Touring Bands - Elvis Costello

ELVIS COSTELLO

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Peter Silverton, Sounds, 1 April 1978
"KNOCK KNOCK."
"Who's there?"
"Elvis."
"Elvis who?"
"Forgotten already, huh?"
Elvis Costello smiles faintly at the 'joke' his bassist, Bruce Thomas, has just cracked and turns to face me. Despite looking younger and less healthy than he does in his Riviera Global cool publicity pix, despite the fact he's sunk more than a couple of brandy and cokes, he still tries to come on with the whole warped and bitter schtick.
"I remember that review of yours. (I panned his performing abilities on the Stiff tour last year.) I was after you for while. Not like I was after Frances Lass of Time Out – I was really after her – but if I'd met you...
"I could still recite your review word for word."
Go ahead; I can hardly recall it myself.
"Forget it. I can't remember it all now."
Being anywhere with Elvis the Cee ensures a highly charged atmosphere. Add his Attractions, his moderately unpleasant quasi-egomaniacal manager, Jake Riviera, a bunch of music press scribblers and a couple of Irish journalists (this is, after all, Belfast) and you'd be stupid to open your mouth to ask the time of day without expecting your ears to he filled with brittle, pointed, sarcastic, even slightly venomous piss-taking. Jake does his whole obnoxious manager trip so successfully that his endless Irish jokes have the Irish writers not only apologising for being Irish and telling Irish jokes themselves but claiming that the jokes were all true, the Irish really were stupid. Even leaving aside the irony that Elvis himself comes from Liverpool Irish stock (and if he's not a bright lad, I'm Kubla Khan), that's like blacks telling a casual racist in all seriousness that they live in trees.
Elvis himself kept quiet, reserving the bite of his tongue for journalists like me, seeing if we could handle it without getting upset. In a peverse kind of way it was like an initiation test. When the Costello bandwagon hits town, you're either on the bus or getting run over by it.
Letting the scene wander round my (slightly drunk) mind, the only parallels I could come up with were film clips of the Beatles being ultra sardonic at 1965 press conferences or more precisely Dylan in Don't Look Back laying into some poor jerk of a journalist in Newcastle. Costello might not be the new Dylan (and he should thank his God for that) but he packs the same kind of whiplash wit. Probably because it comes from the same root – belief in his own talent and abilities and the resultant fierce in-group fear of those strengths being diluted by music business leeches or the uncritical adulation of selfseeking worshippers. He feels – probably correctly – that he needs protection from those blood suckers and so defends himself the only way he knows how – with verbal lashings.
And the velocity of his ascent to the upper realms of the rock and roll scam (first single out a year ago, dismissed as a mere pleasant Nick Lowe/Graham Parker/Van Morrison; now he's got an album going straight into the charts at number four) has been so rapid that it still seems faintly ridiculous that this little creep in Oxfam suits and big glasses be a pop star of at the second magnitude. The pressures must be heavy enough to drive anybody to the wall, maybe even through it.
All I can say is be thankful they haven't destroyed Elvis yet. Before, I'd always rated him very highly as a songwriter but found his live shows superficial. The bitter twisted little man ambience was so heavy-handed that I'd end up laughing. At the Ulster Hall, I saw the blissful light. His presence and the band's playing was so powerful, so – there's no other word for it – wired that it was like watching some kind of high intensity encounter group therapy. I haven't seen such a show since the Clash were playing the clubs. The same feeling that this was all that mattered at the moment. The fear to look away in case you missed the tiniest fraction. Hypnosis but without the exploitation that implies.
The crowd, naturally, was his before he played a note. Six Counties kids starved of rock and roll and too often treated as background misery colour for music press features must have been truly thankful that someone up there on the stage related to them with respect. No banalities about the troubles – like Sham's 'Ulster Boy' – just brief song announcements and a score of songs.
I don't know if you remember the TV puppet show, Thunderbirds but there was a character in it called Brains – all head, no body and big, big glasses. Give that head a body and you've got Elvis. Where in the early days his microphone poses looked forced, now he dances about and beats hell out of his guitar like he's in a self-induced but fully under control trance.
