Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, March 31, April 1 & 2, 2024

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sweetest punch
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Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, March 31, April 1 & 2, 2024

Post by sweetest punch »

Last edited by sweetest punch on Sun Apr 23, 2023 8:08 am, edited 4 times in total.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
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Re: Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, Sydney, Australia, April 9 & 10, 2023

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.elviscostello.com/bluesfest ... 2023-tour/

BLUESFEST TOURING ANNOUNCES ELVIS COSTELLO & THE IMPOSTERS 2023 TOUR
14 September 2022

Elvis Costello & The Imposters will return to Australia in 2023, headlining shows in Sydney and Melbourne, following their appearance at the 34th Annual Bluesfest in Byron Bay over the Easter Long Weekend.

“It’s been twelve years since our first appearance at the Byron Bay Bluesfest – when we shared an evening bill with Bob Dylan, and I got to sit in with Mavis Staples. I see a number of friends and favourites are on this year’s bill, so who knows what thrills, spills and encounters may take place.

There is nothing that jolts a show alive so much as stack of strong new songs but we recorded ‘The Boy Named If’ while locked away in our lairs and hideaways, so bringing those songs to the stage has made the hits and highlights of the songbook ring out anew.

The Imposters will make their Sydney Opera House bow 39 years after I made my solo debut at that legendary venue.

The very name of the venue probably should have got my attention when I first arrived in Melbourne in 1978, pursued by a press posse after a slight dust-up in Sydney.

After all, the ‘Hammersmith Palais’ was my dad’s place of work for most of my childhood. It seems I am destined and disposed to return to venues called the “Palais”, like a homing pigeon or some other more tuneful bird. The proximity to the seaside and a fun-fair only adds the thrill.

The Imposters and I are not bringing any vaudevillian contraptions with us on this occasion, but we will be joined by our guest guitarist, Charlie Sexton and a stack strong recently recorded songs that have caused the hits and headlines of the repertoire to either ring out anew or fight for their place in the show. “We are ready as anybody can be and look forward to seeing you there.” – Elvis Costello
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
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Re: Postponed to 2024 - Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, April 9 & 10 & 11, 2023

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.elviscostello.com/australia ... d-to-2024/

Sydney Opera House: Sunday, 31 March 2024 (Easter Sunday)
Sydney Opera House: Monday, 1 April 2024 (Easter Monday)
Sydney Opera House: Tuesday, 2 April 2024
The Palais, Melbourne: Thursday, 4 April

Your current tickets will be valid for these performances. Ticket providers will be in contact.

A note from Elvis Costello:

“We are so disappointed not to be returning to the stages at Byron Bay, where we had plans to surprise you with a few friends joining the show. It is maddening these unfortunate but unavoidable circumstances mean that our three sold-out nights at Sydney Opera House and a return to the Palais in St. Kilda, which was also sold out, must also be rescheduled. We are sorry for any inconvenience and hope that the wait will seem worthwhile when we return. Yours through music.” Elvis Costello & The Imposters (and their pal, Charlie Sexton).

Refunds will be available should you not wish to attend the rescheduled performances. Bluesfest only refunds one-day tickets for up to 30 days after the event.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
Offshoreram
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Re: Postponed to 2024 - Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, April 9 & 10 & 11, 2023

Post by Offshoreram »

I’m in Perth, WA at the moment and fly to Sydney on Saturday with tickets for the Sunday and Monday shows at the Opera House.
I had already planned to be in Australia but swapped flights and accommodation when the tour dates were announced. I suppose that is the risk with going abroad to see any event is the costs if the show is cancelled. I must have lost £500 just on the Vegas show being cancelled last year.

Still I’ve managed to get a ticket to Larkin Poe in Sydney on Sunday.

