Hayseed Dixie at the o2 Academy in Liverpool. January 2015. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Coming to Liverpool on the back of the immensely popular new album, Hair Down To My Grass, there is only one way to describe the banjo loving, Tennessee loyal awe-inspiring sight of Hayseed Dixie and that’s committed, unpretentious brilliance.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Review 8.5/10
That rare showing of charisma, you either have it or you don’t. If you don’t you can get by being truthful, unabashed or even by smiling, all of these bring out the sunshine in a performer. To have charisma though and to have it so far ingrained into every single member of the band that the sweat pouring off them can be cloned and sold off as new aftershave or perfume, is to have magnetism and every single pair of eyes looking at you as if you were some sort of Demi-God taking a break, well that’s enough to know that the formula is exciting, raw and beautifully wild.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
If passion is your thing, if it’s the be all and end all and makes the nights hanging by an amplifier, dry ice clinging to your lungs like a wet December fog and a guitar playing a sweet serenade of honest love and toiled emotion, then the Keith Thompson Band’s live album, Snapshot of Reality, is one in which to count the ways in which to adore your love of music.
The devoid of feeling, empty processed pea tin rattles down the street and
pushed along by the banshee like eruption of winds
that beat, beat…beat against the window
pleading to be let in, the tin can, the remnants
of its former glory long since spilled on the Bootle battlefield
shows off its ability to send
out a message in Morse Code to anybody willing to listen.
The signal is kept going, the odd momentary lapse
where the wind blasts it up against the side of half
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Neil Dudgeon, Gwilym Lee, Fiona Dolman, Tamzin Malleson, Una Stubbs, Georgia Taylor, Ed Birch, Charlotte Cornwell, Adam Kotz, Simon Kunz, Howard Ward, James Lance, Kobna- Holdbrook-Smith, Grant Russell,, Raj Awasti, Paul Blackwell, Pamela Betsey Cooper, Anthony Farrelly, Susan Fordham, David Golt, Oona Kirsch, Liberty Mills, John Neville, Shaun Newnham, Terry Noble, Lia Williams, Timothy Watson, Allan Williams.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The poet, whether armed with guitar, piano and possibly even a generous loving violin or the thunderous confident tones of well oiled and lubricated voice, with expertise is able to take a moment from the past and turn into something that can border on the exquisite, or crushingly, to filled with future optimism that it loses its buoyancy, its grasp on the real and ventures unwittingly into the absurdist fantasy beloved of the broken and bemused.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Being the main attraction isn’t for everybody. Many are more than happy being the player filling in, the unseen midfielder who puts in more than his fair shift week in, week out, the beautiful scene behind the supposed alluring landscape or the rare flower in the hands of a beautiful woman, some quite rightly prefer it that way. Every so often though that rare flower gets noticed, even if it has been prominently displayed, it may have gone undetected to all but those that rave in the dark of its sanguine effect on the whole.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
For many, indeed arguably millions, Stephen Fry has that modern disturbing invisible, perhaps slightly jingoistic moniker attached to his name that implies monetary wealth, rather than the importance he brings to the species as a whole and yet National Treasure he is and will be hopefully until the sad lamenting day when Q.I. has an empty host chair in sad rememberance.
We sat back triumphant, but exhausted and overwhelmingly drunk
in a small public bar by Waterloo Station
full of football supporters letting off steam
after their team had lost in the capital again
and part of our collective soul didn’t care,
but the devilish, impish, teasing part thought,
we could wind them up after winning our own battle
with all that sits on the coloured squares and overpriced
bars and a tin of beer outside Holloway Jail.
Our own private Monopoly Board challenge.
February 17th 1996 and the first train up from Salisbury
…And there is no room in the world for the sentimental.
No earthly place in which to stack the memories
upon high, layer upon layer like bricks laid out
on a spring morning in which to build an annexe.
Move on, like a fluttering unfeeling butterfly
already in the sights of the patient entomologist,
letting go of the nightly moth in his paw like grip
and ready to pin you down.
I will not but be sentimental, to be romantic,
certainly emotional and perhaps at times flowing