Halfway through Costello's Christmas show at the Odeon, it looked like they were going to have to send out for an ambulance. Four months of constant touring had left the band dead on their feet.
Pete Thomas' drumming was uncharacteristically lethargic, Steve Nieve stumbled through a repertoire of fairly mindless keyboard doodles, Bruce Thomas looked blank and Elvis had an apparently tough time remembering the lyrics to songs like "Secondary Modern."
A long evening had actually opened with Elvis showcasing a trio of new songs — "Turning The Town Red," "She Loves The Jerk," and another whose title I didn't catch.
Accompanied only by his own meandering guitar strumming and swamped by a highly-contrived succession of flats and sharps that were barren of any musical heart, the songs remained forgettable, lyrically smug.
"This song is about the breakdown of civilisation as we know it," Elvis deadpanned, introducing one of them. It was a tuneless contortion so starkly uninviting, its words fell on pained and flinching ears.
Nieve joined him for a self-important version of "Pills And Soap" before they were joined by the whole wrecking crew, whereupon a succession of songs including "Watching The Detectives" were heartlessly stripped of their original tensions by the hyperactive TKO Horns who refused to either tone down or back up and were mostly inappropriate.
Seemingly intent upon blowing everyone else off stage with their pseudo-Stax blasts, they noisily drowned the usually thrilling subtleties of Costello's songs.
Only "Shabby Doll" and "Beyond Belief," freed of the prattle of horns, were memorable. Here, Costello's slashing guitar took over, surprisingly lethal when it could be heard through the musical brickwork of Nieve's toytown keyboards.
Everything else, including the normally resilient "Clubland" and "King Horse" sound lifeless and drab.
But something happened during the encores. Suddenly, Elvis was smartly back on the beat. The safe money had been on a couple of rabble-rousing standards to enliven a generally listless evening.
No one could have expected a string of titles nearly as long as the original set (another 12 songs), all of them played with a gangbusting bravado the group hadn't been able to muster earlier on.
There were brazen re-workings of "(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea," "Red Shoes," "Everyday I Write The Book" and "Alison." "Clowntime Is Over" had Costello on his knees; and while "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down" was butchered by the TKO Horns, even they couldn't ruin the extended version of "Pump It Up" which took in a spirited shot at "Ain't That A Lot Of Love For One Heart To Have And Hold."
An obvious companion-piece to "Shipbuilding," another new song, "Peace In Our Time" had prefaced this final section. Another solo performance, it had an almost Dylanesque ring to it and drew a suitably reverent response from the audience.
A curious night, however, ended on a more irreverent note with guest personality Lenny Henry (camping it up outrageously during "Pump It Up") being chased off-stage at the end of the set by Costello dressed in a gorilla suit.
Maybe it was just the Christmas spirit; maybe clowntime has just started...
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