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Pump it Up

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I am still reeling with shock and disappointment after last night’s trip to Birmingham’s wonderful Symphony Hall. After an entertaining set of stories and Squeeze singalongs from Chris Difford, Elvis Costello took to the stage. His backing band were superb as always, and the set list was varied and interesting. The problem was that Elvis’s voice has completely gone. It was weak throughout and out of tune probably 80 % of the time. Songs such as “Shipbuilding” and “Almost Blue” were painful to sit through. A muddy, bass heavy sound mix did not help, but it was so poor many people left early. Having seen many great shows by him over the years, it was a sad and strange experience – a bit like watching someone fight through quicksand……

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Comments

  2. I was there, and that’s what my pal and I thought, too. The middle section was hard to bear, and some of the rearrangements didn’t work. And the lack of engagement after the masterclass by Chris Gifford really highlighted Elvis phoning it in. His PA farting didn’t help, either.

    • I vowed never to see him again after last time (which was in 2020), but my friend bought tickets to Hampton Court so I’m going again (at least I’m not paying). I’ve seen a couple of videos and they have confirmed that my vow was the right one. Unless he’s improved drastically between now and Thursday, this will be my last EC show.

  4. I have seen him numerous times the last time in Oxford a few years ago unfortunately his voice was obviously failing him then . It didn’t help with the sound mix being horrendous too.

  5. I know someone who attended the aforementioned gig & singled out Almost Blue as being fairly horrible. Opinion was that he’s picked some songs that don’t do him any favours, and he could have picked other stuff. Otherwise the verdict was mostly good, with praise for the band (including Charlie Sexton!) and for Chris Difford’s mix of standup and songs.

  7. I was just about to post my own review but I will reply on the back of yours. I think you were being kind to him. He was awful and the sound was horrendous. I sat half way back in centre of the stalls.
    The first four numbers you couldn’t hear Steve’s keyboards at all – all that was audible was the booming drums and bass, the vocals were barely heard too and its only because I knew the lyrics that I knew what the hell he was singing. Some people to the left of me shouted out the they couldn’t hear anything and to sort the sound out. He completely lost it and said, I kid you not: ‘The next number is acoustic so you will fucking hear me then”. I was incensed by this comment – if it was supposed to be a witty comment it completely missed the mark. Almost Blue was a joke, slight redemption for an acoustic Clubland and very good Honey are you straight which is not normally a favourite song of his. This is probably about the 20th time I have seen him if not more and I hold him in more regard than almost any other artist or at least I did. However there was something wrong last night- even the band seemed disinterested. Sw him on his last tour at Wolverhampton and he was engaging and ebullient.Last night he was morose and I don’t think he wanted be there.
    It is not the first time I have experienced sound issues at some of his gigs. I recall the Brutal Youth tour at the Albert Hall that started with dire sound and another gig at Warwick Arts centre that was pretty ropey. Then there was the gig a The Tower of London with Allen Toussaint where we got an abridged gig because he couldn’t be bothered getting on stage on time. So for every Transcendentall gig ie.The Spinnnig Songbook at the Symphony hall, Costello and Nieve at Manchester Bridgewater Hall, his gig in Reykjavik and countless more I hold great memories of a special performer and the Attractions/Imposters are surely one of the best live bands on their day. Yesterday was not one of their days but much more than that a valid complaint from the audience was dismissed with an arrogance unbecoming of someone I regarded as one of our greats.
    I thought when the opening bars of Shipbuilding rang out that we were going to see an improvement then his voice came in – out of tune, awful pitch. I couldn’t take any more and walked out. I have defended him against numerous similar comments in recent years – last night I finally had to admit that his talent is waning. This is sad.

  8. I can’t comment on his voice, but really poor sound – too loud, too muddy, too unbalanced – has been a perennial problem with Elvis in my experience.I have no idea why but can only assume he has a sound engineer he trusts but who is rubbish at the job and/or Elvis likes it the way it’s done and no one in his camp is prepared to tell him how bad it is. He has form regarding the sarky comments when the paying customers have the temerity to complain – he did something similar in Liverpool a few years back and completely lost the good will of the audience.

  9. I’ve given up seeing my favourite artists from back in the day when they can’t hack it. I’m going to see Richard Thompson in a couple of weeks who can most definitely hack it, though he gave up the bad stuff decades ago.

    • Same here; I mostly threw in the ‘let’s go see one of the greats’ towel a year or so ago, when mister Aqualung delivered what sounded like a gig from the bottom of the sea through a speaking tube.

      Happily, on the several occasions that I’ve seen mister Costello play, both he and his band have been on sparkling form. However, the last such occasion must have been around 1982-3.

