How long can someone continue to be an “angry young man”? Elvis Costello is now 71 years old, and certainly still giving it a go. It’s been nearly 50 years since the man born Declan MacManus tore onto the scene with My Aim is True (1977), as impeccable a debut album as they come. Then, in his early twenties, Costello was a songwriter with a fully formed voice – wry, playful, caustic. Taking to the stage at the Royal Albert Hall on Monday, he exhumes a few of these tracks as part of a 26-song rollick through his glory days. It’s a marathon of a gig – but the lactic acid is a killer.
Costello starts with a murky rendition of “This Year’s Girl”, a slick, catchy number from his drum-tight second album This Year’s Model. He has a habit, like late-era Bob Dylan (or, increasingly, Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner), of singing a half second off the beat, letting lyrics slide out of their familiar crevices. This, presumably, is a choice. But he’s also pitchy, his voice, once scissor-sharp, showing the unavoidable frays of time. It’s a particularly neutering problem because Costello’s intricate, idiosyncratic lyrics were always one of his great strengths. Here, they’re often difficult to discern. When Costello sits down at the piano, at least – to croon his way through the hauntedly jazzy “Almost Blue” – he manages to finally ballast his voice.
The arrangements prove just as much an issue. Costello has an obvious comfort with his longstanding backing band, the Imposters – accompanied here by Charlie Sexton on guitar – but there’s a fatal lack of energy to most of these reworkings. “I Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down”, one of Costello’s best-known songs, is performed in such a way that I, and two other people I later speak to, fail to recognise it until halfway through (another very Dylanesque flourish). “Butchering” might be too strong a word, but Costello is at least putting on the apron and sharpening the knives. When he does up the tempo – with a run of more faithfully recreated hits towards the end of the night – the whole room responds in kind.
Watching a musician perform songs they wrote decades ago can be a thing of real poignancy – think Jackson Browne performing “These Days”, or Paul McCartney picking his way through “Blackbird”. With Costello the effect is mostly just discordant: songs like the mischievous, euphemistic “Mystery Dance” seem rooted in a sort of youthful irreverence that the singer has long outgrown. (The exception to this, among his early tracks, is the timeless, unageing ballad “Alison” – given a frustratingly perfunctory outing here.)
As Costello thunders towards the finish line with a flurry of crowdpleasers (“Less Than Zero”; “Oliver’s Army”; “Pump it Up”), he stops at one point to note that this is his 31st time performing at the Albert Hall. That sounds about right.
It’s unsettling to walk away from a gig comprising such brilliant songs and feel that something is missing. This was a night in which Costello’s songwriting genius was laid bare – but the performance couldn’t even get close to matching it.