work. For someone like me, it could definitely be the latter. So, I figured, while nobody was going to stop me, I’d make a double album and if this was going to be the sign-off for the recorded career as I’ve known it, I wouldn’t be doing it in any sort of melancholy or melodramatic way. I would make the record, it would come out, it would exist and then I’d move on to the next reality, which is what I’ve been doing all along anyway, which is playing. I can’t change it. Conforming to the structure of a CD-length thing, whatever that’s supposed to be, as opposed to a four-sided vinyl record, wouldn’t change the fortunes of the record business one way or another. I just put out the 16 songs that I liked the best. And, like you said, there’s a lot of different contrasts, because I would think it’s an affront to the audience to make a record on which all the songs sounded the same. I know and love lots of different moods of music and I have the players to play it. So it obviously is not everyone’s taste to go all these different ways, but if you take time to listen, this record flows very well.

Well, for anyone who is familiar with your work, this shouldn’t come as a great surprise. There’s no need for the “warning label” that was included as a joke on Almost Blue.

I do get a little exasperated sometimes at how much coverage is spent on the trying to fit this into the jigsaw… it’s not strictly speaking appreciation or, in the proper sense of the word, criticism, to simply list the genres that are identified. It doesn’t prove that you’re that observant to simply go, “that is a sort of rock and roll song and this is a sort of a ballad.” What kind of insight is that? That’s self-evident. You just need to put the record on to know that. What’s within the songs and what the songs are about hardly gets commented on with anybody’s music these days. Possibly it’s because people are making such instantaneous judgments and they couldn’t be bothered to think harder than that.

I’ve never made records in reference to the other records I’ve made, except that I’ve probably done that thing and it doesn’t interest me in the immediate future. Then I might return to a form again and try to do something different with it, say, the next time I get to do a rock and roll combo record. I like all of the records I’ve made in that form, but they’re all different. This Year’s Model doesn’t sound like Blood & Chocolate, Blood & Chocolate doesn’t sound like Brutal Youth, Brutal Youth doesn’t sound like Momofuku. They share some of the features of my writing and some of the players. But National Ransom wasn’t set up in competition with King of America than Secret, Profane & Sugarcane was. I don’t understand the impulse to want to put them in a hierarchy. I know that National Ransom is a better record that many others that I’ve made, or that you’ll hear today, but it’s a record that does invite listening, that’s for sure. I think there’s enough things that will hook you right away and that’ll get you involved in it, if you want to.

But, most importantly, it’s just an announcement of a repertoire. Otherwise, I’d be making that announcement from the stage. And that’s probably where I will be making it in the future. You know, “Here’s a new song. Would you like to hear it?” It may cut down the speed of which new material can be disseminated, because, obviously, people are less willing to listen to a lot of new material in a theater. They will listen to one or two songs that are new. So, I think we’ve got to see where the future lies with recorded music and how it’s compiled. I think it’ll be very interesting. I think there will be a case for instantaneous communication with the audience and the new media. But there could be a tendency for some people to go to a live performance, as the best place to drop these songs in. Because the minute they’re performed, they’ll be excerpted on whatever phone camera is running at that moment, so they’ll still exist…

They’ll be on YouTube by the end of the night.

Yeah, that’s all right, that’s all right, because I’m not getting paid anyway, so what difference does it make? It’ll just be an inferior version. It won’t be the one that I would have made. But, I’m not going to spend my own money making records. I don’t have any. So that was a period of time that we lived through. Here it is. It’s over now, and here are the new songs in performance. I could spend 10 years just playing songs that already exist. I could play shows for a year and never repeat myself, you know?

You mentioned that you’re usually only able to do one or two new songs in a show. Do you find that people get restless if you do more than that?

Actually, no it’s not the case, necessarily. I’m just saying that, if you advertise it up-front, people are going to want to know that they’re going to hear the hits. My experience of playing the songs of National Ransom in performance ahead of the release of the album was that every single concert that we played “Jimmie Standing in the Rain” or “Slow Drag with Josephine,” it stole the show. I mean, I played a two-hour show with the Dallas Symphony, two nights, actually, in the summer. And, as an encore, I came out and played “Josephine” on my own, without a microphone, and completely upstaged everything. Now, there’s a certain trick to doing something that’s very, very immediate like that. Singing directly to people has a certain showman aspect to it, but the song has to work, as well.

I opened a show recently with “Bullets for the New-Born King.” Now that’s not a typical opener, is it? It’s a ballad. And it really created a great mood, and, what it did, it created– people leaned forward in their chairs. And then, when we hit them with the first rhythmic number, it kind of upped the… So, I now have a group of songs which can change the architecture of the show quite a bit. I’ve found that over the last little while, taking a moment to play, whether it’s an acoustic guitar version of “Bedlam” or “Stations of the Cross” or “One Bell Ringing” – these songs can capture a moment. And that’s something you share with 1,500 or 2,000 or 3,000 people in a theater. That’s very different than shooting something out into the void of a recorded medium, never knowing for a moment how people are listening – whether they are listening with intent and concentration, or if they’re half-hearing it and saying, “Well, it hasn’t got much of a beat.” Well, that’s not what it’s about, you know? But if you’re in a room and you’re in control of the mood and people are with you and listening, that’s a very persuasive thing, that we’re all feeling something about what’s going on in that moment. This is what makes live performance… I don’t want to say superior, but richer and more nuanced than anything you’re capable of recording on a record.

It’s all about the moment, about what’s happening right now.

Well, that’s all recordings are. They’re that moment. That’s why we record the way we do, as performances, rather than these highly crafted records – some of which I’ve made and enjoyed making. But right now, I don’t hear recording that way. And, as the resources become less and less for recording, there can only ever be sketches in the future, until there’s a new paradigm. So, I think that’s why I wanted to take full advantage of the richness of the possibilities of National Ransom, because I literally don’t know when we’re going to do this again. Because, to gather those musicians together to make a recording that’s going to be issued on a disc is a very different thing than bringing those musicians together to go on stage and play. The one thing is a viable commercial equation and the other isn’t.

The Right Rev. Jimmy Quickly says

"Happy Christmas To All And To All A Good Night"...

Wishing You An Improbably Peaceful 2011"

Elvis Costello's National Ransom Set For Release October 25th International

Elvis Costello's National Ransom Set For Release October 25th International & November 2nd U.S.A
From Hear Music/Concord Music Group;
Produced By T Bone Burnett

All members of The Imposters and The Sugarcanes feature in a wide variety of groovy new combos with guests Vince Gill, Marc Ribot, Buddy Miller and Leon Russell

"Around the time the killing stopped on Wall St.
You couldn't hold me, baby, with anything but contempt"

The record is led off by the loud electric guitar of Marc Ribot in the left channel and the lap-steel of Jerry Douglas in the right channel. Steve Nieve enters on the Vox Continental organ, while the rhythm section consists of Dennis Crouch on double bass and Pete Thomas on drums. National Ransom (Hear Music/Concord Music Group) is the name of the album and also a rock and roll song, "For the bankrupt times, whenever they may be," as Costello recently described it.

National Ransom, recorded in a total of eleven days at Sound Emporium, Nashville and Village Recorders, Los Angeles was produced by T Bone Burnett and engineered and mixed by Michael Piersante at Electromagetic, Los Angeles.

All of these songs are newly composed by Costello with the exception of "I Lost You," co-written with Jim Lauderdale and "All These Strangers," for which Costello and T Bone Burnett collaborated on the lyrics. Costello and Burnett also provide the lyrics for "My Lovely Jezebel," a Leon Russell rock and roll tune and he leads Thomas/Crouch/Ribot combo from the piano.

"Loose change lonely, not the right amount"

The album’s second track, "Jimmie Standing In The Rain," recalls the misfortunes of a cowboy singer playing the northern English musical halls in 1937. The music owes a little something to that time. The ensemble for this song includes: the acoustic guitar of Marc Ribot, violinist Stuart Duncan, Dennis Crouch on double bass and The Sugarcanes' accordionist Jeff Taylor playing piano. Darrell Leonard adds the trumpet commentary.

"Farewell my little ballyhooo, you broke my heart in two"

"A Slow Drag With Josephine" described by Costello as "rock and roll, as it sounded in 1921" has been a highlight of recent Costello live shows. Mandolinist, Mike Compton sings the close vocal harmony. On "Five Small Words," The Imposters rhythm section – Davey Faragher and Pete Thomas – combine with the twin electric guitars of The Coward Brothers. Howard Coward also plays Farfisa organ, while Mike Compton once again provides the vocal harmony.

“The water came up to the eaves
You’d think that someone had opened a valve
It’s too soon to stay now and too late to leave
So spare your remorse all the way up to Calvary”

“Stations Of The Cross” – in which disasters are regarded from a safe and depraved distance and “Church Underground” – tracing the life of a nightclub singer from obscurity through infamy to a harsh final redemption - are arranged around Steve Nieve’s grand piano with Stuart Duncan’s electric violin or viola, Jerry Douglas' lap-steel and the Crouch/Thomas rhythm section. The latter song also features a four-piece section of flugel horn, trombones and baritone saxophone, arranged by Darrell Leonard.

"Turn up the music just to turn it down.
The trivial secrets buried with the profound"

Despite the presence of lap-steel, mandolin, dobro and fiddle throughout the record, the music probably owes more to the rhythms and harmonies of R&B, or even Gospel music, than to Bluegrass. Vince Gill adds a beautiful vocal harmony part to the chorus of a string-band tune, "Dr. Watson, I Presume," on which the Sugarcanes full instrumental line-up is heard together with Pete Thomas, Marc Ribot and the baritone guitar of Buddy Miller, who also sings on the title cut.

The ballad accompaniments range from a single acoustic guitar and double bass on "Bullets For The New-Born King" - a song in the voice of a regretful assassin - to a hushed 21-piece ensemble for, "You Hung The Moon" - a song about a séance held in 1919 as a family struggle with the loss of a soldier executed for desertion in the First World War.

"Lower the hood on his last lament, dash him down on the cold cement"

"One Bell Ringing," in which a man has dreams of his own interrogation and demise is set in 2007. The song hears Costello's finger-picked guitar and Dennis Crouch's double bass augmented by singer's own arrangement for bass trumpet, alto flute and bass clarinet.

Asked if National Ransom’s songs and their characters were set in specific times and places, Costello said, "Yes but I'd be happy if you imagine them any time you want."

Speaking of the now and then, the album closes with "A Voice In The Dark", a hopeful, good humoured song that is the lyrical bookend to the harum-scarum of "National Ransom"

"King's reign beneath umbrellas
Hide pennies down in cellars
And money pours down and yet
Not everyone gets soaking wet"

Tony Millionaire once again provides the ink illustration for the cover.

National Ransom Track List
1. National Ransom
2. Jimmie Standing in the Rain
3. Stations of the Cross
4. A Slow Drag With Josephine
5. Five Small Words
6. Church Underground
7. You Hung the Moon
8. Bullets for the New-Born King
9. I Lost You
10. Dr Watson, I Presume
11. One Bell Ringing
12. The Spell That You Cast
13. That's Not The Part of Him You're Leaving
14. My Lovely Jezebel
15. All These Strangers
16. A Voice In The Dark

Elvis Costello Performs Live On The Geoff Lloyd Hometime Show

Elvis Costello joins Geoff Lloyd to play a live session. Includes the tracks "A Slow Drag With Josephine", "Every Day I Write The Book", "Condemned Man/Watching The Detectives" and "Pennies From Heaven/A Voice In The Dark". Click to watch the video....

Elvis Costello performs Live on BBC Radio 5 Live with Richard Bacon.

Widely regarded as one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation, Elvis Costello talks about his career and 33rd album release - National Ransom. He discusses the state of the music industry and the impact of shows like the X Factor all live on BBc Radio 5 Live with Richard Bacon ... More...

Garrison Keillor Welcomes Elvis Costello To A Prairie Home Companion's Town Hall Shows

Keillor Welcomes Costello To A Prairie Home Companion's Town Hall Shows, December 3rd and 4th

(NEW YORK) Garrison Keillor and crew are heading into a six-show run in New York at The Town Hall (West 43^rd Street between 6th Avenue and Broadway).

While tickets for the regular APHC live broadcasts on December 4, 11, and 18 at 5:45 p.m. are all but gone, there are still great seats available for three nonbroadcast performances — all the fun, without the clock — on December 3, 10, and 17 at 8:00 p.m.

On Friday, December 3 (and Saturday, December 4), Garrison welcomes Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Elvis Costello and Dublin-born guitarist John Doyle. Actress Sue Scott, Tim Russell (the man of many voices), and sound-effects wizard Fred Newman will be on hand as usual, along with the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band, led by pianist Rich Dworsky. And as always, there’s a chance to catch up on the news from Lake Wobegon during Keillor’s signature monologue.

Currently in its 37^th season, A Prairie Home Companion has made the fictional small town of Lake Wobegon part of American popular culture. The show is broadcast on close to 600 public radio stations nationwide, with a weekly audience that tops 4.3 million listeners. The program can also be heard on the Armed Forces Network Europe, the Far East Network, and in dozens of European cities via the Astra satellite network.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Go to www.prairiehome.org

Elvis Costello AOL Sessions

Elvis Costello AOL sessions is now live on AOL

Click Here to see more...

"Spectacle" wins a Gemini Award in Toronto

Elvis Costello, played his song, Slow Drag with Josephine, with Ron Sexsmith and Feist. Costello then won the Gemini Award for best talk show for Spectacle: Elvis Costello With….

"It's been an incredible opportunity to talk with friends and people I didn't know before the show and see some incredible performances," he said, recalling in particular a show that featured Jesse Winchester as guest. He also spoke of Kris Kristofferson's moving performance of Sunday Morning Coming Down.

"It's been remarkable to me that when I go out to the shops in Vancouver, people of all ages come up and talk to me about the show," Costello added.

Elvis Costello performs "Jimmy Standing in the Rain"

The Bridge School Benefit Concert 2010

Rolling Stone:

Costello brought out Emmylou Harris for his entire set, beginning with a lovely duet on Neil Young’s “Tell Me Why.” They also song the Everly Brothers song “Love Hurts,” which Harris performed with Gram Parsons shortly before his death. Pegi Young and Lucinda Williams joined Costello for a powerful “Scarlet Tide.” “I found a razor blade since I first played here twenty years ago,” Costello said, in one of the night’s lighter moments. “Back then I looked like the Wolfman. I would have kept it had I known the Werewolf look was going to come back.”

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/51942/224972

Spin:

Costello remains a consummate songwriter and entertainer: Saturday night he accommodated Emmylou Harris, who wasn't on the bill but contributed sweet harmony vocals throughout his set to songs like the standard "Love Hurts." Sunday afternoon a well-dressed Costello premiered songs from his excellent forthcoming album National Ransom; his only oldie was set opener "Brilliant Mistake.

http://www.spin.com/articles/buffalo-springfield-pearl-jam-shine-bridge-school

Please Mr. Postman

I never quite got over finding a note from Solomon Burke in my morning mail. It was electronic mail at that. But this was no hoax, here were good wishes on the occasion of birth of my twin boys from a man who had seemed, until quite recently, like an unattainable name on a record jacket.

We first met in 2002, during the sessions for the “Don’t Give Up On Me” album, for which I had written a song called “The Judgment”.

I’d expected only to be a witness at the studio but one peculiar phrase in the song seemed to be tripping everyone up, so the producer, Joe Henry, called me to the microphone to illustrate how vocal line was supposed to fall.

I’ll let you imagine how intimidating it was to “illustrate” singing to Solomon Burke with him sitting three feet away in the vocal booth.

Solomon soon made the song his very own. His enthusiasm and his dreams were expansive. By the end of the evening, he was hatching a plan to book the Royal Albert Hall and stage “The Judgment” as an opera.

And so it was that we became occasional correspondents.

His notes always arrived out of the blue, filled with love and kindness and questions about our young sons, to whom he appointed himself an honorary uncle, one of the lesser known titles that he wore, along with the “King of Rock and Soul”.

Then the subject of love and children were things on which he spoke with considerable authority.

When I first heard one of his indelible Atlantic sides on a compilation album many years ago, I could not have imagined ever meeting such a man. Photographs revealed an outlandish presence in ermine-trimmed robes and crown, while his records were dominated by a staggeringly beautiful voice.

It is true that after a while he was not always best served by writers and producers and could drift from public view but then advocates like the writer, Peter Guralnick were able to portray the greater complexities of his character; the anarchic humour in his showmanship and his still untapped musical promise.

Solomon would therefore be “re-discovered” on several occasions although he’d never been lost in the first place.

He astounded those who had never heard him before with a command over the audience that drew on his experience in the ministry. Regardless of the material, sheer beauty of his voice could be quite overwhelming.

I will not pretend to have known anything unique about Solomon other than that which is obvious to ears and eyes but feel blessed to have known him at all.

His last dispatch was just this summer. I found myself closing a European tour at a jazz festival outside Lisbon, the night before Solomon was appearing and was disappointed that I would his miss show.

Then a note arrived. Solomon was looking for me. I called the number provided and we talked for good while. These are notes that I’m going to miss and words that I will always remember.

In the last days, I’ve located the picture of us backstage on the one occasion I found myself on a bill with Solomon Burke. In fact it turned out to be like something that happens only in a dream.

The night was a salute to Sam Cooke organized by the Roll And Roll Hall Of Fame in Cleveland. Among the people on the bill were William Bell, The Manhattans, Cissy Houston and my old pal Peter Wolf. I was handed the unenviable task of performing between Solomon and Aretha Franklin.

I speculated that the organizers wanted to avoid the possibility of any old rivalries. Nevertheless, when I was shown the running order my blood ran cold.

“I have to follow Solomon Burke? Are you drunk?”

When the moment of truth arrived, Solomon sat, resplendent on his throne. He spoke about his friendship with Sam Cooke and how he had handed a torch to Solomon…

“And tonight, I am handing it to my son!”

The vocal was very ably delivered but Solomon didn’t utter another sound. He was making all manner of dramatic gestures in the background but not singing one note. I wondered if he might have a cold or some other reason for holding back but at that moment it felt like a bullet dodged.

I’d chosen two lesser-known songs from the Sam Cooke catalogue, reasoning that I had a better chance of not making a fool of myself, if fewer people had Sam’s voice in their head.

The producers then prevailed on me also perform, “Bring It On Home” but as this was in two-part harmony with Otis Clay, I knew together we could set the scene for the Queen Of Soul without too much disgrace.

Aretha passed over “You Send Me” and that other Sam Cooke classics she had covered for her short set but sang very beautifully. It was only during her last scheduled number of the evening that the entire bill was summoned backstage for participation in an unrehearsed finale.

As Aretha’s ovation subsided and she returned to her dressing room, Solomon was once again revealed and the band stuck up “A Change Is Gonna Come”

This time he did sing.

Flawlessly.

The cast assembled in the wings and a plan quickly hatched that we would join Solomon in the final choruses. Otis Clay and I happened to be wearing matching evening dress, so were detailed to lead the impromptu procession.

We had no sooner been given the signal to enter than strong hands yanked us back into the shadows by collar of our tuxedo jackets.

Somebody said, “Look!”

Aretha had apparently heard the finale start up and wasn’t going to let anyone else steal the show. She sailed out from the wings along the lip of the stage, without her shoes, Peter Wolf acting as her trainbearer and suddenly the two finest singers of their generation were trading lines on “A Change Is Gonna Come”

A tap on the shoulder came again. It was our cue to join the fray.

A voice said, “Are you crazy? I’m not going out there”.

It might have been me.

It might have been any of us.

I don’t know how many times Aretha and Solomon sang round the song before we were eventually pushed out into the spotlight.

By this time, Aretha was really wailing and Solomon had tears rolling down his cheeks, declaiming, “Bring the boys home” like a preacher, reworking the song as plea for sanity during the never-ending war.

Unlike so many things today, none of these scenes seem to have been caught on camera. They live in the memories of those present.

Like the great performances that Solomon gave, when the eyes of the larger audiences were turned elsewhere and the songs that he recorded that are still to be re-discovered, they are, in the words of his first big hit, “Just Out Of Reach”.

Perhaps some mysteries just work out that way but here’s a little backstage memento from that night; Solomon, Wolf and I sending birthday greetings to a mutual friend.

The Speaking Clock Revue

T Bone Burnett ToPremiere The Speaking Clock Revue
With Two October Multi-Artist Concerts inBoston and New York
To Benefit Music And Arts Education In Public Schools

Both Shows To Be Presented In Association With Participant Media
And Forthcoming Waiting For “Superman” Documentary Film

     T BoneBurnett will premiere The Speaking ClockRevue – a multi-artist concert extravaganza –on October 16 at the Wang Center in Boston and October 20 at the Beacon Theaterin New York City. Both evenings of the Revue will feature performances byElton John & Leon Russell, JohnMellencamp, Elvis Costello, Gregg Allman, Ralph Stanley, Jeff Bridges, Punch Brothers, Karen Elson, and newcomers TheSecret Sisters. In addition, Neko Case and Jim James from My MorningJacket will join the lineup in Boston and New Yorkrespectively.

    The concerts will be presentedin a revue format with a house band consisting of the players featured onnumerous Burnett-produced recordings. Tickets for The Speaking ClockRevue will go on sale Monday, September 27 at noon,through Ticketmaster (http://ticketmaster.com).

    This edition of The SpeakingClock Revue is presented with Participant Media inconjunction with the release of the documentary film Waiting For “Superman”,from Academy Award-winning filmmaker DavisGuggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud), which follows a handful of promising students through a U.S.public school system and offers hope by exploring innovative approaches byeducation reformers who refuse to leave their students behind. All netproceeds from these shows will be donated to The Participant Foundation tosupport music and arts education programming in public schools.

    In conceiving The SpeakingClock Revue, Burnett aims to bring to the livestage a musical event that conveys the excitement he and his fellow musiciansexperience when creating music in the recording studio. “The privacy and the intimacy of the studio affordartists the freedom to create, but something thrilling happens in getting awayfrom the machines and into the live communication of real time storytelling inthe larger community. The firsttour I went on, my first job in show business, was on The Rolling ThunderRevue, and I've come back to that type of collaborative and extraordinarilyrewarding experience from time to time. We are looking forward with greatanticipation to getting The Speaking Clock Revue up and running this fall andcontinuing it in the years to come,” he said.

Burnett’s decision to join with Participant Media to donate all netproceeds from the concerts to support music and arts education came after hesaw an early screening of Waiting for” Superman”. As he explains, “This film deals most powerfully with the troublingstate of public education in the United States, and offers solutions and theopportunity to be part of those solutions. I am very grateful to themusicians who are giving so generously of their time and talents for theseshows, and for joining with the Participant Foundations to work for a betterworld.”

   “T-Bone has joined with an amazing lineupof musical artists who believe music and arts education should be available toevery student in America.” said Jim Berk, CEO of Participant Media andthe Participant Foundation, “These two live events, inspired by Waiting for “Superman”,provide the chance for us to join together toinsure that this occurs”

    T Bone Burnett is a 10-time GrammyAward winner whose 40 years of experience in music and entertainment haveearned him an unparalleled reputation as a first-rate innovative artist,songwriter, producer, performer, concert producer, record company owner andartists’ advocate.