But what gawky marionette comes up with songs of the calibre of Elvis? Starting with a slowly-building 'Waiting For The End Of The World' running through his terse "Good Evening" at the start of the fourth song, his founding statement, 'Less Than Zero', and on the final three encores, he was never less than mesmerising, the band was never less than awesome and the songs were predictably as good as the album and not so predictably, often even better.
Like 'Red Shoes', which in the context seemed even more a song of hopeless hope (deep down, Elvis is the most godawful romantic). Just as everybody else is slowing down their songs, Elvis speeds his up. Peverse little sod, ain't he. But he gets away with it because he is so good, so much his own man. And 'Little Triggers', while it still sounds to these ears like the kind of song that Nick Lowe might have written in his Brinsley days (and that's a compliment), had much more emotion live than it does on record. 'Watching The Detectives' naturally draws the wildest crowd response. It's also the tensest, most dyanamic moment of the set. When Elvis hands his guitar to a roadie half way through and wraps himself round the mike, tearing his throat into the anguish of it all, he looks like a matinee idol trying to come on real for once and succeeding by the sheer power of his belief. Balance that against the aural contrast of the bright, happy organ figures and you've got the kind of paradox that makes Elvis and his Attractions tick.
These days Elvis refers to the Attractions as "the band I'm in" not "my band". The difference is subtle but important but it's what transforms them from just another band into a world-beating outfit. If Patti Smith talks about rock and roll being a substitute for war, the Attractions know it and don't bother talking about it. Bruce Thomas (bass), Pete Thomas (drums) and Steve Naive (organ) – see, you got a name check, boys – provide the colour to turn Elvis's songs into widescreen epics.
As a rock and roll show it could hardly be faulted. The only competition Elvis had was his own shadow, projected high over the organ pipes during 'Night Rally'. I can't think of anyone else currently playing who could even come near.
All Images © Terrence Bowman
Gavin Martin - Alternative Ulster Fanzine No. 31 1978.
Like a hurricane in my brain — the power, the punch, the style and the pacing, Costello joins the select pantheon of performers that includes Dylan, Iggy and Townshend. The sheer intensity of his fever pitch commitment to every note and every syllable showed without a doubt he is one of rock 'n' roll's prime time geniuses.
He enthralled a packed Ulster Hall with a set starting from a quirky feet-finding "Waiting For The End Of The World" culminating in a gripping fourth encore of that vein-bulging gem "I'm Not Angry." It was a night that ran through the gamut of emotions — the impassioned sexuality of "Little Triggers" to the anger, fear and rage of "Night Rally." Each song a finely etched masterpiece, Elvis being the obvious focal point as you slip into synche with his every movement and the seven flavours of sweat that drip from his brow. You look around to see who the idiot dancer at the front of the hall is and you find out it's yourself — it's one of those gigs. More peaks than your average mountain range, when he plays my faves from Model (78's best album thus far — as if you ain't guessed) I wonder about the set's pacing but dammit all the guy can play for an hour or more and still leave without playing classics like "Alison" and "No Dancing."
It's hard to pick out individual numbers but "Night Rally" is worth a mention. While the new-wave troops dream of a buckles and strap riot or deal in crass lyrical sciamachy — Adverts being a perfect example — Elvis steps to the fore bathed in a blue light, the organ drones, the guitar feedback pierces the air frightening me into awareness and then he sings “They're putting all our names in the forbidden book / I know what they're doing but I don't want to look / You think they're so dumb, you think they're so funny / But just wait till they've got you running to their night rallies.”
Quite a difference then between Elvis and his support act — the catastrophically boring Micky Jupp Band. Perhaps it was something of a shrewd move as there is obviously no hope of MJB even beginning to warm up the audience never mind blow Costello off stage (Christ, the very thought). On another sour note there is just no way the gig should have been seated — asking a crowd to sit while El and The Attractions pump out their obsessive rhythms is like trying to get an elephant to tap-dance on a pinhead.
