Rick Wakeman, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall 2014. Photograph by Ian D. Hall
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
There are some things that are well worth the wait, even if you didn’t realise just why you had waited for them until the first note came crashing down around your senses and you were transported through time and the love of literature to a point of sheer bliss.
Bob Catley, Wolverhampton 2014. Photograph by Judith Hall
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
There are homecomings and then there are days when the bunting has been prepared for weeks, the ticker tape pouring off machines and road sweepers gladly earning overtime as they have brushes at the ready and every condition met to be remembered as a cog in a big machine of musical outpouring. With the sun pouring down on the Staffordshire City, its football team, Wolverhampton Wanderers having made it a very successful season and confirming Championship status for the following season, all that was left was for Magnum to come home to the Wulfrun Hall and give a splendid performance.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
For the audience who made their way to one of the final nights of rock to be heard in the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall before its anticipated make over, for the band on stage who entertained them solidly for over two hours, there is at times nothing like Living In The Past; especially when it comes to witnessing the legendary Ian Anderson on stage.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 91/2/10
It took a smile, the easiest of human reflexes and the most disarming to understand that this was going to be a set in which love would not just be felt but would in turn become admiration and fully encompassed respect. For Emma Stevens, the smile she wore for almost the entire set inside Zanzibar was not one of falseness, not just placed there in which to entrance an audience, but one of the most honest beams you ever likely to see on stage by a musician as they perform a set of music that just stole the heart.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
It may be the Easter break for many students up and down the country but that doesn’t mean that they either unwind over the spoils of Cadbury wars and gargantuan eggs, nor for the benefit of their own sanity or health hitting every single book for 24 hours a day ready for the impending exams that naturally hove into view once the last wrapper has been dispatched to its fiery hell.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
TJ and Murphy provided the harmonic dichotomy on a stage that had been and would be dominated in the early part of the evening by two female musicians, one on her own but with a voice that could break down barriers and playfully tease affection out of the sulkiest stone and the other whose refreshingly bright and breezy attitude reminded the world that a smile can be the most effective weapon in anyone’s arsenal.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Just watching Katriona Gilmore and Jamie Roberts on stage for a short while is enough to confirm what the whispers and folk murmurings have been about for the last couple of years. To witness it live though is a pleasure that in some old fashioned way might feel as if it was knocking too much upon the memory for example of the likes of Ralph McTell, the genius of the narrative story laid out for all to see is worthy of the some of the greats of British Folk.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Rita Payne, a band name so good there just had to be two musicians in there to fill the space and neither of them are called Rita. For Rhiannon Scutt and Pete Sowerby the last two years has been a big curve and the music they perform is not only enticing but also fulsome in its delivery and as they tour with new Folk heroes Gilmore and Roberts, the excitement they generate in the stories and playing is enough to convince all who made their way to The Atkinson in Southport that they had witnessed something very special and utterly adorable.
Elbow in Liverpool 2014. Photograph by Mr. Darren Moore.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
For many inside the Liverpool Echo Arena it may well have been the first opportunity to see Elbow in such a setting. The enormous roofed space in which has held so many great concerts since it first opened its doors to the public in 2008 now reverberated and swayed to the atmospheric delights employed by Elbow.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
To a generation and beyond Suggs is a man who has been with them probably throughout their entire lives. He and Madness are so entwined as part of the very fabric of the U.K’s glowing music history that to dismiss him would be reckless, even a crass thoughtless statement.
For all those that made their way to Southport’s Atkinson Theatre to listen to him relate, admittedly in a condensed form, moments of his lifetime from his best-selling autobiography in the two hour My Life in Words and Music, were left thrilled, amused, slightly stunned at the candour and the utter excitement of a man who has lived and been admired.