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Elvis Costello returns to Phoenix at the helm of the Imposters for a concert at Arizona Federal Theatre on Wednesday, Nov. 10.
Tickets are on sale at ticketmaster.com.
This is Costello's first appearance in the Valley since an unplugged "Storyteller" show at Mesa Arts Center in 2016 that found the legend alone on assorted guitars and piano singing songs and telling stories that were frequently hilarious but also deeply moving on occasion.
He hasn't done a full-band concert in the Valley since 2008, when he and the Imposters opened the Police reunion tour at what was then called Cricket Wireless Pavilion.
His last headlining show with a full band in the Valley was in 2002, when he played what was then the Dodge Theatre in support of an album called When I Was Cruel, his first release with the Imposters.
Two members — keyboard wizard Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas — have backed Costello on and off (but mostly on) since 1977, having been in the Attractions, who made their studio debut on the 1978 single, "(I Don't Want to Go To) Chelsea," which appeared on U.K. pressings of that year's iconic This Year's Model album.
They're joined in the Imposters by a former Cracker member, Davey Faragher, on bass, tensions between the singer-songwriter and the Attractions' bassist, Bruce Thomas, having come to a quite-acrimonious end from which there doesn't seem to be much hope of reconciliation.
Costello exploded on impact at the height of the punk revolution, a newer-than-average Dylan insisting "I'm not angry anymore" in an intensely angry song that found him listening to his former lover making love to someone new.
That song was one of many highlights crammed into the grooves of a breathless debut that even today remains one of the greatest first acts in the history of rock 'n' roll, My Aim Is True.
And that's before he'd even rounded up the greatest backing band he could've hoped to meet, the Attractions. They followed through with an avalanche of brilliant albums in a 10-year whirlwind, including such classics as Armed Forces, Get Happy!!, Trust, Imperial Bedroom and the criminally underrated Blood & Chocolate.
A singular artist with a restless spirit and encyclopedic love of music, he's continued to evolve in the course of projects that have found him working with a string quartet, an opera singer, jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, Burt Bacharach, the Mingus Big Band, Carole King and Paul McCartney, with whom he's written several classic songs that effortlessly lived up to the former Beatle's daunting legacy.
His latest release is a Spanish-language reimagining of This Year's Model, with Latin artists from Juanes to Jesse & Joy breathing new life into the exhilarating backing tracks the Attractions recorded in their brutal youth.
The Hello Again Tour will feature selections from the pages of his formidable songbook. According to a press release, they'll also treat the audience to "songs from the future, as the band time-travel in all directions."
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