Elbow – Southend Cliffs Pavilion – Sunday 1st March 2009
Set List:
Starlings
The Bones Of You
Mirrorball
Leaders Of The Free World
The Stops
Any Day Now
Mexican Standoff
Grounds For Divorce
The Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver
Newborn
Switching Off
Weather To Fly
One Day Like This
--------------------
Station Approach
Some Riot
Scattered Black And Whites.
After we had been ably entertained by Elbow’s special guests, Canadians The Acorn, the lights dimmed as four female backing musicians took to the stage as the first notes of Starlings rang out. The crowd’s audible anticipation grew even louder as Guy, Pete, Craig, Mark and Richard arrived on set seconds later. It’s an easily anticipated opener, Guy replete with trumpet emphasising the two opening loud bursts before the first lyric kicks in. Unfortunately, these bursts were accompanied by blindingly bright flashes of light that were frankly unnecessary. I don’t want to grouse too early, but the lighting throughout was abysmal; the stage constantly backlit by a succession of extremely bright lighting that made it impossible to watch the stage in any comfort.
Guy Garvey is the most consummate of front men. His trademark gentleness, charm, humour and humility together with his readiness to encourage crowd banter between songs made sure that very quickly his audience was hanging on his every word. On a few occasions, he tried to introduce songs by explaining their own particular genesis. Mirrorball, for instance, the third song in performed from Seldom Seen Kid was touchingly described as being written the day after he met the woman he loves. When Guy introduced the next song as Leaders Of The Free World, a forlorn cry of “Grounds For Divorce!” rang out from someone in the crowd obviously wanting Seldom Seen Kid to be played in its entirety. Guy responded with an assuaging “All in good time!” like a loving parent trying to teach his child the virtues of patience.
By the time they played The Stops, the lighting was so severe that the easiest way to watch Guy’s distinctive arm-waving as he sings was to look at his silhouettes on the side walls of the theatre. Guy playfully informed the audience that one of their roadies reminded him that he had a propensity to mess up “the next song”, Mexican Standoff. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, it took a couple of false starts in the first couple of bars before the song took off. As ever, Grounds For Divorce went down a storm, pre-cursored by Garvey’s assertion that the band’s possible award of having the Freedom of their home town of Bury bestowed upon them had been scuppered by Guy making a jokey off-the-cuff and slightly disparaging remark about the town that had meandered its way into local media circles. By now, Elbow were in full flow, Garvey triumphant in that he held his audience firmly in the palm of his hand, the other four members seemingly content to stay in the background, though Richard Jupp’s majestic and somewhat hypnotic percussion on the epic The Loneliness of A Tower Crane Driver came briefly to the fore.
Garvey perched on a stool with an acoustic guitar for a lovely rendition of Newborn, though he was beaten to the punch lyrically by someone in the audience yelling “I’ll be the corpse in your bathtub”, greeted with a grin by Guy before continuing the song. He introduced the next number, Switching Off, as being inspired by a slightly alcoholically-infused discussion in a bar once with bassist Pete Turner about the notion of “if you knew you were going to die, what would be important enough in your life to be the final thought in your conscious brain” before you crossed over to the other side, hopped the twig, snuffed it or however you prefer to describe the final journey? Profundity over, all members then decamped to Craig Potter’s keyboard for an “unplugged” version of Weather To Fly, temporarily truncated by Garvey marching back to the front of stage, asking the audience if, as per the song lyric, they were having the time of their lives? Response affirmative.
That such a big man can deliver such delicate vocals in such high registers including falsetto is testament to Garvey’s myriad of talents. Any writer writing lines such as “And marriage in an orange grove, You are the only thing in any room you're ever in” (Starlings) “I plant the kind of kiss, That wouldn't wake a baby” (Mirrorball) “But I think we dropped the baton like the Sixties didn't happen/ Passing the gun from father to feckless son” (Leaders Of The Free World) deserves to be cherished and revered as a national institution for evermore.
The final song before the encore was the warmly anthemic and cosy One Day Like This, in many ways the spiritual lead on its parent album. I had confidently predicted to my neighbour that the encore would be An Audience With The Pope and the gorgeously mellifluous Powder Blue: oh dear, time for Mister Babbage to snort electronic disapproval. Station Approach – according to Guy Garvey – a homage to home-town Bury (maybe that will curry favour with the good burghers of Bury and re-instate possibilities of Freedom, perchance?), and the darkly elegant Some Riot (slugging it out with Mirrorball as your correspondent’s favourite song on Seldom Seen Kid, but oh what a terribly flaccid and weak title for a song) were most welcome. The final song of the evening, Scattered Black And Whites, was not. Whilst the lyrics are nicely evocative, could there be a more musically bland song in Elbow’s increasingly impressive back catalogue? Certainly not last-song-of-a-concert-let’s-send-everyone-home-humming-a-classic material. No. It was crying out for the utterly electric Powder Blue, with its spellbindingly arresting and immaculate keyboard refrain, a true classic that sits proudly atop Elbow’s canon of work. Whilst I cannot influence the set list, an Elbow set without Powder Blue is like an Eagles gig without the hallowed Hotel California or an REM show without Losing My Religion. Apart from this glaring omission and the aforementioned lighting issue, a fantastic evening’s entertainment.
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Mon 02 Mar 2009, 00:08