    Burnett has recentlycollaborated with nearly all of the performers on The Speaking Clock Revue. The Union, from Elton Johnand Leon Russell was produced by Burnett and will be released October 17 onDecca Records. John Mellencamp’s No Better Than This was produced by Burnett, in mono, and was the first such album in46 years to hit the Billboard Top 10 when it was released August 17 on RounderRecords. Elvis Costello’s mostrecent album, Secret, Profane & Sugarcane,and his forthcoming National Ransom, both onConcord Records, were produced by Burnett. Gregg Allman’s first solo album since 1997 was produced byBurnett and will be released in early 2011, also by Rounder Records.

Music pioneer Ralph Stanley andBurnett have collaborated numerous times over the past decade, including theirstudio work on the O Brother, Where Art Thou?soundtrack and Stanley’s performances on the Burnett-produced tours, DownFrom The Mountain and The Great High Mountain.

    Neko Case has previously performed with T Bone onstage, and has recentlyparticipated in two projects produced by Burnett: Jakob Dylan’s most recent album, Women & Country, and the forthcoming soundtrack to Ghostbrothers Of DarklandCounty, a play with music written by Stephen Kingand John Mellencamp. Burnett has long been an admirer of Jim James from MyMorning Jacket, and is looking forward to him joining the lineup for the NewYork show.

    Burnett and Jeff Bridgescollaborated on the film, Crazy Heart, whichgarnered numerous acting and music awards this year, including Oscars for bothBridges (Best Actor) and Burnett (Best Original song – with Ryan Bingham – for“The Weary Kind”).

    The Secret Sisters self-titleddebut album, set for an October 5 release, was Executive Produced by Burnett andis being released on his newly created Beladroit imprint throughUniversal/Republic Records.

Both Punch Brothers and Karen Elsonare two relatively new artists that Burnett admires, and felt they would makegreat additions to The Speaking Clock Revue. Progressive string band Punch Brothers released their second album, Antifogmatic, on Nonesuch Records in June, while singer/songwriter Elson released her debutalbum, The Ghost Who Walks, on Third ManRecords in May to great critical acclaim.

About Participant Media:

Participant Media is a Los Angeles-based entertainmentcompany that focuses on socially relevant, commercially viable feature films,documentaries and television, as well as publishing, digital media, live eventsand music. Participant’s films include The Kite Runner, CharlieWilson’s War, , An Inconvenient Truth, Good Night and Good Luck., The Visitor,The Soloist, Food, Inc., The Cove, The Informant!, The Crazies, Oceans,Countdown to Zero, Waiting for “Superman” and FairGame. The Participant Foundation exists tosupport programs which support a sustainable and peaceful world. For more information, go to www.partricipantmedia.com.

EXPOSE!!!

“Moon just left a note saying he was going to the desert to shoot snakes but frankly I’m worried about his state of mind”

These words were a rare public utterance by Miriam Cooney, the woman usually described by her Hollywood public relations boss, as “My Girl Monday-To-Friday-Including-High-Days-And-Holidays”

They are a footnote to a bizarre and rather poignant feud brewing between two distinct and highly eccentric personalities, Ernest Vivian “Moon” Conway and The Right Reverend Jimmy Quickly, each vying for position in the increasingly desperate, twilit world of showbusiness.

“If they can break into the computer at the Pentagon, then I suppose it is entirely possible that this supposed gentleman of the cloth can pass himself off as the legitimate voice of one of our most esteemed clients”, continued Miss Cooney.

Having just spent several hours in the company of a certain formerly angry and perpetually guilty man, who shall remain nameless, I can attest to the level of self-delusion at play in the world of such public relationships and image manipulation.

Cooney, who provides the modern communication skills for an irascible boss, resolutely wedded to the ribbon typewriter and fountain pen as the tools of his trade, is referring the fact that the Rev. Quickly has issued a number of curious and conflicting media statements via the Internet that were not sanctioned either by Moon Conway or the artists he represents.

In truth, their “esteemed clients” now number far more of those with careers that might-have-been rather than any that are about-to-be.

Still, Miriam Cooney continues her tale of woe.

“Mr. Conway even took his pearl-handled revolver with him; the one that he swore was given to him by Tex Ritter. I hope he doesn’t attempt anything rash”

Moments latter, in an uncharacteristic moment of disloyalty, she concedes that the pistol is probably a novelty store fake, although this admission betrays a genuine concern and the affection and gratitude that she feels towards Conway.

“Make no mistake, the man has imagination and in it he has the libido of a seventeen year old but he’s lived hard”, Cooney said of the 72-year old Moon Conway.

“He actually bears the constitution of a man ten years his senior. I don’t like the idea of him wandering out there in dust, firing blanks into the rocks”.

So, who or what could have triggered the extraordinary flight of this larger than life character, throwing what some might say is the kind of laughable tantrum more befitting one his charges?

The answer would seem to be “The Right Reverend” Jimmy Quickly. Given the spiritual concerns of some of my readers, I have placed his clerical title in quotation marks, as its provenance seems somewhat dubious.

What can be established is that Jimmy Quickly was briefly a student at a Jesuit seminary and at that time, also a promising amateur pugilist in the bantamweight class.

Unfortunately, these twin vocations did not prove to compatible. This was not due to any goodwill towards all men but because he was discovered to be running a betting syndicate during a round-robin tournament against Church of English curates and a team of visiting Methodist missionaries.

A talent for invention and disguise came to Jimmy Quickly’s aid upon expulsion from college. Despite being of modest background and means, he had always assumed the airs and manners of the officer class.

One may deduce that as a small boy, he had observed the way officers advanced socially compared to how his hard-working father, a quartermaster in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, fared during a posting to late-Colonial Kenya.

Although the Quickly family hailed from Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, his father, Con and mother, May had met at a dance near her home in Leytonstone.

In his later occupation, Quickly found use of dropping into the argot of these Irish and East London societies without truly belonging to either.

He also quickly realized the advantage of adopting grand salutations such as “My Dear Boy” and appearing to possess the fastidious formal manners of the Upper Classes, while occasionally lapsing into a highly theatrical composite of blarney and rhyming slang that bore little relationship to the way people actually spoke.

This shape shifting and spiritual restlessness inevitably led Jimmy Quickly to a world in which disguise and illusion were positively valued and even passed as currency.

After drifting through the late 1960s in a series of deadening clerical jobs, it was 1972 that Quickly happened to attend a performance by the rightly forgotten theatrical rock group, The Hand-Stitched Houndstooth Revival.

The stuttering fortunes of the ensemble made them vulnerable to the opportunistic myth making of Jimmy Quickly in his newly invented persona as a promoter and road manager.

Realizing that the group was too unwieldy in scale to prosper, Quickly used another of his talents to first seduce, make pregnant and then abandon, the largely decorative, lead singer, Sable Melchett.

Other superfluous instrumentalists, such as percussionist and dancer, Nobby Bendix were equally cruelly cast aside. Bendix later sold his story to the newspapers but eked out a pitiful existence with the proceeds until his violent death in a drug-related crime incident.

By then the group had fluked a massive pan-European hit, when an excerpt from one of their concept albums was re-mixed and used as the theme for a beer commercial. H.H.R. woke up to find that they possessed none of the rights to either their composition or the hit recording.

Their novice manager absconded to the United States with the spoils of success and bartered this solitary hit for a career in the record industry during vastly more lucrative times.

Jimmy Quickly found a niche in publicity and later, in A&R, a realm of charlatans studded with the occasional visionary. Though he was clearly a mountebank of the first water, Quickly also possessed a rare cunning.

When his first American discovery, a prodigiously talented but anti-social group known as The Plunderers proved too ugly for public consumption, he signed them to secrecy agreements and used them as ghost musicians and singers for countless rock and pop novelty hits.

This single ruthless act and the royalties that he no doubt annexed financed a gilded life in which Jimmy Quickly ran with infinitely more talented artists and scene-makers, even those attached to competing record companies.

Any gathering worth the name saw him offer his ready wit and flattery along with a constant supply of pills, powder and potions.

There was a time in the mid-80s when “Going for a Jimmy” became watchwords for seeking some kind of narcotic or erotic pleasure in the inner circle of a particular, peculiar kind of party.

Needless to say, it did not take long for a spiritual crisis to overwhelm the fallen would-be priest.

After a spectacularly decadent publicity jaunt to an undisclosed location in Bolivia, during which he managed to see journalists from five major publications briefly held for ransom by Maoist guerrillas, a chastened Quickly claimed that he was entering the ministry.

The Church Of Free-Locution and Vision, known to cynics as the “Church of Free-Love and Loading”, was one of a number of mail-order ministries unburdened by the presence of an over-bearing deity or the need to pay taxes.

For a while, the now pious “Minister Of Information” flourished anew, acting as a spiritual guide and offering decorative advice to the vacuous and vulgar while providing alibis for any penitent drunks on the roster or in the company boardroom.

However, as the greedy python began consuming itself, the record industry that had once welcomed the audacity and barefaced cheek of the younger Jimmy Quickly, found less use for such an obvious sham artist even if he was wearing a dog collar and spouting incorrectly attributed passages of scripture and obscure philosophical tropes.

Still, most of Quickly’s indiscretions seem to have been buried in the collective amnesia of former clients, lovers and even among his many enemies in record company ranks.

The latter were apparently willing to buy his silence with a substantial stipend in the guise of numerous, fruitless consultancy contracts. That is until the purse was finally emptied over the last years of financial disaster.

What troubles this commentator is not that this dubious character has surfaced again and is allegedly stealing business from a far from admirable rival but that having run out of places to tell his tallest tales, it appears that The Right Reverend Jimmy Quickly has lately discovered that the World Wide Web could be one ready made for his lies.

While he enjoys fraudulent access to the service of apparently legitimate announcements about Moon Conway’s clientele, his dispatches should be treated with caution and suspicion, even as they raise a smile.

Odile W. Husband (neé O’Súlleabháin) is the popular music correspondent of “The Inquisitor” - an independent catholic journal on all matters cultural, satirical and spiritual.

Elvis Costello accelerates to 78 rpm for 'National Ransom' LA Times

Los Angeles Times: Randy Lewis :21.09.10

Elvis Costello's forthcoming album, “National Ransom,” mines a century’s worth of pop music history in both the characters, scenarios and themes in his songs, and in the atmospheric sound that producer T Bone Burnett has given the record.

So it makes perfect sense that Costello, a voracious fan of music of all styles, would want to add a vintage touch of some kind in conjunction with the album’s release come Nov. 2.

Vinyl LP version? Everyone’s doing that nowadays, so Costello is going one step beyond: He’s releasing four songs on a pair of 78 rpm discs.

A whimsical announcement about the 78s has been posted on Costello’s website, sounding much like the fancifully stylized introductions he gives his musical guests on the Sundance Channel “Spectacle” show:

“Lupe-O-Tone -- Purveyors of fine flat phonograph records & cylinders since 1913. Our motto is ‘Ego sum satus infremo.’ Lupe-O-Tone present 78 rpm discs in full Lycanthropic Sound. …‘A Slow Dance With Josephine’ b/w ‘You Hung the Moon’ and ‘Jimmie Standing in the Rain’ b/w ‘A Voice in the Dark,’ by the Lupotonians with vocal refrain by Elvis Costello.”

The 78s will be pressed in limited editions of 25 copies, each signed by Costello. No price is mentioned, but the announcement promises more details to come.

"She woke up and called him "Charlie" by mistake"

"Moon Conway says, "She woke up and called him "Charlie" by mistake". Go to www.lupe-o-tone.com to find out why"

Elvis Costello In Conversation With Odile W. Husband The Epilogue

OWH: “My Lovely Jezebel” sounds like it was fun to make. Had you seen Leon Russell perform before and what was it like to work with him?

EC: I saw Leon Russell headlining at the Liverpool Empire. It must have been in 1971 or 1972. Freddie King opened the show. Then as now, Leon made everything happen when he took the stage. For heavens sake, his rock and roll credits could fill up a big inscribed monolith, if they still made such things.

We had met just once before the evening on which T Bone, Leon and I wrote “My Lovely Jezebel”.

That was in the wings at Willie Nelson’s 70th Birthday Show. Leon was standing there quietly, while all sorts of singers and tap-dancers came and went. Then he went out on stage and played his part in the absolute highlight of the show; a trio version of his composition, “Song For You” with Willie and Ray Charles. It was one of the greatest things I’ve ever witnessed.

OWH: When Sir Elton John was the guest on your television show, “Spectacle”, he spent a good portion of the interview talking about Leon Russell’s music. Did this have anything to do with their recent collaboration?

EC: Well, that isn’t for me to say but it wouldn’t have required a Pauline conversion. Leon’s music clearly means the world to him.

In fact, when they were recording, “The Union” together, I went down to the studio to visit and T Bone introduced me to Leon properly.

Elton had to cut out early that evening, so T Bone suggested the three of us write a song.

First off, we sat around with three guitars but Leon said, he just liked to play the blues on that thing, so we retired to the piano booth, which was what I really had in mind all along.

Moments later, Leon had come up with the music for “My Lovely Jezebel”. I improvised a few lines of the lyric and T Bone later sent me a note with a few more lyrics. I carried a rough tape of this off with me to my next engagement in St. Paul.

It was about 11.30, on the next evening when a very polite Minnesotan voice called my room and asked me to keep the noise down.

I’d apparently been singing along with the demo tape wearing headphones and hadn’t realized that I was serenading the entire floor of the hotel.

I must have sounded like a madman, trying one line of the chorus and then half a verse, then the refrain again.

I’m glad to say that once Leon got into the studio in Nashville and started leading the band, the song sounded a lot less berserk than it did to the desk clerk.

OWH: It’s great to hear Leon take that closing piano solo

EC: Yes, I think that’s what Hoagy Carmichael would have sounded like if he’d played rock and roll.

OWH: I mentioned “Spectacle” a while back. Are you excited about the prospect of “Season Three”?

EC: The entire adventure has been filled with unbeatable, unrepeatable moments but when I went out to speak with the audience before we started this incredible four-hour taping the episodes with Bruce Springsteen, I told them I was determined to enjoy myself as if it were my last show as host.

Doing any show as if it is your last or even your first, is not a bad frame of mind to be in and for now it seems we are putting up the test-card until all of the necessary pieces fall into place again.

OWH: So, the show might return at later date.

EC: Well, it is essential we add something of worth to the twenty all ready completed.

When I am home in Canada, minding my own business in the grocery store or the tobacconist, barely a day goes by without someone mentioning the show and artists they may have enjoyed or even discovered. That’s quite remarkable.

Finding a way to present people like Jesse Winchester to the broader audience he so richly deserves and sharing a stage with Ray Lamontagne, Kris Kristofferson, John Prine, well, all of the guests really, has been a privilege.

OWH: Do you have a favourite episode?

EC: There are moments I like in all of them and others where I’m clearly finding my way but I’m thankful because those people gave me a chance.

The show with Smokey Robinson from Season One was pretty thrilling to do and the show with Allen Toussaint, Richard Thompson, Nick Lowe and Levon Helm seemed to sum up what we were about in Season Two.

I really appreciated Levon going for the “Mister Ed” routine, as he was under doctor’s orders not to speak.

OWH: The “Mister Ed” routine?

EC: “Mister Ed” used to communicate by beating his hooves in the dust, when not actually talking.

When it transpired on the day that Levon was forbidden to speak as well as sing, due to vocal strain, it did temporarily throw the structure of four-part show into chaos.

He was a good sport to go along with idea of giving me a drum fill in response to the names of drummers who I imagined he admired:

“Earl Palmer” – Rat-Tat-Sssht-Tata-Tat-Te-Ta-Tat-Tat-Tat-Crash!!!

“Jimmy Lee Keltner” as he calls him – Diggity-Boom-Dack-Dack-A-Dum!!!

“Spider Kilpatrick”…

Well, you get the idea…

OWH: And your favourite musical numbers from each season?

EC: Oh, that’s nearly impossible.

Okay, of my own performances from Season One perhaps, “Ballad Of A Well Known Gun” from the very first show with Elton and “Baby Let’s Play House” from the President Clinton show just because of the James Burton guitar solos,

My favourite moments from the guests have to be Kris doing, “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and oddly enough, Smokey doing a cover of “Don’t Know Why” and absolutely killing it.

In Season Two, everyone’s favourite performance seemed to be Jesse Winchester’s “Sham-A-Ling-Dong-Ding” but “The Weight” was pretty terrific.

I loved the way Allen Toussaint took the “Go Down Miss Moses” verse. The “Pops” verse as my wife calls it, because she loves the way Pops Staples sings it in “The Last Waltz”.

Then I have to throw my hat in the air for the way the Imposters stepped up behind Bono and Edge and again with Bruce at either end of the season. I think all concerned enjoyed playing together.

OWH: The new album cover, like the previous one, is an illustration by Tony Millionaire. The drawing for “National Ransom” reflects the music by being more aggressive and filled with small details, symbols and signs. How much information did you give Tony to get that drawing?

EC: I sent Tony the music and I suppose he drew what he heard. The first notion was to take the black bird from the cover of “Secret, Profane & Sugarcane” and portray him rampant, heraldically speaking.

That wouldn’t have quite done the job. Then we hit on the wolf.

We discussed Tony's early sketches and he took it from there; the use of symbols found on currency, objects paid for with blood or money in ever-inflating denominations.

I couldn’t imagine anything that could be better suited.

OWH: Tony Millionaire’s illustration would look good on an L.P. jacket

EC: It will.

You can never be certain about these things going in but I always thought that "National Ransom" was composed as a double album, so you might say that the vinyl edition is the real record.

We are living through a "duck and cover" era in the commerce of music, so you don't want to say these things up ahead or people will never come out from under their desks again.

Which is why we were fortunate to locate an outfit like Lupe-O-Tone.

OWH: I read a slightly cryptic announcement that something called "Lupe-O-Tone" was issuing a very limited edition of 78-rpm pressings of songs included on "National Ransom". I took this to be a hoax.

EC: It most certainly is not. The wax is cooling as we speak. The needle is ready to drop.

OWH: So, is “Lupe-O-Tone” a sound process as much as a record label?

EC: They still offer “Full Lycanthropic Sound”. You probably remember when the record companies tried to pass people off with “Enhanced Lycanthropic Sound” in the late ‘40s. It was like that fake stereo in the early 60s, just one velour paw in the left-hand channel.

OWH: You don’t hear of many people pressing 78rpm records these days.

EC: We had to engage a kind of private investigator to locate someone who still understood the beautiful mysteries of manufacturing such records.

Our first enquires led to a man mixing chemicals in his garage. He told us that he knew how to do it but that is was impossible to get the necessary insects, these days

Then we contacted this fellow, Mr. Mancini.

He claimed to be a distant relative of Henry, so I thought he might be the man for the job. It was one of those "call the phone booth on a Wednesday at 11am, let it ring three times and they might call you back" scenarios, right out of motion pictures.

Eventually, this led us to a small company that had been doing this since 1913. When the market for 78s became limited, they went into the fine art business. They won't press more than fifty records at a time.

We spilt the difference and decided to cut two double-sided, ten-inch discs. Four songs in all, "Jimmie Standing In The Rain" b/w "A Voice In The Dark" and "A Slow Drag With Josephine" b/w "You Hung The Moon".

There will we be a signed and numbered edition of twenty-five of each title.

OWH: Who do you imagine will buy them?

EC: Anyone who still loves beautiful objects and good music.

OWH: But will they actually play?

EC: They most certainly will, on the right gramophone. Of course, they'll sound like hell on your mp3 player but you must be used to that by now.

OWH: One of those songs, “You Hung The Moon” sounds like something remembered from a dream and scrawled onto a bedside pad. Are songs sometimes mysteries even to the writer?

EC: Actually, “You Hung The Moon” was written on the same railway journey as yielded “(The Angels Want To Wear My) Red Shoes” – the London to Liverpool line. I think I may have started a station or two earlier with this composition.

The song itself is set in 1919, when it is well documented that bereaved families turned to clairvoyants and all manner of bogus spiritualists to deal with the enormity of their losses.

Now that they have stopped shamefully hiding the return of fallen soldiers, I suppose it was likely that a song of this kind might come to mind.

OWH: Your vocals sound somehow more comfortable on this record. Even on the songs with tricky melodies, there seems to be a calmness, authority and ease. Did you approach the vocals any differently for these songs?

EC: The approach to recording taken by T Bone Burnett and Mike Piersante places the singer at the centre of the ensemble.

There were no big screens or isolation booth between my vocal microphone and the players. You have to sing, you want to sing and you can see and feel everything to give you every encouragement.

OWH: On “You Hung The Moon” is sung in a low croon very much like Bing Crosby. You don’t do it in a campy way – you really go for it. Is singing that way a privilege you would not have allowed yourself when you were younger?

EC: In the absence of Bing, I think that mine is the natural voice for the song. I’m merely singing very quietly in my speaking register.

OWH: From the thirties until well into the sixties, that was the principle style of mainstream male pop singing. Now no one sings that way. Even the few remaining old school pop singers, Tony Bennett first among them, have craggier voices. Did Jim Morrison finish off crooning forever?

EC: The only song by The Doors that I like is “Break On Through To The Other Side” and I don’t think that involves any crooning. But the opening of Iggy Pop’s “Turn Blue” is a fine a croon as one could hope to hear. I based "Little Triggers" on that for "This Year's Model".

OWH: Have you sent “That's Not the Part of Him You're Leaving” to George Jones yet?

EC: No, but I have sent it to Solomon Burke.

OWH: Other singers’ vocal harmonies play a crucial role in this record. How did you arrive at these different combinations?

EC: Hearing those great harmony vocals from Mike Compton on “A Slow Drag With Josephine” and “Five Small Words” was something else.

Jim Lauderdale makes a vital contribution to both “That’s Not The Part Of Him” and “All These Strangers” and we’ve already spoken about Vince Gill singing on “Dr. Watson, I Presume” but I should mention that Buddy Miller also lends his voice to the title track.

In all the other cases, I felt that I didn’t want to shy away from dubbing vocal harmonies myself, something that I’ve done to good effect since my first record.

OWH: What about live performances?

EC: Well, concerts are another matter.

Davey Faragher and I harmonize on Imposters shows and nearly all of Sugarcanes can vocalize.

On one of our last summer dates, Stuart Duncan actually took a lead vocal on “I Am A Pilgrim” and Mike Compton, Jim Lauderdale, Jerry Douglas, Jeff Taylor and myself made up the vocal group on the spot.

Maybe we’ll cut that one for our gospel record.

OWH: No, I meant what are your plans for live performance?

EC: Right now, I feel I have the greatest freedom in a solo concert, as least with regard to repertoire but any occasion to convene either the Imposters or the Sugarcanes or any combination of the two would be very welcome.

