Elvis Costello and the Imposters, Blackpool Opera House, 13 June 2013 and Manchester Apollo, 14 June 2013

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.

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.

Marcus Brigstocke, Chorley Little Theatre, 11 April 2013

Marcus Brigstocke's Brig Society tour came to Chorley and played to a full house.  Politics was the overriding theme for the evening. Brigstocke set his stall out in the opening minutes with a few jokes about Margaret Thatcher that, despite the nearness of her death, were acerbic without bordering on the tasteless. 

The central concept of Brigstocke's two and a quarter hour show was a critique of David Cameron's vision of a Big Society, with members of the Chorley Little Theatre audience appointed as ministers for Education, Health and Transport and free to make up policies of their own. The truck driver given the transport brief duly abolished people who hog the middle lane, proposing that machine guns be fitted to the front of lorries in order to remove offending vehicles in the centre of the motorway.

Brigstocke demonstrated he could easily have been a politician. Not only did he go to a posh school and have a very good line in appearing to talk down to people but he also made a splendid fist of explaining how the banking crisis occurred. His use of audience participation to illustrate how the banks lent other people's money to those that couldn't afford to repay was as clear as anything the BBC's Robert Peston might come up with, and in the process he emptied the audience's pockets of more than £50. His analogy of the Greeks staying in the Euro being like gatecrashing a German run nightclub and being unable to keep up with the music also illustrated his ability to extract a gag out of unpromising material.

George Osborne (net worth £4m) and David Cameron (£30m) were targets of his ire for pursuing the Government's economics policy, but so too was Jimmy Carr for the tax avoidance measures he employed and made headlines with last year.

Some of what Brigstocke does is hardly comedy at all. His rant against The Sun ('why does anybody still buy it? They hacked into a dead girl's phone') could be that of a left wing politician, and his amusing comments about UKIP leader Nigel Farage speared the pretensions of the UKIP leader to be treated as a serious politician more effectively than anything being said by the mainstream party leaders. Proving Brigstocke is also no fan of Labour Ed Miliband was dismissed with a withering one liner about his appearance.

But it wasn't all about politics. Brigstocke questioned the necessity of most train announcements and washing your hands after visiting the lavatory, whilst also cautioning men against drying their genitals in a Dyson airblade.

Despite its length and the weighty subject matter, the show was evenly paced and by the end the audience had been entertain and educated, with everyone having a better understanding of economic policy and with those who 'invested' money in Brigstocke to help him illustrate the banking crisis once more clutching the banknotes he borrowed mid show. Unlike the audience member in Leeds who Brigstocke apparently took £10 off and omitted to refund, finding the money in his shirt pocket afterwards, the Chorley audience did not go home unrewarded.

Justin Moorhouse, Chorley Little Theatre, 16 March 2013

Justin Moorhouse is fat.  But not fat in a bad way.  He’s more of your affable Hairy Biker kind of fat, the sort of genial fat bloke who’d elbow his way past you in his eagerness to get to the cream cake counter at Greggs and crack a gag in the process such that you wouldn't mind him beating you to the last eclair.

And Moorhouse is comfortable with his size.  It's not glandular or due to big bones.  It is, as he tells a packed house at Chorley Little Theatre, because at home the biscuits are next to the kettle.

Food is a subject close to Justin's heart and at different points in his act the biscuits, a sausage roll and a Ginster's steak slice all feature.  But it isn't just about food, and in a two hour set he also talked about his relationship with his teenage son, his eight year old daughter's obsession with Catholicism and whether, when the rest of the country was facing civil unrest, riots in Euxton and Whittle-le-Woods were ever a realistic proposition.  His conclusion?  They weren’t.

He has a go at teachers in a ‘I’m not having a go but –‘ kind of way which even the teachers in the audience could not help but laugh along at, before - and using an image that will be instantly familiar to everyone who's ever been on a Sunday outing with their family - recounting a childhood visit to Botany Bay that came to an abrupt halt when his father refused to pay the admission.  His own visit to an owl sanctuary as a parent witnessing bored dads trying to get a 3G signal in order to watch the football on Sky on their smartphones also resonated. 

Moorhouse wasn’t afraid to be edgy – his jokes about Paralympian swimmers and the Asian guy running his corner shop had the audience wondering whether they dare laugh or not while he showed that beneath the affable exterior lies an experienced comic when he dealt firmly with a drunken heckler who, having slept through the first hour of his act, started to shout incoherently.

A good comedian draws you into their world, settles you into your seat with an introductory gag or two and then takes you on a journey looking at things you might not have thought you were going to spend your evening contemplating.  So it was with Justin Moorhouse.  Gay sex, teenage masturbation and paedophilia were probably not topics that the audience were expecting to be listening to as they sat eating their pre theatre madras in the curry houses of Chorley, nor where they thought Moorhouse would be taking them when he stepped onto the stage and blinked at them from behind his spectacles.  But that’s where he took them.  And they loved him for it.

Sean Lock, Chorley Little Theatre, 11th March 2013

Sean Lock brought his Purple Van Man tour to Chorley Little Theatre as a work in progress.  The almost full theatre was treated to an hour and three quarters of material, some of which was clearly taking shape on stage as Lock delivered it.

