His grandfather Pat MacManus was a musician on the SS Olympic, the Titanic’s sister ship, where he met Duke Ellington and got his autograph. His father Ross MacManus sang on the BBC radio and with the Joe Loss Orchestra and was the voice behind the famous R. Whites “Secret lemonade drinker” advert. Such a wide range of influences from an early age made a formal education unimportant and Costello’s talent for acquiring and integrating musical styles and setting them against complex, poetic lyrics meant that, early in his career, Costello was hurled forwards more for his emerging potential than for the commercial success of his work.
Over the past 47 years, Costello has released 25 studio albums, another nine collaborative albums and has performed for and in a number of movies including Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Notting Hill.
With his trademark pork pie hat, glasses and red shoes, Costello’s tour with former Attractions member Steve Nieve is hard to define, marrying a breadth of genres including folk, punk, rock and roll, ska, reggae, Merseybeat, music hall, vaudeville, latin, new wave, blues, Americana and more. Rolling Stone described Costello as a musician who had “reinvigorated the literate, lyrical traditions of Bob Dylan and Van Morrison with the raw energy and sass that were principal ethics of punk”. In short, you might say that he soaked up the variety of musical styles around him and squeezed them out through a filter of punk sensibility.
The evening at The Halls was opened by Ian Prowse, another Irish/Merseyside contemporary of Costello, performing in a similar vein which fused spirited, rousing folk songs with a punk-pop theme which Prowse referred to as ‘Mersey Hymns’, such was the recurring theme of life and love both in and for the Liverpool area.
The stage was as much a visual retrospective for Costello and Nieve as it was an auditory one. The lighting was a soft glow, emulating the dim depth of the music hall stage that his father or grandfather might have once stood on. Golden lights and antique microphones took the reverent audience from vaudeville to the radio theatres of the 1950s. Various props and visual tricks littered the stage as tangible reminders of the breadth of commercial releases over those 47 years. It was as if the stage designer had turned Costello’s head inside out and laid the contents for all to enjoy.
Many artists approach this style of retrospective performance as a one man show, stripping their compositions down to their very essence. Others reunite the old band or form a new one from trusted session musicians. Costello and Nieve’s show was something different, something in between. It was the songs that had meaning for them, stripped down to their essence and then put into a blender with something else, an ingredient to add a new dimension to the story. ‘New Amsterdam’ was blended with The Beatles’ ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’. Other songs were blended with ska in the form of ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials, or a sprinkling of bossa nova rhythm. Country blended into ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’, these snippets of musical flavour revealing Costello’s myriad influences and perhaps adding something that wasn’t in the original lyrics. The result was neither old nor new, neither familiar nor unfamiliar. Something in between, something that perhaps allowed Costello and Nieve to express the passage of time in a way which was neither a rerun nor a reboot.
Songs were punctuated by comments and stories which wove another dimension through the music. Costello said that this was his first return to Wolverhampton in 30 years since his final tour with The Attractions. A story of the genesis of the song ‘What Is It That I Need That I Don't Already Have?’ was a hint at Costello’s global status, the title being something that Bob Dylan said in conversation with John Cougar Mellenkamp while Costello was supporting them on tour.
Overall, an engrossing evening for any Elvis Costello fan looking for something old, something new, something borrowed and with a sprinkle of the blues.
Wolverhampton marked the end of the UK leg of the tour which now moves across to Ireland.
Peter Freeth
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Images: Peter Freeth
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