      Mind you, I still have tickets on my pin-board for two further gigs with a great: Jon Anderson in September and then Martin Simpson the following month. Recent video evidence suggests that both will spare me from such disappointment.

      • Martin Simpson is one of those rare artists, getting better and better with age. The same sort of age as Costello, his voice may show signs of age, but he uses that to his advantage, a cracked vessel of no small beauty. His own songwriting canon may be small, but his has crafted some superb songs over the years, as well as having immense talent and technique on guitar, across all styles of acoustic, so as to embrace a comfortable and seamless mix of UK of the Anglo-Celtic tradition and American roots encompassing blues, country and all in between.

  10. Hmmmm. I’ve seen Costello 30 times and like @SteveT the gigs have ranged from extraordinary to what-the-hell-was-that.

    The worst one was in Dublin’s BGET in 2018 and it sounded very like the description above – murky sound and EC hitting some remarkable bum notes. He subsequently came off the road because of his cancer diagnosis and so I put it all down to that.

    My next EC gig was the National Concert Hall in Dublin in 2023, I was in the front row and it was sensational . All was forgiven. Then he did a four night stand in Dublin in September 2024 and of course I went to each one, and within those four gigs was excellence and wobbliness. Coming out of those four gigs I think I got a sense of what the two main problems are (1) He is in his 70s and is still using wedge monitors; from what I know about these things he should be using decent in-ears with a personal mix of what is happening around him and (2) His timing goes wonky, which may or may not be related to not being able to hear his surroundings; when he is on his own or being accompanied by Steve, he is controlling the tempo and it goes up and down, at two of the 2024 shows the Brodsky Quartet turned up and you have to perform to their tempo or else it all falls apart.

    He is due to play Dublin next month in a venue I dislike and I don’t have a ticket. I am wary about it because I think it could be disappointing, and @Excitable-Boy has confirmed my suspicions. I’m sure I’ll be there anyway. Oh dear.

  12. I saw him about 25 years ago at Hammy Odeon, using up a friend’s spare ticket, and the sound was so overly loud and muddy that I left after about 45 minutes and got the last fast train home.

  13. How was it at the Albert Hall?
    The was far, far better vocally than we feared following Steve’s post. He sung within the obvious limitations of age, but that wasn’t the problem.
    My wife did think he veered into Vic Reeves’s pub singer territory on Alison – over emoting when restraint would have been the order of the day.
    The big problem as far as I was concerned was the “aural sludge” they produced, but it wasn’t like that all the way. They came on and started with This Year’s Girl which was great. Why that balance in the sound mix couldn’t have been maintained is a mystery.
    When he performed quieter songs (notwithstanding his performance of Alison) the sound was fine, but later on the rockier material it just melded into this undifferentiated noise. Drums aside, no instrument could be clearly identified. It was as noted already, a loud aural sludge.
    When Elvis and guest guitarist Charlie Sexton got down to a guitar duel I thought back to just a few days ago, when in almost exactly the same spot Jason Isbell and Sadler Vaden had exchanged their best guitar licks and for them the notes sang out, clear and true into the hall. Here it was just undistinguished noise.
    We’d had enough when it got to the closing stages when something that parodied a song formerly known as (I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea was being performed. It was 10:30 so there wouldn’t have been much more.
    The vast majority of the audience seemed to be loving it.
    There was a marked lack of fuckwittery, which was pleasing.
    If only I could have swapped this audience for the one that attended the Jason Isbell gig.

  14. Not long home from the Hampton Court show…for me, a gig of two halves. Elvis seemed relatively good humoured tonight, perhaps because he grew up in nearby Twickenham and was able to share a couple of stories, one about visiting Hampton Court on a school trip. However, over emoting, very dodgy sound, a somewhat thin vocal in places and fussy rearrangements of too many songs threatened to turn this into a bit of a damp squib. All of a sudden though things fell into more focus for the second half. Tighter arrangements definitely helped, although he clearly doesn’t want to play those old classics with much of a straight bat any more. OK, they’re his songs, but if you’re that fed up with them, why agree to do a tour with that as the theme?

  15. The voice thing… I felt a bit sorry for him last night. It’s a mighty instrument but he just can’t control it. Most of it was forgivable but Good Year For The Roses was embarrassing. Horrible. He dropped Shipbuilding and I never thought I say this, but I’m glad he did. He’s also started singing half- or even three quarters behind the beat, so good luck singing along. What used to be rendered as AAAlison now comes out as oh-oh-ah-ah-lison. That’s ‘re-interpretation’ I suppose.

    Other things to note is that the first audience member went out for a wee after 14 minutes, surely a record, and that the magnificently spitefully and splenetic rebel of my youth bought his gig under the great clock of Henry VIII’s palace to an end precisely on the dot of 10.30pm.

