Elvis in "Songs in the Key of London" again, London, March 2022 ?

Pretty self-explanatory
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johnfoyle
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Elvis in "Songs in the Key of London" again, London, March 2022 ?

Post by johnfoyle »

From listserv-

John H-


Twitter posts say EC appeared at "Songs in the Key of London" at the
Barbican Tuesday night.

http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event- ... sp?ID=9950


Nunki -

And he apparently played "Hoover Factory" and "London's Brilliant Parade."

http://twitter.com/richardcree/status/10242209665

I believe the last time he played "Hoover Factory" was in 1986.


http://www.gettyimages.com/Search/Searc ... 20costello

including-


Image
Elvis Costello performs with Natty and Glen Tilbrook in finale of the Songs In The Key Of London event at Barbican Centre on March 9, 2010 in London, England. (Photo by Roberta Parkin/Redferns)
Neil.
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Re: Elvis, "Songs in the Key of London", London, March 9 '10

Post by Neil. »

Wow, how does he do it? He seems to be in two or three places at once, these days! Would love to have been at this concert.
Jonsmad
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Re: Elvis, "Songs in the Key of London", London, March 9 '10

Post by Jonsmad »

Hello. I was at the Barbican last night. I'm a big fan of Madness & Ian Dury related music so there for that in the most part.

It was an eclectic mix of artists and music styles with a direct or more tenuious London theme to the songs. Such a mix delighted, thrillied or bored people in equal amounts, depending on taste, some great highlights, cool show, but never a feeling of a gig getting going, because this was variety on display. And then as the evening was announced to end and did so with host Phil Daniles getting up and doing Parklife with Natty to a backing track it sort of felt like it wasnt quite a full evenings entertainment at that stage really despite enjoying Jools holland, Suggs, Blockheads and Squeeze members along side folk and modern artists.

But the whole house band and everyone left the stage, as if it was over. Until the lights didnt go up but down a little further, and then Elvis appeared dimly lit through a little dry ice, and the atmosphere went up a huge number of levels, a bit of murred excitement too. Pretty much unbilled anywhere (except the bbc website I think on the day of the gig.) He said that when Chris Difford asked him to do the gig, he kept saying he was out of the country. He also said that the time before last that he played on the same stage it was with Max Bygraves. Great music, and this being the first time I've seen him, I was impressed. The audience as a whole went away talking about it, not believing their luck in the most part I think.

He stayed for the final song as well, A unique version of the epic kinks' "Waterloo Sunset" which he sang most of with
Robyn Hitchcock (as well as Natty, Glen Tillbrook & late ariving Andy "ian dury movie" Serkis on parts), mainly those singers on the vocals, but also the whole shows cast on backing vocals too and instruments, Suggs, Chas, Jools, Green, Difford. Tilbrook. Chaz, Derek, et All. A Very Fine sunset on this gig!
johnfoyle
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Re: Elvis, "Songs in the Key of London", London, March 9 '10

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/musi ... eview.html


Songs in the Key of London at the Barbican

This musical celebration of the nation's capital offered ramshackle fun, but was not entirely successful.

Rating: * *


By Thomas H Green
10 Mar 2010

The Barbican has developed a likeable sideline in one-off themed evenings, concerts with varied artists performing songs by a particular individual or based round a central concept. Songs in the Key of London was one such, put together by Chris Difford of Squeeze to celebrate the nation's capital.

It was a nice idea charmingly executed by the contents of his address book, but unlike, say, the Barbican's evening in honour of Syd Barrett, it was not entirely successful.

Things got off to an uninspiring start when host Phil Daniels, perched stageside in an armchair, read his band introductions woodenly off a piece of paper with minimum verve (although he did later redeem himself with an energetic take on Blur's Park Life).

Fortunately the opening numbers, including a spartan A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square, were sung by Kathryn Williams with clarity and sweet folky melancholy. Chaz Jankel and Derek Hussey of the Blockheads paid tribute to Ian Dury but Hussey, Dury's old minder and the Blockheads' current vocalist, seemed to have microphone or mumbling issues, so words were often lost. In fact, thoughout the evening microphones went on and off at random moments.