OWH: I saw you perform this summer and the songs from, “Secret, Profane & Sugarcane”, had changed quite bit but you were also playing arrangements of older songs from “Red Shoes” to “I Want You”.

EC: Music is continuous. Singing “Red Cotton” on the stage of the Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool – a town were much of most shameful action took place – alongside the Sugarcanes first ever rendition of a hopeful song like “Shipbuilding” is something that I will never forget.

OWH: So what happened to “Condemned Man” and “Poor Borrowed Dress”, who songs featured in the show I saw but are absent from “National Ransom”?

EC: We recorded them. Their time will come.

OWH: There is obviously a genuine interest in song structures from the past but I never get the feeling that it is born of nostalgia. What is your relationship with the musical past?

EC: Well, I see it more and more as a source of strength. These songs are not curios or exercises in form or an actual longing for yesteryear

It helps to have musicians around you that have similar curiosity and even more knowledge of the riches of the past.

If people were to hear some of the shorthand that is used in the studio they might think we’d taken leave of our senses. But if I say to Jeff Taylor, sitting at the piano, “Think Harry Lauder” just before counting off “Jimmie Standing In The Rain”, he knows what I’m talking about.

Whatever is played as a result, it puts you in a certain frame of mind.

These songs are happening now but things we share with the records of the past is the sonic clarity in which we were performing, together with a willingness to listen on the part of the musicians.

Small details in the performances continue to surprise me. In “Dr. Watson, I Presume”, I describe a guardian angel in the form of a clipped crow as, “hung upside down and cawing”. It wasn’t until a number of playbacks that I noticed that Stuart Duncan had imitated the bird in the moment after I sang that line and yet this was a first take.

OWH: Some people would be surprised that you necessarily believe you have a guardian angel

EC: I didn’t say I did and I didn’t say didn’t, although I was taught to believe they were smiling down on everyone, except Protestants, who dwell in eternal darkness…

I am joking, you realize.

OWH: Your immortal soul is no laughing matter.

EC: That’s what they all say. I mean no disrespect. I just have an insolent face.

OWH: What then are the craziest perceptions or greatest misconceptions people might hold about you?

EC: If you are on the stage for while, all you can hope is that these lie somewhere between the falsehood of slanders and the implausibility of compliments.

We are all assembled from experience and circumstance and seen through the eyes of our loved ones and enemies alike.

For all we know. Mrs. Husband, you too are the work of a committee, just a series of curiosities and enquiries, prompted with the whispers of lovers, the jealousy of rivals, the echo of your own loathing and dread or whatever else you pull out of that Hessian postal bag of yours.

OWH: Humour me then, how about the label, “Ironic”?

EC: Never understood that one. Even if a lot of songs contain paradoxes, I mean what I say.

OWH: “Cynical”?

EC: Skeptical, perhaps.

OWH: “Intellectual”?

EC: Oh, come on now.

These are just songs. Being regarded as the slightly clever pupil in a class of uncouth dullards is hardly reason to change your hat size. Nobody is splitting the atom here.

OWH: Well, “Literate” then.

EC: Barely. But if you mean that pose of donning the clever glasses and appearing sensitive to talk impressionable young woman into bed, then several bad poets and not a few songwriters are guilty as charged. I can’t say I’ve ever been in their number.

OWH: Then how about trying, “Misogynistic” on for size?

EC: Steady now. It’s a family show.

I do think that was in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps there was a tiny, unpleasant but persuasive chorus who identified themselves with those early songs and actually had such vile feelings towards the very people I was trying to seduce.

OWH: Would you say you are “Spiritual”?

EC: That’s a terrible cross to bear. It’s a little like flashing those tags; “Dangerous” or “Subversive”, once you say you are, you probably aren’t.

OWH: So, do you have “Faith”?

EC: Yes, I do and “Hope” and “Charity” but not always at the same time and I suppose that it the idea really.

OWH: Then what of your original calling card, “Mr. Anger”?

EC: “Hello Darkness, My Old Friend”.

Dismay at the ways of the world, disappointment at the failure of a romantic ideal, loss of belief or the trust, the betrayal of grand promises.

It depends on what kind of “anger” you are talking about and who or what it is directed towards.

Any impatience or frustration I’ve ever expressed at it being taken for the major part my persona was soon drowned out by laughter and there isn’t a harsh word that I haven’t said ten times over and hundred times more bitterly to myself.

OWH: But with “National Ransom”, you must hear that there is a real sadness and, if I may say, moments of holy anger, grim resignation and even anguish in some of these songs.

Yet you choose to end it with a song of optimism and emotional support. Is that a fair description of you nowadays - aware of the horrors but unwilling to give in to the despair?

EC: Well, that last song, “A Voice In the Dark”, alludes to “Pennies From Heaven”, one of the finest of songs of perseverance that I know.

I suppose my proposition is, no matter what fancies and dreams we have and whatever terrors we face, we had best not do it alone and it is easier with song or a fond word secreted somewhere about your person; in your heart, your elusive and eternal soul or hidden in your shoe.

Right now, I’d say it’s all about love.

OWH: Okay, before we conclude, what, exactly, is a “radio hat”?

EC: It’s a very early clue to the new direction but you should never wear it out in the rain.

OWH: And who is this Josephine who shows up in “Jimmie Standing In The Rain” and “A Slow Drag…”?

EC: Those are different “Josephines”.

OWH: So, where is the “Josephine” from “A Slow Drag” today?

EC: I don’t know exactly but wherever she is, but I believe she is still dancing.

OWH: Was there a real “Alison”?

EC: Yes, he played with Buddy Holly.

Odile W. Husband (neé O’Súlleabháin) is the popular music correspondent of “The Inquisitor” - an independent catholic journal on all matters cultural, satirical and spiritual.

Elvis Costello In Conversation With Odile W. Husband Episode Three

Episode Three

OWH: “Five Small Words” and “The Spell That You Cast” are both terrific little beat combo records. One is mostly an Imposters track and the other the Sugarcanes. The two bands approach rock'n'roll differently. Could you have swapped the bands for those two songs?

EC: These cuts actually mix up the two bands. “The Spell That You Cast” has Dennis Crouch playing with Pete Thomas and I trade off in the solo with Mike Compton’s mandolin and Steve Nieve’s Vox Continental Organ.

OWH: Where you not concerned that people might see this as a battle of the bands?

EC: I think that music and musicians are at their least attractive when set in competition and these are two terribly handsome bands.

To know that this is true, you need only look at the nightly entertainments that begin with the stage directions:

"First, fill your arena with water. Now release the crocodiles"

Humiliating people is so old hat.

And it’s a battered old top hat with no white tie, a sort of P.T. Barnum promotion without the wit or the alibis.

OWH: You wrote about him on your last record, didn’t you?

EC: Yes, I did.

You know, Barnum had a whale in his “American Museum”. So, releasing a crocodile is nothing.

OWH: But not a blue whale as you claimed in “Red Cotton"

EC: Okay, he wasn’t blue but he was despondent.

OWH: Speaking of those songs, will “The Secret Songs” ever be completed?

EC: Those crazy Danes are always up to something. Just this morning, I received a request to permit a Danish translation of “The Big Light” for a stage play about Johnny Cash.

OWH: A stage play about Johnny Cash in Danish?

EC: It would appear so or this Danish translation of my song is going to seem a little out of place.

OWH: Is it faithful?

EC: My Danish is not what is was when I worked the longboats but I believe it is steadfast and true.

Did you know that there is a Polish version of “The Juliet Letters”?

OWH: I did not. How does that sound?

EC: Almost exactly as you would imagine. That interpretation contains very imaginative re-arrangements. It is my favourite rendition after the original recording. I like “´Swinia”, in particular.

OWH: And what of “The Secret Songs”? How do you look back? How do you move forward with them?

EC: I’m grateful for that invitation from the Royal Danish Opera. I could not have known that, when I cracked the spine of my first Hans Christian Andersen biography, nine years ago, that it would lead to me singing “She Handed Me A Mirror” on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium and it feeling like some sort of mutant George Jones song.

Far from being motivated by hubris, as some cynics would have you believe, this kind of work allows you to write in a different, less harmonically predictable way.

Lyrically, it offered a pretext for me to write about a number of subjects that I might not have arrived at.

That little theatrical business in which Barnum dismissively reads an abolitionist’s pamphlet, gave me the chance to write something about Liverpool’s part in the slave trade.

It’s something that troubles you, when you see the grand maritime buildings, the Town Hall with engraved stone remembrances of men made into commodities, the cotton exchange, the banks like palaces and the grand mansions.

Then you think what fate handed the city as it withstood everything the 20th century could throw at it.

I needed to go through all that paraphernalia and persuasion, the misery and the guilt, to get to a closing expression of love for frail and faulty human beings.

People stood up at the end of that song, when it was first performed on stage. I was touched by that response. It is rare.

OWH: Nevertheless, there is a mounting pile of unfinished works; “The Secret Songs”, “The Delivery Man”, an album that contained an incomplete narrative and I read something about several abandoned works for Broadway. Are you concerned about not seeing things through?

EC: I suppose I have a different sense of where these endeavors have lead, rather than where they left off.

“Bedlam”, has been central to my recent solo shows and was also featured in an orchestral arrangement in concerts with the Dallas Symphony, earlier this year.

I wouldn’t have had that option, if I had held rigidly to my first structural notions about “The Delivery Man” and not allowed the world at large enter into the small society that the character songs were describing.

About three years ago, I spent a couple of afternoons with Barry Levinson, examining where songs might occur in a stage adaptation of one of his most renowned scripts. I even went so far as to write a song in the likeness of Screaming Jay Hawkins that was to be playing on a jukebox.

Although we didn't manage to resolve the conundrums and contradictions that face collaborators in such a task, you couldn't possibly characterize such an experience as time wasted. Not all education concludes with a golden seal on a diploma.

OWH: Some people regard it as strange that you have never written for the musical theatre.

EC: These are clearly people who haven’t recently visited a Broadway theatre with very few certain noble exceptions.

OWH: So, there have been serious overtures.

EC: Some of them have seemed endless.

Between Broadway and the art music world, I’d say one or two approaches have been made every couple of years, over the last decade and a half. Three or four have merited serious consideration but nothing has got past the stage of preliminary sketches.

OWH: What about writing for film or television? Has that nothing new appealed to you or nothing been offered, beyond a co-write like “The Scarlet Tide” or your music for English television drama in the early 90s?

EC: Well, when ideas float into view, you are never really certain whether they come from the writers and directors or seventeenth under-assistant dogsbody to the producer.

In any case, creative dialogue is often stifled by disputes over the ownership of such songs as appear in television and movie productions. My belief is that songs should always retain an independent life, as they frequently outlive their celluloid sources.

For example, I have no idea whether the notion that I write all of the songs for one season of “Deadwood” was serious, as the alternative history of showbusiness is probably littered with such missed connections or you would have been hearing “The Crooked Line” over the end credits of “I Walk The Line” and there might have even been a musical production number featuring Sean Penn singing, “Sulphur To Sugarcane”.

OWH: So perhaps you were relieved to write “National Ransom” without the framework of any theatrical conceit.

EC: It’s not the only way songwriting is provoked.

A line can lie undisturbed in a notebook for ten years, only to prove key to completing a verse in a hit tune. Nothing is ever completely wasted. Melodies can be transformed from instrumental to vocal and themes are found common to free standing compositions and those sketched for a special occasion.

Here’s an example.

Four years ago, both T Bone and I were approached to work on a musical based on a wonderful radio documentary by the Kitchen Sisters – Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva. It was about a radio station WHER, initially founded and funded by Sam Phillips in 1954.

The odd thing about the station was that it played absolutely no rock and roll and was staffed and presented entirely by women WHER was directed by Sam’s wife, Becky, who programmed an early form of “Easy Listening”, before the term had really been defined.

It was a wonderful story, rich in contradictions, not least in that it contradicted almost every cliché about life in the 1950s that you have received or perceived.

Latterly, I entered into a fascinating correspondence with the playwright, Sarah Ruhl, who had been asked to write the book, that is the dramatic adaptation of this essentially factual record.

Sarah wrote a couple of exquisite pages of dialogue, immediately establishing one of the key relationships in the story and I wrote a song that would have been playing in the background of another scene.

Curiously enough, unbeknownst to all concerned, two other musicals set in the Memphis of the 1950s were about to go into production. There is an old saying about London buses, “You wait for ages. Then three come along together”.

Needless to say, in commercial terms, this rather poisoned the well.

OWH: So, were you left with a lot of unresolved and useless material?

EC: On the contrary, I’ve written songs based on chance remarks, overheard and even misunderstood, from apparently innocuous passages of newsprint, from footnotes in biographies, so to suddenly have a couple of orphaned themes was no inhibition at all.

In a world of endless, useless, worthless choice, the idea of taboo is almost quaint, as is the notion of a faint signal reaching out across a land almost devoid of light.

When I started to write for myself again, I found one or two of my scribbled notes to be quite valuable.

One simply said, “a voice in the dark”, with no other clues. It might have been some kind of imagined stage direction but I took it to be an invitation, somewhere between a sales pitch and a prayer.

For some time, I’ve carried around this notion of “Church Underground”, meaning an incongruous location for exaltation, like a dive.

These Memphis women from WHER lead decorous lives by day, playing carefully programmed, genteel music but took to the nightlife with some enthusiasm. It’s hard now to imagine that I could have inserted a notion like that into their existing story, so I had to conceive my own narrative with which to present it.

I don’t suppose we’ll ever know whether these little cast aside fragments might have lit up the Great White Way but if they had they would have been entirely different songs employing with different words in a radically different story.

Somewhere up in heaven, George M. Cohan is sticking pins in my likeness.

OWH: Travel and exile is a repeated motif, especially in the songs that you’ve written and that have been produced by T Bone Burnett. I’m thinking about “American Without Tears” and “Last Boat Leaving”

EC: It’s the family business.

My father was onstage or on the road for 40 years or more. His father was an army bandsman who circled the globe in one uniform and then made several return passages across the Atlantic on the White Star Line, playing trumpet before ending up in a pit orchestra in his hometown.

You might say I’ve had it easy.

Travel songs like “Sulphur To Sugarcane” have taken me around the world. They even transported me to Australia, although they allowed me to leave again.

OWH: In the last years, you seem more and more drawn to arcane language and historical context. Do you spend much time on detailed research?

EC: One makes you forget the other.

OWH: In what sense?

EC: You must memorize and then destroy, just like a spy movie.

All of the words, arcane or otherwise, animate the characters and construct the worlds they walk in. But these little dramas and comedies are also works of imagination and you know how dreams can be distorted versions of waking life.

Only prigs and pedants hold songs up to the light, looking for clues, as if decoding them could carry you into an exact replica of the past, a facsimile of the truth.

Those looking for absolute veracity seem to forget that history is not only written, as they say, by the victors but it is also printed in bad translation, via a false or faulty memory.

We can only speculate as to how the air felt around your face, how the knife of a cruel word twisted in the heart.

OWH: So, historical accuracy is not of primary importance to you?

EC: It seems rather missing the point that we should fixate on the buttons on a coat.

I look back because mistakes are there to be repeated. You think there is no slavery in the world anymore?

These “National Ransom” songs were written quite recently and are being heard in the present moment with reference to an elusive past.

I can't explain the effect any better than in these lines from "You Hung The Moon":

"The lines of the fallen are viewed through the glass, you cannot touch them at all

Or hear their footfall just as they go past

The drunken ground is where they are bound"

OWH: Nevertheless, are you concerned that people will see these songs as less personal?

EC: Would they have a greater claim to power or beauty, if I could prove to you that everything happened just as I’ve written it? Is there any more personal place than the imagination?

OWH: People do seem to value songs that mirror their own experiences.

EC: Then perhaps they’ll love this record. It seems we are all driving over the same cliff together, in slow motion.

Understanding that nothing takes exactly as much time as life itself, is central to abandoning the delusion that you are buying pieces of the singer’s soul for the price of a record.

Those diary records that you used to love, that spoke to your secret fears and desires. They are full of deceptions and evasions. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they don’t sound great and you’ll always wish you’d had the courage to put on that eyeliner.

OWH: So, is there simply some strange satisfaction to be had in employing a word like “fingersmith”?

EC: Yeah, I’ve waited half my life to use it. It’s just another word for pickpocket. There are so many about that they each require a different title.

OWH: Surely, there is actually no such expression as “skedele-daddle-do”?

EC: Tell that to Fred Flintstone. I simply took a liberty with the verb “skedaddle”, meaning to run away in panic.

OWH: These images financial and spiritual chaos seem to go back to “The Scarlet Tide”, another song you wrote with T Bone about “swindlers who act like kings and brokers who break everything”

EC: You never like to be right about these things but we do continue to elevate and lionize these brigands and pirates. They would be first to the scaffold in any sensible society.

OWH: Okay, we are getting pretty far away from rock and roll

EC: How far away would you like to get?

OWH: Not that far.

What should the listener take out of the location and date of “The Spell That You Cast”, which is “The Castle Hotel, Richmond” 1965”?

EC: That’s a little walk over the bridge.

I used to go to the pictures on a Friday and Saturday night. Well, I was eleven year old and too young to go to the cinema in the evening alone, so my mother would take me to see “A” pictures that she wanted to see.

Like any young English boy of that time, I favoured anything that involved killing Nazis. “The Heroes of Telemark”, “The Guns Of Navarone” but I also remember seeing, “The List Of Adrian Messenger”, “West Side Story” and “The Ipcress File”.

I saw Ursula Andres come out of the sea. And although I didn’t understand how rude "Honey Ryder” and “Pussy Galore” were as character names, I was never quite the same again.

Oddly, enough while I was having this preliminary introduction to adult themes, rock and roll was going on all around me but I was too young to attend.

OWH: How so?

EC: The Station Hotel, which housed the club where The Rolling Stones started out, was just up the road. Eel Pie Island in the bend of the Thames, hosted The Who and The Yardbirds. By the time I was old enough to go to those places, that scene was gone.

So, emptying out into the dark streets from whatever fantasy had dominated the previous two hours, you might walk home past some kerfuffle as the coppers were chasing lads down the towpath, who had been thrown out of a dance at the Castle Hotel.

I don’t know if the “The Spell That You Cast” is the song that was playing behind the green door, so to speak. It is just the product of a chance tuning of my Gibson Tenor guitar. It yielded that “spell” chord at the end of the refrain.

All my favourite rock and roll records sound like happy accidents. This one sees a beat group collide with a driving mandolin player who can beat the band like Johnny Johnson. It’s a new kind of music. Perhaps we’ll call it “Mod-Billy”.

All the kids will be doing it next week

OWH: That’s almost the only electric guitar that you play on the album, isn’t it?

EC: I play some electric bass on “National Ransom” but that’s my only electric guitar solo and I used just four strings. Perhaps my fingers were tired from being a hired gun?

OWH: You’re not going all Chuck Barris on me now, are you?

EC: I’m talking about my session work

OWH: Session work as guitar player?

EC: That’s right. People think that I’ve been pursuing another career in television but in the dead of night, I shin up drainpipes into studios and overdub my electric guitar.

Curiously enough, the guys tend not to call me but the girls understand.

OWH: What records are you taking about? Do you have an alias?

EC: A ‘Nom De Twang”?

OWH: Yes?

EC: It never occurred to me that I needed to cover my tracks.

My first assignment was playing on my friend, Wendy Bird’s album, “Natural Wonder”. I played the Gretsch guitar solo on a song called, “Deliver Me”.

Around that time, I lead the Imposters on a Jenny Lewis song called, “High And Lows”. I understand that Jenny and Johnny now regard it as that start of their brand new sound, which has paid off with the album, “I’m Having Fun Now”.

And I think I’m on four tracks of the next Lucinda Williams record.

OWH: You’re singing with her?

EC: No, playing lead and rhythm guitar.

OWH: You are making this up, aren’t you?

EC: I am most certainly not, Mrs. Husband.

I was asked to sing a harmony on a song that Lucinda contributed for this show about biting people but there was very little I could add to her performance, so I sang a very discreet line of harmony.

My consolation was Lucinda and her husband Tom invited me down to play on a session at Capitol Studios. We cut one song live with Lu in the booth and they must have liked what I did, because they kept putting up reels of tape.

By the end of the night, I think I must have played on half the record.

OWH: Davey Faragher makes his sole appearance on “Five Small Words”. What does he bring to the party?

EC: He plays down low where the bass is supposed to go. He is an incredible musician, as anyone with ears will tell you. The Coward Brothers take care of the guitars and even the Farfisa Organ on that one. I think it was Howard’s work.

OWH: The Coward Brothers have always gone their own way with songs.

EC: I’m glad you noticed.

At our very first reunion appearances back in 1984, we were playing songs by Doc Watson, George Jones and Bobby Charles.

In fact, at that session for “Five Small Words”, we also cut a beautiful Bobby Charles song called “I Hope”, which was originally recorded by the great Tommy McClain.

Have you ever heard Tommy’s song about King Herod, “High Class Fool”?

OWH: I don’t believe I have.

EC: I think you would appreciate it.

I heard Tommy’s version of “Sweet Dreams” before I even had a record contract. That was much more of an influence of my own take on the song than even the Patsy Cline recording.

I finally got to meet Tommy just this year. We sang in two-part harmony on, “Before I Grow Too Old” at a salute to Bobby Charles in New Orleans, during JazzFest.

C.C. Adcock and the Lil’ Band Of Gold put together the kind of night that made you proud to be there. If I ever have the misfortune to die, I hope they can play the wake.

"After the break, The epilogue in which the Lupe-O-Tone mystery is explained. More on Leon Russell, Tony Millionaire, Harry Lauder and that forthcoming gospel record."

Odile W. Husband (neé O’Súlleabháin) is the popular music correspondent of “The Inquisitor” - an independent catholic journal on all matters cultural, satirical and spiritual.

LUPE-O-TONE

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“A SLOW DRAG WITH JOSEPHINE” b/w “YOU HUNG THE MOON”

AND

“JIMMIE STANDING IN THE RAIN” b/w “A VOICE IN THE DARK”

BY THE LUPOTONIANS
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BE THE FIRST ONE TO HEAR THESE SONGS FROM THE FORTHCOMING CONCORD RECORDS ALBUM “NATIONAL RANSOM”

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“I’M STARTING TO GROWL”

Elvis Costello In Conversation With Odile W. Husband Episode Two

OWH: How much of Walter Mitty is there in the man singing “All These Strangers”?

EC: He is as much “Billy Liar” as “Walter Mitty” but I take your point. He has a vivid imagination and a score to settle.

OWH: In another way, “All These Strangers”, feels like a 40s film, perhaps with Peter Lorre, although the character in it seems to know that the past is not his friend. This is a song in which sinister goings-on are married to very gentle music.

EC: He is a man who has been left by his lover for a more dangerous man and so, to compete with his rival, imagines himself the worst he can be, a gunrunner, a dissolute painter, a brigand after dark.

