Get ready, the Kerrang! Tour is back for 2014 with 11 huge nights across the U.K. and Ireland.
Kerrang!, the U.K.’s biggest selling music weekly magazine, has created another stellar line up for February next year featuring headliners Grammy Award-nominated multiplatinum Florida titans Limp Bizkit, Japanese Metalcore five piece Crossfaith and goblin core band Nekrogoblikon. This incredible line up will take in the Liverpool’s 02 Academy on Sunday 9th February.
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The name, the very thought of his face and the way he was even able to clear the pubs of any custom at his absolute peak, is enough to remember Tony Hancock for what he was, a genius of comedy, the master of stalled look at camera in which he carried a nations funny bone for over a decade until his untimely death in Australia in 1968.
Following high profile U.K. festival appearances at Glastonbury, T In The Park and Reading and Leeds this year, Editors have announced their first U.K. tour in three years. The November tour sees the band play extensively across the country following the release of their fourth studio album, The Weight Of Your Love over the summer. Recorded in Nashville with Jacquire King (Tom Waits, Kings Of Leon), the album marked a fourth consecutive Top Ten placing for the band in the U.K. with Top Ten placing throughout Europe.
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Time moves on and the brilliance of a band that came to the forefront of their country’s contribution to the Heavy Metal/Thrash genre seems to have finally come to a stuttering halt and whilst not completely disintegrating into fragments just yet, the signs are ominously there. For Annihilator and Jeff Waters in particular, the premiere of Canadian Metal, the band that bought out some illuminating and defining classics in their time, have bought out their 14th studio album, Feast, and it is regretfully anything but.
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Cast: Iwan Rheon, Amaka Okafor, Rufus Sewell, Bill Nighy, Adrian Scarborough, Peter Marinker, Robert Blythe, Ben Crowe, Philippa Stanton.
Tom Stoppard’s pedigree goes before him, he is arguably one of the most prolific and important playwrights of the latter half of the 20th Century and his work has continued to be a source of inspiration and keenly watched and listened to. The idea though that he would come up with an original play that delved deep into the mindset of British Progressive Rock Kings Pink Floyd and their seminal 1973 best-selling album Dark Side of the Moon could be seen by some, if not many, as a voyage of linguistic artistry too far. However if anyone can do justice to the opus that revolves around madness then Tom Stoppard perhaps is one of the finest to even attempt it the daunting process.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Four albums in and Metallica confirmed their place as the world’s biggest Metal band with the release of …And Justice For All. As years in music go, 1988 was a phenomenal year for Heavy Metal of any sub-genre, Iron Maiden had released the superb Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, Queensryche had raised the bar to a new height with the epic Operation Mindcrime and Megadeth showed what was to come in the form of the interesting So Far, So Good…So What. …And Justice For All was the best of all worlds, the fusion of Progressive, the barbed sterile lyric feel in which the music reigned supreme and despite the incredible loss of Cliff Burton, the band were able to top the brilliance of the previous album Master of Puppets and give their audience perhaps arguably the finest album of their career. Out of such adversity facing the band with the loss of the superb Cliff Burton came the outstanding entrance of bassist Jason Newsted.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
With the festival season nearly behind him, Ed Harcourt made his way to Liverpool for the second time this year and gave the crowd attending this year’s Summercamp at Camp and Furnace something extra to hang their 2013 musical memories upon.
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If an E.P. or album can whet the appetite of seeing a group perform for the first time, then Me and Deboe’s fantastic self-titled recording released earlier in the year has had the same effect of being shown the menu of a five star restaurant which serves the finest food anywhere in the world and knowing you can eat there for free with a gift voucher but noticing you have to wait the best part of fifty years before you get even pick up a fork and smell the tantalising aroma.
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For a woman who has been performing for a little over 12 months, SheBeat catches audiences completely unaware, she sneaks up on them with arms outstretched and then takes her chosen audience on a journey that will stay with them for a long, long time.
The Bluecoat is a fascinating building; its history seems to seep out of every stone and edifice that makes the structure a must see, to wallow in its garden and sit and listen to the world and its joys, groans and ideas. With songs that showed great depth of character and an interesting take on life, SheBeat made sure that what she bought to the table would be enjoyed and chewed over as much as anybody else over the International Music Week Festival and rightly so.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
John R. Chatterton has the unnerving ability to make songs that you have listened to perhaps a million times before sound somehow fresh and new. Tracks, that despite having been on the end of radio play and being sat in people’s records collections gathering dust, mean a great deal to people but have become stale and repetitive. In the hands of this superb musician, the music, his own compositions and those he covered were played with aplomb, a defining skill and instrumental ability that is hard to imagine anybody else being able to do.