Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
To sit infront of a young band who has come out fighting on all fronts since their inception and knowing that each time they appear before you, they just get more sleek, more smooth and unbelievably good is a feeling that warms the heart of even the most ungracious of hearts.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Tom Burke, Rose Leslie, Anca-Ioana Androne, Tim McInnerny, Trystan Gravelle, Clive Wood, Pamela Ashton, William Belchambers, Ed Birch, Vicenzo Ferrara, Aine Garvey, Lorna Gayle, Yare Michael Jegbefume, Solomon Mousley, Harley Rooney, Mason Rooney, James Stratton, Kevin Trainor, Velile Tshabalala.
In your life time, depending on how old you are, the population of the Earth has almost tripled. Seven billion people fighting for a scraps of land, for food, water, over religion, over the right to survive and the right to have a family, Seven billion souls, who thanks to the advancement in healthcare, the quick eradication of infectious diseases and peace keeping forces, seemingly take up more resources than the world can actually supply. Such is the dystopian plot that makes up one of Channel 4’s finest programmes in over a decade, Utopia.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
There are moments in which you can believe that you have listened to something that goes beyond the realms of the earthly, that somewhere something profound has come along and imbedded itself it at the very core of artistic endeavour. You just can’t help but love the sound that emanates across the few feet of floor between you and your stereo, between the speaker and your ears, a bond is formed and you cannot help but accept that music has moved you. Such a time comes in the form of Greg Russell and Ciaran Algar’s album The Call.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Life is worth fighting for; it should never be placed into the open ended furnace in which desire and thought are too readily disposed in the pursuit of the quick fix and the so called unwelcome. Even when something doesn’t grab you at the first attempt it should at least be explored at least another couple of times so you can at least give it due consideration. Nothing is truly non-descript or distinctly average and that goes for music at the best of times.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Songs of Drink and Revolution, something that has been lost, eroded in the lifestyle of the comfortable in the last 50 years, the chance to be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with your brother and sister and bemoan the state the world.
The comfortable, perhaps through the lack of main stream national bands and musicians under a certain age refusing to go against a certain grain for fear of being labelled as something other than an artist with a social conscious, the comfortable being led down a path of least resistance with promises of everything today. Then there is Lizzie Nunnery and Vidar Norheim, who show that there is another path, a path laid down by the likes of Ian Prowse, The Levellers and Alun Parry before her, a path where Revolution is freely discussed and lauded.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating: * * * *
Cast: Ashleigh Jones, Nicola Ravenscroft, Rhiannon Davies McCabe, Amy McAlan, Kate Emmett, Emily Rigby, Courtney Carragher, Emily Washington, Olivia Coleman, Reece Armstrong, John Risley, Ceri Wyn, Ian Curran, Nigel Peever.
There have been many memorable Victorian characters created over the years. Perhaps Charles Dickens springs to mind as one who really captured what life was like with his descriptions of the workhouse and his over the top characters. For writer Lyn Wakefield Ghosts Of Kirkdale is such a snapshot of grim Victorian life but told from the perspective of children.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
One of the most perplexing and perhaps insistent of all the creations by Marvel comics is The Guardians of the Galaxy. Unlike other explorations into the team ethic made by Marvel, The Fantastic Four, The Avengers, West Coast Avengers, X-Men for example, The Guardians of the Galaxy is one that doesn’t necessarily jump off the page and grab the sympathetic attention of the reader. It could be argued that it delves into a space that would have been more suited to the underworld/underground realm of comic books and yet given the amount of time it takes a class A comet to light up the sky and bring an end to all life on the planet, it grows upon you.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, Steven Chester Prince, Bonnie Cross, Libby Villari, Marco Perella, Jamie Howard, Andrew Villarreal, Shane Graham, Tess Allen, Ryan Power, Sharee Fowler, Mark Finn, Charlie Sexton, Byron Jenkins, Holly Moore, David Blackwell, Barbara Chisholm, Matthew Martinez-Arndt, Cassidy Johnson, Cambell Westmoreland, Jennifer Griffin, Garry Peters, Merrilee McCommas, Tamara Jolaine, Tyler Strother, Brad Hawkins, Savannah Welch, Richard Andrew Jones, Karen Jones, Sam Dillon, Jesse Mechler.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Liam Hale, Dominic Davies, Rio Matchett, David Paes, Sean Stokes.
The world according to Gregory Bike, a mantra for all the giants of theatre, a man to whom you should listen to with open ears and open minds…a man to whom the word theatre is the be all and end all of life’s pursuit of truth and experience…a man who exists completely as fantastic extension of Liam Hale’s superb imagination and for whom Play With Myself: The Trials and Tribulations of Drama Practitioner Gregory Bike will surely be rated as a must see at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
First published by Ace Magazine online July 2014.
“On the cusp of glory, frustration and exasperation will find a way to block success…”*
Emotions in Brazil must be heading all over the place as it stands, for the footballing public, the religion of the sport is enough to make anybody even remotely concerned about the final on Sunday wonder just who they are going to cheer on. The industrious Germans who tore their side apart with the consummate ease of a Lion being offered an all you can eat menu whilst picking their main course for dinner on the Serengeti or Argentina, their biggest rivals in World Football, a country that is less than a couple of hours away by airplane, a country that produced more attractive football than Brazil in the last decade…Nobody could surely blame a single person in Brazil if they thought on Sunday afternoon, “I cannot face this, I am going to bed till Monday, roll on 2018.”