Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Songs of Drink and Revolution, something that has been lost, eroded in the lifestyle of the comfortable in the last 50 years, the chance to be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with your brother and sister and bemoan the state the world.
The comfortable, perhaps through the lack of main stream national bands and musicians under a certain age refusing to go against a certain grain for fear of being labelled as something other than an artist with a social conscious, the comfortable being led down a path of least resistance with promises of everything today. Then there is Lizzie Nunnery and Vidar Norheim, who show that there is another path, a path laid down by the likes of Ian Prowse, The Levellers and Alun Parry before her, a path where Revolution is freely discussed and lauded.
Songs of Drink and Revolution hits home; just how far we have come and just how much we have lost, the songs play with memory and time and the way we look back at certain periods with a mixture of awe and fear. Revolution is not just a construct for the disillusioned, disaffected and dejected, it is also for the individual’s mind, the chance to take back in your thoughts what has been replaced by the scampering running towards acceptance and so called normality, the morphed sense of having to desire what everybody else desires. In both senses, Ms. Nunnery, a woman of absolute sincere thinking and belief, and Mr. Norheim capture the radical thought perfectly with five extremely well constructed songs and from whom the ideas come thick and fast. Politically charged songs with inspiration from the likes of the indomitable spirit left behind from greats such as Dylan Thomas and Tony Benn, it seems the rebel heart, the voice of conscious lives after all.
Songs of Drink and Revolution is the allusion, the gigantic nod and firm handshake to the days when a common enemy stood at the gates and rattled the chains, the spectre of disturbing ideology and its creeping tentacles which somehow has managed to come back into fashion with pleasant acceptable faces and yet is still scared of the artist or single solitary person who says no. Tracks such as Smile and a Knife, the superb Drunk in the Midnight Choir and Two Revolutionaries all combine give heart to those who also want to say no, no more, your ideology is not wanted here.
Belief is what these two musicians, along with Martin Heslop, Martin Smith, Dean Ravera and Paul Caldwell, offer, the flame has not died, it has just been transformed.
Ian D. Hall