Odds and Sods

Elvis Costello & Bill Frisell
Deep Dead Blue
1995, Warner Bros Records, recorded live @ the Royal Festival Hall, London

1. Weird Nightmare [Mingus]
2. Love Field [Costello]
3. Shamed Into Love [Costello]
4. Gigi [Lerner/Loewe]
5. Poor Napoleon [Costello]
6. Baby Plays Around [O'Riordan/Costello]
7. Deep Dead Blue [Costello/Frisell]

Nowadays it's fairly much common practice for a non-classical musician to curate epic annual Meltdown Festival on the south bank of the Thames but, when Elvis Costello was approached the festival's organiser's for the job, 'til then it'd been purely an event in which to celebrate classical music. Since then of course we've had people such as Morrissey, David Bowie, Nick Cave, Scott Walker and Jarvis Cocker, even Massive Attack and John Peel doing the job, but it was hardly the norm back then. For those of you reading this and wondering what the hell I'm on about, as curator of the Meltdown Festival, it's one's job to select a fairly large and diverse mix of music, art, performance and film to take place over the course of the week. Not only did this give Costello a chance to call on performers like Jeff Buckley the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Jazz Passenger, friends like Steve Nieve and Marc Ribot among so many others to play sets (much of the time with Costello himself), but it also gave him the chance to show off his growing passion for classical music with a few compositions of his own.

More relevantly though, Costello had himself quite the hands-on approach as curator, not only personally attending each and every performance but also singing a ridiculous songs over the course of the festival (I forget the exact figures), and seven of those were with prolific jazz guitarist Bill Frisell. Those seven songs are, it goes without saying, the same seven that make up this limited-release live album. To give you some sense of perspective as to how much else Costello did during the festival, another official release spawned from it (which I may get round to sometime) was a six-disc recording of his sets with his long-time collaborator and friend Steve Nieve.

Anyway, the night of June 25th Costello and Frisell, armed only with the latter's electric guitar, took to the stage and went their way about the above, fairly modest setlist, comprised of a bunch of oldies from Costello's repertoire, a couple of covers and a couple of new songs. The result is much better than I expected upon getting this album for myself, as there's a very unqiue sound to Frisell's guitar and, set alongside Costello's signature vocal, it sets up a fairly ghostly, cold and downbeat vibe. The opening rendition of Charles Mingus' Weird Nightmare illustrates this perfectly, what with all that talk of 'weird nightmare, why must you torment me' and all that. This one would've been good for the night-driving comp now that I think of it. Oh well. By the time Love Field comes around, we see what a partnership these guys were, as what was once a rather rubbish song from Costello's very own dated 80s fluff-fest (Goodbye Cruel World) goes through a real transformation for the better here, really doing so much to bring out the desperation and sorrow in the lyric than its studio treatment did all those years earlier. Shamed Into Love was a newly-penned song written for a fella called Ruben Blades (no, I don't have a clue either!), and is another slow, sorrowful number that fits the vibe suggested by the album's title like a glove. Like the cover of Gigi after it, it keeps that ghostly, eerie kind of vibe going, wherein once again Frisell's strange ability to make his guitar sound like a synthesizer in places does the song a whole world of good. In that sense, yet more very good work is made of Blood and Chocolate's Poor Napoleon, although this version of course lacks Steve Nieve's distinctive organ lines, and therefore isn't quite as good as its original version. Originally written with his missus for the fantastic Spike, Baby Plays Around is the one Costello original here that sounds a lot like its studio original, and once more Frisell's guitar and the way it plays off Costello's vocal performance works so well. Deep Dead Blue, another new song unveiled here and a co-write between the pair is more or less every strength of the album rolled into one brooding, haunting package and was, like Shamed Into Love, never released in any other format than this one.

It's a wonderful set and really is quite an extraordinary album, especially as I actually didn't expect to be that amazed by it when I first got my grimy paws on it. A lot of the things I mention in this part of the trhead are gonna be more in the interests of hardcore Costello fans, but this one truly isn't. As a body of work it really is a very dark, brooding effort, and Bill Frisell's work on the guitar is really quite something. Basically, so long as you can stand Costello's voice, I'd recommend this to anyone.