It was in every sense a very special performance, one of those sessions when the band give that little magical touch which lit a fuse which even now burns strong in my memory. Y'see for me what the Attractions and Elvis (and remember it's the former's show just as much as the latter; let's cut all that "backing band" crap out right now) are doing is as fresh and original as anything is likely to be in 70s. The idea of an organist, bassist and drummer holding forth on stage — as often happens when Elvis discards his guitar — is in itself original. And is it a successful combination? Is water wet? Is Colin McClelland a big drip? It renders the lethargic bleatherings of XTC totally obsolete.
Bruce, Steve and Paul's ability to grasp an understanding of Elvis's songs is far more apparent onstage than on vinyl. What they are able to achieve in future ventures holds scintillating prospects. Each song segues into the next, the atmosphere never lets up. “Chelsea” receives a rapturous reception. It's a spine buzzer. Elvis' glazed eyeballs prowl over the audience's pyche — accusing, drawing out each word making the lyrics far more meaningful than on paper — “I don't want to check your pulse / I don't want nobody else — I don't want to go to Chelsea.” And you're just taken away by the shuddering and shaking hookline.
He's been occasionally criticised for a drab onstage visual. But I've never been so impressed by a rock 'n' roll star who makes no attempt to perform — gestures and expressions are not exaggerated preening but part and parcel of the songs: explaining and complementing. Take that killer line from the “The Beat,” “I don't want to be your lover / I just want to be your victim.” He hangs over the mike stand, screws and contorts his face — virtually pleads you to understand. Costello is currently delivering the goods with more root level commitment than anyone since old Bob Dylan. And, yes, I too am beginning to forget who Bob Dylan was and and I'm nowhere near 23.

Record Mirror, March 25, 1978 - Tim Lott
Elvis, you’re a genius
Elvis Costello / Ulster Hall, Belfast.
This was something of a homecoming for Declan. Although Elvis was born in Liverpool, I suppose you could call him a genetic paddy, a fact which maybe influenced his decision to play Dublin and Belfast as the first dates on his tour. His chromosome compatriots were hugely glad to see him. The Belfast kids, obviously, don't have bands queuing up to play their city, and the ones that do turn up are as often as about as exciting as a John Miles interview.
So the reception for Elvis was immense. The crowd made a racket worthy of a cup final crowd. No trouble either apart from a few dumb Nazi salutes (because of "calling Mr Oswald with the swastika tattoo"). What violence there was happened onstage. The vitriol came from the speaker stacks. Elvis may not be angry, but at least he seems irritated. That edge to his voice is agonising. But it's a different man who peers out from under the shadow of the vast organ pipes that fill the rear of the packed hall. A not-so-clinical artist, a less vicious vision. Costello no longer has a sneer of contempt. He is utilitarian instead of arrogant; introduces songs and sings them. No more posturing, but maybe that's because he isn't playing to the Londoners he holds so much antipathy for.
And the performance is somehow more 'live'. Not so long ago, Costello was approaching gigs in such a scientific fashion that the songs were as close to replicas of the studio as they could be; each solo measured, each intonation considered.
In Belfast the approach was rougher, and looser, a sacrifice of precision for spontaneity. It's a better approach. The huge excitement Costello drummed up — four encores ended the show — cannot be put down purely to the music starvation of the punters. There was a spark there that was absent before. Considering the perfection of his previous tours, I find it hard to swallow that he's actually improved, but he somehow has. I was jammed in the crowd and stuck in the wash of excitement, more enthralled than I have been since the last time I saw him perform.
Last year I described Elvis as a genius. He holds me in contempt for that, apparently, as he holds nearly everyone in contempt for something. It seems I was being premature. But I wasn't, of that I'm completely sure. Elvis has genius and is a genius. It's the first time I've used that word to describe a new artist for ages, and I mean it. He is the next big thing, and the big thing after that, and after that. Costello will endure because he can't be ignored.