St GEORGES CONCERT HALL, BRISTOL (2005)
'BRISTOL POST' (July, 2007)
Elkie Brooks, St George'sYou could forgive Elkie Brooks for taking it easy after more than 45 years in the music business. But not only is she still out there wowing crowds, she has a touring schedule to shame even the most enthusiastic young band in a van.
Despite this, the former Elaine Bookbinder hadn't played Bristol "for longer than I care to remember" and rewarded her fans' patience with a set that took in songs from right across her career.
Looking nowhere near her 62 years, she opened with Rod Stewart's Gasoline Alley and then, after waving at the audience like a minor royal, launched into a bluesy take on Love Potion No. 9.
The Salford-born singer has always been a strong interpreter of other people's songs and here she played the old Percy Sledge hit Warm And Tender Love and Bob Dylan's The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar by way of everyone from The Doors to Muddy Waters.
Amazingly, her voice has lost none of its power over the years and she showed it off well on a version of Billie Holiday's classic Travelling Light which served as a reminder that Elkie started out as a jazz singer working with the likes of Humphrey Lyttleton before being seduced by rock'n'roll and forming Vinegar Joe with the late Robert Palmer.
There was also a new song, Why, from an album she's working on with her son. A gentle piano ballad, it was good but, as with a few other songs, let down by a rather synthetic keyboard sound. A piano may be a swine to take on a tour that will see her travel from Dunfermline to the Isle of Wight but it would have made a real difference.
There were also, of course, all the old hits, with Lilac Wine starting quietly and building into a crescendo that wouldn't have been out of place in a West End musical. And if she's thoroughly sick of Pearl's A Singer, her best-known song, released 30 years ago, it didn't show. It was played faster than normal as "at last I have a band that can play it in the right tempo".
She may qualify for a bus pass but Elkie Brooks shows no signs of slowing down and remains one of the great British voices.
(Paul Dallison)