Some numbers were delivered in alternative versions that did them no justice - notably young band Peggy Sue's version of the Clash's Guns of Brixton, which turned post-punk gold into a Jefferson Airplane B-side.

And the London being celebrated throughout was not so much a living city as one trapped in amber. Rich nostalgia bled from songs such as Robyn Hitchcock's Trams of London and a rousing take on the Small Faces' Itchycoo Park.

Even the snappy We Are London, sung by Chaz Smash and Suggs of Madness, fell into this category. The exception was a group of teenagers from a local school, representing real contemporary London and featuring the evening's only rapping.

There were other highlights - Jools Holland added much-needed showbiz sparkle, alongside a boogie-woogie take on London Bridge Is Falling Down, Difford and his Squeeze partner Glen Tilbrook performed their deathless bedsit classic Up The Junction, rising reggae singer Natty attacked his own Cold Town with gusto, and surprise guest Elvis Costello emanated easy-going charisma, dipping deep into his back catalogue for a pithy take on Hoover Factory.

After him all the performers gathered for a closing take on the Kinks' Waterloo Sunset that was ramshackle fun but, like the rest of the evening, not quite as engaging as it could have been.


http://www.leoabrahams.com/webdiary/201 ... e-vs-wine/

Leo Abrahams blogs -

(extract)

Last night I played in ‘Songs In The Key Of London’ at the Barbican: a night of London-inspired songs performed by lots of different artists. I got to do the guitar solo in ‘Our House’ by Madness, which is something I used to sing along to even before I played the guitar. Elvis Costello turned up during the interval so there was an impromptu rehearsal of ‘Waterloo Sunset’ in his dressing room, with Squeeze, Green Gartside, Robyn Hitchcock, Madness, The Blockheads and Andy Serkis (Gollum) all crammed in. Totally bizarre. When we played it onstage (for the first time), picking out that beautiful melody to a packed house was just a tingly experience.
johnfoyle
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Re: Elvis, "Songs in the Key of London", London, March 9 '10

Post by johnfoyle »

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 057118.ece

From The Times

March 11, 2010

Songs in the Key of London

at the Barbican, WC2

David Sinclair


It was a great idea for a show: a celebration of the songs and singers of London. And it was thoughtfully assembled by Chris Difford, who organised an efficient house band and pulled in several heavy hitters including his former bandmates from Squeeze, Jools Holland and Glenn Tilbrook. The actor Phil Daniels hosted the event, introducing the various performers in a voice that was Cockney charm personified. He also performed Blur’s hit Parklife with the North London singer and songwriter Natty, a rare moment in the programme when a sense of the rude vitality and bustling energy that is part and parcel of London’s musical heritage was successfully evoked.

However, for long stretches of a long evening the show suffered from an underpowered line-up and a rather stilted air of formality. Kathryn Williams, the singer-songwriter from Liverpool, set the scene with the Gershwin standard, A Foggy Day in London Town, a song she seemed ill-equipped to interpret. The memory of Ian Dury was evoked by Derek Hussey, Dury’s now permanently installed understudy in the Blockheads, who turned in Xeroxed performances of Billericay Dickie and What a Waste.

Pictures of London and Londoners drifted across a screen at the back as the two female singers of Peggy Sue, a group from Brighton, sang a strangely glazed version of the Clash’s Guns of Brixton. Tilbrook led a spirited romp through the Small Faces hit Itchycoo Park, followed by a reliable rendering of the Squeeze evergreen Up the Junction.

But it wasn’t until the nutty boys Suggs and Chas Smash arrived that the show picked up much-needed momentum. The pair performed the Madness songs We are London and Our House with confidence and swagger . Arriving like the cavalry for the encores, Elvis Costello raised the bar several notches as he performed Hoover Factory and London’s Brilliant Parade. A disorganised finale of Ray Davies’s Waterloo Sunset brought the curtain down on an evening that had promised more than it delivered.
bronxapostle
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Re: Elvis, "Songs in the Key of London", London, March 9 '10

Post by bronxapostle »

pretty good start to 2010, huh? he's played THREE countries already!
blureu
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Re: Elvis, "Songs in the Key of London", London, March 9 '10

Post by blureu »

Another article with mention of Hoover Factory.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicbl ... soundtrack

