'No god for the damn that I don't give'

Spending a misbegotten Fourth of July with Elvis Costello at Insert Beer Company Here Amphitheatre, Toronto

Like you, I resist being reduced to a category. But if I am any type of a guy, there’s little question I’m the Type of a Guy Who Listens to Elvis Costello. More precisely I was the type of a teenaged guy in the mid-1980s who listened to Elvis Costello (we can throw Tom Waits in there too). And while I later saw their flaws, and have had greater musical loves, the candle remains lit in the window of the derelict carriage house of my soul: The artist born Declan McManus was among those who first helped show me how much songs could really do and, with his knack for being complex but not exactly subtle, educated me in how to catch songs in the act.

Someone on Etsy makes these Elvis Costello beer-can candle lanterns. I can’t decide if I really want one or really really don’t.

Given his importance to me, and how widely he tours, it’s bizarre how little I’ve seen Costello live. In fact before this week I’d only been to one show. And it was an odd one. It was 20 years ago, when he was touring North, his album of torch songs written for and under the influence of his then-new-spouse, the Canadian jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall. It was still a great concert, just E.C. alongside his chief co-conspirator Steve Nieve on piano, and taking advantage of the supreme acoustics of Toronto’s Massey Hall by delivering extended passages unamplified and a capella, crooning dramatically from the lip of the stage.

Yet since then I’ve missed every show, including several more at Massey, and I really can’t account for why. So, given that each year brings the deaths of more cultural heroes, I determined this time not to miss the 69-year-old E.C. when I saw he was playing the outdoor stage at beleaguered Ontario Place this summer.

The downside began to dawn on me when I learned that not only was he touring with his onetime “Only Flame in Town” duet partner Daryl Hall this summer (yes, Hall sans Oates), but E.C. was opening for Hall. I shouldn’t have been so surprised, logically speaking. Hall & Oates were far bigger in North America at their peak, even though the Philly duo has not had anywhere near Costello’s record of creative productivity since. (Few have.) There’s a reason E.C. usually plays places like Massey Hall rather than arenas, even modestly sized ones like at Ontario Place: He never had a “Private Eyes.”

Naturally, Hall didn’t relegate him to a routine opening slot; he played for more than an hour and a quarter. But that’s a quickie for E.C., who’s prone to extended unpredictable encores following already long sets, drawing on his voluminous back catalogue. Tonight, as he cracked, “We’re just here to give you a few toe-tappers before delivering you to the main event.” (I paraphrase.) Really the show couldn’t have been less like that 2004 concert in so many ways.

Positively speaking, there was the presence of the full Imposters band, featuring Nieve along with from-the-jump drummer Pete Thomas plus relatively longtime bassist Davey Faragher, and handsome guest-star guitarist Charlie Sexton. But also: the acoustics were godawful and the sound mix was worse, boomy and muddy and often somehow out-of-synch with itself. Unlike in the intimate environs of Massey Hall, the band seemed far away even from my very decent seat in the second section. I ended up watching the big video screens a lot, which I hate doing. And while I was far from the only person there mainly for E.C., the appreciativeness of the crowd was no doubt dampened by the impatience of some on their Thursday night out to hear “Maneater.”

My view at the Molsenheimer Antechamber on July 4. During Costello’s moving rearrangement of “Veronica,” a woman who was insisting on standing up and dancing at the end of the aisle got into an extremely long distracting argument with this usher, obstructing everyone’s view further, as other staff had to be called in to help talk her down. The people who work at these venues are just doing their jobs, folks. Don’t be dicks to them.

Thankfully, E.C. is too much of a showman and too vain/proud ever to phone it in. It felt a bit perfunctory at first as the band ran through “Pump It Up” and its extended noir version of “Watching the Detectives”—was this just going to be a greatest-hits roundup? But then he got chatting to the audience and the atmosphere warmed. He dismissively referenced the July 4th holiday south of the border, then teased about the name of the venue having changed from Molson Amphitheatre (Canadian beer company) to Budweiser Stage (American beer company). “It’s a slippery slope, people. What’s next? Mickey’s Big Mouth Arena?” Then, as an implicit anti-Fourth-of-July anthem, he played “No Flag,” a kind of “Search and Destroy”-styled barrage of punk skepticism from his 2020 album Hey Clockface.

I've got no religion
I've got no philosophy
I've got a head full of ideas
and words that don't seem to belong to me
You may be joking but I don't get the gag
I sense no future but time seems to drag

No time for this kind of love
No flag waving high above
No sign for the dark place that I live
No God for the damn that I don't give

Now all bets were off. After all, if you’re Elvis Costello opening a summertime nostalgia show, are you more likely to say to yourself, “Let’s just give them the hits,” or, “Why don’t we play whatever we bloody well want, whether anybody out there knows it or not?” So we got the Brinsley Schwarz cover “Surrender to the Rhythm” from the 2022 album on which E.C. revived Rusty, his teen guitar duo from before he became E.C. We got “Wonder Woman,” a deep cut from his 2006 collaboration with New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint, The River in Reverse. We got “Face in the Crowd,” the yet-unreleased title song to Costello’s stage musical, which after years and years of development is finally slated to open at the Young Vic in London this fall. (It’s based on the same story as the 1957 Andy Griffith movie about a spookily Trumpian populist politician.)

