Greedy Jesus, St. Luke’s Church, Liverpool. August 2014.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

In Jesus some trust, if you hear Greedy Jesus perform then all musical worship is usually conviction in faith is expected and delivered. Faith is what you make of it, it is what gets you through the small hours, the darkness and the negative damning thoughts that creep into your psyche like a rampaging vampiric worm bent on eating out on your soul and asking for a doggy bag for the leftovers; faith is what stands between you and oblivion.

For Greedy Jesus, not only a man who puts on a hell of a night at Zanzibar and who also hosts the popular Hunger Games there, but someone who can thrill as a performer, music is the thing, the be all and end all. It is if you like, his to feel custody for and it is his to be protective of. That though doesn’t cover half of the reason why he is such a great act to listen to. For Greedy Jesus can turn a single simple lyric into something that should have stepped out of a Jackson Pollock painting, a set of words that would have found a home in an art gallery opened specifically for the works of the embodiment of realism and pointing out the insanity that prevails in a world that at times isn’t going to Hell in a handcart, not even Hell would take the lunacy that feeds some people’s thought of self-worth, but a world that is just heading for destruction by the inane and self-obsessed.

With just enough time to nail his mast together, Greedy Jesus played a selection of songs that captured the imagination and strung together three covers that in many ways had no business being placed in the same space but worked tremendously.  Alongside the songs Friend Like Me and the fantastic and utterly compelling Council Kids with its damning look at the way society has become one in which a few take great delight is making themselves look out of place but with the wrong result, Greedy took the incredible Frankie Goes To Hollywood track The Power of Love and infused it in his own image with Echo and the Bunnymen’s Killing Moon and Nirvana’s excellent song Something In The Way. These three tracks should not have worked together in the same breathe, each being far too special to consider mixing them mutually, yet somehow it worked, it was a far better miracle than ringing out for a thousand fishes and an army of workers delivering bread to the party.

For Greedy Jesus, the day was young, yet for many in the audience this was a particular highlight inside St. Luke’s on an August day in which music was the very proof of existence.

Ian D. Hall