Unsurprisingly these songs sound fantastic stripped down to guitar and piano (Pete Thomas plays drums on a few cuts). Only 30,000 of these were pressed ... 5 eps from 5 different concerts that the duo played in 1996. Your EC collection is incomplete without this one!

Picked up this somewhat hard to find live collection from a used-like-new vendor on Amazon for under $30...an excellent value. It's surprisingly well produced for the most part, though I do find myself tweaking the volume control occasionally.

Only some narrowness of song selection and a couple of 'clunkers' keep this from 5 stars. 'All This Useless Beauty' tunes are the centerpiece. If you don't like ATUB, you'll be wasting your money here.

'It's Time', 'Man Out of Time', 'You Bowed Down', 'Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes' and 'I Want to Vanish' are among the best cuts. However, the versions here of 'Little Atoms' and 'All This Useless Beauty' far exceed their studio-brothers and are the real finds for Costello completists looking to embellish their desert island best-of collections.

Excellent stuff, better than I expected. They play almost all of Useless Beauty (a favorite of mine) and a bunch of older tunes. The commentary between tracks is funny and insightful. Grab this if you can find it!

Steve Nieve is wonderful on the keyboard with elaborate but percise arrangements of Elvis Costelo songs. Elvis is in great voice with most of his best known songs included and a fer neglected gems plus one or two i have never heard before. Elvis, between songs aids off beat comments and introductions that give insight into the man while being amusing in them selves.Although just two musicians (except some tracts with Pete Thomas on drums) they create a full and exhilarating sound in what sounds like an intimate environment. Not all songs work but these are few. For anyone who has followed Elvis's career with all it's twists and turns this is a essential collection.

Having most of EC's catalog, I was glad to pick this up on Amazon used for not too costly of a price. The five concerts scattered around the country all have superior sound quality, although a few times you can't quite make out a few things that Elvis says in his commentary to the crowd. Elvis's voice is very good in this relaxed setting, and for most of the songs, just the guitar and the piano are quite enough to make the songs come across, as in acoustic settings, there is always more of a focus on the lyrics. As all Elvis fans know, the lyrics are always a strength, even on his less acclaimed albums (Goodbye Cruel World and Mighty Like a Rose) the lyrics stand out if the production does not. In these discs, you get a tastful look at song construction and depth of what Elvis is singing about. And, of course, they sound good too.
I'd enjoy many more future discs of acoustic Elvis in concert, he has the catalog to delve richly into, and many of his songs would sound great in this format. Worth the price, for those of you wondering.