Streets of London: The city's shifting soundtrack
The capital's soul is harder to pin down than other cities because its musical climate can change between postcodes

Posted by Bob Stanley Tuesday 9 March 2010 15.39 GMT guardian.co.uk

If London had the grid system of Manhattan, or had been rebuilt entirely like the Paris of Haussmann, then maybe it would have a readily identifiable sound. After all, you can spot the sound of Manchester – whether it's the Hollies, Joy Division, the Stone Roses or MC Tunes – at 20 paces. London has always been more fluid, in its architecture and its population. Different eras, and different postcodes, define the sound of the city at any given time. The Barbican's forthcoming Songs In the Key of London event could have included such mismatched performers as Chas & Dave, Rod Stewart, and Dizzee Rascal on the bill and it would have all made perfect sense.

Instead, along with likely lads Suggs and Chris Difford, it features a bunch of singers who aren't even from London – Robyn Hitchcock is Cambridge to his toes, Kathryn Williams's Byker Grove accent is a bit of a giveaway. The reason they will be sharing a stage with compere Phil Daniels is that most of the great London songs have been written by outsiders and suburbanites.

David Bowie, tucked away on the fringes of Kent in Beckenham, wrote a few pre-fame songs in the 60s about moving to the big bad city: Can't Help Thinking About Me saw him on the station platform, I Dig Everything was a sarcastically joyous arrival ("I've got more friends than I've had hot dinners/Some of them are losers, but the rest of them are winners"), and, best of all, the London Boys saw the former Face on his knees, beaten down by the cold, pill-popping demands of the city; even in 1966 Bowie was ahead of the game, giving Swinging London a scornful kick. Ray Davies penned the similarly damning Big Black Smoke in the same year, though where Bowie had used a sobbing voice and Tony Hatch's foggy brass section to highlight the city's meanness, the Kinks sneered and stomped all over the smashed dreams of the arriviste country girl: "Every penny she had was spent on purple hearts and cigarettes."

With even more scorn, Sleeper's Gants Hill-born singer Louise Wener wrote a revenge song for the whole city, winningly entitled Cunt London. The fact Morrissey hates the whole city has never stopped him writing about it: Dagenham Dave may be a clunky Essex boy caricature but Come Back to Camden is entirely evocative of mouse-ridden bedsits. He sings of "drinking tea with the taste of the Thames", the only recorded complaint about the city's hard water.

The further the writer lives from London the more he is likely to romanticise it. Bob Merrill wrote such brainless singalongs as How Much Is That Doggie in the Window and Mambo Italiano, but on She Wears Red Feathers – a 1953 No 1 for Guy Mitchell – the singer works in a London bank where "from 9 to 3 they serve you tea" before meeting a native girl (in a "huly huly skirt") who sails back to London for a life of tea-drinking antics in Piccadilly. It's ludicrous but adorable. Another American, Nat D Ayer, wrote Dear Old Shepherds Bush when he first arrived in London – has anyone else in the world ever thought of that grizzled triangle of grass with such unabashed love?

If Ayer had spent more than a day or two in his dear old Bush he might have written quite a different song. Some parts of London are impervious to gentrification or hipness and remain defiantly unloveable. For the teenage Marc Bolan, a move from happening Hackney to tedious Tooting, where he he was no longer a mod face, was written up in the wry Over the Flats – part glam demo, part music-hall moan. Finnish band Hanoi Rocks moved to deeply unfashionable SW17 and commemorated their grim times there in Tooting Bec Wreck: "I'm the sort of case that people find hard to face/I'm the living wreck, I live in Tooting Bec/I'm the Cosmic Ted spaced out of my head." Not a great song, but still the greatest song ever written about Tooting.

You can travel a short distance and the musical climate will change completely. A few tube stops from from Tooting, Brixton has two solid London classics to its name in Eddy Grant's Electric Avenue and the Clash's paranoid but prescient Guns of Brixton, released 18 months before the 1981 riots. A mile or so east, Camberwell is only celebrated in a comical way – Basement Jaxx have paid winking respect to it three times over with I Live in Camberwell, Camberwell Skies and Camberskank while Gracie Fields's Heaven Will Protect an Honest Girl has her losing both dignity and clothing in SE5: "I pawned me shawl in Camberwell/Then me skirt and blouse I sold 'em, and went trampin' back to Oldham."

