Monday, 26 October 2009
I don't know if the same thing applies elsewhere in the wide increasingly brown land, but when I see advertisements stating some solo performer is appearing somewhere in our neck of the woods you tend to take the presence of the drum machine/click track monster as inevitable.
Among locally based performers at least.
On the other hand, for a bit over two hours at the Brisbane Convention Centre on a Sunday evening in mid-October there was Elvis Costello, an impressive array of some of his favourite guitars and nary a drum machine in evidence.
A couple of effects pedals, yes, but no obvious external rhythmic enhancements.
While Costello could more than likely summon an auditory silk purse out of a sow's ear using such devices, their absence left him free to deliver a set that wandered through most phases of a thirty-plus year career ranging from Radio Sweetheart ("the first song I ever recorded") to a couple of as-yet unrecorded numbers.
There's no way of knowing how much of the set-list was actually planned in advance after the opening salvo of Red Shoes, Either Side Of The Same Town and Veronica, but at times an apparent hesitation as to which guitar to turn to next suggested a certain amount of flexibility.
At the same time, while there were a number of Elvis' Greatest Hits included (Veronica, Every Day I Write the Book, Watching The Detectives, Good Year For The Roses and Oliver’s Army) there were enough obscurities to suggest the idea of catching more than one show on tour wasn't necessarily an act of stretching the concept of fandom to the point of obsessiveness.