Isobel Lim from The Indecisives. Studio 2, Parr Street. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.
Liverpool Sound and Vision rating 7/10
To sit in a venue and watch any number of bands or seasoned solo musicians ply their trade, thrill a crowd and look pristine throughout is something that any of us can take for granted. Sometimes though we forget where the musicians start out from, the nerves of debut or even 50th gig still thundering round their instruments and still fresh as the hour after a storm abates.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
There is arguably nothing as fulfilling in life as seeing a master, in whatever profession, guild or sense of artistic endeavour, play infront of you knowing that they are having the same effect on every other member of the audience and that their work still hold you gripped after many years of having the fortune to stumble across their legendary output.
Graham Gouldman and Heart Full of Songs at The Epstein Theatre. Photograph reproduced with kind permission by David Munn Photography.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
There are many lyrical geniuses walking the Earth, and long there may be so, for the world would be a place of desolation and rampant fettered hegemony controlled by those with no sense of humour or in some cases not an ounce of poetry in their soul. Their main concern the next big hit that has been written somewhere in a mansion and something that appeals to the wallet rather than the feeling of what the lyrics and music combined mean.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 71/12/10
How you deal with last minute adversity is how you can be perceived by an audience. Many is the time when a group of any genre persuasion has seen disaster heading straight their way, like an American College comedy being completely misplaced in British cinemas, and have panicked and the start of many an argument come their way. It is inevitable and it is part of life. If you greet that split second choice between carrying on and making an audience still enjoy the gig and respect you all the more then arguably as a band you have succeeded.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 81/2/10
The spirit of The International Pop Overthrow isn’t perhaps in the meaning of Pop but in the two words either side of it, International, for which it always is and Overthrow.
International is fairly self-explanatory when it comes to watching a lot of music from as far away as you can think of and the exotic nature in which those bands play, the beautiful way a band from Spain can enlighten your day just as much as group as close to home as coming from the same part of the city as the wandering visitor to the Cavern Club. Overthrow though should perhaps arguably be looked upon as overthrowing not the old order of pop supremoes, who have given so much pleasure, especially the period between 1963 and 1988, but the overthrowing of your mind and opening it up to a realm of exciting new possibilities. It isn’t perhaps Revolution but evolution.
Liverpool Sound and Vision rating * * * *
In amongst it all, life throws you the occasional musical curve ball in which to relish. At any festival it impossible to see every band, especially when the organisers find 140 of them in which to treat your taste buds to. All you can do is see the ones you really want to see and then hope you have enough left in the stamina box to see a couple that have alerted your radar and in which to check out.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Geoffrey Chaucer neglected to tell one story when penning the grand uncle of English Literature classics, the Tale of Alison Green.
Much debt is owed to The Canterbury Set of musicians who made their mark on certain specific genres over the years, the history of the Kent City, nestling deep as the spiritual home of the country and offering a path to pilgrims over the century and as place which once visited should never be forgotten. Now add all these reasons together and intensify them with a young musician by the name of Alison Green and you have all the ingredients of powerful sonnet or lengthy adoring poem in which the writer would have been proud to have placed somewhere between The Wife of Bath’s Tale and the upstanding Knights Tale.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
There are times when hearing an album by a band finds you sadly lacking the understanding of what to expect when they play live. There is no substitute for watching the group plough a very individual style and perform incredibly on stage and away from the waking dreams you have as the stereo enacts for its own amusement what it wants you to think on how the gig will go. As the lights dimmed in The Cavern, the expectation in those who had lasted the distance of the late session of music, soared and awoke the reason for many in which to take heart with the Fast Camels.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 81/2/10
There is a special place surely reserved in anyone’s heart for a band when they play a track that just really just gives the said organ a jolt of undisguised passion, of catching the listener unawares of its importance to them. It can happen a lot with a band that you may have followed for years, it happens less frequently with a group that has not appeared on your in built radar and yet for anyone watching Kontiki Suite in The Cavern Club on a warm Saturday night in May; that feeling of first time love was like lightning hitting the Eiffel Tower and creating a spark so wide it would light up Paris.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The International Pop Overthrow would be an awful lot poorer if the abundance of great acts north of the dotted line that separates Scotland and England found themselves bereft of a slot or ten inside The Cavern over the seven day period in which the music plays lovingly down the ears of all who attend. In the year in which the key question of Independence for Scotland gathers pace, the music that the nation is proud of producing is still very important to both sides of that in question line.