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Elvis Costello was so good last night that when I came out of the National Concert Hall I had forgotten where I parked the car.
My head was in a spin after the two-hour show (with no interval) that included many key songs from his career.
At 9.50pm he looked like he had played his last songs: the tender "She" by Charles Aznavour followed by "My Thief," which he co-wrote with the late Burt Bacharach.
The crowd, by this point in the night, were on their feet giving the great man an ovation. They wouldn't let him leave.
"Who would have thought the crowd would be so rowdy at the National Concert Hall," he said with a laugh. He then played the heartbreaking "Shipbuilding."
Steve Nieve — who has been a member of Costello's backing bands The Attractions and The Imposters for four decades — was to his left on the piano and keyboard the entire night.
When Costello finished that song, they still weren't letting him leave. So, he performed a rousing version on acoustic guitar of "What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love And Understanding."
Nieve, at the piano and keyboard, took over on vocals. As they sang it, I recalled Bill Murray singing it at the karaoke party scene in the 2003 movie Lost in Translation (while Scarlett Johansson sang "Brass in Pocket" by The Pretenders).
He then performed "We Are All Cowards Now" from the Hey Clockface album. The crowd refused to let him go. So, he picked up an electric guitar and played a rockin' version of "Alison."
At 10pm, Elvis left the building. It was an incredible, and sold-out, show.
The man with Irish roots, who was born Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus, opened with "Jack Of All Parades" from his King Of America album.
The 69-year-old likes to make physical comedy out of making funny facial expressions and pointing randomly at the crowd.
When he asked them to applaud Steve Nieve for his brilliance, he quickly reminded them "not to cheer too much or he'll ask for a raise." He is up for the craic.
His face doesn't scowl like it did on the front sleeve photo of his 1977 debut My Aim Is True. His face tends to smile now from beneath his jazz hat.
Elvis Costello is a happily married family man (to Canadian jazz singer Diana Krall), an internationally respected renaissance man of the music industry whose work is constantly evolving and diverse.
He is no longer the young man who told the New Musical Express in 1978: "The only two things that matter to me, the only motivation points for me writing all these songs are revenge and guilt. Those are the only emotions I know about, that I know I can feel. Love? I don't know what it means, really, and it doesn't exist in my songs."
All of that twisted darkness is still in there in his work, of course.
He mightn't have the punch and pace of when he started off as an angry young man behind glasses and a skinny tie and drain-pipe trousers. (He dresses now like a rich busker, as some wag once quipped.)
Yet in some ways, Costello delivers his ire and anger at a hypocritical world with more venom than he ever did. This is apparent in the anti-war "Shipbuilding." It's hard not to be moved when he sings: "Somebody said that someone got filled in / For saying that people get killed / In the results of their shipbuilding".
He had the foundation of the National Concert Hall shaking.
In some ways, Elvis Costello is angrier than he was when he was part of the angry class of 1977.
Time magazine once called him the coolest nerd in rock 'n' roll. Albeit a hipster nerd who has sold millions of albums and whose song ("High Fidelity") Nick Hornby named a book after, while Bret Easton Ellis did the same with another Costello song, "Less Than Zero."
In 2023, as demonstrated last night, Costello is one of the world's greatest songwriters, up there with McCartney. You forget how many timeless songs he actually has until he plays them. It is immediately obvious of the enduring power of them too.
He spoke about his friendship with the composer Burt Bacharach, explaining how they worked together right up until he died in February of this year, aged 94.
His love for the man was evident in that he played three songs last night that he co-wrote with him: the aforementioned "My Thief," "Toledo" and "I Still Have That Other Girl."
He read, for the first time, a new poem he has written called "John Went Walking."
It included a line that went: "Michael Collins, Michael Jackson, Jackson Pollocks and all that bollocks."
He introduced Tart by saying he wrote it in Seville in Spain and that he was traumatised that his father spoke Spanish perfectly.
He recalled how his father once replied "in bed" to someone who asked where he learned Spanish.
Costello added, with a wry laugh: "And my mother never spoke a word of Spanish in her life."
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