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When word arrived last year that Elvis Costello was cutting an album with his original band, the Attractions, it raised the intriguing possibility that the foursome — long since split by rancorous personality clashes could set the past aside enough to tour. Amazingly enough, they are touring, but the past is very much part of the scenery.
Road rumors about the enduring animosity between Costello and bassist-turned-poison-pen-novelist Bruce Thomas have been flying. And at the end of a smashing set Wednesday, a now-and-then program that featured two-thirds of this year's Brutal Youth (Warner Bros.) as well as half of 1978's This Year's Model and a dozen other vintage selections, Costello acknowledged this quartet may never tour again.
All of which added a bittersweet sense of occasion to a fine performance, one that stuck to the basics but did them up right. Unprotected by the fuller, statelier ensembles (forget the string quartet?) that have been accompanying him in recent years, Costello cranked up his old Fender guitar with paint-peeling distortion and concentrated on his singing. And for two hours, he, Thomas, keyboardist Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas on drums recaptured most of the sublimely skilled freak-show intensity that made their late-'70s tours among the most memorable rock performances of all time.
Once a bug-eyed coffee achiever edging to leap right off the stage, Costello has matured into a supremely controlled and creative vocalist, one who is virtually alone in the ability to sing and rock with equal skill and fervor. In the process, his songwriting has matured as well. The songs from Brutal Youth (recorded with the Attractions) slipped right in musically with 15-year-old numbers, but their lyrical concerns are more worldly and wise than his adolescent anomie. Meanwhile, Costello's relationship to the songs of his brutal youth has shifted from desperate personal aggression to ironically amused observer. But if he no longer inhabits the seething discomfort of "No Action," the cloaked paranoia of "Watching the Detectives," the fiery attack of the still-relevant "Radio, Radio" or the scorn of "Lipstick Vogue," their interiors are second nature to him, and he navigated them with effortless conviction. The care, emotion and intensity with which he delivered "Alison," a song that must have lost its flavor for him a decade ago, was especially impressive.
Other than Costello's occasional vocal embellishments and noisy guitar excursions, the classics "Pump It Up," "You Belong to Me," "Accidents Will Happen," "Party Girl," "Clubland," "Man Out of Time" and others — were done more or less by the record. Only "Everyday I Write the Book" digressed substantially from the recorded blueprint, with a fast, peppy take that Costello announced as the song's original arrangement. "Alison" slid into a brief Smokey Robinson medley, and "Puppet Girl," a song Costello wrote for Wendy James, was among the encores, but there were no other surprises.
The "Brutal Youth" material that made up a good portion of the show was rendered effectively and without incident, as if it had been in the setlist for years. "Kinder Murder" didn't fare well in a stripped-down arrangement, and the lack of backing vocals was damagingly noticeable to "Pony St." and "Clown Strike," but everything else worked: "Sulky Girl," "London's Brilliant Parade," the hauntingly romantic "Still Too Soon to Know" and a raved-up "13 Steps Lead Down." In the tender grip of this fragile alliance, the new sounded old, the old sounded timeless and it all sounded meaningful.
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