Philadelphia – “I want to give you an example of uncomplicated behaviour,” Elvis Costello said this week, on the second day of a three-night stand at the Tower Theater in suburban Upper Darby. With that, he bent over his electric guitar and slashed his fingers across the strings a few times, raising an awful racket.
The audience cheered and laughed, in on the joke: Costello was preparing to play a song called “Uncomplicated.” But as we all knew, an even richer joke was the unstated one: Elvis Costello never does anything uncomplicated.
Everything, from the way he organizes a concert tour to the knotty, profuse lyrics he stuffs into his songs, is rife with complication – it’s what makes this British songwriter and singer on one of the most interesting and challenging performers in rock.
A full decade into his recording career and appearing in America for the first time in two years, he had dubbed this tour “Costello Sings Again.” Performing in only six cities, he made Philadelphia his final stop. As he did everywhere, he gave a completely different performance each night:
On Monday, Costello spent half the show singing solo with an acoustic guitar, the other half performing with a band that included guitarist James Burton, who once upon a time held the same position with the Other Elvis.
On Tuesday, Costello offered the “Spectacular Spinning Songbook”: a carnival wheel at least 12 feet tall labelled with the names of close to 50 songs. Volunteers came up from the audience to give the wheel a spin, and wherever the wheel stopped, that was the tune Costello and his longtime backup band the Attractions performed.
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