Even in his wildest imaginings, he ends up in a defeated army, sitting in a locomotive yard without any boots.

As to the music, this was the very last piece recorded in Nashville. The band had barely finished writing out their numbers charts when we hit “Record”. In truth, I finished harmonizing the final refrains, while the players were already at their music stands.

This is the kind of high wire act that doesn’t always come off but on this occasion, everyone was simply listening to a story and responding. It is one of my favourite ensemble performances on the record.

OWH: What is the role of a producer at a time like that?

EC: T Bone’s work was already done in the setting up the circumstances and the surroundings that were so conducive to trust. He doesn’t veneer the songs, as some producers do.

On the other hand, his attention to detail and that of Mike Piersante during the mixing means that all of this is far more than chance.

T Bone and his team are now creating sound pictures of great nuance and resonance. You can hear that across all the records he is producing, regardless of the qualities the artists bring into the room.

We have both had to forget things about the recording process that are of no value.

OWH: The records you’ve made with T Bone seem to have the largest casts of players.

EC: But they are the right players for the right songs.

From “King Of America” onwards, T Bone has helped me understand that you could call, say, James Burton or Jim Keltner, Earl Palmer or Ray Brown for your session. You could cast the ensemble as demanded by the song.

These had once seemed like unattainable names on record jackets to me. I found that you just had to have the songs and the circumstances. Sessions like the one for “Poisoned Rose” are irreplaceable experiences.

Needless to say, having predominantly worked with just one band up until “King Of America”, it was hard for the Attractions to accept. It made for an unhealthily competitive and ultimately self-defeating atmosphere on their contributing sessions but everyone lived to fight another day.

When I wrote “Stations Of The Cross”, I knew that I needed to call Steve Nieve for this record. Listen to the way he leads into the second chorus. It couldn’t be anyone else.

I’ve spent about half my lifetime with Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas as my friends and bandmates, so you can imagine what it means to make “National Ransom” and hear them in the company of more recent cohorts like Dennis Crouch, Stuart Duncan and Jerry Douglas.

OWH: When did you first meet Jerry Douglas?

EC: I think I first met Jerry when he was recording with T Bone, Billy Swan, Jerry Scheff, Byron Berline and David Hildalgo for his Dot album, “T Bone Burnett”.

Even though I had admired his playing, Jerry and I didn’t have the opportunity to work together until 2007. Merlefest assembled a band around me for my appearance that year that included, Jerry, Jim Lauderdale, Sam Bush and Larry Campbell. So these alliances didn’t exactly all appear overnight.

OWH: The sleeve notes for “National Ransom” refer to “Visiting Dignitaries”. What is the significance of that list?

EC: You never know who you’re going to meet in T Bone’s company. I mean, he once introduced me to Jerry Lee Lewis but we’d need a couple of martinis to tell that story properly.

One day while we were working on “Spike”, T Bone appeared in the doorway to the studio lounge with Willie Dixon. They were getting ready to make the album, “Hidden Charms”. A couple of days later, he walked in with Kris Kristofferson.

OWH: Didn’t you end up writing a song with him?

EC: That was some time later. 20 years later, in fact.

In the last couple of years Kris, Rosanne Cash and I have written a couple songs together. We actually plan an album together but we are making slow progress because we live so far from each other. You can’t get the pigeons, you know.

OWH: So it’s a “supergroup”?

EC: Yes, it’s either “KCC” or “CCK”. I prefer the latter

OWH: Did T Bone produce any such surprises during these sessions?

EC: Well, I don’t think it’s a conscious part of his production method but I looked up during one take and realized that the figure twirling in the producer’s chair wasn’t T Bone. He isn’t the twirling kind.

It was Cowboy Jack Clement. He originally designed the Sound Emporium studio, so I think he just wanted to know we were putting his handiwork to good use.

OWH: What song were you recording?

EC: “Jimmie Standing In The Rain”. Seeing the Cowboy put me on my toes and that turned out to be the take we used. It was Take One. He even offered to fetch his ukulele and overdub it.

A similar thing happened a couple of night’s later after Donnie Fritts came down to visit T Bone, one afternoon.

Donnie had thanked me for some words I’d written about his song, “Breakfast In Bed” on a “Dusty In Memphis” reissue and then we started talking about an album called “Country Soul”, on which both he and Dan Penn had appeared. I told him that I had never met Dan, despite having admired him for years.

He said, “I can fix that” and a couple of hours later he returned with Dan, right in the middle of another take.

OWH: And what song were you recording that time?

EC: I was doing the guitar and vocal recording of “A Slow Drag With Josephine” to which we later added the Sugarcanes’ parts.

I think Dan’s appearance definitely brought me good luck with that song, so I wanted to acknowledge the visit. It meant an awful lot to me that he took the time to come down to the studio.

OWH: So, T Bone has an open-door policy.

EC: No, you have to have written a couple of million sellers.

I don’t want to give the impression that we are just sitting around carousing when we should have been working. We were moving fast; recording in one room and overdubbing in another, while editing or balancing the track we had just cut.

But it’s instructive to spend a few minutes listening with curious, interested friends. It stops it from feeling like you are in a submarine.

OWH: The record is very detailed for such a brief recording time

EC: We’ve just dispensed with the distractions that used to make these processes more tortuous and the players know what they want to do.

OWH: There is also a dedication to Hank Cochran, who died a short time ago.

EC: I have to thank Jim Lauderdale for that introduction.

The Sugarcanes and I were in Nashville and on the afternoon before our show at the Ryman in 2009, Jim called my hotel room and told me to get over to BMI headquarters, as a gathering of friends were planning a surprise party for Hank Cochran.

You have to understand that his tune, “He’s Got You” was one of the first two songs I cut when the Attractions and I went to Nashville for a trial session with Billy Sherrill, prior to making “Almost Blue” in 1981.

Anyway, I got to the party just ahead of Hank and found myself standing in the welcoming committee with songwriters like Bobby Bare, Jim Lauderdale, Cowboy Jack Clement and Merle Haggard. I had to pinch myself for a moment. Merle even played a few of Hank’s songs after the speeches. Now that was an afternoon to remember.

When I was introduced to Hank, he said, “Thank you for recording my song”. I was stunned that he even knew that I’d cut one of his tunes, as it hadn’t exactly achieved wide circulation but it’s a song I perform to this day.

OWH: So, was it Jim who invited him to the studio?

EC: No, a documentary was being made about Hank and his songs and we were filmed in conversation.

Hank was in very poor health by then but this had done nothing at all to dim his wit or memory for the experiences of his life and work. He told some great stories and I was asked to sing a little of one of his songs and naturally chose, “He’s Got You”.

That’s pretty daunting to do with the writer sitting right there and you’re taking liberties with his harmonies and flipping the lyric from the female to male perspective but I think he got a kick out of it.

It was good to be able to thank Hank personally for writing soulful songs like, “Make The World Go Away”. They will live forever.

OWH: Can you explain why you have been attracted to Southern music from New Orleans to Nashville?

EC: I don’t actually think good music comes out of a geography book even though it’s hard to imagine there being any jazz and rock and roll without New Orleans or rock and roll and rhythm and blues without Memphis and so on.

In fact, Tennessee has a lot to do with it whatever stripe you like running through your music, whether you are talking about Bristol or whatever has made it alive, in and out of Nashville.

In the end, it’s about feeling something as a human being. Maps don’t matter. Peter Green could play and sing startling, chilling blues and he was born in Bethnal Green.

Then again, Dan Penn wrote a song on two of my favourite albums, that were recorded miles apart, in different worlds; “The Gilded Palace of Sin” by The Flying Burrito Brothers and “I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You” by Aretha Franklin. The funny thing is that it’s the same song, “Do Right Woman”.

OWH: The guitar on “Bullets for the Newborn King” and “A Slow Drag With Josephine is a little surprising. Have the little hands of concrete softened?

EC: Yielded, perhaps. The acoustic guitar I am using for several of the songs on this record is a 1937 Gibson L-OO. It fits in the crook of your arm, under the fingers and around the voice better than many larger, fancier instruments. It has its very own confidential voice.

I’ve always fingerpicked songs for my own amusement. When I was a teenager I admired, the Welsh master, John James and all the people who recorded for Transatlantic Records and tried to understand these printed transcriptions of Rev. Gary Davis and Mississippi John Hurt songs but I never became that adept.

Part of the problem is that I have a loud voice but my physical strength does not extend to my fingernails, so I play with the pads of my fingers and that sometimes sounds muted.

Several songs on this record were sufficiently intimate that I did not need to batter the guitar into submission as in the past.

OWH: That song, “Bullets For The New-Born King”, has a very elusive narrative, mentioning a “double agent girl” and a “fallen priest”. Have you been re-reading Graham Greene?

EC: No, but I used to share a dry cleaners with his brother, Sir Hugh Carlton Green.

I will say that I had in mind a political assassination, after which those who have committed the act realize the terrible mistake that they have made, that they have actually extinguished hope. That is the “New-Born” part of the story.

I think there was a time when it seemed almost inevitable that certain public figures would die. It seemed to happen, almost predictably, in regions where vested interest overpowers any sense of justice.

Perhaps that time will come again. I hope not.

OWH: You have added locations and dates as a postscript to the lyrics of these songs. How important are these?

EC: Well, they are mostly playful. It is unimportant that listeners imagine the songs in the same time and place as I do.

OWH: Having said that, “One Bell Ringing” is located in “The London Underground” on “22nd July 2005”. That would seem to be a specific reference to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, would it not?

EC: What happened to that man were a tragedy and a disgrace. It would be a huge presumption on the part of any songwriter to try to rationally explain those events.

The song simply tries to summons up an atmosphere of dread in which a terrible misjudgment might occur. There are beautiful, soothing images right alongside those of a fate that might befall any innocent man or woman: torture; hearing your own voice deny your very name and finally, lamentation.

OWH: In your concert introductions you’ve related “One Bell Ringing” to your earlier song “Bedlam”. In what way are they connected?

EC: “Bedlam” expresses the common bewilderment and helplessness of a refugee, a combat soldier, someone who has had a laurel of false heroism thrust upon their head and, now in this song, here’s an innocent man who cannot understand why he is mistaken for a threat. There simply isn’t some convenient moral on which to conclude.

All mere songs can do is offer these received images in juxtaposition and you can make use of this arrangement of words and music as you wish. I don’t have any snappy slogans or violent solutions to propose but I think we all have a lot of questions.

OWH: So, have you given up singing, “(What’s So Funny ‘bout) Peace, Love And Understanding”?

EC: On the contrary, that song becomes more complex and more poignant, the further we get from the ideal. Heaven preserve us from all these blasphemers who think they know what God is thinking.

OWH: Let’s get back to the music. The strings and horns on some of the songs are full of wonderful detail. There's cornet on Jimmie and a wild bit of bass clarinet that is by turns subtle, vivid and even provocative. Were those parts written or improvised?

EC: The string octet, bass clarinet and horns quartet on “You Hung The Moon” and the horn section on “Church Underground” are written parts.

I wrote the string arrangement and bass clarinet lines for “You Hung The Moon”, while Darrell Leonard wrote and lead the horn quartet that answers the strings at the end of chorus. It was to sound no bigger than an ensemble that could fit into a small radio theatre or hotel ballroom.

Darrell Leonard did improvise the trumpet interjections on “Jimmie Standing In The Rain”. Jimmie Rodgers had a pretty great trumpet player on his records and the imitation Jimmie didn’t do too badly either.

Darrell also wrote the horn parts for “Church Underground”, while I wrote the bass trumpet and alto flute lines that harmonize with the voice in the refrain of “One Bell Ringing”.

When these parts were in place, I asked Tom Peterson to improvise some responses to the vocal lines on the bass clarinet during the second verse of “One Bell Ringing”.

They turn from seductive to horrifying in two lines. Tom played exactly as I imagined it to be but could have never written down.

OWH: “One Bell Ringing” has the sort of novelistic description that we always associate with Joni Mitchell. You’ve talked about her influence on your lyric writing, but in this case the arrangement also echoes Joni around the time of “The Hissing Of Summer Lawns” or “Hejira”. Homage? Coincidence? Rip-off?

EC: Well, I can think of one person who may think it is the latter.

For all my admiration for her work, I can honestly say that Joni Mitchell has never been a direct influence on my lyric writing.

What I think is true is to say is that the subject matter and the unflinching eye for detail of her work admitted and permitted many more possibilities for anyone who writing songs after her most highly regarded work, whether they know or accept this to be the case.

Musically, I can imagine the echo you hear comes from the fact that my guitar is in an unusual open tuning, offering very specific voicings – something found throughout Joni’s writing – and even the way in which the bass trumpet and alto flute are harmonizing with the voice, may recall her use of reeds in arrangements but this was entirely unconscious.

OWH: On your earlier albums there was the danger of your persona overpowering the music. It made you easy to caricature, in the way that, say, John Wayne, is always recognizable no matter what role he is playing.

But more recently it feels like you are approaching some of your work like a character actor. Is there a greater freedom in telling someone else's story other than your own?

EC: Well, I would always rather have been a Walter Brennan, William Bendix or Barry Fitzgerald than John Wayne.

I have written songs in the voices of imagined characters for many years. Some are more overt than others. Some songs read as “personal” are entirely or partly works of fiction.

There was a time when the reduction of those early songs to a few ticks and gestures seemed confining but I haven’t felt that way for over twenty-five years. That’s longer than most careers.

When you are singing of the most singular experiences of a fictional character, you are almost certainly displacing or relocating events and emotions from your own life. It is a less selfish act.

OWH: In fact several of the new songs seem quite cinematic. Who would star in or direct the film version of “Jimmie Standing in the Rain” or “Church Underground”?

EC: That’s an interesting proposition and one that tempts vanity.

But if “Jimmie Standing In The Rain” were a motion picture, you’d need someone with a great talent for disguise and mimicry. So, I’d say Alec Guinness directed by Carol Reed with Gloria Graham in the role of “Josephine”.

“Church Underground” is easier. Ideally, that would be Gene Tierney directed by Ida Lupino.

Odile W. Husband (neé O’Súlleabháin) is the popular music correspondent of “The Inquisitor” - an independent catholic journal on all matters cultural, satirical and spiritual.

Coming Soon: Part Three of “Elvis Costello in conversation with Odile W. Husband” in which they share “Five Small Words” on Leon Russell, Hoagy Carmichael, Tony Millionaire, Harry Lauder and solve the mystery of the “Radio Hat”

Elvis Costello In Conversation With Odile W. Husband

Episode One

OWH: A wolf, perhaps the one from the cover, appears in the opening song and the closing song of “National Ransom”. Is this the same wolf? Is he somehow the master of ceremonies? Are these two songs more linked than we might imagine?

EC: Well, the two songs are set in different times but “A Voice In The Dark” surely being sung in the wake of the same catastrophe that has been repeated in “National Ransom”.

Someone has run off with all the money; people are losing their homes; whole towns are being shuttered.

The wolf in “National Ransom” - and perhaps that one in the cover illustration - might have been a goat. A scapegoat.

We are always looking for someone to blame for our misfortunes and in this case we may have found the culprit.

Look at his mug shot. He’s carrying a big bag of burning money. You can probably imagine how useful burning money can be.

Then again, the wolf I have in mind is within us all. We are all complicit, if not accountable, desiring things that are beyond our means, handing power over us all to the wolves at the door.

OWH: So, what of the wolf in “A Voice In The Dark”?

EC: I think that wolf is a beast of a different stripe. He’s the one who exclaims with joy at the rarity of the blue moon. He’s also something of a red herring.

The “voice” of which speaking is the one that makes the emptiness of night more bearable. It can be the whisper of a lover or a song playing in the next room that entices us in.

OWH: Yet, this song closes the record.

EC: I suppose it might be an invitation to play the record again from the top.

OWH: That opening track is musically explosive. There are not a lot of people who would combine Mark Ribot and Jerry Douglas. Was it hard for them to find common ground?

EC: Not at all, I think they really sparked from playing together. I’ve been a great admirer of Moby Grape and they had three contrasting lead guitarists. Add Steve Nieve to this mix and you have three instrumental voices surrounding my own. This was always my intention for this song.

OWH: Jerry Douglas and Marc Ribot are heard throughout the record but not always as one might expect.

EC: I suppose that is true.

I first encountered Ribot playing at his most angular and extreme in the Lounge Lizards and later with Tom Waits but he is also a very lyrical player. Marc has a beautiful and elegant dialogue with Stuart Duncan on “Jimmie Standing In The Rain”

Jerry predominantly plays lap-steel rather than the dobro on this record but whatever instrument he is playing, he produces an incredible range of tones. He can break your heart in one moment and then tear your head off in the next song.

In fact, all of these guys, Stuart Duncan, Jeff Taylor and, of course, Steve Nieve could dazzle you all the time but the fact that they don’t feel the need is the measure of their musicianship.

OWH: What about the rhythm section?

EC: The whole ensemble is a rhythm section, especially when Mike Compton is driving along behind your right shoulder but listening to what Dennis Crouch is playing on this record is a lesson in itself, whether on his own in the stringband numbers with Pete Thomas in the drum booth.

OWH: Was this the first time that they had played together?

EC: Yes, Pete arrived just as we are getting ready to cut, “That’s Not The Part Of Him You’re Leaving” – a song that had previously been performed without drums – and I put him straight into the booth. Pete and Dennis hit right off.

OWH: So, after the release of “Secret, Profane & Sugarcane”, you took to the road with The Sugarcanes.

Does playing with a certain group of musicians make you say, “Ah! I can do something with THIS! Let me write some tunes to play to their strengths!”

EC: “Secret, Profane & Sugarcane was really a document of our first meeting. It might have been a ranging-finding shot.

All six members of The Sugarcanes did not even played in the same room, at the same time until the rehearsals for our first tour.

We soon found out what we could do in front of an audience and what we needed to do. So, by the time we left Dallas for Cain’s Ballroom, Tulsa – the last date of our tour in the summer of ‘09 – we already had four new unrecorded songs in the show.

Jim Lauderdale and I wrote, “I Lost You” on the ride to Oklahoma and we debuted the song that night.

I called T Bone Burnett on my way out of town and told him we had to record again but between that conversation and arranging the sessions, I wrote a number of songs that called for different players to also be involved.

We began with the Sugarcanes, added drums, added guitar, added piano, took away the number we first thought of and before we knew where we were, we had “National Ransom”.

OWH: So, is this a Bluegrass record?

EC: Only in the way that Sly and The Family Stone are a Bluegrass band.

OWH: There's a lot of rain in this collection of songs. Is the storm brewing or abating?

EC: It rains a lot where I think.

As to whether the weather is approaching or departing, I’d have to say that depends on your disposition to melancholy or optimism. I find fine rain very invigorating. To lie in the dark with rain beating on the window is thrilling not threatening.

OWH: Certain details, including the spelling of the name, give clue to whose “counterfeited prairie lullabies” the protagonist of “Jimmie's Standing in the Rain”
might be singing. If Jimmie Rodger's had died of syphilis instead, what might have been the rhyme?

EC: As near and imperfect as one might get would be to remark that he was left with “no time to reminisce”, possibly while eating an orange.

“Jimmie” is an imaginary fellow traveling the Northern English music theatres in 1937. My grandfather played in the pit orchestra in some of those places.

OWH: So, what exactly is Jimmie’s “act”?

EC: The fellow I’m singing about is an Englishman who has borrowed his act and his songs from the more famous Mr. Rodgers, just as the fashion for cowboy singers is fading.

One of the curious aspects of early recording stars is that they inspired all kinds of cock-eyed imitators in places that they could never hope to visit and Jimmie Rodgers died before he could tour England.

This “Jimmie” finds solace in the embrace of a woman who can’t remember his name and oblivion in the bottle. But though his heart being bereft of hope and his pockets are empty, the absurdity of his situation suddenly occurs to him. He’s standing in the rain. At least he’s clean.

OWH: How important is a running order in a collection with no fixed narrative? Do people listen differently now in the age of shuffle?

EC: Yes, people do seem to listen differently.

I could ask that people incline their head to the left or stand on one leg, leaning against the fireplace with one arm up, suggesting they represent a tin can and the lid is being opened. But that’s a lot to ask in this world of infinite choice and endless boredom.

When there is no specific narrative, I supposed the listener is entitled to construct one of their own imagining, like inventing histories for people one encounters in the street; “that boy used to have a large collection of insects in amber, that man is living alone with a salamander and a small inheritance, that woman has carried murder in her heart for forty years” etc.

OWH: Be that as it may, the running order of this album is very unconventional – the most immediately accessible songs come pretty far in.

Did no one say, “Maybe “I Lost You” should come along early on” or “Let’s get ‘em in the tent with “The Spell That You Cast” before we hit them with the weighty stuff”?

EC: Nobody actually raised this objection but it seems to me that you have to keep the door to the theatre shut for a while for there to be any value in opening it again to the light and air.

OWH: Speaking of confined spaces, “Church Underground” seems to contain within it the sad tale of another female singer. But the story here appears to very different from that in “Stella Hurt” from the album, “Momofuku”.

What happens to the girl here after her song is over?

EC: I’d like to think that she went on to train thoroughbred horses after making a fortune on a betting syndicate until passing peacefully in her own bed at the great age.

This song is less about the final fate of this unnamed actress and singer and her fraught and dangerous journey than the unlikely location in which she recognizes the possibility of redemption.

Many of the best musical churches are to be found below street level but their rituals and blessings are sometimes hard to recognize.

OWH: There’s a fallen priest in “Bullets For The New-Born King” and, not to get liturgical on you but “The Stations Of The Cross” and “Church Underground” also suggest that the Jesuits were right when they used to say, “Give us a child until he is five and we will have him forever.” Is the Hound of Heaven on your trail?

EC: Let’s just say I’ve never really been able to get the smell of Frankincense out of my clothes.

However, “The Stations Of The Cross” does not refer to the procession at the Benediction that I was obliged to attend during Lent but just as there were spectators on that occasion, so we may sit at safe distance regarding every depravity from the blood sports of entertainment to the fickle sympathy of the news.

OWH: The news does seem pretty bad. A flood is a recurring image on this album and it appears in last verse this song.

EC: I think reading Tom Piazza’s “City Of Refuge” provoked some of those images. It a very fine and human book.

Steve Nieve’s piano and Stuart Duncan’s electric violin combine very beautifully on that song.

OWH: Despite the ominous tone of some of the songs there is also a lot of humor and wordplay in this record from “the lay of the land” to “the Hesitation....Waltz.”

Why is there so little playfulness in modern music?

EC: I have no idea about “modern music” - although I think people have wonderful clothes - but the second example you cite which only works because of the music.

OWH: Come on now, the density of the lyric writing and the strings of internal rhymes are very flashy – the veritable chainsaw running through the dictionary.

EC: Truthfully, I’m never conscious of constructing “internal rhymes” or such devices. I am a lyricist and storytelling songwriter, not a poet. I have my own sense of what works for me with the music and that’s a take it or leave it proposition. It is for others to labour and pour over the technical aspects. They do not concern me.

