Elbow at Terminal 5

Guy Garvey

In 1990 in Bury, England, a teenaged guitarist, Mark Potter, invited a 16-year-old schoolmate, Guy Garvey, to sing in Mr. Soft, a band he was in with bassist Pete Turner and drummer Richard Jupp. Mark's brother, keyboardist Craig Potter, soon turned the band into a quintet. They shortened the band name  to Soft, then changed it a third time in 1997 to Elbow, inspired by a line in the BBC TV drama The Singing Detective in which a character described the word "elbow" as the loveliest word in the English language. Elbow has won esteemed accolades in the United Kingdom while struggling to gain comparable recognition in the United States. Elbow's fourth studio album, The Seldom Seen Kid, sold over a million copies and won the Mercury Music Prize in 2008. In 2009 the band won the Brit Award for Best British Group , a Meteor Award for Best International Band, an NME Award  for Outstanding Contribution to British Music, and two Ivor Novello Awards. After 25 years in Elbow, Jupp left in 2016. Now a quartet, Elbow's seventh and most recent studio album, Little Fictions, was released on February 3, 2017.

Elbow headlined Terminal 5 tonight, supplemented by a touring drummer and two violinists/backing singers, and appropriately opened with "New York Morning," a song of admiration of the dreamers who built the city. Elbow's rather soft-rocking and word-heavy set highlighted an inherent bruised optimism that equally penetrated both the lyrics and the melancholy tone of the concert. The songs became prisms that reflected fragmentally the human condition of a lifetime of struggles. The violinists enriched this element with their subtle but lush orchestration. Elbow closed its set with its best-known anthem, "One Day Like This," milked for all it could contain with an extended audience sing-along, then returned for an encore performance with "Lippy Kids" and "Grounds for Divorce." The future continues to look bright for the band that finds much of its inspiration in angst.

Visit Elbow at www.elbow.co.uk.

Setlist:

1. New York Morning
2. The Bones of You
3. Fly Boy Blue / Lunette
4. Head For Supplies
5. My Sad Captains
6. Station Approach
7. Switching Off
8. Any Day Now
9. All Disco
10. Magnificent (She Says)
11. Mirrorball
12. The Birds
13. Little Fictions
14. Kindling
15. One Day Like This

Encore:

1. Lippy Kids
2. Grounds for Divorce