    • Yes, I forgot to mention the crowd fuckwit quotient…a ludicrous amount of changing seats or going for a wee right from the off. What is wrong with people??

      Re the performance, yep, it’s the constant singing behind the beat. I sang along with the original arrangements where I could anyway. I also think the presence of Charlie Sexton might be part of the sound problem. I don’t think the Attractions/Imposters have ever needed a second guitarist, especially an electric one.

      • I had a brilliant idea in the long slow queue for the Gents before the show. Introducing an ‘Prostate Enlarged 1cm or Less’ aisle would massively improve the flow. So to speak.

  16. I know this is heresy here, but I gave up on EC years ago. I absolutely loved the first few albums and singles and got to see him on the Live Stiffs tour, so I was really on board, but then the albums became less interesting and I hated Almost Blue. His voice and material just went off a cliff to my mind – I did try dipping back in over the years to no avail, and that Bacharach album is unlistenable to my ears. I think in retrospect he never had much of a voice, but it was good enough and suited early material – I really did think he was the British Dylan at one point – but don’t get me started on Sheeeeeee…..

      • Just looked at his discography – 33 studio albums! – and that one was 1986. Checking on my LPs, I seem to have bought Spike (1989), but I suspect it was probably going cheap and I took a gamble, possibly because he had been collaborating with Macca at the time and I really liked the Flowers in the Dirt album.

        • Now you mention it, I remember hearing Tokyo Storm Warning on the radio in my 6th form common room, so that was late ’86 to early ’88. 40 years ago! Why do I remember this rubbish?

          I remember buying Spike at Listen Records in Reading while in my first year at university and being massively underwhelmed by it. See also: the second Deacon Blue album. I think the only record I bought that year which I did like was Technique. I’m sure there were others, but I can’t think of any right now. There’s an idea for a thread…

    • We are at one on this. I read the reviews of “Get Happy!” and bought the vinyl (did it come with a free single too I vaguely remember?) but it never landed for me and other than “Almost Blue” which I loved I’ve never really bothered since.

      I watched a toe curling doco about the making of the Bacharach album which confirmed my view, followed by Sheeeee. Oh dear.

      • I love Get Happy but I think his best album came after that – Imperial Bedroom. For me he was generally brilliant up to Spike (1989), then I gradually lost interest. Saw 2 incredible shows with The Attractions in the early/mid 80s and also a brilliant Costello Show just after that. A great live performer in his day, but it seems no longer

        • Yeah I’d agree – ‘Punch the Clock’, ‘Imperial Bedroom’ and, especially, ‘King of America’ are great 80s albums but there was then a run of ‘Return to form’ albums like ‘Brutal Youth’ and ‘When I Was Cruel’ that after an initial positive impression had no lasting impact, for this listener at least.

      • In some shops i.e. chart return shops, it was a free copy of Get Happy, with every copy of the Head To Toe single.
        That was certainly the case in the long lost and still lamented Harum Records in Crouch End.
        I was an early buyer of Get Happy and all I got as an extra was an awful poster. I think I got my copy of Head To Toe from Harum’s bargain bin.

          • Yes, they definitely were giving away a 1980 album with a 1982 single.
            I’m sure someone, somewhere will have documented this with respect to attempts to leverage singles into the charts.
            I got a copy when it had dropped out of the charts. Hence its presence in the bargain bin.

      • Get Happy!! is crammed with fantastic songs and great playing. The problem was they squeezed all of its extensive length onto two sides of vinyl. The sound quality was poor compared to the preceding two albums (which are his best 😉).

        Any love for Trust?

        • 20 songs but only 48 minutes long. I think it sounds reasonable. Play loud! Prefab Sprouts’s Jordan the Comeback was originally a single album at nearly 64 minutes long. Yikes!

          I bought Trust on a cheap cassette at the time. I like it, but I prefer GH or IB. Not a huge fan of Armed Forces seems a bit commercial to me

    • For me I love pretty much most stuff from the very start through to Brutal Youth. After that, some idiot told him he could sing and that he was a proper star, neither of which did him any favours at all. He became convinced he could successfully ape any style he attempted…he couldn’t. I’d only seen him live a couple of times though, once in about 85 at Hammersmith Palais where he gave a heckler his money back, and then in Basingstoke about 14 years ago or so. Both times he was fabulous. He wasn’t at Hampton Court and I honestly don’t think I’ll bother again.

  17. We saw EC in Dublin last night. I actually enjoyed some of the ‘reworkings’, especially Detectives which was almost dub in nature. He did seem to struggle in the middle section where it was mostly other people’s songs he was doing. Overall though it was a nice journey through some great old songs.

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