OWH: But you have been working on a book for some time. Surely when your editor hears a line like, “She woke up and called him “Charlie” by mistake and then in shame began to cry” he kicks the cat and says, “He’s putting what should be his book into his songs!”

EC: This will all be explained in my forthcoming pamphlet.

OWH: How important is it for the listener to know your state of mind or other salient details about your life to appreciate these songs?

EC: I would have thought the listener’s own state of mind is of primary importance before inviting any piece of music into their life. I think my state of mind is pretty clear.

OWH: Does Doc Watson know he is the centerpiece of one of these songs?

EC: Yes, he does. I told him about writing, “Dr. Watson, I Presume” when the Sugarcanes and I played at MerleFest, on May Day, this year.

However, the song is not a literal document of our first conversation in 2007, when I first played the event.

When I was first introduced to Doc, he took off into a testimonial or homily about his life and work, the things his father had taught him and lessons taken from scripture. He may tell a lot of people these things but they rolled around my head for good while.

OWH: So, when did you write the song?

EC: I didn’t immediately decide that any of this should appear in a song. Then one day the song arrived, all in one piece, in just a matter minutes.

Things that I had heard that day had become entangled with various old rhymes and notions; a dedication to the visible sign of invisible grace. At best, this is what we are striving for, accepting that we fail most of the time.

OWH: “Soon these secrets will be scattered”, suggests that we are seeing the passing of a generation of musicians who won’t be replaced. Do you feel an obligation to learn what you can from old styles – and old masters – while they are around?

EC: Well, that’s no way to speak about Vince Gill!

When he appears on the chorus of “Dr Watson, I Presume”, his voice seems ageless and timeless to me and the turns he can make inside a harmony line would confound a mere pup.

But to answer your question seriously, I think music often takes its most confident steps forward while leaning backwards. I can’t say that I’ve ever felt any obligation and whatever has been learned is only the product of love and appreciation.

You know, when the Coward Brothers were first “re-united” in 1984, Doc Watson’s rendition of “Tom Dooley” was part of our repertoire. That’s a short lifetime ago.

OWH: So, the song has nothing at all to do with Sherlock Holmes’ bluff and hearty companion.

EC: I knew that I should have left in that verse about Nigel Bruce.

Odile W. Husband (neé O’Súlleabháin) is the popular music correspondent of “The Inquisitor” - an independent catholic journal on all matters cultural, satirical and spiritual.

COMING SOON: Episode Two of “Elvis Costello in conversation with Odile W. Husband” in which they discuss, Gibson L-OO guitars, Walter Mitty, the postscript: “The London Underground – 22nd July 2005”, the Rev. Gary Davis, meeting Graham Greene’s brother, Joni Mitchell, “Peace, Love And Understanding”, William Bendix and Ida Lupino.

Meet Moon Conway

A 72-year-old showbiz, public relations veteran might seem an unlikely choice for oversee the output of various artist websites but as Old Moon Conway remarks, in a clearly well-rehearsed quip, “They always said I had a face for the wireless”.

Conway pushes back in a swivel chair and swings his “bad leg” onto an overflowing desk in his cell of an office. The address is the old Hobby Building, off N. Cahuenga Blvd on the faded fringe of Hollywood.

Framed and blistered photographs of colleagues and clients stare down from the yellow walls. If he is to be believed, they include many old lovers; some now have their names in lights, others are already deceased.

The career of Ernest Vivian Conway, “Moon” to his friends, allegedly began as a 17-year old rehearsal pianist, deputizing for Jimmy Pruitt on the later editions of “Town Hall Party”, the Tex Ritter-hosted country music and rock and roll show broadcast out of Compton by KTTV.

Conway’s life of hanging around in the backstage shadows made him privy to secrets and scuttlebutt and he claims to have later been the voice of “El Pequeno Assassino”, a scurrilous, scandal-mongering radio host, who briefly broadcast across the border from a now defunct station in Mexicali.

Eventually, the mischief making had to stop. A couple of lawsuits and spell in gaol for unpaid fines brought Moon to a true understanding of the currency of information and his career in public relations began.

Now he was “more of a fire-fighter, bailbondsman and headshrinker”, attending to the fragile, erratic back-to-front stories of stars and has-beens alike.

The cliche of unlit cigar clenched in his jaw is his one concession to the smoke-free, modern world. These days he only lights up when an idea is dispatched.

He still composes all his missives and verses on a vintage Imperial D typewriter. “When I run out of ribbons, I suppose I’ll have to quit”, he muses, “The girl will sort it out”

“The Girl” is actually his long-suffering assistant, Miriam Cooney, a woman of almost indeterminate age, an air of quiet desperation and some considerable perseverance.

Miriam’s improbable loyalty to her curmudgeonly employer probably has something to do with her spell as the 17-year old lead singer of “The Chick-A-Deez”. Their one 1970 regional hit, “Peculiar Petunia”, lead to a swift decline into pill addiction, degradation and tabloid revelation.

If Conway was once her improbable saviour, she is now his Mary Magdalene.

More practically, Cooney is also the only one in the office who knows how to work the shiny new computer that sits like a visitation from the future in a shine to a vanished time. It is a strange window through which Moon Conway now yells his addresses to the invisible world on behalf of his clients, having first composed them at the Imperial.

So, if you happen upon “a postcard from Old Moon”, somewhere on your travels, you may picture Miriam Conway, almost silently tapping her computer keyboard, while a florid man, wreathed in smoke and curses, gives forth dictation like an oration and a noisy typewriter transport chatters until the ringing of a bell.

The North Hollywood Informer

Two Cracking Good Eggs

Costello, Lowe Swap Songs

A club show taking place the evening of the first night of San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival just might be the most intriguing concert you’ll see this year.

Scheduled for October 1 at Great American Music Hall, the show features Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe in a pairing billed as “Costello Sings Lowe / Nick Sings Elvis”.

Yes, you read that correctly. Each artist will play the other’s songs, a rather fitting concert concept considering Lowe penned the song that became one of Costello’s biggest ‘70s hits – “(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding.”

Obviously this isn’t a typical night for either performer, nor is this your run-of-the-mill club gig. It’s a charity benefit for the Richard de Lone Special Housing Project, a non-profit agency which assists those afflicted with genetic disorder Prader-Willi Syndrome by providing a state-of-the-art residential group home setting in the Bay Area.

Tickets are priced at $125 for general admission, $200 for dinner and go on sale Aug. 22 through Great American Music Hall’s online ticketing service. http://www.gamhtickets.com/evlist.php

And be sure to check out the website for the Richard de Lone Special Housing Project. http://www.rdshp.org/rdshp.org/Home.html

Cactus Festival, Belgium- Rock'n'Roll in 1921

Rock’n’roll in 1921
Saturday, 9.45 pm

Despite the persistent rain falling by the bucketful, no one could wipe the blissful grins from our faces. And the reason for our joy? Elvis Costello. He chose to wear a silly, white boater, assembled a band of superb guns-for-hire (with guitarist Jim Lauderdale deserving special mention) and entertained himself with bluegrass, gypsy jazz and Americana for an hour.

Furthermore, the mariachi keyboards in ‘Blame it on Cain’ were hard to resist, while ‘Slow Drag with Josephine’ sidled unabashedly up towards vaudeville. “This is what rock’n’roll sounded like in 1921,” was how the British songsmith introduced the song with a grin.
Earlier on, ‘New Amsterdam’ flirted beyond belief with the Beatles’ ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’.

We weren’t the only ones to savour it: the audience was also clearly under Costello’s spell. ‘Red Shoes’ and a magnificent ‘Good Year for the Roses’ brought proceedings to a climax with en-masse singing. Even the sudden downpour failed to dampen spirits during ‘The Delivery Man’, the Grateful Dead cover ‘Friend of the Devil’ or the brand new and appropriately-titled ‘Jimmie Standing in the Rain’ featuring gypsy violin.

The fact that the anguished love song ‘I Want You’ seemed to be handled equally well by the fiddling gypsies could not even bother us any more.

Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow

Scotsman.com: Fiona Shepherd: 06.07.10

Judging by the modest attendance at this show, Elvis Costello's current country-fuelled incarnation appears to have flown under the radar. To date, his cover of George Jones's Good Year For The Roses remains his best known foray into maudlin country, but his long association with Texan producer and songwriter T Bone Burnett has kept him in touch with the musical wellspring of the southern United States.

Costello may be the star, but this disarming concert was a true ensemble effort thanks to his esteemed band of Nashville players, including Jerry Douglas on dobro and singer/songwriter Jim Lauderdale on guitar and authentic bluegrass harmonies, whose relaxed, unshowy playing belied the excellence of their musicianship.

Highlights among the material from current album Secret, Profane & Sugarcane were Down Among The Wines And Spirits, a hugely poetical spin on the classic tears-in-my-beer country lyric, and the bluegrass, skiffle and rockabilly melting pot of Don't Lie To Me.

But there were plentiful treats from his back catalogue, such as New Amsterdam and (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes, given a light dusting of folksy instrumentation. Every Day I Write The Book was stripped back to a soulful mountain lament, while The Delivery Man was coloured with fuzzy slide guitar and tin whistle.

Even the starkest songs from Costello's past benefited from the band's subtle embellishments, which added depth and eerie character to the tormented maelstrom of I Want You and the quiet devastation of Shipbuilding.

Elvis Costello and the Sugarcanes, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow

Herald Scotland: Keith Bruce: 05.07.10

Confounding our expectations and surprising us at every turn, Elvis was back in the building with a whole new company of musicians and yet another radical revision of his back catalogue.

Actually, it was more than that. Not only does Costello bring a fresh approach to his own music with each visit, he also leads his followers to rethink the whole history and breadth of the musical world he operates within. His sidemen here were the sextet of seasoned players of roots Americana who accompanied him on his last album, but we only heard three tracks from that and we had to wait until the third encore to hear the song, Sulphur to Sugarcane, that gave the group its name. Before that we heard the first thoughts of the other Elvis on Mystery Train, and Costello’s beginnings with Blame It On Cain and a gorgeous mariachi version of Red Shoes. But one of a clutch of new songs, possibly titles Slow Drag with Josephine, harked back even further, to vaudeville.

There was a good deal of Costello’s music hall persona in this show. The lighter moments, however, sat alongside the pointed political triumverate of Oliver’s Army, Shipbuilding, and (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding and the dark menace of Psycho and the hanging chords of a terrific, tormented I Want You.

A strange combination of Willie Nelson, George Formby and, of course, most of all himself!

Diesel Therapy: 01.07.10

… saw Elvis Costello at the Sage last night. The band were fabulous: Jerry Douglas (dobro), Stuart Duncan (fiddle), etc. As a non Elvis fan I was amazed at his talent. Great songs, witty delivery and what a voice. When he hits the high notes … You can’t ignore his wonderful soulful delivery. As an artist who has consistently referenced “Country and Bluegrass” throughout his career, it was affirming to see him so comfortable in the company of Nashvilles finest. It has to be said that Elvis Costello is as Northern as they come.
A strange combination of Willie Nelson, George Formby and, of course, most of all himself! I’m a convert. Jim

Elvis Costello at Vicar Street, Dublin

Vanessa Monaghan: GoldenPlec.Com

There always seems to be one or two artists that you say ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing them’ but never get round to, Elvis Costello was one but I was still unsure what to expect.

Upon entering the venue the first thing I notice is that the audience seems to be more 40 and 50 somethings. Not surprising though when you consider Costello’s first release was in was in 1977 and has an impressive 29 album back catalogue. Younger readers may know Costello from his Austin Powers appearance or his Christina Aguilera cover in the TV series ‘House’.

From the first notes of ‘Mystery Train’, it becomes apparent that Costello, along with his backing band ‘The Sugarcanes’, will be treating us to some country and bluegrass.

Following ‘Blame it on Cain’, Costello, introduces the band which features Jim Lauderdale, a successful country bluegrass artist in his own right. Tracks from last years ‘Secret Profane & Sugarcane’ album feature highly in the set list but Costello paces them nicely with well known songs from his repretoire. A medley of ‘New Amsterdam’ and ‘Hide Your Love Away’ get the biggest cheer of the night so far, until the following song ‘Good year for the Roses’, for which Costello tips his hat to the audience.

The lack of a drummer isn’t noticed on stage and the arrangements of well known songs seem like they may have been written in the bluegrass/country genre. The on stage presence of accordion, mandolin, lapsteel, double bass, and beautiful vocal harmonies make the evening more special.

Costello continues, mixing brand new tracks with classics, getting the audience to sing along to ‘Red Shoes’. He also chooses to cover the Grateful Dead song ‘Friend of the Devil’ while a re-worked version of ‘Everyday I write the book’ leaves Costello with the audience in the palm of his hand.

The band leave the stage only to return a minute later for an encore, if you can call it that. This was really part two of the show, kicking off with the well known ‘Girls Talk’ and then ‘Spell You cast’ from last year’s album.

Costello doesn’t talk much but when he does, he is very witty. He telling the audience they would be too old to go to a Dylan concert and recalling himself on the Dylan show and the kids were ‘sitting on the floor wearing their beany hats wondering if he was the guy from The Buddy Holly Story’.

A second encore shows that the band seem to be genuinely having fun and enjoying themselves, with Costello holding his guitar high to the audience, almost whispering and motioning that he’ll do one more. Beautiful versions of ‘Alison’ and ‘Shipbuilding’ blend seamlessly with newer material, the night ends as all musicians leave the stage apart from double bass and lapsteel who end the evening.

Two hours of pure entertainment and fantastic musicianship, I lost count after twenty five songs and Mr Costello never undid his suit button" -

Old pros with a great line in nostalgia

The Irish Times: 03.07.10

"Old pros with a great line in nostalgia" - For some years we have stopped believing that he is the best thing since the invention of the wheel – his last truly brilliant album, in our opinion, was 2003’s North – but it would be a foolish person indeed to bet against him delivering a show that didn’t provide equal measures of reinvention, humour, cracking tunes and a staggering range of influences and references" - www.jaded.com

Live at Vicar St

Irish Independent: 03.07.10

This organic, often languid, sound works well with expressive vocals of the Liverpool-raised singer of Irish stock.

Glorious

As expected, there's a strong emphasis on the newer material; although, in truth, the low-tempo pace soon tries the patience. Luckily, a stunning as-yet-unreleased song, 'Condemned Man', comes along to pin restless punters to their seats and it's followed by one of the new album's best songs, 'Complicated Shadows', which features some glorious virtuoso slide guitar from Jerry Douglas.

Costello is an engaging raconteur and his showman qualities are revealed on several occasions, not least when he dusts down some old favourites.

'New Amsterdam' sounds especially fine, not least when its coda fades into a lovely version of The Beatles' 'You've Got to Hide Your Love Away', while a faithful rendition of 'Alison' offers a reminder of what a great songwriter the young Elvis Costello was.

The highlight of the night is the sombre 'Shipbuilding'. One of the greatest -- and most subtle -- protest songs ever written, its message about the futility of war is as relevant for those caught up in today's conflicts as it was when released during the height of the Falklands debacle. That it sits somewhat uneasily between jaunty Americana only serves to accentuate its impact.

Elvis Costello Live At The Sage, Gateshead, "Gig Of The Year, No Contest"

The Shields Gazette: Terry Kelly: 02.07.10

The other Elvis launched last night's brilliant musical cocktail with a Sun Records classic by The King.
Looking dapper in grey suit and tie, with a white hat perched on his head, Costello shouted "How are you?" to his Tyneside fans before tearing into Mystery Train.

The former Declan Patrick MacManus, who was clearly up for it, took the audience on a brilliant journey through the vast and highly varied Costello canon.

Backed by his peerless six-piece country band The Sugarcanes, Costello covered the waterfront, from Beatles to blues, cabaret to country, music hall to Motown.

Breathing new life into old favourites like Everyday I Write the Book, (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes and Oliver's Army, Costello sweated like James Brown and performed with grace and 100 per cent passion.

New songs Jimmie Standing In The Rain and Slow Drag With Josephine revealed his muse is alive and kicking during a two-hour show studded with musical highlights too various to mention.

Costello left the stage after an inspired version of the Stones' Happy, and the screaming, clapping audience were more than that.

Gig of the year? No contest.

Triumphant Liverpool return for maestro

Catherine Jones: Liverpool Echo: 29.06.10

TWO years ago he made a Capital of Culture appearance in this very hall alongside the RLPO.

But this time Elvis Costello was the main attraction in a return visit to the city that, if it didn’t actually breed him, certainly raised the teenage music maker.

And the former SFX schoolboy, who once played down the road at the Black-E for the princely sum of 50p, and whose mum was an usherette at the Phil, delivered a marathon two-hour, 26-song, guitar-saluting thank you.

The one-time boy from Birkenhead has certainly come a long way, both physically (he now lives in the States with wife Diana Krall) and musically, picking up - magpie-like - shiny new genres during the last three decades, from pub rock to punk to pop to jazz and the current squeeze in this career of cross-fertilisation, bluegrass and country.
It was the latter that dominated last night’s set, with a black-and- white boatered Costello playing alongside the six-strong Sugarcanes - whose members include dobro guitar maestro Jerry Douglas and Nashville Bluegrass Band fiddle player Stuart Duncan.

It lent a bluesy, country feel and some delicious vocal harmonies to much of the Costello back catalogue, right back in fact to Blame it on Cain and (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes from his debut album My Aim is True, and right up to his most recent output including Down Among the Wines and Spirits.

New Amsterdam was given a waltz-like feel as it seeped in and out of a raw version of the Beatles’ You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away (Costello had spent Sunday afternoon supporting Macca at Hyde Park), while the singer showcased a number of new tracks including Jimmy Standing in the Rain - a tango-infused piece of storytelling with the repeated refrain "waiting on a platform at a Lancashire station", and the ragtime-style Slow Drag With Josephine, featuring a dual vocal with mandolin player Mike Compton.

But there was also room for some of the most loved parts of the Costello canon, including Every Day I Write the Book, a pared down Alison, and a heart- rending, grandiose Phil Spector sound saturated Shipbuilding.

There were times during the evening that the sound system distorted Costello’s vocals.

But it didn’t seem to overly bother the packed Phil Hall.

"You’re the best," he told the crowd as he, finally, left the stage.

Fantastic concert at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall

Laura Davis: Liverpool Daily Post: 29.06.10

Costello was a man of few words but considerable wit , making light of England’s defeat in Sunday’s World Cup match – "Wayne Rooney? More like Mickey Rooney" – though he had been performing with Paul McCartney in Hyde Park at the time of the game.

But this acoustic set was far from a one-man show and only Costello’s charismatic stage presence prevented him from being upstaged by members of his Tennesse band The Sugarcanes.

Stuart Duncan drew a stunningly rich tone from his fiddle, while Mike Compton played the mandolin at such pace that his fingers appeared blurred.

But even their performances were eclipsed by 12-time Grammy Award winner Jerry Douglas who coaxed an amazing range of sounds from his dobro.

Their backing on a beautiful rendition of Shipbuilding made the anthem even more mournful.

A double encore finished the concert with Nick Lowe’s (What’s so Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding as the final song. But if Costello had chosen to play all night, the audience would have stayed to listen.

His namesake may only live on in rumours and records but the singer-songwriter with the Birkenhead upbringing appears to be immortal.
And at last night’s Philharmonic Hall gig, Elvis Costello demonstrated just why his 35-year career has never faltered.

A consummate performer and a master-wordsmith, he mixed new material with old and other people’s songs in a show that was as refreshing as the rain shower that greeted the exiting audience on this sticky June day.

Elvis Costello: The New Theatre, Oxford

Reg Little: The Oxford Times: 28.06.10

his plan to play a solo show or it was going to be quite a night. Two hours later we had our answer as Elvis left the building, acoustic guitar held aloft, his suit still unbuttoned. A set that had begun with a no-nonsense Red Shoes, from his debut album, ended with one of the handful of impressive new songs delivered during an evening that reminded us of his mastery as a song writer.

Anyone who caught him back in the 1970s snarling lyrics about all those girls who left “with another guy”, could not have guessed how the seriously good pub rocker on the Stiff tour, with the geeky look and one of the best bands around, would become a musician ready to steep himself into everything from country to classical music.

Introducing one song he paid a touching tribute to his father, a former big band singer, with whom he first performed — and it’s clear he is still learning the family trade, as a vocalist and seriously underrated guitarist. At one stage he took unplugged to a new level, by stepping away from the microphone to belt out “a 1920s rock’n’roll” song in its entirety.

Strong melodies mean his songs lend themselves well to the stripped down treatment, while the lyrics of Ship Building, written after the Falklands War, and Oliver’s Army have never sounded more poignant, as we all reflected on what the boys of the Mersey, Thames and the Tyne are now being asked to do in our name.

The evening was first ignited by a powerful vocal performance of Good Year for the Roses, while God’s Comic showed that for all his relaxed style and readiness to share anecdotes about working with Bob Dylan and performing for Paul McCartney in the White House, he can still spit out with relish lines about “wading through all this unbelievable junk”.

Then taking a stool, he offers us the sweetest version of the Sinatra favourite All or Nothing at All, perfectly summing up his approach to performing. Maybe that’s what he really learnt from his dad.

St David's Hall, Cardiff: Dynamic and Masterful

Kate Clarke:

This being a solo tour I was half expecting Costello to lean on his gentler bluegrass numbers, but he has so many in built effects and settings on his voice he has no problem summoning up the drama and dynamics needed for his all-angels-and-edges rock, even without a band. So we got it all.

An immense version of Watching The Detectives, was the theatrical centre-piece of the night

Using guitar chord loops, and fuzz and tremolo effects to underline the song's dramatic lines and to crank up the tension, he led up to a controlled madness, Marc Ribot-style solo, which summoned up 60's cop programmes expertly.

We got Costello in the guise of the faded Vaudevillian too, with a clutch of gently strummed and whistled, mournful character studies.

Several encores gifted us a foray into the Great American Songbook which he handles so deftly, with All Or Nothing At All, and the night came to a close with a delicate and subtle song which imagined the last dreams of Jean Charles De Menezes - imagery of Portuguese love songs, the rush of warm air that fills underground trains at their stops, and lone birds singing made for affecting stuff.

Pretty Masterful.

Elvis Costello, St David's Hall, Cardiff

David Owens: South Wales Echo: 26.06.10

TWO musical greats hit Cardiff this week playing vastly different venues, yet both eagerly awaited by fans to whom both have acquired a somewhat god-like status.

Pre-empting McCartney at the Millennium Stadium this evening, the equally talented and highly acclaimed Elvis Costello played the smaller and more intimate St David’s Hall.

Unaccompanied and armed only with an array of fine guitars, his stripped down versions of classics from one of rock’s most celebrated and extensive bodies of work was a real treat.

There are very few figures from the era that spawned punk still treading the boards today as regularly as Costello, and certainly no one nearly as creative or as productive.

It was a low-key entrance from the man.

And with no need for grand introductions, it was straight into his first number 45, followed swiftly by Either Side Of The Same Town and Veronica, a number co-written by Costello with former Beatle McCartney.