It's pretty obvious that a cool area like Brixton will inspire songs with a little more gravitas, yet that doesn't entirely explain why Brixton songs have an air of impending menace while songs about Portobello Road are almost uniformly skippy and tend to feature a whistling solo: The Spectrum (more famous for singing the Captain Scarlet theme), Cat Stevens and Caetano Veloso all eulogise London's most Trumptonesque street. I put it down to the architecture; brightly painted Georgian terraces are more likely to inspire a whistle than towering Victorian edifices. In the 60s, Portobello Road was an oasis of gaiety. Just a few yards west, Notting Hill was a grim area namedropped by Van Morrison on Friday's Child, He Ain't Give You None ("I got messed up 'round somewhere called Notting Hill Gate/I lived up there for a while and when I moved out I was in such a state") and the distressing TB Sheets, a British blues about a lonesome death in Ladbroke Grove's Rachman slums.

Architecture changes, though; Ladbroke Grove is now as chi-chi as Chelsea was in 1967. But not everywhere is upwardly mobile. It is fascinating to take a square mile of London and see how it has been recorded in song over the decades. The East End music halls filled and eulogised by Marie Lloyd with songs like The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery at the turn of the 20th century were largely wiped out by the Luftwaffe; Duncan Browne sang about post-war childhood games On the Bombsite, referencing the remnants of Garden Street in Stepney; on Play With Fire, the Rolling Stones mocked the slumming socialite who "gets her kicks in Stepney, not in Knightsbridge any more"; and in 1993 Pulp – then poverty-stricken students just down from Sheffield – lived in a tower block that was built on Duncan Browne's rubble, and wrote Mile End to commemorate their less than charming home: "It was on the fifteenth floor, it had a board across the door/It took an hour to pry it off and get inside, it smelt as if someone had died."

Some districts have a sound that seems to seep, unalterable, from the pavements. A few miles north west of Mile End is a leafy corner of London which drew in pastoral folkies from St Albans, Kingston, Tanworth-in-Arden and Glasgow – Muswell Hill is where you'll find a gorgeous arts and crafts pile called Fairport, and this is where a budding psychedelic band called Fairport Convention shacked up in 1967. Having settled in the Edwardian suburb, surrounded by woods and parks with jaw-dropping views over the city, their sound quickly mutated into folk rock. Living within cycling distance were the similarly wistful Sandy Denny (soon to become their singer), Nick Drake, and John and Beverly Martyn. Clearly the vistas of Highgate Wood and Alexandra Park affected the music of the locale as deeply as Ridley Road market and the semi-dereliction of Clapton and Dalston have dictated jungle/UK garage/grime narrative of the last 20 years.

Manchester denizen Anthony Wilson reckoned that London had no musical soul. The truth is that it is impossible to pin down, it shifts constantly, which is why the city continues to be a draw for talents who – whether they love the place or not – end up creating its soundtrack. Take a look on YouTube at a clip of Nico singing I'm Not Sayin'. Wandering around an unrecognisable Docklands in 1965, here's a German model singing a song written by Canadian folkie Gordon Lightfoot, produced by Hampstead public school boy Andrew Loog Oldham, yet it has the authentic feel – with its chutzpah, its minor chords, its refusenik lyric and foggy air – of something essentially, perfectly London.

Five songs about less celebrated parts of London:

New Vaudeville Band – Finchley Central
With its 20s bent and megaphone vocal, this makes for a sunnier ode to London Transport than Down in the Tube Station at Midnight: the singer is nonetheless stood up on the platform having travelled "10 long stations from Golders Green" for a fee of "two and sixpence".

Nick Nicely – Hilly Fields 1892
A veteran of just two singles, Nicely still managed to record the best psychedelic songs of the 80s with a mellotron-soaked evocation of a paranormal event at a south London beauty spot. The only building on Hilly Fields is now a music school.

Elvis Costello – Hoover Factory
"Five miles out of London on the Western Avenue/Must have been a wonder when it was brand new." For once, a Costello song is simple, pun-free and heartfelt. The now listed (and currently empty) deco marvel was in danger of demolition at the time that this was recorded; it's survival was "not a matter a life and death – but what is?"


