Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The person who said you cannot do it all, had either never met Liverpool song writer Sue Hedges or was perhaps so embittered by life, that they were doing all they could do to put anybody off trying their best and enjoying fruits of many labours.
Listening to Sue Hedges’ latest album, Outta Party, is something to make you question what certain music makes you feel, even think, when you hear it. The abundance of Dance mixed in a giant blender alongside Disco might make fans of certain genres run screaming for the hills, hiding in a cave for a few years and living off a diet of grass until the latest diversion had gone away. However, what they are missing out upon is not the steady, almost hypnotic beat but the genuine warmth of a woman who feels the structure and openness of music as someone else might draw breath. No matter what Sue Hedges brings to the recording studio, you intrinsically know that it is going to have the rhythm of a music lover stamped throughout it, the rhythm of a song writer who truly can do it all.
Outta Party is not just a set of musical arrangements, set to a groovy beat; a beat to be fair outstrips so much of what the 70s Disco/Dance phase had to offer the British public. It is a set of songs that layer the simplicity of catchy attention with lyrics that are intended to bruise, to seek out and injure the injustice done in relationships, to tear a strip of the maddeningly insensitive and give them an ear bashing done so well that that your mother would be proud of them to have them come round for dinner and show you photographs as a child.
It matters not if you are a dyed in the wool fan of any other music, there is something tremendously uplifting about songs such I’m Gonna Make It This Time, Blue on Blue, The Chemistry of Pain, Liar’s and Lovers and Don’t Give A F**k Anymore.
Sue Hedges is a talent in which to covet, to show proudly your admiration of her skill in turning her hand to many disparate genres and above all someone you would love to see on stage and Outta Party all night long.
Ian D. Hall