It was proving to be the perfect setting which ideally suited what had become a laid-back, living room experience.

And Costello’s good-natured banter and chat about his songs and experiences was certainly an added bonus in what was quickly becoming a memorable evening.

The interesting thing about an evening with Elvis is the likelihood of hearing something never heard before or hearing an oldie dusted down and re-worked.

Costello didn’t disappoint, producing a manic version of Watching The Detectives before moving effortlessly into Radio Sweetheart, with a touch of Jackie Wilson Said thrown into the mix.

The encore produced some real gems with the excellent Sulphur To Sugarcane followed by a bitter-sweet Alison and then the classic anti-war anthem Shipbuilding in what was a quite exceptional evening.

Interview with the South Wales Evening Post

Kate Clarke: South Wales Evening Post: 24.06.10

YOU might call Elvis Costello the ultimate magpie. He made venomous, tongue-twisting rock his calling card, before easing into sophisticated modern standards, smouldering through neglected R'n'B gems, teaming up with 1960s Bossa-pop maestro Burt Bacharach and exercising his classical ear.
But his love of all the colours of music remains a committed romance, rather than a flirtation to hold an audience's wandering eye.
He talks to Kate Clarke ahead of his show tonight at St David's Hall, Cardiff.

Does a solo tour flex different musical muscles?

"I probably have the greatest freedom to sing songs from every year and for every occasion, even numbers I've overlooked or just occur to me in the moment or are tunes yet to be heard on record.

There are obviously songs that announced you to the stage in the first place and that people would still like to hear.

"Time changes them in interesting ways and playing solo makes takes them out of any routine or ritual and gives them back to you like a prize."

You occupy an unusual space in music — you're a household name, your face on an album is a mark of quality, but many would consider your most recent albums niche.

"If I am really a 'household name' I hope it is a delicious one like Vimto and not something that stings the eyes like Vim.
"I've always thought of a niche summoning up an alcove in which you might place a Grecian vase."

You exercise your freedom to follow all musical routes. Having the freedom of the backbenches means also that when you remind listeners about Jesse Winchester and George Jones you can open up new audiences for those artists?

"Sounds as if I've aspired to be the Anthony Wedgewood-Benn of musical advocacy. Or perhaps the Dennis Skinner.
"Then again, it is always a surprise when people thank me for making them aware of, say, George Jones. Then I have to remind myself someone else had to make that introduction for me."

"The television programme Spectacle probably remains obscure to your readers but viewers in Canada and America seem to be looking forward to the proposed season three. If the show had achieved nothing else, one performance by Jesse Winchester, in the last series, would have made it all worthwhile."

Having said that you can fill the Royal Festival Hall. How was it playing in front of dad last week?

"The best possible way to spend Father's Day, other than being with all of my sons."

"Watching both my parents listen to new recordings remains one of the most interesting and important responses I can receive. They both immediately hear details that are intended to reward repeated listening."

Your skill for shoehorning phrases into lyrics, in odd, thrilling alliances is a Costello hallmark.

"Along with skills as parliamentarian, you seem to imply that the rest of the work is a load of cobbling.
"I credit Sister Mary Ninian (and my ma) for teaching me how to read and after that, everything else was easy."

I have to ask about North. If Chuck Berry had only written the one song in his lifetime — Nadine — he would still be a musical giant. You could hold North up to the same light.

"You might be in a minority there. Those songs mean a lot to me and some records have to wait a while for their time to come.
"If Chuck had only known one woman named Nadine and not another called Maybelline, we'd be stuck for a name for mascara."

I hear you often write with particular singers in mind — even if you don't tout them. Do you have one that got away? Would you like to have heard Dinah Washington cut Heart Shaped Bruise? Dion should certainly cut Alison.

"I could possibly imagine Dinah Washington singing Poisoned Rose. Dion writes some pretty good songs, so I don't think he needs my help."

Anything else we should know?

"I recently played a little loud electric guitar on someone's record but I can't say her name."

"Like a child whose lollipop has plummeted down a ravine"

Ben Walsh: The Independent 23.06.10

"I've been wading through all this unbelievable junk/ And wondering if I should have given the world to the monkeys," he spits out with relish on "God's Comic" in this blistering solo set. It's about time we reclaimed our very own Elvis, and thanks to Richard Thompson's Meltdown we get a rare sighting (he now lives in New York with his wife, Diana Krall) of this British new-wave whiz.

The 55-year-old Costello bounces, Tigger-like, on to the stage in a sleek dark-grey suit. Glaring out from his bulky black specs he looks like a blend of Woody Allen and Phil Silvers, and his patter between songs is droll and engaging – he apologises for his American accent, he tells us that his dad is in the audience and jokes about making "two whistling solos in one show". But his singing persona is as raw and belligerent as ever, his head jerks violently away from the mic to emphasise an acerbic lyric, his leg occasionally kicks out and when he attacks his guitar his lips are defiantly downcast, like a child whose lollipop has plummeted down a ravine.

In his generous set – I counted 25 songs and it runs 25 minutes over – the highlights include an exquisite, stripped-down "Good Year for the Roses", sung like it belongs in a David Lynch/Wim Wenders film, a suitably vicious ("though it nearly took a miracle to get you to stay/ It only took my little fingers to blow you away") "Watching the Detectives" and the gorgeous lament "Alison". But the truly bravura flourish is when he shuns his mic and sits on the edge of the stage to croon the blues-tinged "Slow Drag with Josephine". What a wonderful show-off Declan MacManus (his given name) still is.

In the past few years Costello has toured with Dylan, played with Springsteen and appeared on 30 Rock. All in the States. The UK doesn't get to see enough of this smart, literate, opinionated lyricist and sensational performer. For the finale, Richard Thompson joins him for his finest song, the sad, enraged "Shipbuilding". The rousing standing ovation that follows is wholly justified.

Elvis Costello at the Royal Festival Hall

Tim Adams: The Guardian: 21.06.10

As Father's Day gifts go, it would be hard to imagine a better present than the one offered by Elvis Costello to his dad: the perfect concert at the Festival Hall. Elvis dedicated his second number Veronica (the song about his paternal grandmother that he wrote with Paul McCartney) to his old man, the 83-year old former big band singer, who was in attendance, and then proceeded to demonstrate all that he had learned in the 50-odd years since they first sang together.

In recent years, since his unhappy performance at Glastonbury in 2005, Costello, long exiled in the States, has suggested that he had no real desire to play the UK, except on diversions like his Brodsky Quartet collaboration, but this looked and sounded like a change of heart. For two hours, with only a guitar (and, on a couple of tracks, Meltdown curator Richard Thompson) for accompaniment, he reminded everyone of the range and brilliance of his 35 years of songwriting, and the fully evolved soulfulness and attack of his voice.

Definitive, skeletal versions of Alison and Good Year for the Roses were sung as if his life depended on them. Watching the Detectives required fancy footwork on several guitar loops and carried all its homemade edge. There was a newish take on a song he claimed "to hate" – Every Day I Write the Book, revived here because, he suggested, his friend Ron Sexsmith has finally taught him how to sing it – and a clutch of standout tracks from his forthcoming album including Jimmie Standing in the Rain, about a cowboy singer down on his luck, and Slow Drag with Josephine, "how rock'n'roll used to sound in 1921", a ragtime tune that he sang sitting on the edge of the stage, with a whistle solo, and without an amp.

The whimsical interludes are reminders of Costello's understanding of his roots in music hall and cabaret traditions, but he hasn't lost his edge of righteous anger either. His vitriol is news that stays news. There was a wonderfully pointed version of God's Comic, in which priestly hypocrisies seemed fresh minted, and a raucous Shipbuilding, the Falklands-era complexities of which now foreshadow another defence review and another distant war. Perhaps Costello always sounds better under a Tory government, but on this form he seems capable of anything. The Meltdown invitation has led to a short UK tour this week; grab a ticket if you can and give him a proper prodigal welcome.

Elvis Costello performed at the Meltdown festival on 20 June. Richard Thompson's Meltdown continues until 21 June.

Win Elvis’s Guitar and help raise funds for the Picket Music Venue in Liverpool.

Ahead of his sold out performance at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on 28th June Elvis Costello has announced that he is gifting one of his Gibson acoustic guitars to the Picket music venue in Liverpool. The venue will raffle the instrument to raise funds for the work it does with young bands. The Gibson DSM guitar handmade in Canada comes complete with a hard-case and a personal note from Mr. Costello no less!

Since visiting the music venue and its Pinball Studios in the 1980’s Elvis has been a passionate supporter of its work;“It’s a place I feel very strongly about. It’s somewhere in Liverpool that allows people to play music at a community level, and for that it needs the city’s support”.

More recently in 2007 he appeared at the venue in a fundraising concert with the legendary American musician Allen Toussaint and a 12- piece band flown in from New Orleans. The show sold out within days of being announced and proved to be a memorable occasion while raising over £7,000.00 for the Picket.
Philip Hayes The Picket’s venue manager said, “Elvis’s kindness has been inspirational, his gig at the Picket in 2007 was a such a boost for us and a classic show. This gift will help us to continue to support the next generation of musicians from Liverpool, he knows that when you are starting off in the music industry you need help and encouragement and that’s what we provide.”

Tickets to win the guitar go on sale from Monday 28th June.
They can be purchased by sending a cheque for £10.00 to:
The Picket Music Venue,
61 Jordan Street,
Liverpool,
L1 OBW.
UK
Make it payable to ‘The Picket’ and include a stamped addressed enveloped. The draw will take place on 3rd August 2010.Please include your full contact details name, address, email and a contact telephone number.
Anyone entering the raffle from outside the UK will have to pay any shipping and import charges should they win.

Elvis Costello starts his UK

Elvis Costello kicks off his European tour tonight at the Royal Festival Hall in London playing at Richard Thompson’s “Meltdown”. Over the month of June Elvis Costello will be playing other dates in the UK including Birmingham, Oxford, Cardiff, Liverpool, Gateshead & Glasgow. Elvis can also be seen performing at Hard Rock Calling in Hyde Park on Sunday 27th June.

Check out Elvis' Dance Card for more details and ticket availability for all of his UK & European shows.

Allen Toussaint Joins The Sugarcanes On The Stage...

Allen Toussaint joins The Sugarcanes on the stage at JazzFest in New Orleans

The Sugarcanes Plus At Sonoma Jazz

The Sugarcanes played a short run of theatre dates from Boston through Washington, D.C., the United Palace, New York, Richmond, Virginia, Atlanta and Jacksoville, Florida and two headlining festival appearances, concluding at MerleFest in Wilkesboro, North Carolina.

E.C. sang, "She Came In Through The Bathroom Window" during The Waybacks complete performance of "Abbey Road" in the afternoon, while Sugarcanes gave the first full band performance of "Dr Watson, I Presume", a reminiscence of the previous visit to the festival in 2007.

E.C. and The Sugarcanes were joined by Rebecca and Megan Lovell from their new band, Larkin Poe for finale performances of "The Scarlet Tide" and "The Crooked Line"

At the Sonoma Jazz Festival appearance on May 22nd, the band will feature, Jim Lauderdale, Dennis Crouch, Jeff Taylor, Mike Compton and Stuart Duncan. On this occasion Jerry Douglas will not be in the line-up, as he is attending a very important family event but the group will be augmented by multi-instrumentalist, Fats Kaplin and also feature Pete Thomas on drums.

"True Blood Volume 2" is released on May 25th

"True Blood Volume 2"

The album contains a newly recorded Lucinda Williams song, "Kiss Like Your Kiss" which features a harmony vocal from Elvis Costello.

Speaking to minister of information, The Right Reverend Jimmy Quickly, Costello said:

"This is one of the best vocal performances of Lucinda's recording career. I just tried to stay out of the way and add a little harmony where absolutely needed. It didn't need a thing more. The show may make you want to bite someone on the neck but this song is going to make you wish you were loved or in love with someone enough so you could sing it to them."

The complete track listing of this fine compilation can be found at this address:

http://music-mix.ew.com/2010/05/10/true-blood-volume-2-tracklist/

Elvis Costello and Imposters Play Reno

Elvis Costello and Imposters play Reno, close with "Folsom Prison Blues" and "I Trust" by Roger McGuinn.

The Reno Gazette-Journal:

"British rocker Elvis Costello played to what was probably his biggest crowd ever in Reno on Saturday...90-minute show that had fans dancing in the aisles...Its the kind of sound that would go over well at the Nugget Rib Cook-off."

It Is After Considerable Contemplation....

It is after considerable contemplation that I have lately arrived at the decision that I must withdraw from the two performances scheduled in Israel on the 30th of June and the 1st of July.

One lives in hope that music is more than mere noise, filling up idle time, whether intending to elate or lament.

Then there are occasions when merely having your name added to a concert schedule may be interpreted as a political act that resonates more than anything that might be sung and it may be assumed that one has no mind for the suffering of the innocent.

I must believe that the audience for the coming concerts would have contained many people who question the policies of their government on settlement and deplore conditions that visit intimidation, humiliation or much worse on Palestinian civilians in the name of national security.

I am also keenly aware of the sensitivity of these themes in the wake of so many despicable acts of violence perpetrated in the name of liberation.

Some will regard all of this an unknowable without personal experience but if these subjects are actually too grave and complex to be addressed in a concert, then it is also quite impossible to simply look the other way.

I offer my sincere apologies for any disappointment to the advance ticket holders as well as to the organizers.

My thanks also go to the members of the Israeli media with whom I had most rewarding and illuminating conversations. They may regard these exchanges as a waste of their time but they were of great value and help to me in gaining an appreciation of the cultural scene.

I hope it is possible to understand that I am not taking this decision lightly or so I may stand beneath any banner, nor is it one in which I imagine myself to possess any unique or eternal truth.

It is a matter of instinct and conscience.

It has been necessary to dial out the falsehoods of propaganda, the double game and hysterical language of politics, the vanity and self-righteousness of public communiqués from cranks in order to eventually sift through my own conflicted thoughts.

I have come to the following conclusions.

One must at least consider any rational argument that comes before the appeal of more desperate means.

Sometimes a silence in music is better than adding to the static and so an end to it.

I cannot imagine receiving another invitation to perform in Israel, which is a matter of regret but I can imagine a better time when I would not be writing this.

With the hope for peace and understanding. Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello among surprise guests at Bobby Charles tribute

By Keith Spera, The Times-Picayune
April 30, 2010, 9:00AM

The indefatigable Elvis Costello apparently still had energy to burn after leaving the Fair Grounds on Thursday. Five hours after wrapping up his set on the New Orleans Jazz Fest's Gentilly Stage with his band the Sugarcanes, he appeared on stage at The Parish of the House of Blues during Lil Band o' Gold's tribute to late Louisiana songwriter Bobby Charles.

Lil Band o' Gold is already a southwest Louisiana all-star ensemble fronted by guitarist C.C. Adcock and accordionist Steve Riley and powered by veteran swamp pop drummer/vocalist Warren Storm. Charles, who died this spring in Abbeville, wrote a slew of songs recorded by the likes of Fats Domino ("Walking to New Orleans") and Bill Haley & the Comets ("See You Later Alligator"). He counted many well-known musicians among his fans and admirers.
Rumors that some of those admirers, including Robert Plant -- who sat in with Lil Band o' Gold at Tipitina's three years ago, while in town to record songs for a Fats Domino tribute album -- might turn up at The Parish on Thursday sparked a last-minute run on tickets. The 300-capacity room was full as the band, augmented by bonus tenor sax player Derek Huston, swung into gear.

Among the first guests was Shannon McNally. She opened with Charles' "I Spent All My Money Loving You" and "Small Town Talk." She and Storm traded verses on an achingly beautiful "Tennessee Blues," with David Egan and Dr. John on keyboards.

It was difficult to see Dr. John, given that the crowd was pressed close to the low stage. He was among Charles' close friends, and produced Charles' new CD, "Timeless," released just weeks after his death.
Warren sang lead on a sweet "(I Don't Know Why I Love You) But I Do," a Charles composition that became a massive hit for Frogman Henry.

Costello arrived on stage around midnight, invigorated by the setting, the band and the music. He started off with "Big Boys Cry," a song Charles recorded in the 1960s on his Hub-City Records label, but did not write. During a subsequent "Before I Grow Too Old," Costello gripped the microphone and roused the band and crowd, preaching the song as much as singing it alongside swamp pop survivor Tommy McLain. "Elvis Costello!" said McLain. "Tommy McLain!" said Costello.
Costello stuck around to strum guitar on "See You Later, Alligator," more than happy to be just another guy in the band paying tribute to a Louisiana master.

Elvis Costello finds his inner Hillbilly

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
April 27, 2010, by Suzanne Van Atten

"Working their way through selections from Costello’s most recent “Sacred, Profane, and Sugarcane” album and interspersing numerous unique covers, the band shined brightest in the jaw-dropping redone versions of Costello’s signature songs, turning “New Amsterdam” into an inspiring folk song, adding just enough gothic darkness to “The Delivery Man” to send shivers up your spine, and converting Costello’s pop tune “Every Day I Write The Book” into a slow and deeply emotional love ballad that left today’s “hot new country” in the dust with it’s witty wordplay and rich harmony vocals from Lauderdale and Douglas.
With so many highlights, the real surprises of the night were such rare jewels as the delightfully perfect bluegrass take on Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale,” a rollicking romp through the Grateful Dead’s “Friend Of The Devil,” which allowed Lauderdale to further show off his vocal skills, and the uptempo “Happy” by the Rolling Stones. And of course, in homage to Costello’s country idol, a sweet take of George Jones’ “Color Of The Blues.”
As he gradually and gracefully ages into a true ambassador of popular music, Costello seems totally comfortable in whatever niche he chooses to explore. The universality and power of his songs is seen in just how well they transform into different styles, a process which has been a staple of Costello’s shows for many years now. It is clear that he loves what he does, and his contagious joy is shared with his rabid fans. The insightful writer who once declared himself a “Brilliant Mistake” made no mistakes this time around, and he could easily be the next King of Americana"

Elvis Lives (Costello that is)

San Diego Union Tribune
April 12, 2010, by George Varga

"There were so many remarkable musical moments during Elvis Costello's superb solo concert last night at downtown's Balboa Theater that it's difficult to rate one above another...

...The new material he debuted, including the as yet unrecorded "Jimmie Standing in the Rain" and "Slow Drag with Josephine," was uniformly impressive. So impressive, in fact, that he performed "Josephine" while sitting on the front of the stage, with no microphone for either his voice or his acoustic guitar, as the audience listened in hushed silence, the better to hear every word and inflection.
It was a brave move, brilliantly executed...

...So was the pacing of the concert itself, which rose from a whisper to a scream, then back again, as Costello mixed such lesser known songs as "Bedlam" and "Motel Matches" with a stunning medley of "Radio Sweetheart" and Van Morrison's ebullient "Jackie Wilson Said." ...

...The multigenerational audience, needed no prodding to engage in call-and-response vocals with Costello on "The Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes" and other favorites. In addition to "(What's So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding," the encores included two other cover versions, a heartfelt rendition of the classic George Jones country ballad, "Good Year for the Roses," and a haunting version of the jazz standard, "All or Nothing at All" ...

John Ciambotti

John Ciambotti

There is no easy way to receive bad or shocking news but there seems to be something especially cruel and abrupt about electronic mail. It is the modern equivalent of the curt bereavement notices of the telegraphic era.

So it was that I read of the sudden passing of my friend, John Ciambotti. He was a wonderful bass-player, songwriter, some-time manager, record producer and all around great guy.

The fact that he had also latterly thrived in his second vocation as a chiropractor and in holistic medicine meant that he could jokingly claim to be “the Real Dr. John”. All of which makes his absence seem all the more unlikely.

The rest of the day was given to conversations on the phone and messages shooting back and forth between friends who shared even more musical time with John and in those whose lives and careers he had played an important part.

The news first arrived from Alex Call, chief vocalist and one of the several talented songwriters in John’s former band, Clover.

Some of those reading this will know that Clover were the Marin County group, who were persuaded to take up residency in England by our former managers and Stiff Records founders, Jake Riviera and Dave Robinson.

Despite all grand schemes and good intentions, the London scene of 1976 might have been the worst place for a band of relatively longhaired, highly capable American musicians to suddenly pitch up.

Clover’s early 70s albums on the Fantasy label, “Clover” and “Forty-Niner” were very rare and fine but only appreciated by a tiny group of admirers. I had finally found “Forty-Niner” in a Wandsworth second-hand store, just a vinyl disc without a sleeve. I played it until I knew every note in the grooves.

The relocation of the band to Headley Grange – a rat-infested, English country house and former rehearsal haunt of both Led Zeppelin and Bad Company – did nothing to change the band’s fortunes but proved to be greatly to my advantage.

Newly signed to Stiff Records, more as a songwriter than a recording artist, I soon found myself working with players whose records I had previously hunted down in those cut-out bins.

Once it was decided that more than one session should take place, I was introduced to the full line-up of Clover instrumentalists: guitarist and pedal steel player, John McFee, keyboard player, Sean Hopper, drummer, Mickey Shine and on bass, the most outgoing and wickedly-humoured of the outfit, bassist, Johnny Ciambotti.

Musicians often speak with shorthand references before songs are fully remembered. I think it might have been John who first said, without out any apparent malice, “Let’s do that one that sounds like The Byrds”, referring to “(The Angels Want To Wear My) Red Shoes”, while a novice songwriter was busy trying to cover his tracks.

Given my almost complete lack of studio experience and the cult status of Clover, it was pretty intimidating to ask for changes in the arrangements but it is not as if we had the resources to belabour anything in the recording process.

“My Aim Is True” was recorded in a total of six, four-hour sessions, yielding the original 12-track sequence and three completed outtakes.

It transformed me from someone who recorded his songs in a bedroom to a pop singer with an odd name, who had the chance to appear on television and radio, perform on club and theatre stages and eventually make his way in the world.

The recordings with Clover were the first thing that most people heard with my new name attached and whatever naiveté I now detect in my own performances, their impact and the debt I owe to the players, is undeniable.

Although, I had seen Johnny at gigs over the years – he introduced me to Lucinda Williams in the mid-80s, when they were working together – and while his colleague, John McFee also appeared on the albums, “Almost Blue” and “The Delivery Man”, I never really expected to be in a room again with the band, Clover.

Just three years ago – and some thirty years after our last recording session - our mutual friends, Austin and Lesley Delone had asked us to play a show in benefit of the Richie Delone Housing Fund, to assist those, such as their son, Richard, who have Prader-Willi Syndrome, a very rare and immensely challenging genetic disorder.

I’m not given much to nostalgia but this event seemed a fine reason to reconvene as much of the “My Aim Is True” line-up as could be assembled.

Legal reasons meant that Clover had not even been credited on the “My Aim Is True” sleeve, nor had we ever made any public appearances.

In advance, I suppose I thought it might be a lark to perform the songs in recorded sequence and not have it be a complete indulgence, as it served some more worthwhile purpose.

