Alanis Morissette Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London
Touring September 28 to October 4
Mention 1996 to a music-lover and they will probably think of Oasis or the Spice Girls. But those bands, huge though they were, only had Britain’s second- and third- biggest-selling albums of the year.
Both were outsold by a Canadian singer-songwriter who had made a folk-rock CD called Jagged Little Pill.
In those days Alanis Morissette was an earnest young firebrand, belting out lyrics of blazing frankness. Now she’s a mellow 45-year-old who has recently given birth to her third child (Winter, a brother for Ever and Onyx).
Alanis Morissette performs sitting down, flanked by two acoustic guitarists, and her roadie’s main job is to trot out with fresh flasks of camomile tea
She performs sitting down, flanked by two acoustic guitarists, and her roadie’s main job is to trot out with fresh flasks of camomile tea.
She’s here partly to promote a forthcoming album, Such Pretty Forks In The Road (due May 1), but mainly to mark the 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill. In the autumn she will play it in full on a bigger tour, pandemics permitting.
Seeing that she’d booked the O2 Arena in London, I wondered if she might struggle to sell 20,000 seats, but the thought is soon banished by the atmosphere at the Empire, which is bubbling.
Alanis meant a lot to a generation of women, and clearly still does. The fans don’t just join in for the choruses, they sing every word. It’s half karaoke night, half group therapy.
God only knows what would have happened if social media had come along a little earlier. Alanis was the original over-sharer, fearlessly airing her fears. One song of hers from 2001, Hands Clean, could have started the #MeToo movement all on its own.
I interviewed her as she took off in 1996, and again two years later, as she attempted to follow a 33-million-seller. The first time she was likeable and down to earth; the second she was remote, trapped behind a wall of sudden celebrity.
She called that follow-up album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, a title from which even a work of genius would have struggled to recover.
Today, exuding wry humour, Morissette is more like the first version of herself than the second. And while her best material (You Oughta Know, You Learn) is apt to show up the rest (Ironic, Perfect), her singing is rivetingly powerful.
Jagged Little Pill has become a Broadway musical too, and she says that has given her some distance from it – but she still inhabits these songs, and so do the fans.
alanis.com
Elvis Costello & The Imposters
Mayflower Theatre, Southampton Touring until Wednesday
Rating: 
The last time Elvis Costello was in the news, 18 months ago, he was saying he’d had an operation to remove a ‘small but very aggressive cancerous malignancy’. Seeing him in action now, you’d never know it.
He plays for two hours without a break, and tears into the faster songs as if it was 1979 all over again.
A brush with mortality can send a man hurtling back to his heyday. At 65, Costello has had his bus pass for a while, but the songs he is playing on the Just Trust tour were mostly written when he still had a young person’s railcard.
At 65, Elvis Costello has had his bus pass for a while, but the songs he is playing on the Just Trust tour were mostly written when he still had a young person’s railcard
Of the 24 tracks, 17 come from his first six albums, the purple patch that ran from My Aim Is True in 1977 to Almost Blue in 1981.
To be a teenager then was to hang on his every word, and there were a lot of them. The young Costello burst out of Liverpool and gave verbosity a good name. Watching The Detectives and Oliver’s Army have never gone away, and tonight they’re joined by overshadowed siblings such as Green Shirt and High Fidelity, which have just as much bite.
Costello is a genial host, cracking jokes and saying he loves Southampton because ‘you send all your best players to Liverpool’. But he can still summon his old truculence for (I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea, his tenderness for Alison, his tortured lust for Pump It Up, and about six emotions at once for Accidents Will Happen.
Unwanted Number, from last year’s Grammy-winning album Look Now, is one of only two songs from the past 35 years, but there are two more from the future. Costello has been working on a musical, an adaptation of Elia Kazan’s 1957 film A Face In The Crowd.
The two tasters make a warm interlude, as his roof-raising backing singers, Briana Lee and Kitten Kuroi, gather around the piano.
Words, of course, are not enough. Costello’s classics are also memorable pieces of music. As he plays rhythm guitar – with his old mates Steve Nieve on keyboards and Pete Thomas on drums, and his newer mate Davey Faragher on bass – you realise that the whole band is a rhythm section, pressing home those punchlines.
elviscostello.com
THIS WEEK’S CD RELEASES
By Adam Woods
Niall Horan Heartbreak Weather Out now
Rating: 
Horan’s second album is eager but pallid pop-rock with a side order of sad ballads. The half-hearted Sympathy For The Devil-isms of Nice To Meet Ya may be the high point, and the title track is a decent tune with dated Eighties production, but the rest sound like assembly-line work
Morrissey I Am Not A Dog On A Chain Out Friday
Rating: 
This 13th album might once have been seen as a return to form, with robust tunes such as Bobby, Don’t You Think They Know? or elegant closer My Hurling Days Are Done. But, since he has lost many fans with far-Right political views, how many of those who used to love him still care?
Rustin Man Clockdust Out Friday
Rating: 
The return of founding Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb under his Rustin Man alias is welcome. His second album in barely a year is less electrified than 2019’s Drift Code – wheezy and clattery, a bit Tom Waits, a bit Robert Wyatt, but with a haunted, timeless quality of its own
Baxter Dury The Night Chancers Out Friday
Rating:
Baxter Dury, son of Ian, is his own man, though there is a resemblance. Here there are luscious Gainsbourg strings, disco grooves and knowing female backing vocalists cushioning grotty nocturnal character studies. Ugliness and beauty jostle for prominence. A gifted second-generation pop artist