Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Kate Bush’s songs root deep into the heart and soul of her fans. She is a genius, a strange phenomenon, an enigma and most importantly an artiste in her own right. Knowing what Kate and her music means to her fans, she does not disappoint from the first moment she steps onto the stage to thunderous applause and cheers taking the audience on a most incredible journey that ends in a most climatic explosion of rapture and delight.
Steve Howe at The Capstone Theatre, Liverpool. September 2014. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Life is meant to be taken with equal amounts of pleasure and pain, of hope and despair and with a certain degree of unimaginable delicate beauty that filters through to the soul as if carried by a being with a great taste in music and who knows that television, has tried its best to destroy any type of sensuality and indulgence between artist and audience. Thankfully it hasn’t succeeded yet but there are times when you go to a venue, no matter where, and you know deep down in your heart that like those that try to feed the constant mantra of “The Economy” that somewhere, somehow, executives have managed to convince some that by staying in and watching the latest act it wants to promote for profit is good for music.
Little Sparrow at Leaf in Liverpool. September 2014. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Time has been described as many things, a snarling beast which needs to be tamed, perhaps even hunted down and taught a lesson or two, the great leveller in which all humanity is judged by its actions or even perhaps a companion, a trusted ally in which the truth of your life is carried. Time though can also be brutally obstinate, it can make visits to a venue in your city from a very talented singer/songwriter seem as though Ice Ages come and go with quicker frequency.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The candles that stand on the tables inside Leaf flicker with eager anticipation. The small draught that comes and goes as the lift that sits at the back of the hall above the clanking tea pots, the smell of food being cooked and conversations that had at the heart of them been spirited questions of the Scottish Referendum winds itself open to let out yet another selection of fans in time to see Laura James deliver a set that sat happily and comfortably with an enraptured audience.
Anna Corcoran at the Unity Theatre, Liverpool. September 2014. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
This is the show, arguably the only performance in town that would grab the attention of so many on a night when the news, both local and international, in which could prize the heart away from what used to be called despairingly interesting times. For Anna Corcoran, the sweet deftness of a long lingering caress on a keyboard that responds with a nod of approval and its own commendation, is an hour of time that goes by so fast and yet you feel its effect long after you have got home and played the gig over in your mind as dreams embrace your quivering soul.
Thom Morecroft at the Unity Theatre, September 2014. Photograph By Ian D. Hall.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Sometimes, occasionally, as rare as a night in which the stars seem to come out and take a bow for the beauty they provide and in which the moon trespasses on the Sun’s heavenly position in the sky, something just catches the attention of a collection of musicians and they give a performance so exciting, so unreal that even the moon knows it’s time to go hiding in the moment of eclipse.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Watching Buckle Tongue on stage as they deliver songs from their long awaited debut E.P., one of the many rampaging thoughts that takes pulls up an armchair, helps itself to a large glass of the most expensive whisky in the side cabinet and then chucks the half-drunk contents onto the roaring fire is that this how audiences must have felt when watching Iron Maiden perform their sets in the East End’s The Rainbow or how early fans felt their heart roar at the expansive noise laid out before them at The Whisky A Go-Go or The Concert Factory as Metallica took the stage.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The distance between our lives has got to the point where to feel disconnected from society is perhaps a prospect that many arguably feel. Nearly seven billion people on a planet and yet life can feel as lonely in a crowded, bustling and sophisticated city as it can standing at the very top of the world in which the only company is a polar bear with an appetite so large that it mentally makes a menu of your body parts. What keeps us together in one form or another is music, it may divide opinion, one genre’s greatness in one set of senses is another’s form of torture, but it certainly unites those who see the devastating beauty in it.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Fear is the mother of Hope, without one you cannot have the other, without them both the world makes as much sense as dumping a lorry load of nettle leafs into molten gold and selling the remains to the people of Sark in exchange for the island’s entire bicycle collection. Some things just don’t make sense.
Maaike Breijman performing Kate Bush songs. Epstein Theatre, Liverpool. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
When Kate Bush announced her first live shows for 35 years, there were bound to be a lot of people that were going to be left disappointed in being unable to see one of Britain’s perhaps most reclusive, certainly iconic, exceptionally gifted female artists of the last 50 years.