Elvis & The Imposters with Charlie Sexton at Budweiser Stage , Toronto, ON, Canada, July 4, 2024

[Man out of Time]

Elvis' Co-Headlining tour with Daryl Hall, will continue after a short break at the Budweiser Stage, Toronto, ON, Canada on Thursday July 4th. Elvis will be joined by The Imposters and Charlie Sexton again.

The Budweiser Stage was originally known as the Molson Amphitheatre. Elvis and the Imposters played this venue in 2002. This will be Elvis' 31st appearance in Toronto - stretching back to the famous shows at the El Mocambo club in 1978.

According to Wikipedia, the amphitheatre has a capacity of approximately 16,000. There are 5,500 reserved seats under the 60-foot-high covered roof, 3,500 seats under the open sky, and 7,000 seats on the grass bowl. The floor area (100 level) has an unreserved capacity of 1,000. There are also Club and VIP seats for season ticket-holders.

The venue website says this:

This summer, contemporary rock legend Daryll Hall and new wave icon Elvis Costello are joining forces to deliver music fans one incredible tour! Yes! The singer responsible for the smashing hit “Dreamtime” and prolific new wave pioneer Elvis Costello, along with his longtime band The Imposters, are setting out on a massive outing across North America! Covering 22 dates across major cities, this highly anticipated trek will come to Toronto, Ontario, for a one-night spectacle at the Budweiser Stage! See the esteemed Daryl Hall and Elvis Costello as they deliver their remarkable career-spanning hits as they conquer the stage on Thursday, 4th July 2024! This fantastic spectacle is guaranteed to bring the house down with countless hits as both music legends share their captivating vocals and superb musicianship! If you’re keen on experiencing this once-in-a-lifetime tandem between Daryl Hall and Elvis Costello, then you better click on the Get Tickets link now before they’re gone!

Someone likes an exclamation mark!

Tickets are now on sale here priced between $54 (General Admission) and $178 (level 100). There are also VIP packages, starting at $330. The venue website is showing more than a thousand seats still available, with choices at all prices.

Who's going?

MOOT

[johnfoyle]

Who's going?

[bronxapostle]

Who's going?

I'm just guessing....KEN ADIAN???

[Man out of Time]

Preview by Jane Stevenson published in the Toronto Sun on March 8, 2024.

"Daryl Hall, Elvis Costello team up for summer tour coming to Toronto

It is their only Canadian stop

Daryl Hall is hitting the road with Elvis Costello.

The veteran ‘70s hitmakers are teaming up for a double bill North American summer tour that lands at Toronto’s Budweiser Stage on July 4, the only announced Canadian stop.

“It’s fantastic to be able to rekindle a musical relationship,” Hall said in a statement. “Get ready for lots of great music.”

Added Costello: “We are looking forward to kicking off the show in style in the certainty that Daryl will deliver a slam-bang finish.”

Costello will by joined by The Imposters featuring Charlie Sexton.

Hall split from longtime collaborator John Oates in November 2023 after filing a temporary restraining order against him and later accusing Oates of “the ultimate partnership betrayal” for planning to sell his share of the duo’s publishing to Primary Wave Music.

Tickets to the general public for the Budweiser Stage show go on sale March 15 at livenation.com."

MOOT

[heyhermano]

Who's going?

Day of the show and still debating. Crummy acoustics, outdoor show in July, venue hard to get to. (Plus, I was just there last night for Orville Peck.) No-brainer if it was a full show, but there are a lot of cons for a double bill I only want to see half of. Tickets look to be relatively cheap, though...

[And No Coffee Table]

Do it!

[heyhermano]

Do it!

Bought a ticket. I'll post the setlist after the show.

[And No Coffee Table]

That's what I wanted to hear.

[heyhermano]

Pump
Detectives
No flag
Either side
Surrender to the rhythm
Pay it back
Wonder Woman
Everyday I write
face in the crowd (EC on piano)
Veronica (EC on piano)
Everybody’s cryin mercy
Clubland - snippets of Ghost town + Impatience
Alison
Chelsea
PLU

Start: 7:23
End: 8:45

[And No Coffee Table]

Thanks! "Pay It Back" was last played in 2014.

[johnfoyle]

https://aestheticmagazinetoronto.com/20 ... atxwfw3c_A


Photos by: Curtis Sindrey

[bronxapostle]

Thanks! "Pay It Back" was last played in 2014.

Pretty sure the only one I have never seen live from MAIT. Hope it sticks around till NYC

[sulky lad]

Fingers crossed for you, BA!

