Elvis Costello brought his Spinning Songbook tour to the North West with performances in Blackpool and Manchester.
A measure of the powers of Costello and his backing band the Imposters is that they played over 25 songs each night and yet fewer than a dozen songs were performed on both. The reason? The spinning songbook chooses much of the set.
The spinning songbook is a large and garishly coloured wheel divided into small slices on which are scribed various Costello favourites and which sits stage left. Stage right is a small bar and an energetic and spangly costumed go-go dancer.
This is not your average rock gig. After an opening salvo from the band, Costello swaps his fedora for a top hat and assumes the persona of Napoleon Dynamite (Lord Napoleon in Manchester) inviting members of the audience up on stage to spin the wheel. He cracks the jokes while they see whether a song title or a theme such as Love (giving the band some leeway to choose what they might perform) is where the wheel stops. So we get Riot Act as the fourth number in Blackpool and Tokyo Storm Warning in Manchester.
But the wheel doesn't make all the choices. In Blackpool a young woman brought on stage says that her favourite song isn't displayed and Elvis, guessing her musical tastes based on her age, cracks that they can't play a Rhianna song, 'well, only one or two'. But she wants Gram Parsons' How Much I Lied and, whilst it might not have been rehearsed beforehand, the band duly oblige. In Manchester, a 50 year old celebrating his birthday not only gets Happy Birthday sung by the audience and Costello but his request for Battered Old Bird, another song not on the wheel and not rehearsed.
The Blackpool highlight is the anti Thatcher song Tramp The Dirt Down, delivered with passion as Costello links recollections of his father's death to that of the late prime minister. His musician father used to play the working men's clubs 'when there were still working men in the north'. The collective lump in the throat of the audience was a moment of raw emotion.
In Manchester, the stand out section of the show was a rip roaring run through the back catalogue with Oliver's Army, I Don't Want To Go To Chelsea, Pump It Up, The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes, Mystery Dance, Radio Radio and What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding fired off one after another in a breathtaking encore that left the audience baying for more.
The Spinning Songbook tour is evidence that one of Britain's finest songwriters and performers is on top of his game. Whether it's romantically serenading the audience with Charles Aznavour's She or political understatement with Shipbuilding, Costello and his band provide two and a half hours of solid entertainment. Long may the spinning songbook continue to spin.
Saturday 15 June 2013
Tuesday 11 June 2013
Neil Young, Newcastle Metro Arena, 10 June 2013
You sort of know what you're going to get at a Crazy Horse gig. Full on rock and roll at maximum volume. Classic songs. Neil Young leading the band like a man possessed.
But you don't necessarily anticipate the band and road crew shuffling on before the show starts to sing God Save The Queen in front of a huge Union Jack. Or a woman randomly wandering onto the stage mid set with a violin case and looking as though she might join in with the band before wandering off again two minutes later.
Welcome to Neil's world, where he can get away with ideas in front of several thousand paying punters that a pair of Japanese conceptual artists would struggle to attract a handful of people to watch.
Also, feedback is back. Reprising the concept of his Rust Never Sleeps tour of the 1970s, Young and the band perform in front of huge mock amplifiers and coax every squeal and shriek of noise they can from their equipment.
Featuring a hefty slice of last year's Psychedelic Pill album and one new song, Young leads off with Love And Only Love and then Powderfinger before taking a breather mid set with delicate and unaccompanied versions of Comes A Time and Blowin' In The Wind, giving the latter the reverential treatment that the song's author now seems incapable of.
Bob Dylan is notoriously unpredictable as a live act in terms of whether you will feel you have got your money's worth. As Neil Young finished his set with Hey Hey My My (Into The Black) and Rocking In The Free World, there was no question as to whether the punters had got value. Crazy Horse had been on stage for two and a half hours and the crowd were still baying for more.
Like the Rolling Stones and other acts that broke through in the 1960s, time will eventually catch up with Neil Young, but there was no evidence of age or any decline in his passion on stage in Newcastle. There's still a handful of tickets left for Neil Young's visit to the Echo Arena in Liverpool in August. It's a chance to see a true rock legend at the height of his powers while you still can. I've got my ticket already.
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