With Hat and Guitar: Elvis Costello rocks solo in Berlin
Elvis Costello began as a punk rocker and played out by now almost every genre there is. In Berlin he now gave many solo songs from his more than 30-year career for the best.
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Berlin. It is the ultimate test for a musician when he introduces himself without a band his fans. Elvis Costello met the challenge brilliantly in his only concert in Germany. Armed with changing guitars, he entertained the more than 3000 listeners in Tempodrome in Berlin two and a half hours. Whether "Alison", " Watching the Detectives" or the Charles Aznavour classic "She", he ten years ago for the film " Notting Hill "einsang: Hardly missing a hit.
In his more than 30 years in the music business Costello, Declan Patrick McManus bourgeois has experimented with a variety of directions. As a punk rocker he began, now he played everything from rock and roll to piano ballads. There were albums with the opera singer Anne Sofie von Otter, the Evergreen composer Burt Bacharach, the songwriting legend T Bone Burnett. Most recently, Costello replied, matching the current turbulence in the atmosphere of the great economic crisis of the 20s and made it a year ago, the album National Ransom.
In Berlin Costello was more of the rocker, also alone. In a suit and a hat over his typical black horn-rimmed glasses, the 57-year-old took to the stage, with the first few bars of one of his first songs - "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes".
The whole evening was amazing how a man can forget with a guitar bass, drums or background vocals. Finally Costello's unmistakable voice is like an instrument itself: sometimes clear, sometimes raucous, sometimes deep, sometimes pressed together like a broken bassoon. Just the voice filled the solidified in concrete circus tent of the Tempodrom from full, this gave the guitar the rhythm.
And how the man can play! Costello felt at one point in his beginnings as a solo entertainer recalls in a bar - and this hard school is unmistakable. Often enough you could almost think that there engage in reality two people in the strings, groaned at the climax of the evening, the wistful ballad "I Want You 'boomed and the electric guitar in his hands heartbreaking.
For the ballad " Everyday I Write A Book" (Costello: "A song I really hate") sounded the strings as crystal clear pinpricks. For "No Wonder" or "Shipbuilding", he sat down at the e-piano, the early song "Radio Sweetheart", he recruited the audience to accompany. Finally, Costello sang even quite intimate without microphone edge of the stage and called the audience to come closer to the stage easy.
The only Germany concert of solo tour is also likely to remain for the time being the last - Costello promised to return with a companion volume next time.
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