[sweetest punch]

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/entertainment ... r-BB1pt52Q

Daryl Hall and Elvis Costello co-headline in Toronto

Daryl Hall/Elvis Costello and the Imposters
RATING (**1/2 out of four)

Hall and Costello?

It doesn’t quite have the same ring as Hall and Oates — the commercially successful Philly pop-rock-soul duo who formed in 1970 until their ugly split last year — does it?

But there they were, two Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, Daryl Hall, 77, and Elvis Costello, 69 — not quite a generation apart — co-headlining a show at Toronto’s Budweiser Stage on Thursday night in front of a crowd who didn’t completely fill the 8,000 seats, with the lawns not sold at all.

All I could think was maybe the musical combination didn’t quite work for their respective audiences?

Whatever the case, it was a bit of a mismatch of styles despite their collective impressive credentials.

Hall, last seen in 2018 at Scotiabank Arena with Oates, is coming off a heavy last year, having filed a lawsuit and restraining order against Oates in 2023 claiming he committed “the ultimate partnership betrayal” by planning to sell his share of the hit-making duo’s publishing. (Oates responded that Hall’s statements were “inflammatory, outlandish and inaccurate.”)

Meanwhile, British New Wave and beyond act Costello and The Imposters — including longtime keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas, and more recent recruits Davey Faragher on bass and Charlie Sexton on lead guitar — arrived having played as recently as 2022 at Toronto’s Massey Hall with Nick Lowe opening.

Costello, decked out in a light purple fedora that matched his purple tinged sunglasses and a sharp blue suit, was first up and came out swinging with Pump It Up and Watching The Detectives, the latter from his celebrated 1977 debut, My Aim Is True.

After taking a shot at the amphitheatre’s consecutive corporate names — Molson and now Budweiser — he claimed that the audience was really there to see Hall but judging from the way he eventually won the possibly unconvinced over alongside clear fans with his sheer talent and charm, I’m not so sure.

Costello, alternating between guitar and piano, certainly kept it loose and improvisational, presenting some songs, like Veronica, which he wrote with Paul McCartney, completely unrecognizable in a new arrangement.

If that was jarring for some folks, I get it, but I also understand why he wants to keep music interesting for himself.

Then there were more nuggets like Pay It Back from My Aim Is True, A Face in the Crowd from a new 2024 Costello-penned musical of the same name coming to London in the fall alongside hits like Everyday I Write the Book, Alison, (I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea and the set-ending Lowe tune (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding — crowdpleasers one and all.

Hall, backed by a six-piece band, played guitar, piano and keyboards, with a huge D on the backdrop behind him, which he noted was the cover and name of his just-dropped new solo album (his sixth such one and latest since 2011) from which he played the new single Can’t Say No To You in the encore.

Still, he leaned heavily on such Hall and Oates classics as Maneater, Rich Girl, Kiss on My List, Private Eyes, Sara Smile, I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do) and the show ending You Make My Dreams and maybe needs a new partner on stage to balance the performance although serious kudos are due to sax player Charles DeChant and percussionst Carroll Porter Jr.

Hall also attempted Everytime You Go Away, made more famous by British singer Paul Young covering in the ‘85 than Hall and Oates ever did previously, but it didn’t really work vocally.

Elvis Costello Setlist

Pump It Up
Watching the Detectives
No Flag
Either Side of the Same Town
Surrender To the Rhythm
Pay It Back
Wonder Woman
Everyday I Write the Book
A Face in the Crowd
Veronica
Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy
Clubland
Alison
(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea
(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding

Daryl Hall Setlist

Maneater
Dreamtime
Foolish Pride
Rich Girl
Kiss on My List
Private Eyes
I’m in a Philly Mood
Everytime You Go Away
Sara Smile
I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)

ENCORE:

Can’t Say No to You
You Make My Dreams

[heyhermano]

Thanks! "Pay It Back" was last played in 2014.

He said beforehand that it'd been awhile since they played it. He wasn't kidding! It didn't even show up during the Gramercy run!

Consider this my lesson learned: no matter the venue or who he's sharing the bill with, it's always worth my time to see our guy. You never know what he has in store. (Also, I thought I was hearing things when he dropped in the lines from "Impatience.")

[Newspaper Pane]

Thanks! "Pay It Back" was last played in 2014.

Pretty sure the only one I have never seen live from MAIT. Hope it sticks around till NYC

Same here.

[sweetest punch]

https://carlwilson.substack.com/p/no-go ... Hc3RMK0iMA


'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

CARL WILSON
JUL 06, 2024

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.”


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.