Elvis Costello & The Impostors – Palais Theatre, St Kilda, Melbourne Thursday 4 April 2024

charels edwards on Elvis Costello & The Impostors – Palais Theatre, St Kilda, Melbourne Australia Thursday 4 April 2024

Elvis on my mind
by charels “Mr Timing” edwards
Even at this late stage of his career, my respect for Elvis Costello is huge. In my hierarchy of post-WWII songwriters, Joni Mitchell is at the pinnacle but Mr MacManus is somewhere in a top five which also includes Bob Dylan, Lennon / McCartney, and Leiber & Stoller.
One thing Elvis and Joni have in common – besides whip-smart, challenging lyrics – is their insistence on exploring and expressing themselves in different musical genres. It’s kept their work interesting in ways that few other musicians achieve for whatever reason – those who don’t stretch their musicianship much, if at all, during their careers and sooner or later settle for being highly paid tribute acts of themselves. (If they’re lucky, that is. I’m thinking here of a particularly RS band, but there are many, many examples at both global and local levels.)
So an Elvis Costello and the Impostors gig, even one that runs for over two hours uninterrupted at St Kilda’s glorious Palais theatre, is inevitably blessed with choosing from too many brilliant songs to play in one show. The band’s sets in the past week at Byron Bay and Sydney illustrate Elvis’s preference to mix it up and randomly bring in lesser-known numbers, a capacity he and the Impostors demonstrated so cleverly with his earlier Spinning Songbook tours.
Byron setlist https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/elvis-costello-and-the-imposters/2024/tyagarah-tea-tree-farm-byron-bay-australia-33abb451.html
Sydney setlist https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/elvis-costello-and-the-imposters/2024/concert-hall-sydney-opera-house-sydney-australia-73abb6ed.html
Spinning Songbook review https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/elvis-costellos-wheel-of-fortune-243929/
Word from Bernard Zuel in Sydney, a reviewer who’s long influenced my taste, was that Elvis’s voice in the Opera House at Easter was buried in the mix. “More fundamental, more disheartening than all of that though was Costello being betrayed by his voice, which is not a ‘tonight problem’ according to reports from Bluesfest and other shows recently, or from anyone who watched online some questionable vocal performances from his residency at the Gramercy Theatre in New York a year ago. … Mixing him down among the instruments may not have been accidental but tactical …”.
Bernard Zuel review https://www.bernardzuel.net/post/elvis-costello-the-imposters-live-review
So what to expect? And who? A dear friend who saw the Opera House show from close range said it was a great gig, with the only problem being Elvis wore a kilt and T-shirt … and while she wasn’t bothered by the sight of his knobbly knees, his naked forearms were somehow troubling. (Hmmm … forearms!)

