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The four-piece band that Elvis Costello anchors looks simply too small, like something you'd hire for a bargain wedding. The gear is basic, stripped down, so gangly keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Bruce Thomas look like their knees are about to tip over instruments looted from a toyshop. There's just one vocal mic, which Elvis, looking jowly and soon to be sweating heavily under his gray groom's coat, straddles protectively throughout the evening. Bathed in basic white spotlights, they look like very small potatoes.
From Costello's first appearance, singing "Just A Memory" sans band on a darkened stage, he avoided making any false moves by scarcely moving at all. He just stood there crooning his guts out. While the show was well larded with big beat rock 'n' roll tunes (e.g., "Radio, Radio," introduced with "Things haven't really changed much. have they?") this show was what we saw coming with material on last year's Get Happy — a song stylist's tour de force.
You wouldn't quite call it pretty singing, but it certainly was finely nuanced, melodic, even studious. Never, however, lacking in passion. During certain quieter numbers, like Trust's "New Lace Sleeves" or the obligatory "Alison," Costello keeps himself gathered like a cat padding softly into snatching-range of a bird. When the fevered moment comes — "Sometimes I wish I could stop you from talking..." — it's generally reinforced by a brutal rim shot and an almost involuntary seizing gesture with his left hand.
The Rumour's Martin Belmont came on to play guitar midway through the set, but the real standout was bassist Pete Thomas, whose fills were sometimes throaty and percussive, sometimes neatly executed chirps and skids, but always an intelligent augmentation of the mood the song set.
A week after his Palladium gig, at the Capitol Theater in New Jersey, Costello would spice the set with Irma Thomas' "I Need Your Love So Bad" and the Temptations' "Don't Look Back"; in New York, the most interesting nugget was Patsy Cline's "She's Got You" — hardly a better country tune than Costello's own likeably formulaic "Different Finger." The winding, hesitating melody line of "She's Got You" is so similar to that of "You Don't Know Me" that Costello's phrasing sounded for all the world like the man whose name he so notoriously took in vain, Ray Charles.
It seems that we now have an Elvis Costello who wants to perfect his art, not his attitude. He even grinned twice when Squeeze's Glen Tilbrook, fresh from a hot opening set and bouncing around like a spaniel, joined him for a rousing version of "From A Whisper To A Scream." In one final display of musical brotherhood, Costello vamped into Stevie Wonder's "Master Blaster" in the middle of "Watching the Detectives," ending a slam-bang hour of song in the same peak form he'd begun in. And Costello in peak form is quite satisfying indeed.
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