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The Scotsman , Oct.8 '04

Elvis Costello & The Impostors

FIONA SHEPHERD

ELVIS COSTELLO & THE IMPOSTERS ***
BARROWLAND, GLASGOW
NO-ONE seemed terribly sure why Elvis Costello decided to play just one date in support of his vibrant new album The Delivery Man, but his Scottish fans were delighted he had selected Barrowland as the location, even if a couple of hundred extra devotees could have been accommodated round the sidelines and at the back of the hall.

The new songs were mostly convincing. Current single Monkey To Man was dispatched with rootsy swagger, Country Darkness was suitably yearning, and Either Side Of The Same Town was simply as great as anything Costello has performed in his career. Yet, something was missing - that extra push for the brilliance you know he is capable of.

He made a judicious selection of old and new, and returned for an extended first encore, beautifully partnering newbie Nothing Clings Like Ivy with Good Year For The Roses. Interestingly, he favoured tracks from debut album My Aim Is True on this outing - a sign that he and his Imposters (featuring two former Attractions) were feeling youthfully virile.

However, indulgences staggered in and came close to derailing the latter stages of the concert. Shipbuilding pulled the set back from the brink, but it tottered again, until the final salvo of Oliver’s Army, (What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding? and Pump It Up provided a belated reminder what he can achieve.

Glasgow's The Sunday Herald.

The main Attraction

Rock: Elvis Costello - Barrowland, Glasgow
By Leon McDermott

ELVIS Costello might have been a punk. But he was never Punk. His debut album might have been released in 1977, but it was no year zero for the erstwhile Declan McManus (the Elvis came from, well, Elvis; Costello is his mother’s maiden name). His songs always acknowledged that they owed a debt to everything that punk attempted to deny: musicianship, craft, a sense of place that had a little more permanence than a gob of spit hanging off the mic.
And so it is now: Costello, paunchier than the rail-thin youth that appeared on the cover of This Year’s Model (his first album with the Attractions, who are his backing band tonight, playing under the name The Imposters), decked out in a purple jacket, has matured in the same way that John Lydon has descended into childishness. The past quarter-century has seen Costello try everything from country, on 1981’s Almost Blue, to collaborations with the Kronos Quartet, and Burt Bacharach.

This year alone, he has released two albums: a collection of classical pieces, Il Sogno, which offered a measured foil to the raw, and heartfelt collection, The Delivery Man.

His only UK show this year kicks off with a blistering rendition of How To Be Dumb, with Costello almost tearing chunks from the body of his guitar as keyboard player Steve Nieve assaulted his instrument with glee, while drummer Pete Thomas and bassist Bruce Thomas (no relation) are a pummelling, driven rhythm section. And for the next few songs, this pace continues. Costello – tonight, as always – works best when he’s delivering a series of short sharp shocks; when his vocals are spat out with machine-gun pace and the music frantically attempts to keep up.

The title track of The Delivery Man is rendered at a more relaxed pace, its waltzing blues motif wrapped around a Dylanesque story and a lurching, funereal organ, and when Costello gets to the line “In a certain light, he looked like Elvis,” he can’t help but raise a smile. Before the honky-tonk stomp of Monkey To Man, Costello explains that it’s a song bequeathed to us by our simian ancestors – adding that “We should never, on any account, in any country, vote for anyone who is a disgrace to the theory of evolution” – to rapturous applause.

The beautiful, lilting Country Darkness follows, a regretful lament in which his raw baritone is backed with quietly emphatic guitar lines that contain 1000 tears in every note.

There are occasions, however, when Costello seems keen to sacrifice both humour and brevity in favour of lengthy jams which do the songs a disservice. Uncomplicated, from Blood And Chocolate, is sludgy and over-long, its sentiments bogged down in bar-room riffing and pointless handclaps courtesy of the audience. You can feel the song being drained of its energy with every second that passes. It’s a relief when – such as on a rousing I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down, or on the final encore, an electric double whammy of Pump It Up and Oliver’s Army – Costello lets rip, and strains at the collar of his shirt when rasping out a chorus.

Throughout, Costello’s voice is the one constant: a thing of ragged beauty which has weathered the years with admirable lightness; if he sometimes sounded nasal as a youth, he now sounds defiant and just weary enough, like a man who’s seen enough of life to know that there’s more pain than wonder in the world. And that’s after he married jazz diva Diana Krall, who might just be hovering around the sound desk in shades.

A tender run through Shipbuilding is inevitably one of the evening’s highlights, though the song’s resigned conclusion (it was written about the build-up to the Falklands war), “We will be shipbuilding … diving for dear life/When we could be diving for pearls” is marred by an over-talkative crowd.

He might have just turned 50, but Costello still has the fervour of his youthful self. He’s as much of an outsider and a singular proposition as ever, and it’s something we should all be thankful for.

10 October 2004
He came, he saw, he delivered

With a hot new album to plug, Elvis is still Pumping It Up like it's 1979

Ruaridh Nicoll
Sunday October 10, 2004

The Observer

Elvis Costello and the Imposters

Glasgow Barrowland

Elvis Costello and the Imposters arrived with a new release, The Delivery Man. But Elvis began his set by easing towards it, lifting the audience through six older songs before he hit the album's title track and brought the music of the American South back to its roots in Scotland.