Ms T and I instantly connected back in 2007 when I mentioned in passing at a party, while describing a scene from Talladega Nights, that Elvis Costello was my hero. Ms T quietly said, “He’s my hero too” – the first words spoken to me by the woman who’s now my wife.
Last time Ms T and I saw Mr C., we celebrated her 50th birthday in 2009 with a flight from our Adelaide home to Sydney for a solo gig. As a long-time Sydney boy I was slightly embarrassed to acknowledge it was my first visit to the Enmore Theatre. Later, as an averagely tall Caucasian male, I was astonished the balcony seats were so close I had to sit with my knees at 45 degrees throughout. But worst of all, after seeing seven – count them, seven (7) – guitars arranged in a semi-circle around a mic stand before the show started, I let myself fantasise that we could also see a guest guitarist with genuine talent and expertise.
But no, that wasn’t to be. Instead, “Little Hands of Concrete” (one of EC’s pseudonyms) proceeded to slowly ruin the evening by inserting a series of interminable, unimaginative lead breaks to round out lone-singer versions of songs you may not have known or even wanted to hear in the first place. On the other hand, each of the seven guitars got an opportunity to impress.
After buying the tickets we waited 18 months to see EC this time, after his 2023 Bluesfest sideshow was cancelled due to unspecified (to my knowledge) illness in the band. Given Elvis’s reported vocal problems this week were apparently not new, it’s very concerning news about a singer / songwriter I admire deeply and who’s only a couple of years older than me.
I own 18 Elvis albums, in a collection heavily weighted towards the first decade of his career with The Attractions and shortly after, including five Rhino reissues with bonus discs and a treasured copy of his B-sides from 1980 – Ten Bloody Marys and Ten How’s Your Fathers. But the collection also spans Elvis’s output from the 1990s up to 2015, all of them interesting, some clearly wonderful and dear to my heart including collaborations with Burt Bacharach, the Brodsky Quartet, Allen Toussaint, The Impostors and Roots. And let us never forget, the great T-Bone Burnett produced King of America.
Yet despite my deep engagement with so much of Elvis’s oeuvre over the years, it occurred to me only as we took our seats that I barely have even a patchy knowledge of his more recent work, including some albums I own. And so it proved from the get-go.
Melbourne setlist https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/elvis-costello-and-the-imposters/2024/palais-theatre-melbourne-australia-7babee0c.html
The band opened with a rip-roaring rendition of “Hetty O’Hara Confidential”, which I’d not heard before so I blithely assumed it was new and marvelled at the energy, venom and sheer stamina Elvis and the Impostors were spitting out.
But not far into the next song, “Watch Your Step” (one of my favourites), it suddenly felt as if all the wheels were falling off. Trying for a rearranged melody it became apparent the maestro had lost the ability to use his mid-range. For long passages, he literally couldn’t sing a melody – any melody – whatsoever to save himself, let alone save the song.
Equally disorienting, the singer’s phrasing (such as it was) drifted every which way, rhythmically unhinged as if he’d lost all sense of tempo despite the backing of a rock-steady beat group. The effect was disquieting and Ms T said later that it made her feel anxious. (I’ve felt similarly disoriented when working with a drummer who couldn’t keep a steady beat while I sang.)
At first I wondered if Mr Costello was trying to present some dadaist, Dylanesque version of old tunes and failing to pull it off because his voice was crook. After 40-odd years in the business no one truly wants to be in their own tribute act, after all. His speaking voice sounded well enough, and he belted the famous upbeat numbers as if his head voice and muscle memory kicked in at that pitch.
That’s not to say none of the rearranged material worked – Ms T and me agreed the night’s highlight was an enthralling deep dub version of Watching The Detectives. Nor was it just an oldies show, for us anyway. Hearing “Hetty O’Hara Confidential” and “Blood & Hot Sauce” blast out for the first time was thrilling; a delicious medley of “Clubland / Ghost Town / Insensatez” with a Latin pulse engrossed; and the classically upbeat renditions of “I Can’t Stand Up To Falling Down” sparked the same adrenaline rush as I got when first hearing those two bangers in the early 1980s.
Still, it must be said that any delight in Thursday’s show was invariably disrupted by songs that simply failed, thanks to Mr Costello’s discombobulated singing every time his mid-range was needed. It was most noticeable in rearrangements of slower Attractions songs and the softer, more melodic songs – such as Mose Alison’s “Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy”. (FWIW, I’ve always preferred Bonnie Raitt’s version.) In these numbers he’d fail to sing a melody – any melody – because the arrangements demanded his softer mid-range and he just didn’t have it on the night. As a result, “Every Day I Write The Book”, “Almost Blue”, “She” and “Alison” were all ruined for me. And although I’d never heard it before “A Face In The Crowd” also left me cold, as I’ve never gone for Mr Costello’s penchant for overwrought, Tin Pan Alley ballads unless Burt Bacharach was also in the room.
Finally, to another jarring element. In song three “Waiting for the End Of The World” we were repeatedly invited to join a lugubrious singalong with Elvis, a ploy he repeated several times during the two-hour set. Suddenly grumpy old Elvis Costello wants everyone to sing along? I guess it’s a tactic to try to preserve a failing voice, but the notion of a jolly Elvis group choir performing on demand just didn’t work for me or Ms T – who’d experienced the angry, contemptuous Elvis back in the late ‘70s when a snarling, 20-minute EC set was de rigueur.
It’s upsetting to speculate that my experience of Elvis Costello this week may presage the end of his singing voice, at least on tour, hinting as he did that the Palais show may be his last in Australia. That said, all our pop culture heroes must age and fade sooner or later. I wouldn’t swap or forget the hours and hours of mood-matching and musical inspiration Elvis has given me for anything.

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