And, as a second suitable selection for U.S. Independence Day 2024, he did his cover of blues raconteur Mose Allison’s “Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy,” which Costello first recorded for the Canadian benefit album Peace Songs in 2003 and later included on Kojak Variety. His version, played Thursday night on a gorgeous little parlour guitar with minimalist band backup, embellishes a twisty jazzy melody atop the original’s more drawled recitation. Allison wrote the song in the late 1960s, and unfortunately it never seems to hit an expiry date (unlike Mose himself, who left us in 2016 aged 89):

People running 'round in circles
Don't know what they're headed for
Everybody's cryin’ ‘Peace on Earth’—
Just as soon as we win this war

Other times, old favourites came in radically reinterpreted forms, which I’m sure would be familiar to more regular E.C. showgoers. There was a slow piano-ballad rearrangement of “Veronica” (his highest-charting single ever in America) that I wished I could hear in Massey Hall. Though with that higher fidelity, it might have messed me up even more; I understand a lot more about aging and dementia now than when I first saw that video on MuchMusic. There was also a deconstructed Latin-esque version of “Clubland” from 1981’s Trust, which segued into a cover of the Specials’ haunting protest classic from the same year, “Ghost Town.” E.C. of course was the producer of the Specials’ first album, and the band’s co-lead singer Terry Hall died a couple of years ago, so this was a low-key tribute. But it was a perfect meld, too, one song emerging from another so fluidly that it took me awhile to recognize the wheedling urgency of the “Ghost Town” hook. At some point I think Nieve also layered in the keyboard part to some easy-listening hit of the sixties or seventies, but it came and went so quickly I wasn’t sure—“Theme from ‘A Summer Place’,” maybe? (Let me know if you know.)

After that, we did get the hits, but by then they felt earned and gratifying for both band and audience, now all on our feet: “Alison” (with Sexton and Costello’s guitars in a tasty tangle), “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea,” and “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” to which I quietly sang along until it choked me up. E.C. was in strong voice throughout, though on the super-dense early-career songs like “Pump It Up” and “Chelsea,” it seemed maybe he’d slipped a bit in his facility at spewing syllables at speed-of-thought velocity. Elsewhere, he toyed with phrasing and timing in the restlessly improvisational manner he always does, not unlike Bob Dylan’s performing habits, though not nearly so extreme. I did see some people online afterwards complaining that E.C. had “lost it,” but I suspect this was misguided expectations (that live performances should sound like the recorded versions) meeting obfuscatingly shitty sound.

Now here’s where I confess a breach of poptimistic faith: I skipped out before Daryl Hall. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great “blue-eyed soul singer,” as the trope goes, and I’ve come to like a lot of H&O songs—“Rich Girl” is an all-timer, e.g. But have I mentioned the sound sucked? And it’s a pain to get home from Whatchamacallit Beer-rena by Toronto transit. And I had to prepare to do a CBC radio panel first thing in the morning. If I’d been lounging on the Ontario Place lawns for Hall with some friends for company, that’d be fine, but the prospect of spending another 90 minutes marooned in my solo seat while middle-aged couples around me swayed to “Your Kiss is On My List” loomed grotesque and lonely. But most of all, I’d just seen Elvis Costello for the first time in 20 years, and I wanted to preserve the moment more carefully, however atmospherically compromised the whole shebang had been.

There threatened to be a sadness in that, making me feel that my stupid neurodivergi-whosit brain screws up everything and that’s how I end up missing all the better chances and instead seeing one of my favourites in a cavernous not-very-glorified beer tent playing mere herald to another aging popster’s Second Coming. But as it is written in the gospels of Daryl Christ and John the Baptist Oates, I can’t go for that, no can do. There’s an inescapable off-kilterness to any encounter with an artist you’ve personally mythologized. Especially one so self-conscious as Costello, who can rip you right out of your seat with his commitment to a song yet always retains an arch distance, unreachable behind his showman’s carapace. Sometimes a grotty and ill-fitting setting can help flatten out that bumpy disconnect by comically exaggerating it. It’s like the second head conk that restores you after you get amnesia from the first one.

E.C. was right there in the Suds-o-Sphere with me, after all, with the abominable sound no doubt bugging him at least as much (how much better could the monitor mix have been?). He’s obviously made his portion of missteps over the years. And now we found ourselves thrown together with all the rest in the Godforsaken Glugfest Terrordrome, crooked and imperfect but walking on through troubled times, imploring where was the harmony, sweet harmony. It’s all bloody funny, isn’t it Elvis, to an embarrassing degree, and the peace and understanding is probably in the realization that it’s got to be pretty much like that for everybloodybody. So go see the people you love (not just the artists) wherever on Earth you can find them and whenever the no-doubt-inconvenient moment presents itself. If you need to flee at intermission, go ahead and do that too. Fly your no-flag with my blessing, even if it’s out of touch and out of time.