Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

There is folk music, then there is the granddaddy of the genre, the music that the immensity of the last 50 years owes as much a debt to the past as we, as listeners, owe the struggles and bravery of musicians such as Woody Guthrie, Ewan MacColl and Hamish Imlach. That granddaddy, the songs of the people in centuries past survive because they have a resonating truth that haunts every generation and stings them into some sort of resistance. The resistance might not take hold or be very strong but they at least leave a tangible fingerprint in which to remind that injustice should not stand.

That fingerprint is perhaps never more needed in times when blackness stalks the land and the people are metaphorically scythed down in the wake of political ideology and gathering government rhetoric. It doesn’t take a huge band, it doesn’t take a huge venue, but the whispered tones of a musician able to spread the message and with a smile on their face is more memorable to the newcomer looking for inspiration than a thousand daubed posters with a single solitary face upon it.

In Neal John Oade, a lover and collector of the folk ethic, the music is all that is needed to place an element of affirmation that life can be different if words are heeded. As the first artist of the year to stride the stage for Stillhet’s Strings and Things evening of music at Parr Street, the measure of responsibility is one to accept and devour, however as is Mr. Oade’s right, the music is there not just to bear witness to modern history being critical of the times we find ourselves living amongst, it is there to be enjoyed and talked about, explained and knowledge imparted.

Mr. Oade’s set is full of lost wonders, tracks that somehow are able to live, breathe and wander around in the modern world as if they are shadows seen moving upon a heat blasted wall but ones that have stood up to be counted at various times and Mr. Oade certainly know how to let those shadows take corporeal form. From the traditional to the so called inflammatory, Neal John Oade makes them all as pleasurable and relevant as they were when first heard on the streets of Liverpool, whether in the form of the sea shanty Haul on the Bow Line, Hamish Imlach’s Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice, the child’s play song of I’ll Tell Me Ma, Frank Higgins’ The Testimony of Patience Kershaw, the sheer legend behind Finnegan’s Wake or Ewan MacColl’s The Fitter’s Song, the songs were delivered with a smile and sword ready to stand by the side of any one under the cosh of despair.

To have Mr. Oade kick off the new season of music from Stillhet’s great night of music was a masterstroke, the past allowed to breathe the same air as those living in 2015, Folk is always appropriate, it just needs to be allowed to be seen to constantly remind the people that the message has always been there, waiting patiently to hold once more.

Ian D. Hall