Author Archives: admin

The Voodoo Sheiks, Borrowed & New. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Something old, something new, something borrowed, lots of things blue…The Voodoo Sheiks cover all the bases with their new album Borrowed & New.

Borrowed & New sees The Voodoo Sheiks lead with something rich, diverse and ultimately a pleasure to wriggle into, an album of many different features but with one goal squarely in mind, to give the Blues a good going over and rock the life out of it, to give it a good shake and tell it to misbehave, to disobey the sometimes tight regulation attached and play up all night long. In that Andy Pullin, Slowbox Dave, John Coombes and Adrian Thomas tear into the Blues, their own temple building songs and tracks by some of the greats, and start to put up the adjoining and naughty beat alongside.

The Voodoo Sheiks, Borrowed & New. Album Review. full post

(498 words, estimated 2:0 mins reading time)

Helen Forrester’s Twopence To Cross The Mersey To Return As A Brand New Stage Show.

The producers that brought you the record-breaking musical are delighted to announce the return of Helen Forrester’s Twopence to Cross the Mersey in a new format of a straight Stage Play.  Based on Forrester’s best-selling memoir, the new stage play version will premiere at Liverpool’s Epstein Theatre in March 2015 for a two-week run and tickets go on sale on Friday 2nd May at 10am.

This much loved account tells the true story of a young girl and her formerly wealthy family as they are suddenly thrown into poverty during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Leaving behind the nannies, servants and comfortable middle-class life in the South West of England, they uproot their shattered lives and choose Liverpool as the city to restart and rebuild their dreams and fortune. Unbeknown to them however, they are in for a terrible shock.

Helen Forrester’s Twopence To Cross The Mersey To Return As A Brand New Stage Show. full post

(532 words, estimated 2:08 mins reading time)

Rob Clarke and The Wooltones, The World of The Wooltones. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

If you can remember the 60s then as saying goes, you can’t have been there. You can’t have seduced by the sound that ensnared a generation and made the smallest hairs on their arms spring to attention as if a thousand watts of electricity had been pumped through every individual strand. Of course if you were born after the 60s and have had to make do with the stories of those who professed to having been at Candlestick Park, the Isle of Wight and the other hundreds of magic moments in which the 60s music hung round and the highlighted sores on society they captured.

Rob Clarke and The Wooltones, The World of The Wooltones. Album Review. full post

(502 words, estimated 2:00 mins reading time)

Simon Cousins, Given Songs. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Music truly is about opening yourself up, like all art it responds to how you feel on the day, what mood you have climbed out of bed in and how that period of darkness has affected you and your thoughts. For Simon Cousins, once of the Wiltshire Folk rock band Ophiuchus and Liverpool’s own The Onset, the mood he must have come to be in whilst recording the tracks on Given Songs must have been somewhere between serene and tranquil with a little nomadic aside into the realms of tender affection.

Simon Cousins, Given Songs. Album Review. full post

(468 words, estimated 1:52 mins reading time)

Headlong Bring Spring Awakenings To The Playhouse Theatre.

Following last year’s smash hit production of 1984, theatre company Headlong return with a radical new version of Frank Wedekind’s ‘children’s tragedy’ Spring Awakening. Unnerving, entertaining, funny and dark, the definitive play about youth comes to the Liverpool Playhouse from Tuesday 13th to Saturday 17th May.

In a society where we are constantly bombarded by overt messages and images, writer Anya Reiss has created a startlingly modern adaptation which sharply evokes the sexual precociousness and confused raw tension of teenage life today.

Headlong Bring Spring Awakenings To The Playhouse Theatre. full post

(294 words, estimated 1:11 mins reading time)

Off The Ground Theatre Bring Cotton Wool To The Unity Theatre.

Cal and Guss are teenage orphans living in Flint on the edge of the estuary and at “the end of the world”. Eighteen-year-old Cal believes they should make a new start in London but, on the night of their mother’s funeral, after a few beers, the pair think they spot her calling to them from out at sea. When they meet young runaway Harriet, their search is thrown into chaos and brother is pitted against brother in Off The Ground’s Cotton Wool which is coming to the Unity Theatre on Tuesday 20th and Wednesday 21st May.

Off The Ground Theatre Bring Cotton Wool To The Unity Theatre. full post

(430 words, estimated 1:43 mins reading time)

Little Sparrow, The Wishing Tree. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Some creatures are more observant than others, be they slight or minute, what they see and reflect upon should still be taken as evidence of their existence and their right to require a voice that should be heard.

The journey through life is full of these voices and in Little Sparrow, music lovers have the chance to fully embrace someone whose observations and musical interpretations are amongst the finest you are likely to hear. The joyful sadness, the stirring, inspirational notes that Little Sparrow brings to her songs is akin to the fruitful day time walk through the woods closest to your home and discovering the world as it should be, bountiful, full of meaning and an exercise in letting go of the despondency which growls and gnaws at the flesh.

Little Sparrow, The Wishing Tree. Album Review. full post

(387 words, estimated 1:33 mins reading time)

A Poet In New York, Television Review. B.B.C.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Tom Hollander, Essie Davis, Ewen Bremner, Phoebe Fox, Samantha Fox, Stuart Matthews, Shane Hart, Morfydd Clark, Lucinda O’Donnell.

What really drives a poet as an artist? Not for them perhaps the adulation bestowed upon them as other artists, the secrecy of their work arguably not given a thought by the population as whole in the same way as a those who follow music. The craft is unseen and so is their life as they squirrel away words like some hide treasure or famous paintings by old Masters. However for Dylan Thomas, he was a breed of the new poet, loved on both sides of The Atlantic after the ravages of World War Two.

A Poet In New York, Television Review. B.B.C. full post

(464 words, estimated 1:51 mins reading time)

Sin City: Booze, Broads And Bullets, Graphic Novel Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 5/10

Into every magnificent series must come a dip, a lack of form or supposed interest that makes all the other titles so far printed seem even more tantilising. In Frank Miller’s Sin City series that fall comes with the sixth in the range, Booze, Broads and Bullets.

Sin City: Booze, Broads And Bullets, Graphic Novel Review. full post

(471 words, estimated 1:53 mins reading time)

The Lantern Theatre To Host New Comedy, Last Train To Yuma, This May.

From the writer of the smash hit play The Salon, comes a dazzling new comedy about comedy to the Lantern Theatre, Last Train to Yuma.

As 10 year olds they won the biggest television talent show of the day and were hailed as the next big thing. Fast forward twenty years and the comedy duo Lemmon and McGarvey are now in their 30s, broke, living on past glories, and bottom of the bill in whatever dive will still hire them. Then, along comes fellow comedienne Jose, with the offer of a lifetime. But will it make them or break them?

The Lantern Theatre To Host New Comedy, Last Train To Yuma, This May. full post

(230 words, estimated 55 secs reading time)