The big question now is do I start to plan another trip to Australia next year?
My head is spinning and my legs are weak
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Re: Postponed to 2024 - Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, April 9 & 10 & 11, 2023

Post by Fishfinger king »

Very bad luck. Having met you in New York I’m sure the answer is yes - you should plan another trip next year. Giving in to one’s whims and crackpot plans is always the best thing to do, isn’t it!!!?? I’d be up for it if tickets become available!!
Already booked Dublin & Oslo.
Can't you see I'm trying to change this water to wine
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Re: Postponed to 2024 - Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, April 9 & 10 & 11, 2023

Post by Offshoreram »

I’m sitting in an Air BnB apartment across from Sydney Opera House. It’s a wonderful location and the weather is perfect.
Ah well, I’m off to the Metro Theatre in Sydney in about 4 hours to see Larkin Poe. Luckily it’s only a 20 minute walk to the Metro as opposed to the 11 minute walk to the Opera House.
My head is spinning and my legs are weak
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Re: Postponed to 2024 - Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, April 9 & 10 & 11, 2023

Post by bronxapostle »

Offshoreram wrote:I’m sitting in an Air BnB apartment across from Sydney Opera House. It’s a wonderful location and the weather is perfect.
Ah well, I’m off to the Metro Theatre in Sydney in about 4 hours to see Larkin Poe. Luckily it’s only a 20 minute walk to the Metro as opposed to the 11 minute walk to the Opera House.

So sorry my friend
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Re: Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, March 31, April 1 & 2, 2024

Post by Man out of Time »

Elvis has recorded an interview with ABC National Radio talking about his return to play in Sydney:

abc.net.au

He talks to Sarah MacDonald - presenter on Sydney Mornings.

MOOT
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Re: Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, March 31, April 1 & 2, 2024

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Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
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Re: Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, March 31, April 1 & 2, 2024

Post by Man out of Time »

Man out of Time wrote: Tue Nov 28, 2023 5:46 am Elvis has recorded an interview with ABC National Radio talking about his return to play in Sydney:

abc.net.au

He talks to Sarah MacDonald - presenter on Sydney Mornings.
Also available as a video clip on YouTube:



MOOT
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Re: Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, March 31, April 1 & 2, 2024

Post by johnfoyle »

https://amp.smh.com.au/culture/music/el ... 5es4h.html
(Behind paywall)

The trouble with Elvis Costello, at least according to Bob Dylan, is that he’s “relentless”.

“He exhausted people,” Dylan writes in his recent book The Philosophy of Modern Song. “Too much in his songs for anybody to actually land on. Too many thoughts, way too wordy. Too many ideas that just bang up against themselves.”
Costello chuckles at the criticism.

“Too many words?” he splutters. “Coming from Bob Dylan that’s a pretty good compliment: the man who just wrote a 16-minute song. You know, often there’s an element of humour in the delivery that I think people miss. You have to kind of read it in his voice.”

It is tempting to unpack the juxtaposition of pot and kettle here but there isn’t time. Costello’s relentlessness spills beyond the lyric sheet to the Zoom call, just as it continues to gush in all directions from recording studio to concert hall.

“This has probably, since 2017, been the most productive time in terms of recording since ’77 to ‘82,” he enthuses of his recent output. It includes one solo album, two with his band the Imposters, an EP revisiting collaborations with Paul McCartney and Burt Bacharach, and another with his abandoned ’70s duo Rusty, as well as French, Spanish, Slovenian and sundry other collaborations.

It doesn’t mean that these records are better or more important,” he adds, referring to his defining albums of the post-punk era. “Records, at some point, went from being ephemera to being these big supposedly significant cultural events, and some of them are. But I don’t think you can proceed now with a self-consciousness that that’s what you’re striving for. After all, it’s for other people to decide what they mean to them.

“There are times when you’re in tune with a change in style or scene that you can either work with or against,” he says, alluding to the “new wave” wagon he hitched in the late ’70s, and the confusion that greeted countless later diversions into country, jazz, ballet and more. “I always thought I was in pop music,” he says. “I still think that.”

