The CTV people tell me in my email today that a week from Friday (i.e., Dec 11) they’ll be airing a “preview” edition of my favourite talk show, Elvis Costello’s Spectacle, taped at the Masonic Temple in Toronto in that week back in September that U2 was hanging out all over town. The synopsis says that among the tunes The Edge & Bono perform is “a show ending mash-up with Elvis and The Imposters” of Costello-classic Pump It Up and Get On Your Boots from the last U2 album. Good move by the Irish lads there, after tons of people noted the blatant similarity when they first released that single: If only George Harrison had had the presence of mind to throw the word “mash-up” at the Chiffons back in the day - back then they still just called it a “rip off.” I’m kidding, but it does demonstrate, if any further proof of it were really needed, Costello’s healthy sense of humour. (Imagine how he would probably have reacted to this kind of copycatting back in his angry-young-drunk days.)
In other news, I’m trying to shake the blog awake as it seems to have nodded off the past month. (Besides general busyness, there’s definitely something to the phenomenon of Facebook and Twitter quietly siphoning away one’s will to blog.) To reconnect Then and Now, here’s a really lovely entry on the very fine local blog Mechanical Forest Sound that catches you up on what you missed if you missed the event I was pimping when I last checked in.
