Category Archives: Live

10cc: Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool. Gig Review. (2024)

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Ever the consummate professional, Graham Gouldman requires no introduction, the music he and the rest of 10cc created is understood from the first bar, and universally enjoyed; and once more the band of merry, and talented groove setters rolled into Liverpool as part of their Ultimate Ultimate Tour, and the result was one that was the sense of perfection, sweet, accomplished, complete and exact proof of the legendary status of the music, and of the longevity of spirit of those that created them.

Toyah And Robert’s Sunday Lunch: Live. Gig Review. Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Toyah has never lost her sense of fun and style, and her husband, the legendary Robert Fripp, exudes such an air of gentlemanly grace that to be in their presence can often feel measurably overwhelming.

For to watch two of Britain’s most experienced performers on stage can lead to the listener being comforted and dominated in the same breath; and when they are together on the back of their hugely successful Sunday Lunch show online that sartorial elegance on stage for a Liverpool crowd is one that is to be acknowledged as being performed by a king and queen of Prog and Punk.

Iron Maiden: Utilita Arena, Birmingham. Gig Review. 2023.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Time is its own master, we are its servants, we are the victims and playthings in which the illusion of freedom is sought as a compromise, in which the future has its own set rules and inevitabilities, and the past is written either in dark forbidding ink or ruled with glory in hues worthy of memory.

The Christians: Gig Review. Usher Hall, Edinburgh.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

There is a calming effect on the audience to which takes a sense of the pure soul in which to capture when they are on stage. Many have this quality, but it is in tandem with the exuberance of the immense, the industrial like performance which whips up a frenzy in the aisles and leaves the heart thumping, sometimes out of time with the message in the set.

The Classic Rock Show. Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool. Gig Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

For many the sound of various anthems, hits, and obscurities that came their way via the beauty and inner workings of the local pub juke box, was an introduction to a memory that would inspire, stimulate, move and arouse in equal measure, and be the backdrop to the days when the world was cast in shadow; it only takes a line, a moment on the drums, a scintillating vocal, that guitar – that instrument of expression which to many a rock sound would simply not exist, for the world to make sense.

Clannad, Gig Review. Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Award-winning band Clannad said farewell to Liverpool, and Liverpool said a reluctant sad farewell to Clannad.  

It’s been 50 years since this exceptional Irish band from Donegal bounced onto the music scene with their eclectic mix of traditional Celtic music and new age ethereal vibes. 

Legendary, influential and culturally important, the band was formed in 1970 by siblings Moya, Ciaran and Pol Brennan and their uncles Noel and Padraig Duggan. Unfortunately, Padraig passed away in 2016 and the band gave him a “shout out” at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall last night to the delight of a packed audience. For a short time, sister Enya had been part of the line-up but now ploughs her own path.  

Me And Deboe, Gig Review. Studio 2, Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

In another plane of existence it would be fair to openly state that Me And Deboe would be one of the biggest, and well known duos on the planet, with a sound, a sense of urgent creativity that flows through each song and with a passion for expression that arguably has only been matched by Simon and Garfunkel, it would make sense, it would be the conversation of wisdom, to see and insist that Me And Deboe would be shaking the tree of indifference and pulling up those that follow with them.

Charlie McKeon, Gig Review. Studio 2, Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

On any night in which providence strikes, to open yourself up to the elements, to throw yourself down on the barbed wire of artistic integrity and be seen, to be witnessed as the moment in which the evening’s flourished bloom begins, that is fortune, but in the hands of Charlie McKeon as he set the tone of the evening for Thom Morecroft’s album launch at Liverpool’s Studio 2, it was of farsighted destiny.

Thom Morecroft, Gig Review. Studio 2, Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

The vibe is just as important as the aftermath, the importance of feeling something in the air begin to glow, to shimmer with excitement, the build-up of atmosphere. The sense of the occasion grow like vines from the ground up, that vibe is what makes an evening become an event and when that event takes the attendee to places they thought they might not see again, when they feel the fine hairs on the back of their neck stand on end and the mind is completely transfixed to the point where they don’t know if anyone else is the room, that is when the vibe breaches the soul, that is when they know they have been taken to Heaven and back.

White Little Lies, Gig Review. Studio 2, Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Celebration, we arguably don’t do it enough, or if we do then we do it for the wrong reasons, we find the excuse to congratulate almost anything and we often neglect the purposeful and the driven to our own cost.

It is in the resolute and focused aim that White Little Lies took to the stage at Studio 2, not even the spectre of November’s horrendous weather, the grey skies leaving its sternly fixed gaze over the Liverpool skyline could deter Daniel Saleh and Vanessa Murray from delivering a set full of mastery, poise and the squeal of delight from the audience.