An Evening With Elvis Costello and Steve Nieve Friday, 1999-01-29, 8:50 pm Melbourne Concert Hall, Melbourne, Australia Elvis Costello & Steve Nieve - David Hyland (aussiedave) After following Elvis's career for the past six years or so, I was pretty excited to learn that finally he was going to perform once more for a Melbourne audience. I'd heard a lot about this guy's live performances from a variety of sources - this beloved list for one, as well as the C/N boxed set, and various videos, etc... But nothing was to prepare me for the concert last night. I was, if you'll excuse the cliche, totally blown away. For the record, Elvis looked, oh, about 5'10" or so, and was dressed very suavely in a black suit, with an open necked black shirt under his jacket - a fine figure of a man, and handsome too. But this is not what blew me away. Oh no. Elvis & Steve's set began with Accidents Will Happen. Elvis's voice last night was particularly raw and fruity. He humbly apologised for his voice and explained that the rawness of his voice this night was due to spending recent time in Sydney, choking on the pollution. I don't think anybody really minded at all. To my ears, there was nothing at all wrong with his voice. Despite his vocal discomfort, Elvis was in fine spirits. He introduced Steve Nieve to the audience as "Professor Steve Nieve"- the cameraderie between those two was a sight to see. Steve was great- I haven't really said much about him, but his piano and keyboard-playing blew most of the audience's expectations to smithereens. Even their old songs that you can only imagine with the full band, (eg. Talking In The Dark, (I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea, Pump It Up) were delightfully and faithfully reinterpreted for the stripped-down arrangements. Elvis proved to be just as good a clown as he is a singer-songwriter. I won't detail all the times he joked around with the audience- it's probably mostly a case of, "you had to be there..", but there's one lyric change that must be reported... Elvis was singing "I Want You", and after singing "Every night when I go off to bed, and when I wake up," he paused for a second, grinned devilishly and sang "and put on my make-up, I say a little prayer for you." I wanted to laugh out loud, but man, that song's just too good to spoil by laughing in the middle of it, so I had a good laugh later anyway. Elvis and Steve performed four songs from Painted From Memory during the concert. I think he'd have done more if he had some more confidence in his voice, but what he did was very impressive. The last of several encores was "Couldn't Call It Unexpected #4". He decided to sing this one without the mike - a brave move for a man cursing his own voice. It was excellent. I called it unexpected, because, well, I didn't expect him to sing this song. At the end of this song he wandered around the stage like a lost conductor, conducting the audience as we sang the circus music bits. Elvis and Steve had a great time, and so did the audience.