Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Eleanor Nelly, Liverpool. April 2017. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.

If Paradise is half as nice as Liverpool on sunny but freezing cold day then to be honest it can only be enhanced by the sound of one of the city’s daughters being heard in the centre of the main shopping area and being so entrancing that she could be heard at either end of the main street and possibly the echo reverberating all the way to Nashville where she was going to spend the next week on the next step of her music career.

Paradise Street may not be the first place in the city which a stage and music would appear, the thrill of a set of live music as the precursor to Liverpool’s 2017 Sound City extravaganza somehow popping up out of nowhere, and cutting across the certain yells of shoppers in search of their designer clothes and hopeful consumerism bargains. The expected sound of the odd busker and wide eyed exclamation by the visitor to the city drowned with beautiful soul by the sound of Eleanor Nelly laying down yet another important marker in her development as one of the great young hopes of the city.

Whilst the cold raced with the ferocity of a Formula One racing car haring round the world’s leading circuits, the overtaking wind cutting down Paradise Street and shunting any sunshine into the shade offered by the buildings that tower above the shoppers, Eleanor Nelly took the stage by its metal collar and gave the passers-by, those who realised the monumental moment at hand and the strangers to the city, a glimpse of what has made her a voice to be admired, to be loved.

Even with a biting wind making the guitar feel like an iceberg had floated into view along the Mersey and taken root between the fingers of the musicians who were to grace the stage during the entire day, Eleanor Nelly still managed with sheer force and smiling will to make her set sound forceful, dominating the air and the whisper of tills; such moments before you fly to another land are to be treasured, after all, it is all part of the same life.

With Eleanor performing a sensational version of The Beatles’ Please Please Me, the sublime If You Want Me Tell Me Now and Paper Aeroplanes, this young musician showed that all that ever stands between the young and their goals is usually the apathy of those whose life may have passed them by in the blink of that till’s whisper. If overcome, if heard, they can truly be amazing.

Ian D. Hall