It’s always been the most malleable pigeonhole, after all. These days it pretty much excludes rock, a genre that never interested the young Declan MacManus anyway.
“I don’t own a record by Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd… I didn’t know anything about Elvis Presley when they [his circa ’77 managers] called me Elvis to start with, because there was nobody in my house who listened to that music. My parents listened to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie — and that’s way hipper.”

The rabbit holes Costello charges down in conversation are dizzying. He jumps from late ’60s Fleetwood Mac (“Man Of the World was the song that made me pick up a guitar”) to classic Stevie Nicks (“it’s just not my thing”) to Tom Petty, Michael Jackson, Chic, Robert Wyatt and some long-forgotten Dutch girl group in a musical stream of consciousness some might call relentless.
His recent albums, from the pandemic-forged Hey Clockface to a Spanish language remix of his Attractions breakthrough This Year’s Model, have each arrived by similar logic: random incidents and meetings given equal weight by an imagination more attuned to “why not?” than anything more culturally significant.

Fashionably late by 50 years, The Resurrection of Rust EP is another example. Allan Mayes, his partner in aborted pre-Attractions country duo Rusty, “wanted to make a cassette,” Costello says. “I said, ‘I don’t think that’s gonna reach many people… Let’s just make the record we would have made if they’d let us’.

“To make a record of our repertoire then was good fun. And it was in the good spirit of something to mark 50 years that we had known one another. And the next thing we’re on The Tonight Show with Madonna. That was great.”
The only problem with this gleefully freewheeling approach to genre and repertoire comes at showtime. Over the decades, Costello has often resorted to an ingeniously theatrical live selection system he calls the Spectacular Spinning Songbook. But even 40 titles on a giant raffle wheel is far too limiting these days.

“At the beginning of this year, I did a 10-night stand at the Gramercy Theatre [New York] which I billed as 100 songs in 10 nights,” he says, “knowing that I had 10 other songs in my mind that would complete each night. I usually play upwards of 20…

“I printed the song lists like a classical program, so people knew which show to come to and they could probably guess the disposition of the show from those titles. But what they didn’t know was I had also planned to bring other musicians that weren’t billed…”

So begins another relentless explosion of rabbit holes: uilleann pipes, accordion, musical saw, violin, double bass and mandolins; live sampling and vaudeville; Bob Dylan’s bassist, Rebecca Lovell from Larkin Poe, Eleanor Whitmore from the Mastersons; a medieval literature lecturer from upstate New York, an eight-piece vocal chorus from “this Broadway musical I’ve been working on” and … well, much more.

“Too many thoughts,” some might say. “Too many ideas that just bang up against themselves.” But “it’s not indulgence because the audience went with it,” Costello counters. “It goes to show that the more daring you maintain in what you’re doing, the more satisfying it’s going to be.”
But don’t panic, Attractions fans. A survey of this year’s setlists indicates that on most nights crowdpleasers such as Pump It Up and other smash hits from the old world remain well within the Imposters’ elastic horizons.

“[But] I do think I owe it to the audience to earn the right to get to that song by it being emotionally vivid to me, so I don’t give them some kind of poor facsimile,” Costello says. “I want it to matter. I want it all to matter.”

Elvis Costello plays Bluesfest, Byron Bay, March 28 - 29; Sydney Opera House March 31 - April 2; Palais Theatre, Melbourne, April 4.
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Re: Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, March 31, April 1 & 2, 2024

Post by sulky lad »

Really good interview without resorting to the old hackneyed clichés - just shows antipodeans don't need to resort to nostalgia based lazy journalism!
sweetest punch
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Re: Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, March 31, April 1 & 2, 2024

Post by sweetest punch »

Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
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Re: Elvis & The Imposters, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, March 31, April 1 & 2, 2024

Post by thepopeofpop »

I'll be at the April 1 show. I didn't buy tickets for the other shows because at the time (2023) I was going to be seeing EC in Iceland in May - which did happen. I could go to Bluesfest but I'm getting a bit old for that festival stuff.
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