Elvis Costello (Photo by Mark Seliger)
Elvis Costello & The Imposters celebrate the release of their widely acclaimed new album, The Boy Named If, with summer tour titled The Boy Named If & Other Favourites. The band appear at the Filene Center at Wolf Trap on Thursday, Aug. 18.
The show includes an opening set by Nick Lowe & Los Straitjackets, marking the first time since 1989 that Elvis and Nick have toured together.
Costello and his band, The Imposters — Steve Nieve, Pete Thomas, and Davey Faragher — will once again be joined on stage by Texas guitarist Charlie Sexton, who also played the 21 date, Hello Again Tour in October 2021, when six of the then unreleased songs, now heard on The Boy Named If, were performed for the very first time to incredible audience reactions. In the OC Register, Peter Larsen wrote that “over the course of 26 songs and nearly two-and-a-half hours, Elvis Costello and the Imposters delivered a terrific night that time-traveled across Costello’s songbook, past, present, and future.”
The Imposters have been Costello’s bandmates for the last 20 years or as Costello put it recently, “Pete Thomas, Steve Nieve, and I have been spinning around like your favorite 45rpm for forty-five years and let’s be clear, Davey Faragher isn’t anyone’s deputy. The Attractions could have no more made The Boy Named If than we have any desire to time travel back to the 1970s. This is happening right now in 2022, we are coming at you, big as life and twice as ugly.”
Watch the official music video for “Magnificent Hurt” by Elvis Costello & The Imposters on YouTube:
Costello first met Nick Lowe in a pub opposite The Cavern in Liverpool in 1972 at a time when the then “D.P. MacManus” and his partner Allan Mayes — as the duo “Rusty” — were performing many of the songs Lowe had written for the band Brinsley Schwarz.
By 1976, Nick Lowe was house producer and recording artist at Stiff Records — a small independent label in London. The newly named “Elvis Costello” was their first signing.
Lowe went on to produce Elvis’ albums My Aim Is True, This Year’s Model, Armed Forces, Get Happy, and Trust in just four years, during which Rockpile (with both Lowe and Dave Edmunds) were part of a US package tour playing between Mink Deville and Elvis Costello and the Attractions.
Nick Lowe returned to the studio for Elvis and the Attractions last album of the ’80s, Blood & Chocolate, before playing bass on “Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)” in 1990 and then on five tracks of the 1993 album, Brutal Youth.
Nick Lowe’s songs have been recorded by Johnny Cash, Tommy McLain, Sir Rod Stewart, Engelbert Humperdinck, and Solomon Burke. His song “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love & Understanding,” first recorded by the Brinsleys in 1974, covered by Costello in 1978, and sung by Curtis Stigers on one of biggest selling movie soundtrack albums of all-time, The Bodyguard.
Elvis Costello & The Imposters
w/ Nick Lowe & Los Straitjackets
Thursday, Aug. 18
Gates @ 6pm
$37-$77
All ages