More than a decade after his first record, Elvis Costello remains one of pop's most unpredictable talents. Take his spring solo-acoustic U.S. college tour (with Nick Lowe). Its only area stop was Tuesday night at, of all places, the Tilles Center of LIU's C.W. Post campus, where a jovial Elvis sang his and others' songs and emceed an audience-participation segment with a werewolf (more on this to follow).
As he demonstrated on an '84 solo tour, Costello is one of the few rockers capable of making fierce music alone with a guitar. Songs from his heavily produced Spike album fared well in these bare-boned settings. "Veronica" and "Let Him Dangle" were crisp and sharp, and a high point was an impassioned version of the anti-Thatcher "Tramp the Dirt Down."
The show also had its share of old faves, from "Radio Sweetheart" and "Pump It Up" (in a Hendrix-like squalor of electric guitar and drum machine) to "Blue Chair" and "Brilliant Mistake." In between, Costello referred to everything from Jackie Collins to Solid Gold, joked with the yuppie crowd ("Remember punk-rock? It's the stuff they did before you were born"), encouraged sing-alongs and interrupted his own songs with "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" and Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said."
However, the fun really began after the last of two encores. Dressed in a red velvet jacket, Costello played satanic emcee while a stagehand dressed as a wolf selected women to come onstage and select a "deadly sin" from a giant heart and then request a song. With that, Costello sang an extra half-hour of tunes and turned Tilles into a rock 'n' roll carnival.
"See you later this year," he said before finally leaving the stage. For the sake of those who couldn't make it to LIU, let's hope he's right.
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