I was completely unprepared for incredible wave of emotion that came over me when I found myself in a room with Johnny, Sean and John.

Whatever other adventures I have enjoyed in the succeeding years, none of it could have happened without that first step, when I was effectively a student and they were the masters.

After the greetings and embraces, I strapped on my guitar on started “Welcome to the Working Week”. It sounded just as it should.

Pete Thomas was deputizing for drummer, Mickey Shine, who had become a painter in central California. I asked Pete the count off the second number, “Miracle Man”.

That couldn’t possibly be the tempo…

His metronome must have been set incorrectly…

But no, it really was this slow.

Time may have altered all our appearances slightly but the sound was instantly recognizable. Any doubt one might have had about, “Dr. John” no longer being a full-time player, was quickly put away.

Johnny had always established this great rolling motion when the music was moving the right way, with the player and his instrument making one big wheel and there it was again, after thirty years.

The pace of music and life certainly picked up after the Attractions and I took these songs out on the road in 1977 but once I trusted that Pete Thomas had really noted Mickey Shine’s original tempi correctly, a groovier, more swinging version of songs like “Sneaky Feelings” and “Blame It On Cain” started to emerge.

The show was a joy to play.

Bonnie Raitt - who had been at one of the Attractions first London club shows in 1977 – was once again leading the cheering. We played to two houses in one evening and people’s generosity towards the event was extremely impressive.

“My Aim Is True” doesn’t last but 30 minutes, so I played some acoustic songs from the same period, the trio of outtakes and we ended with two Clover songs, “Mr. Moon” and “Love Is Gone”, both from that album without a sleeve.

The next morning, I got a thank you note from Alex Call – Clover’s lead singer and therefore like his harmonica-playing colleague, Huey Lewis, unemployed on my album. Alex is a resident in Nashville and had heard overnight about us playing two of his songs.

Yesterday afternoon is was Alex who wrote to me to let me know of Johnny’s passing.

And so the calls went back and forward between other friends and colleagues; Jim Lauderdale, Lucinda Williams and after flying home from New York to Vancouver, I placed a call to Nick Lowe.

I felt sure the news would have reached London but I also knew he would understand the good fortune and blessing that we once shared in having a cohort like Johnny, especially when the way ahead was uncertain and unknown.

Rationally, it is all in the process of life to lose friends before their time but perhaps because music can deliver such a sense of being alive, it becomes hard to accept the absence of a vibrant spirit.

John Ciambotti and I only ever shared the stage on three evenings. The most recent of these was that “My Aim Is True” show at Great American Music Hall in 2007.

Prior to that you have to go back to a couple of nights in 1978, when Johnny was drafted to deputize in the Attractions for Bruce Thomas, who had injured his hand in a bizarre juggling accident.

It was the very start of our third U.S. tour. That was to be our second trip around America of that year and it was only April.

Johnny not only joined us for our first two Mid-Western dates but also found himself captured in newsreel footage as we and Rockpile travelled together with a “20/20” camera crew lead by future tabloid news anchor, Geraldo Rivera.

Looking at the footage now could either make you laugh or cry, it’s hard to tell.

In the late ‘70s, the Attractions and I were hardly ever mistaken for rock and roll musicians, given that we had short haircuts and thrift-store threads. At least two of us might have been seminarians.

Meanwhile, Johnny had this longer, perfectly-coiffed, West Coast hairstyle, a red leather bomber jacket, mirrored aviators and snakeskin boots, a look that can now be found in a many a magazine spread, as the styles of past decades comes back into fashion.

I think we probably teased him about being such a dude but it was a look none of us could have carried off with any aplomb, any more that we would have risked treading the planks as a trio.

Geraldo is still up there on some dire network, twirling his pantomime villain moustache, scaring up some bogus indignation and I’m going out on the road in a couple of weeks and will mostly likely find a place in the show for a couple of songs that I wouldn’t have at my disposal if Johnny and his colleagues hadn’t been around to originally lay them down.

Wherever John is right now, I hope it is peaceful. My thoughts and love go to his family and friends. They aren’t any more like him.

UK Tour Dates

"Elvis Costello and the Sugarcanes show at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on June 28th is presently their only appearance in the U.K."

Concerts at the Birmingham Symphony Hall on June 21st, Oxford New Theatre on June 23rd and St. David's Hall, Cardiff on June 24th are all Elvis Costello solo concerts, following on from highly acclaimed such shows in Australia and Canada.

Jam Music: Winspear Centre, Edmonton - February 7, 2010
“If anyone can pull off a solo show and make it sound so much more than just one guy and his guitar — and not even a round-the-neck harmonica holder or knee tambourines to fill out the sound — it’s Elvis Costello.”

Herald Sun (Melbourne) 2009-10-12
“Get this. For almost two hours, Elvis Costello stands on the stage of the grand old Palais and sings songs on guitar. That's it -- nothing else -- and he's brilliant.”

Hey Hey My My October 11, 2009
Elvis Costello has always been an artist to watch with interest.
He performed a solo concert – truly solo – to the extent that when a second microphone was set up by the road crew and he alluded to the impending arrival of a special guest it transpired that the special guest was “Elvis Costello” – seated!

Charlie Gillett

While reading the sad news of Charlie Gillett's passing, I had a vivid memory of being in a darkened kitchen in1975 and tuning in his "Honky Tonk" radio show to hear Tommy McClain's "Sweet Dreams" or Bobby Charles' "Small Town Talk", records that I could neither obtain or afford.

Anyone in his radio audience can probably think of a song that they would not have heard without his help.

Truthfully, it seemed like some kind of magic trick when Charlie first broadcast my home-produced demo tape on his show, in 1976.

After all, it was the same tape that had been rejected by just about every music publisher in England. Perhaps its very obscurity was attractive to him.

It was even the same tape which lead to me recording a couple of those songs for Stiff Records, when Charlie's Oval label shilly-shallied over a plan to cut a couple of sides.

I will always be grateful for those few curious minutes when I sat with my head cocked like Nipper the Dog at the improbable sound of my own voice coming out of a radio speaker.

Charlie would routinely play such songs as Dan Penn and Chips Moman’s “Dark End Of The Street”, sung James Carr or Charlie Rich’s version of “A Woman Left Lonely”. A short time later, I was seeking out Peter Guralnick’s great book, “I Feel Like Going Home”, to read more about such artists. That’s the way the trail leads.

When Charlie famously championed Johnnie Allen’s great Louisiana version of “The Promised Land, the very next spin might be a great record from Senegal, back when it was just a great record from Senegal and not something safely filed away in the “World Music” racks.

He also seemed to have a prescient view of the dissemination of music that the Internet age would confirm.

Needless to say we disagreed about his entitlement to later issue some of my demo tape simply because it had found its way into his hands but the line between “opportunity” and “opportunism” was, to say the least, a little bleary back then.

Just as people have their virtues, so they can also have their blind spots and biases. Oft-times, a puritan streak is found running through the heart of even the most widely versed musical theorist.

Perhaps some unimagined fate or an unfortunate career undoes all that lonely evangelism and embarrasses early advocacy. On the other hand, the path of noble failure and the embrace of decent obscurity are not conditions to which many musicians aspire.

Some say songs last forever, just as the voices and options that attend them fade from memory. I don’t know if that is true. These days, everyone has an opinion to broadcast and hardly a soul seems to have a decent song to sing.

For myself, I’m still glad that I caught hold of records that might have otherwise escaped my notice because I was listening to a radio show. It’s not something you get to say very often.

Three weeks ago, I was in a Nashville studio making some new recordings with T Bone Burnett. Over the nine days we were working, a number of songwriters, producers and singers stopped by to visit.

They included, Donnie Fritts, Dan Penn, Cowboy Jack Clement, Delbert McClinton and Hank Cochran.

I’m pretty certain that I heard songs by most of these gentlemen come over the airwaves, courtesy of a Charlie Gillett radio show, a long time ago, in another country.

T-Bone Wolk

T-Bone Wolk:

When word arrived of the passing of T-Bone Wolk., I just happened to be in a recording studio with a number of colleagues with whom we had both worked during the mid-80s and early 90s.

After the initial shock, we spent some timesimply talking about T-Bone’s beautiful playing and even recalling various funny incidents as a way of staving off our incredulity at the announcement.

One can only imagine the feeling of loss for his family and his closest musical allies, to whom I extend my sympathies.

John Oates and Darryl Hall’s beautifully expressed tributes remind me that music first founded in the vitality and possibility of youth must now accept and reason with loss and absence.

Needless to say, it was at a Hall and Oates show in the around 1983, that I first heard T-Bone play in person. I think I came away from the date most vividly remembering his bass playing and I doubt Darryl and John would be offended by this remark.

On the first album of mine to which T-Bone contributed, “King of America”, he found himself in the company of former Elvis Presley bass-player, Jerry Scheff and jazz master, Ray Brown, in whose company he entirely deserved to stand.

T-Bone played just great on “Jack of All Parades”

However, one of the more enduring songs from that record, “Brilliant Mistake”, actually featured T-Bone on guitar and accordion, an instrument on which he had been a childhood champion.

Indeed, it was on this last instrument and as a vocalist that T-Bone briefly became a member of the touring line-up, “Elvis Costello and His Confederates”, alongside, Jerry Scheff, Jim Keltner, Benmont Tench and James Burton.

In the late 80s, when I was trying to learn how to arrange for larger and more contrasting groups of players, I turned to T-Bone to bring in the vital grounding more expansive songs such as “Last Boat Leaving” and “Satellite”.

This last song provided my first personal introduction to Burt Bacharach, who happened to be working in an adjacent studio at the time and whose arrangement style I naively imagined the recording echoed.

So when Burt and I first wrote together, about six years later, it was T-Bone who we called to play on “God Give Me Strength”.

One of T-Bone’s most endearing qualities was the way in which retained the perspective of the fan and student while being a master of his instruments.

If you mentioned, say, Rick Danko or Paul McCartney with regard to the approach to a song, he could joyfully incorporate something of their style in this part, while remaining utterly his own man.

In fact, I think he took delight in doing this and it is something you hear most clearly on our recording of “So Like Candy”.

For his indelible playing, his generous spirit, not to mention always admirable choice of lid, I will always think of T-Bone with great fondness, respect and the regret that I did not get to share more time with such a wonderful musician.

He was a truly sterling fellow.

Elvis Costello shines in Neil Young Project

Elvis Costello shines in Neil Young Project

By Alexander Varty

At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Thursday, February 18.

Whoever coined the all-too-appropriate phrase “let the games begin” probably wasn’t thinking about the epic battle that played out between Canada and the United States at the Queen E on Thursday night, but it’s hard to imagine a more gripping contest—even on ice.

That’s probably not what producer Hal Willner had in mind when he came up with the idea for the Neil Young Project. In fact, in an earlier interview with the Straight, he expressed the hope that both of his “house bands”—Toronto’s Broken Social Scene and an ad hoc collection of ace New York session players—would wind up playing together. This did happen, on occasion, but more often the two groups took turns—highlighting, in the process, the cultural divide between their native lands.

The Canadians, as usual, were respectful and guileless and communally minded, as when Broken Social Scene’s Jason Collett sweet-talked the crowd into a goofy—but effective—exercise in creating an audio rainstorm out of finger snapping and knee slapping. The Yanks, as usual, were more individualistic and took greater artistic risks, as when singer and upright bassist Eric Mingus led a fantastically vivid avant-gospel version of Young’s minor masterpiece “For the Turnstiles”.

So who won the tourney?

A Brit.

But at least he’s our Brit: West Van resident Elvis Costello, a Londoner by birth, was one of two surprise guests and the undeniable star of a night that was in sore need of resuscitation after a run of unexceptional performances midway through its second act.

I knew it was coming—during intermission, I had scoped out the soundboard and discovered a set list in full public view. But I had no idea just how stunning Costello’s second appearance of the night would be. Sure, he’d given hints with his earlier rendition of “Love in Mind”, a major performance of a minor song during which he’d been in full Tony Bennett jazz-crooner mode. But when it came to the one-two punch of “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Cinnamon Girl”, both from Young’s breakthrough Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere LP of 1969, he simply killed.

Barely in control of a big, blond Gibson guitar that squealed and snarled like it was possessed by old Shakey himself, Costello stalked the stage with a flamenco dancer’s élan. Even a ridiculous leopard-skin trilby didn’t undercut his sinister—and, yes, weirdly sexy—intensity; he’d probably skinned that cat himself.

The crowd, which had been drifting toward torpidity, rose to its feet and stayed there for the rest of the night.

There were other highlights, including James Blood Ulmer’s slurred but compellingly surreal take on “Scenery”, Teddy Thompson’s sweetly sung “I Believe in You”, and the arrival of the night’s other unannounced guest, Emily Haines, whose tough edge brought a new dimension to “A Man Needs a Maid”. A couple of Willner’s conceptual notions didn’t quite come off, such as the pairing of Ulmer and Lou Reed on an oddly tepid “Fuckin’ Up”. And there were a few out-and-out disappointments, such as Iron & Wine mainstay Sam Beam’s disappearing act and folk icon Vashti Bunyan’s disappearing voice.

It was a mixed bag, then. Somehow, though, this seems appropriate for a survey of the notoriously unpredictable Young’s oeuvre—and Costello’s star turn was genius. Elvis was in the house—and so, through him, was Neil.

Elvis Costello Performs at Hal Wilner's Neil Young Project

Elvis Costello will be part of the amazing lineup for Hal Willner's Neil Young Project, a two-night live tribute to the Canadian rock icon at Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Theatre. He will join Lou Reed, Ron Sexsmith, Emily Haines and James Shaw of Metric and dozens of other artists and it all goes down Thursday and Friday (February 18 and 19) as part of the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad. If you are anywhere near Vancouver, get your tickets here:

http://www.vancouver2010.com/more-2010-information/cultural-festivals-and-events/event-listings/hal-willner%27s-neil-young-project-_70660zv.html

Live Cinecast of

Elvis Costello will appear on A Prairie Home Companion, Thursday, February 4th, in a special, first time live Cinecast of the show from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, MN. Thursday’s show will be beamed into hundreds of movie theaters around the the United States and Canada, and will also air in audio-only form during the A Prairie Home Companion’s regular time slot this Saturday. Also on tap for this year, Costello will tour the U.S. this spring with a variety of line ups: solo, with his band the Imposters, and with the Sugarcanes, the accomplished musicians who joined him on his Grammy-nominated 2009 album 'Secret, Profane & Sugarcane' (Hear Music).

Check here for a list of theaters broadcasting Thursday’s show

http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/

Marian McPartland on Piano Jazz, Part One With Elvis Costello

January 8, 2010 - This week's installment of Piano Jazz marks a true milestone, as host Marian McPartland appears as a guest on the program with guest host Elvis Costello. In part one of this all-new interview, McPartland and Costello recount some memorable moments from the program's 30-year (and counting!) run.
The session opens with a mainstay of Piano Jazz: the duet. In a fitting tribute to the program's 30th anniversary, Costello serenades McPartland as she plays "Our Love Is Here to Stay." Afterwards, McPartland adds, "That was a treat! I seldom get a chance to accompany you."

The First-Ever Guest On Piano Jazz
Turning toward the subject of guests on the program, McPartland and Costello discuss the very first guest on Piano Jazz: Mary Lou Williams.
"I picked the wrong guest," McPartland says. "I adored her playing, but she was very tough."

Williams displays some apprehension in the interview clip played here. But Costello looks on the bright side.

"At the end, you had really won her over — she audibly relaxes," he says. "You actually did cajole her to vocalize, although she was not known as a singer."

Pianist Bill Evans also appeared on that first season, and gave an in-depth demonstration of rhythmic displacement in Cole Porter's "All of You." Throughout the program's history, McPartland has interviewed many great players at length on the topic of technique. For musicians, it's an invaluable aspect of the program.

"It's extraordinary to hear someone of Bill Evans' level discuss the mechanics which go into the magic that we hear," Costello says.

The Story Of The Song

Next, McPartland and Costello discuss the opportunity to bring singers on to the program. When McPartland's friend Rosemary Clooney, appeared, she addressed the challenges of raising a family and maintaining her career.

"When I first started, I had five children in five years, and my work always involved a lot of travel," Clooney said. "Now, they're all grown, and I can really concentrate."

Clooney sang the Cole Porter tune "Don't Fence Me In" with accompaniment by McPartland, who added, "I just think you're better than ever."

Costello notes McPartland's attraction to lyrics.

"You frequently comment on the story of the song, and particularly the melancholic romanticism," Costello says before singing another McPartland favorite, Rodgers and Hart's "Dancing on the Ceiling," with pianist Pete Malinveri.

Musical Portraits
The first installment of this interview ends with clips of two other regular Piano Jazz features: McPartland's on-the-spot musical portraits of her guests and improvisational invitations to them. McPartland describes her first-ever portrait, created for pianist Chick Corea (hear that full show here).

"I'll tell you the ingredients: A lot of strength, humor, energy, a lot of creativity, love, kindness," McPartland says. "I'm not going to have time for all of this!"

Finally, Teddy Wilson plays a brief sequence of five notes, which McPartland uses to improvise a heartfelt tune.

"Listening to your portraits and your five-note compositions reminds me of when people speak about 'soul' in relation to music," Costello says. "It seems to me quite possible that everyone we have ever known or loved through music is with us in the chance turn of a phrase or a signature rhythm. I think you certainly have captured many of the ingenious personalities in this series so that they will be forever enduring."

Tune in next week for part two of this special session, featuring performances by Marian McPartland with husband Jimmy McPartland, Dizzy Gillespie and more. This program will also feature guest host Costello as he unveils a new tune, "You Hung the Moon."

You Take The High Road And I'll Take The Low Road

I’ll be in Glasgow in just over two weeks. The occasion is my first orchestral concert in the land of my grandmother’s fathers, if that makes any sense at all.

It is from that side of the family tree that I descend from the name, “Jackson”. I was recently informed - by our local Highland apparel emporium, here in British Columbia - that I am entitled to wear the Hunting Stewart tartan. It was either that or the pattern specially designed for Mr. M. Jackson of Neverland, California.

I should explain that on this year’s Burns Night, I was attending a formal dinner and felt honour bound to don a kilt with all of the accessories. It was an ensemble that caused grown woman to swoon and trembling men to run in terror. Then again, I was armed to the teeth.

Fear not, I have not become like one of those American Presidents who belatedly discovers that the blood in his little toe flows from a whisky still outside the village of Yell in Shetland. This is my round about way of saying, “The road lies ahead”.

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For those of you considering attending the concert with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on the 22nd of June – and that’s an awful lot of “Royal” - you might care to know what you will hear. I can assure you that fancy or formal dress will not be required.

For the last couple of years, Steve Nieve and I have been appearing with orchestras from Honolulu to Houston, from Chicago to Baltimore and, most recently, from Nashville to Minnesota. The repertoire has developed and changed radically since the year 2000, when these adventures began.

This concert in Glasgow and another with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic on the 25th of June will be the first to consist almost entirely of orchestral arrangements of songs.

Previously, we featured a 30-minute suite from the ballet score, “Il Sogno” and it had been erroneously stated that half of the Glasgow concert would consist of instrumental music.

However, as a guest of these orchestras, I think it is only good manners that they be heard before I enter the scene and start singing. So only a brief, overture-length excerpt from “Il Sogno” will be played, followed by a programme of songs dating from 1977 to the present day.

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These dates will be my first collaboration with these orchestras and the conductor, Clark Rundell. We will also be joined by the rhythm section of Chris Laurence on bass and Martin France on drums with Rob Buckland taking care of the saxophone features in a number of the arrangements.

This team will surely make short work of the more rhythmic songs; a 50s detective-theme arrangement of “Watching the Detectives”, Vince Mendoza’s psychedelic chart for the Billy Strayhorn composition, “Blood Count”, for which I wrote words and retitled, “My Flame Burns Blue” and the Charles Mingus number, “Hora Decubitus”.

These concerts obviously feature more ballad material than rock and roll but both Steve Nieve and I have continued to add to book of arrangements.

Some of this orchestration work was actually done while travelling, as I sensed the elements needed for a more balanced programme.

I wrote the arrangement of “All This Useless Beauty” while trapped in my hotel room by monsoon rains prior to our Honolulu dates of two years ago. Shortly before our last orchestral dates in the autumn of 2007, I arranged a song that I co-wrote with my wife, Diana, called, “The Girl In The Other Room”.

Steve Nieve’s version of “Greenshirt” is one of my personal favourites, making imaginative use of the woodwind section and calling for one of the percussionists to play an old manual typewriter.

At the end of 2007, I made an orchestral transcription of Chet Baker’s trumpet solo from “Shipbuilding” and was amazed to find that with very little additional harmonization, his spontaneous inventions could provide nearly all of the material for the orchestra. In a way, the arrangement is really his work.

There are some songs that lend themselves very obviously to the orchestral setting. We usually feature a couple of songs from the album, “Painted From Memory”, a full-string orchestra version of “Still” from “North” and the Charles Azanavour tune, “She”.

Some songs have been adapted or re-arranged from my work with the Brodsky Quartet. Richard Harvey – with whom I co-wrote the music for the television drama series, “G.B.H.” – provided a beautiful, full-orchestral setting of “Birds Will Still Be Singing” from “The Juliet Letters”.

My arrangement of “Almost Blue” was begun for string quartet, as an encore tune on “The Juliet Letters” world tour and has been adapted and expanded until it now features the entire orchestra and closing bars in which I do something unspeakable at the piano, while Steve Nieve takes a solo on the melodica.

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The concerts will also include the first full-orchestral performances of three excerpts from “The Secret Songs”, an unfinished work that was commissioned by the Royal Danish Opera as part of the Hans Christian Andersen bicentenary celebrations of 2005.

My version of Andersen story centres on his infatuation with the renowned Swedish soprano, Jenny Lind, who provided the inspiration for a number of his most famous tales and yet rejected his romantic advances, which were feeble at best.

In 1850 the “Divine Jenny” Lind undertook an American concert tour, the first of its kind in scope and acclaim, promoted by the showman P.T. Barnum.

There was certainly a marked contrast in the way the two men regarded and were motivated by Lind. Andersen elevated her to a pedestal of virtuous womanhood and artist ideal, while to Barnum she was more of a marketable entity.

One of the themes of Andersen’s story - that of a misfit in love with an unattainable woman - was of particular interest to me and can be clearly understood in the three numbers which will be performed.

Gisela Stille, who sang in the Lind part in the Copenhagen premiere of a “work-in-progress” song cycle in 2005, will sing, “How Deep Is The Red?” – an imagined folk riddle performed on the first occasion Andersen encounters the singer.

This will be followed a ballad in which Andersen recounts Lind’s romantic rejection. The title of the piece notes Lind’s response when Andersen asked why she could not return his love: “She Handed Me A Mirror”.

Finally, a duet, “He Has Forgotten Me Completely” – part of a dream in which Andersen imagines Lind performing his “secret songs” – which stand for the tales that she inspired in real life.