Mott the Hoople – Waterlow
Following a divorce, Ian Hunter wrote this gorgeous cello-led song about walking around the titular Highgate park with his young son in a pushchair. Mott later gave the London borough of Croydon a much needed high five on Saturday Gigs.

Nadia Cattouse – Bermondsey
"The tide is turning now on barges in Bermondsey." The area has changed more than Belize-born Cattouse could have imagined when she sang this in 1969, just as the docks were starting to close. Cold but wise, it has a beautiful 2am feel: "On London Bridge young lovers shiver and gaze at the lamplight in the river."
johnfoyle
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Re: Elvis, "Songs in the Key of London", London, March 9 '10

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0d850e54-2d2f ... abdc0.html

Songs in the Key of London, Barbican Hall, London

By David Honigmann

March 11 2010

Admit it: there is something suspiciously second-rate about cities that feel the need to celebrate themselves in song. Nonetheless, the Squeeze songwriter Chris Difford assembled a first-rate cast of local singers, plus the odd ringer, for his not-too-triumphalist musical tour of the capital.

But what capital was this? Backdrop photographs scrolled from black-and-white pea-soupers to Mods to Piccadilly Circus, from market stalls to handfuls of uppers to Carnaby Street. The songs traversed similar territory, beginning with Kathryn Williams swinging gently through foggy days and nightingales in Berkeley Square. Robyn Hitchcock hymned the trams of London Town, accompanied by a musical saw that was half ghost, half metal wheel scraping on rail. The three-piece Peggy Sue showed how badly “Guns Of Brixton” fares when stripped of Paul Simonon’s truculent bassline.

Tutelary genius to the evening was the spirit of Ian Dury. His old minder Derek “The Draw” Hussey sang “Billericay Dickie”, with its bodywork of pure innuendo built on a chassis of oompah.

The second half had London’s best songs. Difford teamed up with his bandmate Glenn Tilbrook for a swaggering “Up The Junction”, and their former confrère Jools Holland vamped through a boogie-woogie “London Bridge Is Falling Down”. Suggs and Chas Smash sang Madness old (“Our House”) and new (“We Are London”). The compere, Phil Daniels, sprang up from his armchair at the side of the stage, to swap the lines of Blur’s “Parklife” with the young singer Natty as if they were bantering on a park bench. Elvis Costello made an unannounced appearance. And it all ended with a mass singalong on that perfect metropolitan miniature, “Waterloo Sunset”.

On its own terms, the high points were memorable enough. But there was little sense that this is a city where half the citizens, from the mayor on down, were born abroad. Natty, coincidentally, narrowly escaped both the 7/7 bombings and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, but that threatening, contested city was not the heritage London on display here, its brand of multiculturalism 30 years out of date. (3 star rating)
johnfoyle
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Re: Elvis, "Songs in the Key of London", London, March 9 '10

Post by johnfoyle »

Ayako posts to COSTELLO-L

Now on YouTube!

Hoover Factory
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1RCLkd64tA

London's Brilliant Parade
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDRxZRIblc8

Waterloo Sunset
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6VHrDLy2r0
sweetest punch
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Re: Elvis, "Songs in the Key of London", London, March 9 '10

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.
johnfoyle
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Re: Elvis, "Songs in the Key of London", London, March 9 '10

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.elviscostello.com/lies-inventions/page19

9th March 2010

Surprise encore appearance at "Song In The Key Of London" at the Barbican.

Chris Difford produced this evening of songs with London theme.

Performers include members of The Blockheads, Robyn Hitchcock, Chas Smash and Suggs from Madness, Jools Holland, Green Gartside and Glenn Tilbrook.

Songs performed are "Hoover Factory" and "London's Brilliant Parade", while the Mystery Jets' Blaine Harrison sings, "Man Out Of Time"

Hitchcock, Tilbrook and Costello lead an all-cast finale of Ray Davies' "Waterloo Sunset"
johnfoyle
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Re: Elvis, "Songs in the Key of London", London, March 9 '10

Post by johnfoyle »

Maybe Elvis will be a late addition again

https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/20 ... -of-london
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