Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

There are many reasons in which to enjoy Paddy Clegg’s Head In The Cloud E.P.  Aside from it sounding like a well-oiled Formula One engine, purring with anticipation of the battle ahead and yet creative enough to avoid every pitfall placed before it by those out to do young musicians down, it also has the musical brain musing in what the young man sounds like. Or rather who he sounds like. By the end of the E.P. the dawning realisation of the comparison will explode in the head as if watching a series of Van Gogh paintings come surreally to life; that Paddy Clegg, the young Liverpool lad, has all the early hallmarks of a young, unpolished, unrefined and wonderfully cultured anger hanging in the back of the voice John Lennon.

To compare Paddy Clegg to John Lennon would be ludicrous to the extreme, that’s like comparing To Kill A Mockingbird to any Sherlock Holmes story, so widely different, so separate in their way their lives have taken, and yet it is there, it announces itself and then recedes gently to the back of the hall, content to let the work he has produced for the album make its own scintillating entrance.

Paddy Clegg is not John Lennon, nobody ever will be; but there is the attitude, the drive, the sense of the cheeky grin, the love of an earlier age emanating throughout the four songs; that comparisons ought to be addressed. To be 17 and have the world at your feet and live in an age where you are not reliant on the big labels to like you so you can at least get your thoughts across is something surely that many in the long rich past of music would have killed for. In Head In The Clouds, Paddy Clegg is good enough to understand that not everything happens at once, sometimes never at all but at least you can keep going, keep trying and not be too disheartened just because someone at the top takes a dislike to you.

The songs are fresh, honest. They grab the attention of the listener and in Have You Ever Wondered? What you have is a song that screams out, take me home and play me till the neighbours politely suggest that you might have an addiction problem.

All artists start somewhere, the trick is not to be discouraged by those with an agenda and in Paddy Clegg, the rough, shy quality that blends with the thought of times past is enough to savour a talent that needs nurturing.

Ian D. Hall