Lock’s laconic delivery will be well known to TV viewers as one of the stars of 8 out of 10 cats.  Voted amongst Britain’s Top 20 comedians by Channel 4 viewers in 2010, and arguably the first comedian to play Wembley Arena (he was the support act to Newman & Baddiel at the time and so preceded them on stage) Lock has sold out three nights at The Lowry in Salford with his current tour so getting him to Chorley Little Theatre was quite a coup.

And since the tour was due to get fully underway less than two weeks after this show, the only real sign that the Chorley audience wasn’t getting the full article was a flip chart on the side of the stage that Lock occasionally referred to as an aide memoire.

His act comprised musings on a number of topics, such as the cost of food at the cinema, the state that most cinemas are left in by the departing audience, and the questions that children ask.  Lock has three young children and questions flow all day at a rate of one a minute, so whether it’s okay to lie to children (it is – better to say that there are monsters under the bed than tell them about the monsters out in the real world) was one subject around which Lock chatted for around ten minutes.

He also spent several minutes expressing his views on Sir Richard Branson (not repeatable in case I get sued!) and considering whether Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones or Radio 2 presenter Jeremy Irons would make a better sleeping bag companion, which gives a flavour of how left field some of Lock’s thoughts are.

Lock has a reflective style, and throws in the odd old fashioned gag every few minutes accompanied by an Eric Morecambe style shuffle to illustrate the showbiz nature of his delivery.  It may have been work in progress, but for the Chorley audience it was job done.

Tull, Octagon Theatre, Bolton, 2 March 2013

Tull, a play by Manchester United scout Phil Vasili about the life of Walter Tull, runs at the Bolton Octagon Theatre until 16 March 2013.

Walter was the first black player from Britain to play professional football (Arthur Wharton, who played in goal for Preston North End and who was the first black professional footballer, was born in the Gold Coast, now Ghana) and served with distinction in the First World War.

The play tells the story of Walter's life from the death of his mother through his football career at Tottenham Hotspur, where he was hounded out by racism from fans and opposing players, to his death in the spring of 1918 in Flanders.  Tull finished his football career at Northampton Town, chose to enlist and, had he survived the war, was ready to sign for Glasgow Rangers on the cessation of hostilities.

The play is performed by a cast of eight people who between them perform over 100 different parts. There is no scenery and no costumes. Despite this, the play works thanks to dramatic lighting effects, an able cast and a tight script.  Nathan Ives-Moiba, who plays Tull from the age of 6 until he dies on the battlefield is the one constant, with the rest of the players taking on the roles of Walter's family, key political and military figures in his life and football people that he encountered.

Tull encountered racism throughout his life, none more so than when he was at Spurs, and his relationships with Northampton's legendary manager Herbert Chapman and Suffragette Annie Williams are at the heart of the play.  This is a gripping tale and a must see for football fans as well as anyone just wanting to see great drama.

The final chapter of the story, as directed by David Thacker, has yet to be concluded.  For being black, Tull was denied the posthumous honour of the Military Cross that a white army officer would have been granted for similar acts of bravery in combat.  Until that wrong is righted (and there is an online petition to government calling for it to happen) this play serves as a fitting tribute.

Richard Thompson, Liverpool Philharmonic, 1st March 2013

Richard Thompson's reputation is built on that of a folk guitarist who, since his days as a founder member of Fairport Convention, has forged a solo career that now spans six decades. But Thompson likes to mix it up a bit and his latest UK tour features him at the heart of a solid three piece band with his new album Electric at the core of the show.

Accompanied by bass player Taras Prodaniuk and a powerful drummer in the shape of Michael Jerome, Thompson presented a set at the Liverpool Philharmonic that was at the rockier end of the folk rock spectrum, verging on heavy rock at times.

Opening with a trio of songs from the new album, most of which is played during the course of the following two hours, Thompson led the band through a thunderous set played mostly on a fetching pink Fender Stratocaster.

Dressed in his customary black clothes and black beret, a two hour performance saw Thompson displaying the virtuoso guitar skills that have led some to place him up there with Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. And when the band encore with a cover of Cream's White Room, the comparisons are easy to make.  Thompson was cribbing from a lyric sheet for the song, but whilst he smilingly struggled to remember the words, his fingers never missed a note.  Clapton, take note.

As well as expert musicianship, part of the attraction of Thompson's live act is his witty repartee and he cheerily reminds his audience that no evening's entertainment is complete without both a murder ballad and a sea shanty, the latter finishing in 9/8 time.  When an audience member calls out for a song that the band hasn't rehearsed, he jokes that 'I’m the only one up here that knows that. Not that it's stopped us so far.’  And when fan favourite Beeswing is requested from the front stalls he responds ‘I’ve got the wrong guitar for that - unless you want the punk version,’ and then proceeds to play a couple of bars in just that style.  Beeswing later features in the encore, beautifully played on the acoustic.  Since it wasn’t on the original set list, Thompson presumably decided to accede to the shout from Row D.

Alongside staples such as Wall of Death and Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed, new songs Saving The Good Stuff For You and Salford Sunday stand up well.  Thompson remains one of Britain's foremost singer songwriters and whilst this current tour does not reflect the full range of his songwriting talent and the extent of his impressive back catalogue it does showcase his immense skill as a guitarist.  Rock on, Richard.