This gentle ascent allowed us to take a measure of the Imposters. Tom Waits once called Pete Thomas 'one of the best rock drummers alive' and you can see why, although, with his new haircut he looks disconcertingly like Alastair Campbell. Steve Nieve wore a kilt and was as watchable as Costello himself, approaching his instruments with the hand gestures of the Karate Kid as he amused himself with his modulating Moog theremin, which (I hope I'm right in saying) makes all the 'wheeeeazzziiiinnnn' noises on 'Country Darkness'.

So we were led through the suburbs of Costello's punk youth and out into the country by way of 'Radio Radio' and the oft-shouted-for 'Psycho'. Then a roadie brought on a fabulous guitar, perhaps a Gretsch Country Gentleman, and the new material rolled out like Hank Williams's truck.

Glasgow's a knowledgeable town to play country in - it exported all that yearning - but Costello had already tested his material in a small bar in Oxford, Mississippi. The lonely, hardscrabble sentimentality rose like mist off the Delta. 'In a certain light he looked like Elvis/ in a certain way he seemed like Jesus'.

By the time we reached 'Either Side of the Same Town', which was the point where other bands might have been thinking of their green room, Costello's case that he can take his music in any direction he fancies had been argued. This song, also from the new album, would keep patrons of a truck stop in New Mexico happy. Next to me, a fat man with a beard began to sing along and several others raised their plastic pints in salute.

It's a pity about Costello's audience. It's great we're all so loyal, but disappointing that we are so homogeneous. There we swayed; middle-aged blokes whose Grant Mitchell haircuts were leavened by (quite) fashionable glasses. It's the downside of Costello's constantly inquisitive career that although he is seen as cool by almost everybody, his audience consists only of those prepared to take the journey with him. There were still tickets available and almost nobody was in their twenties.

What hasn't changed is Costello's voice. It may not be as close to cracking as it once was, but when he played 'High Fidelity', from 1980's Get Happy , it was like being drawn back into a world where the Jam were king. Yet this is skill, not sentimentalism.

When the band decide to rock, they can make the Barrowland's famously sprung dancefloor trampoline. 'The crowd moves like the sea,' said Travis's Neil Primrose of performing there. 'It feels like being in a trawler off Aberdeen.' On Wednesday 'I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down' summoned such a storm.

Costello's journey will eventually give him the immortality he seeks, but it is something else that makes him the live performer he is (and which made last week's show so memorable). He must love performing. Costello played 27 songs, brought the house down with 'Shipbuilding' and then, after a second encore, went out with 'Oliver's Army', '(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding' and, finally, 'Pump It Up'. He'd have to love performing in order to play those songs after 25 years and still make them fresh.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

The Times (London)
October 08, 2004

Pop

Elvis Costello
David Sinclair at Barrowland, Glasgow

WHISPER it, but Elvis Costello turned 50 earlier this
year. With an industrious flourish that is typical of
the man, the anniversary was marked by the
simultaneous fruition of two wildly divergent
projects: a dodgy orchestral work, Il Sogno,
commissioned by the Italian dance company Aterballeto,
and a superb rock album, The Delivery Man, that is
closer in spirit to the work of his early years in the
aftermath of punk than almost anything he has recorded
since.

While Costello retains a Napoleonic vision of his own
talents as unlimited by boundaries of genre or taste,
let alone ability, his core musical strength remains
his talent for getting a gripe off his chest by
writing three-minute songs with a hook around every
corner. So it was a genuine pleasure to find him
appearing, once again, without string sections or jazz
songbooks or whatever the latest fad might be.
Instead, for his only British date this year, he was
accompanied by that leanest of rock’n’roll units the
Imposters: Pete Thomas on drums, Davey Faragher on
bass and backing vocals, and Steve Nieve, resplendent
in a tartan kilt, on keyboards.

While Costello no longer has the wiry energy of his
youth, he performed with an impressive, dogged
intensity as he briskly picked his way through a
mixture of songs old and new. No Action and Radio
Radio sped past in a nostalgic blur, while Blame it on
Cain even inspired an oddball guitar solo from the
maestro himself, which flew all over the shop in four
bars flat.

Even so the immediate appeal of new songs such as the
rocking Monkey to a Man and the slow-burning Country
Darkness ensured that the energy levels remained high.

But for Costello, enough is never quite enough. Having
led the band off the stage to a tremendous roar of
approval, he returned for a stretch of “encores” that
lasted longer than an entire gig would have done back
in 1978. He could have finished on a high at several
points: after an exquisite version of Good Year for
the Roses, perhaps, or a poignant Shipbuilding, or
even the romping, country-rock swing of There’s a
Story in Your Voice , from the new album. But he could
never quite bring himself to close it out.

As the journey became subject to long, increasingly
indulgent detours in numbers such as Needle Time, the
effect of the show had become slightly dissipated by
the time the band left the stage for a second time.
However, with a final blast of Oliver’s Army, (What’s
So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding, and
Pump it Up, momentum was restored and closure
achieved, at last.