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The Glasgow concert will be followed by an appearance at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool on the 25th of June.

My Ma worked as an unpaid, volunteer usher at “The Phil” in the late 40s and early 50s, so it is something of a family reunion to be playing at this venerable institution.

2008 is also the year in which Liverpool celebrates being European Capital of Culture, so I’m glad to be playing in what I regard as the closest thing that I have to a “hometown”. It is pretty hard to be sentimental about Paddington, unless you mean the marmalade-eating bear.

The ECOC awards are usually accompanied by an influx of investment, European grants and the drawing up of grand town planning schemes. So, I wish I could believe that this award was somehow destined to transform the fortunes of the city.

I also wish I could comprehend the ugly local politics that has already capsized the original plans for at least one major event during this gala year.

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Last time I was in Liverpool, I was dismayed to find that the entrance to the famous ferry landing stage was a sprawling building site. I immediately checked my watch. Yes, it was already 2008. Isn’t this when the eyes of the world were upon us?

Perhaps, the people who might have been employed re-modelling that landmark had been busy, unwittingly destroying another. That is the renowned skyline as viewed from the river.

In a wiser but less civilised age, the twits who designed and sanctioned these latest, out-of-scale additions to the waterfront would have been taken out into Liverpool Bay with lead weights attached to their legs and pushed overboard.

Yeah, I used to play with Lego and Meccano when I was a kid but at least none of my “buildings” were full scale…

Okay, away from the river there are pristine shopping precincts and some fine new hotels and restaurants, together with the arrival of vendors who previously thought that Liverpool was a little beneath them. I hope that people also remember to support their locally owned businesses. Look what happened to Meccano.

Through the grim years of government hostility and neglect and the more depressing hours of self-pity and self-defeat, I’ve hoped to see the city restored to the kind of vibrancy of which my parents once spoke. They were born into the Great Depression and lived through the Second World War, so we’re talking about the good times here.

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So, what is there to celebrate?

Well, quite apart from the extraordinary numbers of painters, poets, playwrights, songwriters, sporting magicians, comedians, prize-fighters, thespians and rock and roll musicians who have come out of Liverpool, I always tell visitors to walk through the city with their head held up.

They will see some of the most remarkable architecture in Britain. Liverpool contains more listed buildings than any city outside of London.

It also should to be noted that the 18th century Town Hall has African faces carved into the sandstone of first storey decorations, right alongside barrels and bales and other commodities from the city’s mercantile and maritime boom years.

In fact, many of these grand structures were built with fortunes founded in the blood money flowing from the slave and cotton trades. The museums of the city are now opening up this chequered past to discussion and understanding, rather than it remaining a dirty, unspoken little secret.

Liverpool has always presented a series of paradoxes…

It used to have the world’s first overhead railway but they knocked it down. It had one of the first tram systems but they tore up the tracks in the late ’50s.

Liverpool also has rows of beautiful but abandoned Georgian terraces and not enough viable inner city housing, two contrasting cathedrals, only one of which looks as if it might see out this century. But then it also has two contrasting football teams, only one of which will ever win the European Cup.

In among the many thriving theatres and clubs, there are the obscured facades of many lost musical halls and picture palaces. Times move on. These are the venues in which my grandfather played as a pit musician, when he can home from working on the White Star liners in the late 20s.

He got back just in time for “talkies” to really take hold, throwing theatre musicians out of work. My grandmother never really forgave Al Jolson.

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Since the Tate Gallery moved into it’s great digs in the reclaimed Albert Dock building, it has provided an ideal space both for the works of Liverpudlian artists and visiting exhibitions, such as the one in which the paintings of JMW Turner were hung in natural light.

Even before the Tate came to town, the Walker Art Gallery was one of best-kept secrets in the North of England. You have more chance of standing alone for a few minutes in a room with a George Stubbs, a Joseph Wright of Derby or even a Rembrandt than you have in any other major city.

The institution has a remarkable collection of Pre-Raphaelite works and if you need to see more you can go “over the water” to Port Sunlight and visit the Lady Lever Art Gallery.

Sure, there are also bars and guided tours offering to part the passing Beatles fan from their holiday savings but these amusements are only what you find in other music cities such as Memphis and New Orleans.

Having been christened at the church of Holy Cross, in the North End of Birkenhead and through my mother’s origins in Liverpool 8, I’ve sometimes snuck onto lists of famous Liverpudlian sons. Then again, if I’ve played a bad gig, I’ve also been written off as a “Cockney” interloper.

I’m not going to be the guest who is invited to the party and then spends all his time criticising the hosts, so I’ll hold my peace and conclude this piece.

I will close by saying I’m really looking forward to playing my only English show this year in the People’s Republic and ask that you lend your support to The Picket, the music resource venue in Jordan Street which continues to fight for its place in the “culture”, just as it has done in less optimistic times.

Quit Mumblin' And Talk Out Loud

Bo Diddley was one of only two people to whom I’ve ever addressed a get-well note. That is people that I didn’t know, personally. The other was Ava Gardner but that is another story.

It was as if the mere idea of them, the very thought of them and the indelible mark that they made on their chosen fields made it preferable not to have to entertain a world without them.

Nevertheless, when the news of Bo Diddley’s passing hit the wires this afternoon, I was somewhat surprised to see my name in a list of rock and roll musicians who had come under his spell.

By then I’d been asked by a newspaper for my thoughts on the man and volunteered that there was a kind of rock and roll music for which only a tremolo guitar, a killer beat and one and a half chords were really needed. I’ve tried to live by that on a couple of occasions and it is not nearly as easy as it sounds.

Then if you put most R&B originals up against the cover versions cut by beat groups and rocking combos of the 60s and 70s, you’ll find a slower, more emphatic pulse that lays waste to cheap excitement and nervous energy of pale young imitators.

However, this is not the case with Bo Diddley. He has them beaten their own frantic game. The last time I had played “You Can’t Judge A Book By The Cover”, I had check that my turntable was not running fast. This thing is urgent.

Maybe it was that tremolo guitar or the ferocious use of maracas that makes the tempo appear as if it were rushing ahead. This record jumps out of the speakers and runs away up the hallway, screaming. Nobody ever played this number better.

In any case, people didn’t always take their Bo Diddley, head on. Buddy Holly took “that beat” into the charts with his own song, “Not Fade Away” and The Rolling Stones turned that same tune into something close to punk rock, while The Strangeloves had a hit on the Diddley beat, in 1965 with “I Want Candy”.

Even though that record still sounds fantastic today, “The Strangeloves” were actually a bizarre pop-punk scam, the invention of the songwriting team behind the title, who insisted the “group” pretend to be sheep-shearers from Australia for reasons that remain obscure today.

New versions of that tune seem to hit the airwaves about every ten years and some of them with even less obvious claims to “authenticity”, that most over-rated of pop virtues. Still, Bo Diddley didn’t have too much time for imitators.

Nevertheless, my favourite “Bo Diddley” song, not written by Bo Diddley was “Rosalyn” by The Pretty Things”. At least they had the decency to name themselves after one of Bo’s records.

If you are reading this then you probably know all the great Bo Diddley cuts and the cover versions too. My favourite Bo Diddley cover? That’s got to be “Pills” by the New York Dolls. What else?

However, if you still want to hear something really unhinged, check out “Mumblin’ Guitar” or “Hush Your Mouth” from Bo Diddley “Chess Box Set”.

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I only saw Bo play live once and that was in Australia during the 1980s. He was second on a double bill with Chuck Berry.

Now Chuck is infamous for leading his often, inexperienced pick-up band accompanists a merry dance of perverse rhythm changes and tricky key signatures and this night was no exception.

I remember very little else about Chuck’s performance, except for a rather sweet and faithful rendition of Nat Cole’s “Ramblin’ Rose” – which he preceded with the remark, “And now for some REAL music”, as if his own compositions amounted to nothing at all.

The little I recall is in stark contrast to every beat of Bo Diddley’s set, which was hammered into my memory. He couldn’t possibly have played every song I would have liked to hear in the time available but I recall a stupendous version of “Mona”, which made be forget all about the Quicksilver Messenger Service.

At the end of the set, a rather nervous M.C. took the central microphone, as Bo continued to vamp out the rhythm of his final number. He made an erratic flapping gesture and yelled, “The Legendary Bo Diddley!!!” and started for the wings.

Bo, stopped him, said something in his ear and sent him out centre stage…

“The Incredible”, “The Amazing” and “The Fantastic” were all auditioned, in turn, as tributes, followed by that same bolting run for wings and the same slumped tramp of shame back out into the spotlight, as the M.C. once again failed to measure Bo Diddley’s achievements.

This seemed to go on for five or ten minutes, although I accept that it was probably less. Nobody was complaining. The place was in uproar, as Bo and band churned on with “that beat”.

Finally, in desperation, the hapless comperé sprinted to the microphone and blurted out, “The originator of ALL MUSIC! Bo Diddley!” and the great man was satisfied and brought the number to close.

Later that evening, I found myself in small and crowded hotel elevator with “The Originator of All Music”. He was still wearing his black cape-like smock and his gunslinger Stetson.

I was a little disappointed to see that his sheriff’s badge was actually cut out of that rainbow reflective foil that you see at the funfair and stores selling party favours. I suppose we should all take that up with those who bought his songs for a pittance and those who never paid him his due…

Staring at my equally unimpressive shoes, we rode up a few flights together and I didn’t dare utter a word. It was a close to greatness as I care to get.

Your Unreliable Correspondent Writes

YOUR UNRELIABLE CORRESPONDENT WRITES…

It’s been a while since I’ve written so I hope this finds you in rude health and distilled spirits…

I’m just about to depart New York for rehearsals and some groovy shows in Memphis and Nashville - not to mention playing again with Allen Toussaint at New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. So, I hope to see you all there in your finery. We would have also been playing the Tabernacle in Atlanta, had it not been temporarily put out of commission by tornado damage. I hope the old place gets well soon.

All of this is leading up our summer jaunt in the Big Top with the band we like to call “The Filth”…

Il Papa is coming town tomorrow and he and I obviously have an agreement to never play the same venue on the same day, so I understand that I must leave under cover of darkness to avoid the traffic chaos…

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ABSO-MOMOFUKU-LY

By now, some of you may have heard rumour of an album called “Momofuku” and wonder what this record is...

Well, the real version is pressed on two pieces of black plastic with a whole in the middle. You may prefer other, more portable, less scratchable, editions that will soon become available for your convenience but this is how it sounds the best: with a needle in a groove, the way the Supreme Being intended it to be…

The absence of much advance notice or information might seem a little strange and perverse but the record was made so quickly that I didn’t even tell myself about it for a couple weeks.

Ever since I hid ten copies of “30:10”, - solo home recordings of re-written songs - in the jewel boxes of the “Best Of” collection released in the Spring of ‘07 and then waited in vain for one of them to surface, I’d realized that it was time to do things differently…

I don’t think many people believed that “30:10” really existed but if anyone reading this has one in their possession, they had better claim their special prize right away because we will be posting the songs on this site very soon and the offer will expire…

So, what can I tell you about “Momofuku”?

Number One, on Page One of daft interview questions is, “Why is it called “Momofuku”?

Well, obviously the title is a tribute to Momofuku Ando, the inventor of the Cup Noodle. Like so many things in this world of wonders, all we had to do to make this record was add water.

Now, I understand that there is also a fancy eatery in New York City that has made the same connection with Ando-San. So, just in case anybody is inclined to mistake our record for something edible, we’ve added a disclaimer to the record jacket. I like saying, “record jacket” again.

This record actually came about because of an invitation I received from Jenny Lewis to sing on her upcoming record. Davey Faragher had been playing bass on some of the sessions, so it didn’t seem like too much of a stretch to call Pete Thomas to complete the Imposters’ rhythm section.

It was Jenny’s idea for Pete play alongside his daughter, Tennessee, who plays drums in The Like and the line-up was completed by Ms. Lewis’ beau, Johnathan Rice on guitar and vocals and their pal, “Farmer” Dave Scher on pedal steel and vocals with Jason Lader manning the controls.

So, I went down to Los Angeles for the day and we cut a couple of versions of a song Rice had written for Jenny’s record plus two songs of mine, one of which I wrote on the eve of the session. Some rock and roll music is better if you don’t think too hard on it.

In the absence of a full-time keyboard player, “Farmer” Dave and I split the organ duties, on an old Acetone. I especially liked the vocal harmonies that Jenny, Rice, Davey and “Farmer” Dave cooked up for “Drum & Bone”.

Ms. Lewis sang the entire harmony part of “Go Away” in the vocal booth with me, while the band played in the studio, lead by Rice’s guitar part and the drumming of Thomas, Peré et Fille. That was Take Two. Then we went home…

I’d been telling people that I was done with recording and believed it myself. This record date reminded me that it wasn’t making music in the studio that made me miserable but the nonsense that predictably follows in what we laughingly call the “music business”. So I decided to change it and my mind. That’s what I do.

We booked Sound City Studio in Van Nuys for six days of February and cut the eight new songs that I had written in the weeks following Jenny’s January session.

We also recorded “Song With Rose”, the lyrics of which I wrote with Rosanne Cash and “Pardon Me, Madam, My Name Is Eve” a title that was given to me by Loretta Lynn, while we were writing some songs together, late last year. I had first played these two songs an autumnal tour, opening up for Bob Dylan, although I think they sound a little different now.

I called Steve Nieve in from Paris and asked our friend, David Hildalgo to add little guitar to “Flutter & Wow”. He also played viola and then added Hildalguera to “My Three Sons”.

Tennessee Thomas played alongside her Dad for two more cuts, including “Stella Hurt” – which is a true story - but then she had to leave for the mixing of The Like’s great new album. Look out for that, sometime soon.

The Imposters and I recorded a number of songs as a quartet, including “American Gangster Time”, “Mr. Feathers” and “Pardon Me, Madam, My Name Is Eve” and “Harry Worth” which is not actually about the beloved English television funnyman but a true story nonetheless.

Jenny, Rice, “Farmer” Dave and their pal, the guitarist, Jonathan Wilson came back in for a couple more days and to add their voices to the new songs. We had a ball making up the parts for the vocal “supergroup” to which everyone contributed.

The live band for “Turpentine” and “Song For Rose” got up to nonet. That was a fine old noise.

For those who like to know these things, we recorded exclusively to tape, completing and mixing each song before moving on to the next. The entire record took a week to record and mix.

The music has been pressed on four sides of vinyl for volume and clarity although the album was originally sequenced with six tracks a-side.

Jason Lader not only recorded and mixed the record; he also managed to document the sessions with his camera.

Coco Shinomiya put these shots together in a gatefold sleeve design, so you have something to hold in your hands while listening to the music, especially if you don’t currently have a sweetheart or swell of your own.

Every record has its own method. This was the one for these songs.

www.elviscostello.com

This site is new. It no longer exclusively host UMe label imprints. It is also a work-in-progress but I wanted to get some words out there about “Momofuku”, as I will be playing a lot of shows this summer and my chances of appearing in the hallowed pages of your local “ Morning Bugle & Whippet Fancier” might be a little slim.

There will be new features appearing in the weeks to come and I hope you find something of interest among them. “Momofuku” is one of those records that I would rather be heard than read, but if you want to know the words to your favourite cut, you will find them on this site.

A complete lyrical database will be available shortly, along with facsimiles of original notebooks with rough drafts and deleted verses going back to 1977, unseen photographs, unheard recordings and a gallery dedicated to guitars for those who are interested in the hardware. You will also soon be able to purchase egg-timers, leg-warmers, lion-tamer’s hats and racy underwear featuring the likeness of singer of your choice.
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MIAMI-NASHVILLE-NEW YORK

I spent a week in Miami at the end of March. It was the first time that I had been in that city for more than a day or two. It’s quite the place.

Much of my time, through the summer and autumn of ’07, was taken up writing and orchestrating NIGHTSPOT, a collaboration with the choreographer, Twyla Tharp for the Miami City Ballet.

Now that the piece was in rehearsal, I finally got to hear, what had previously been going around in my head, played by real musicians.

The score calls for a ten-piece dance band, performing at the back of stage, while the dancers enter a swinging NIGHTSPOT. A modest-sized orchestra plays in the pit. They combine at times into one big ensemble while at other moments they play in dialogue.

When enquiring about songs, people often ask, “When comes first? Words or music?” I suppose a similar question might be asked about ballet music only with regard to movement and music.

Ms. Tharp’s method was to listen to a number of my existing songs and then ask me to write something new that departed from one or other station,

Although the writing doesn’t have a verse-chorus structure and music is played continuously, none of the individual cues are very much longer than the average song. Once I had some knowledge of Twyla’s intentions for the dance, I could proceed.

I made an early decision to make passing reference to some of those existing songs; a handful of changes here, a melody completely re-harmonized there or a background motif, brought to fore and fastened to an entirely new rhythm and melody.

Words and ideas attached these fleeting musical fragments plotted a line through the score while I was writing it, though it isn’t necessary for anyone in the audience to recognize or follow them in order to understand or enjoy NIGHTSPOT.

NIGHTSPOT portrays many forms of nightlife and a series of couples as they go through various temptations, flirtations, betrayals and transformations. There was plenty of opportunity for waltzes, a Spanish guitar ballad, some satirical striptease music, a little ragtime tune, a cockeyed tango or two and a show business hymn.

On three occasions in the score, I used processed loops to augment the on-stage rhythm section. This was the first time I’d employed this sound since the album, “When I Was Cruel”.

In fact the “dummy” name of one cue was actually “When I Was Cruel No.5”, as it was a more expansive version of the ideas contained in the song of that name, “No.2”.

There is no immediate plan to record the score in the studio but it is not entirely impossible to imagine a performance of the entire 38-minute work being recorded for DVD, some time in the future. That way you would be able take in the entire scene as it was intended.

The dancers of the Miami City Ballet are a wonder to behold at work. Even physical preparations that they undertake in order to begin to dance would kill a small stable of horses. I am no expert on dance technique but to my eye they gave a wonderful performance of the material.

The premiere was a fairly swish affair. People were dressed up to the nines and really raised the roof at end of the night.

The performance went without any obvious catastrophes” but even as you are taking your bow and accepting bouquets, the mind is bound to stray to changes that occur, now that the music been heard in the heat of battle.

I will make a number of small but crucial revisions in time for the Los Angeles performances in October 2008.

Miami City Ballet could not have been more gracious hosts but for most of the time I was in their city, there seemed to be a 700ft. motorbike approaching from several streets away. This turned out to be the low, dull rumble of an electronic music festival that was dominating the aural and social landscape.

I suspect that a few of the company left the post-show gala to dance the night away in an actual nightspot but I shall not pretend that I was among their number.

Brief headlines now because I hear the Popemobile approaching and I must depart…

So, I left Miami for Nashville.

Straight from the plane, I visited John Carter Cash at his studio that backs on to his father’s old writing cabin, which I visited while making “Almost Blue” in 1981. We recorded a couple of vocal harmony parts for the Loretta Lynn record that he is producing, including one for a song of mine.

On Monday morning, I was in Sound Emporium with my brother Henry Coward and an incredible group of musicians including, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, Mike Compton, Dennis Crouch and Jim Lauderdale.

We successfully recorded the more than 35 pieces of “Henry and Howard’s Last Entry Into Brussels” in three days and about which I’m sure you’ve already heard quite enough. The release of this soundtrack will be announced at this location in due course.

Returning to New York, I cut a song with Rosanne Cash and Kris Kristofferson, in which we each wrote a verse. Rose’s husband, John Leventhal played some beautiful guitar on the track and made the whole affair go like a dream.

I think we were all surprised that our voices fit together as they did. Perhaps we’ll form a supergroup; I hear they’re coming back. We could call it “C.C.K.”, as it sounds like an old Soviet republic.

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SPECTACLE

For the last two weeks I’ve been in and out of Studio 8H at N.B.C., where have been taping the first editions of SPECTACLE, the interview and music show that is being made for Sundance Channel, C.T.V. and Channel Four in the U.K.

This was the scene of my previous finest broadcast hour in 1977, when I mistook the word “live” in the name “Saturday Night Live” for an instruction and switched my song while on the air. Needles to say, I was chased from the building for my sins with dire threats that I would never appear on American television again, ringing around my ears,

Obviously, this has not been the case. I’ve returned to SNL on a couple of occasions and even did a skit for the 25th Anniversary show in which I interrupted the Beastie Boys playing, “Sabotage”, only for them to hammer into “Radio Radio”, the song that I had substituted in ’77. You know what they say, “The old ones are the old ones”…

It is too early to say too much about “SPECTACLE” other than it has been a wonderful and surprising experience. There has obviously been a lot to learn in a very short time. On the face of it, I have an ideal face for radio. Still, I’m hoping that when all the pieces are put together, you will see a few intriguing conversations and hear some fine music.

I have found that people are most inspired when talking about the things they love rather than talking about themselves and repeating tales that they have told many times in the past.

I’m not pretending to be Johnny Carson or Sir David Frost but it isn’t so very hard to read a teleprompter and chew gum at the same time, so when we forget about the cameras and the lights for moment, the conversations can be quite surprising.

Our first three guests were Sir Elton John – who is also one of the executive producers and who talked almost exclusively about songwriters that he loved, such Laura Nyro – President Bill Clinton and Tony Bennett. They were all more than generous with their time and thoughtful and witty in their responses.

What I can be absolutely sure about is that we have had a big time playing the musical numbers that announce and conclude the shows. Any time I can share as stage with the Imposters and musical guests such as Allen Toussaint and James Burton, is fine by me.

It was a little more surprising to find myself singing a Hank Williams song in a line-up that consisted of Charlie Haden, Pat Metheny and James Burton, with Pat deferring to James to take the lead.

Charlie is making a terrific record with his daughters, Petra, Tanya and Rachel and, his son, Josh, continuing the tradition of the Haden Family Band. He was playing in his parent’s hillbilly band at the age of two, long before his work with Ornette Coleman, Hank Jones, Quartet West or Liberation Music Orchestra.

It seems he thought well enough of our SPECTACLE rendition of “You Win Again”, to ask me to sing it in the studio a couple of days later.

Last night, we opened up the last of these shows to be recorded in April with two Velvet Underground songs. The band comprised of Steve Nieve, Larry Campbell, Tony Garnier and the wonderful violinist, Jenny Scheinman playing my new arrangement of the song, “Femme Fatale”.

This preceded a soulful and often very funny talk with Lou Reed, who was joined in the latter stages by the artist and film director, Julian Schnabel. That conversation obviously centered on their friendship and collaboration - a recently filmed performance of Lou’s “Berlin” album - but also took in a little magic and considered some loss.

Lou and I closed out with two-piano accompanied version of “Perfect Day”, because it was.

More editions of SPECTACLE will be made later in the year and it will air on a channel near you in November.

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I can’t always promise that I’ll write at this length on every occasion but I wanted to kick things off in style. I will check in during the coming weeks and months and be back with some news of records, people and places that you might care to know and hear...

If you want to know anything at all, don’t ask me.