Oh, it's so funny to be seeing them after so long, girl. Elvis Costello, keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas: still together, still rocking, still playing their brilliant catalog of songs that stretches back nearly 50 years. What’s so funny about Pete, love songs and understatement? The Factory offered all three as Costello and the Imposters, including bassist Davey Faragher and special guest Charlie Sexton on second guitar, hit Chesterfield on Friday night.
With a 23-song, two-and-a-half-hour set, Costello played a career-spanning selection of tunes, and considering Costello’s relentless decades-long prolificacy, any of his concerts must necessarily leave a thousand winners from his catalog behind. Did I get the tunes I wanted? Well, choosing my favorite Elvis Costello song is like identifying my favorite atom of blood in my veins, but by playing nine tracks from his first five albums, Costello was careful to provide plenty of crowd-pleasing haymakers that a nostalgic crowd came to the Factory to hear.
He would make the crowd wait for more familiar fare, however. Four of the first seven songs of the evening were unreleased originals, including the opener, “A Town Called Riddle,” one of two songs offered Friday that Costello wrote for a planned (perhaps stalled-out) musical adaptation of Elia Kazan’s 1957 film A Face in the Crowd. The other from that project was the gospel-steeped “Blood & Hot Sauce,” one of two songs Friday on which Costello played piano.
The grooving, wordy “Hetty O’Hara Confidential” from 2020’s Clockface was another relative obscurity played early but was a highlight nonetheless with extended solos by Sexton on guitar and Nieve on organ. Before the evening's first classic, “Radio Radio,” Costello told a lengthy story about listening to BBC radio (taking shots at Boston [the band] and Pink Floyd), his parents meeting across the counter at a record store and his early attempts to write a song like those on Bruce Springsteen’s first album.
Incidentally, the angels want to wear his red hat: Looking spry in a black jacket, a red polka-dotted shirt, a matching scarf and a red fedora, the 69-year-old Costello was dressed like Prince in his seminal 2004 performance at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame playing “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Always with a touch of vaudevillian cheekiness, Costello flirted with the crowd. “We’ve been to St. Louis lots of times, but we’ve never been to Chesterfield before,” he told us. “If you knew how great the Chesterfield in Yorkshire was, you’d be so thrilled.” No one knew what he was on about, but the audience laughed anyway. A song later, he said, “It’s Friday night, has anyone done anything scandalous yet? Are you sure? I bet the people up in the balcony are up to no good, I can tell!”
The legend avoided most of his work from the ‘90s and ‘00s, a period of collaborative albums, ballets, Bacharachs, Brodskys and beards. Instead, it was a night that emphasized his stature as a rock and roll lifer, swinging from soul to rock to jazz to country to blues, and if you squinted, all of his early snarling cynicism and his singular combination of nerdiness and cool was all very much intact. And, of course, no one could mistake how great the songs are, still packaged in an urgent run of angry young pub rock, golden-age hooks and tongue-tripping wordplay.
Costello leaned on such classicism that it didn’t matter if the material was unfamiliar to the audience. “Even though you’ve never heard it before, I bet by the second verse you’ll be singing,” he said as a way of introducing “My Baby Just Squeals (You Heal),” a song he described as having been inspired by crate-digging for old records in Ft. Worth. Swing-rocker “Like Licorice on Your Tongue” came with Sexton’s most fleet-fingered solo as Nieve chased him up and down the piano keys and the jump-blues track “I Don’t Want Your Lyndon Johnson” featured one of the night’s greatest vocal performances as Elvis painted the corners of the melody, switching to a radio-style mic for the last verse.
“Watch Your Step,” a beauty from 1981’s Trust, was just gorgeous as Costello slowed down and allowed space in the arrangements, before a frenetic one-two punch of “I Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down” and “High Fidelity,” a big favorite for the Declan-iacs in the audience.
Nieve, for his part, was a man possessed, flooding the songs with roller-rink swirls, haunted-house dive-bombs, and percolating stabs and burples, holding the songs together when Elvis vamped for the crowd. And is there any rock drummer as feloniously underappreciated as Pete Thomas? All hail Pete! The Factory positively shook from Thomas’s jaw-dropping prowess — his furious, continuous fills and syncopated freakouts.
A lengthy version of “Watching the Detectives” saw Costello’s guitar teasing out the song’s reggae chord-stabs on the guitar as Nieve honked into a melodica and played with the stage bathed in blue light, giving the track a menacing feel that was downright scary. Midway through, Costello sat and pushed buttons on a laptop to trigger audio samples. “We’re going to break it down and put it back together,” he warned.
Costello sat at the piano for “Poisoned Rose” for his most croony, country-influenced turn of the night. Faragher switched to electric double-bass as Costello reached way up in his range for his epileptic vibrato, like Katharine Hepburn being strangled by a feral cat (in a good way).
Some curious props adorned the stage, including a piggy bank shaped like Jimmy Durante’s head and a lit-up flower under glass that Costello says he picked up in Arkansas and described as “a Valentine gift for you all.” He sat next to these props to fingerpick an acoustic guitar to Mose Allison’s “Everybody’s Crying Mercy” before shifting to a medley that included Burt Bacharach’s “Mexican Divorce” (Costello shouted out Kansas City, Bacharach’s hometown), Costello’s own“Brilliant Mistake” and Depression-era traditional pop standard “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”
After “Clubland,” highlighted by Nieve’s Latin flourishes, and “Wonder Woman,” an Allen Toussaint collaboration given a tough, lean treatment in the absence of the album version’s horn charts, the band laid the crowd to waste with an overwhelming six-song run of classics that had the everyone surging to their feet, including singalong renditions of “Everyday I Write the Book” and “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” to close the main set.
A tender version of “Alison” opened the encores (Sexton handled the famous guitar intro), and during “Pump It Up,” Costello added a snippet of Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land” for St. Louis as well as a bit of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” A rousing “(What So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love and Understanding” saw Pete murdering the cymbals, a long guitar outro by Elvis and a false ending that felt like such a climax that folks were reaching for their coats.
However, in a last-second audible, Costello picked the guitar back up, surprising the band with a slow-burning version of “I Want You” that lasted a full 15 minutes, built around Costello’s acerbic guitar and snippets of Dionne Warwick’s “I Say a Little Prayer” (that bit about waking up and putting on makeup had ladies gasping in the balcony) and Ray Charles’ “I Believe to My Soul.”
The gal next to me was moved to tears during “Alison,” and while the tequila drinks the Factory was serving may have played a part, she told me in the car on the way home that it was “I Want You” that really got to her. Indeed, it was an emotional cap to a show that still felt like we were seeing Costello and Co. at the peak of their powers. Bono once recalled going to an Elvis Costello and the Attractions concert back in the ‘70s, after which everyone in the audience left and immediately started a band. At the Factory, that kind of surging inspiration was still in full effect a half-century down the road.
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