Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
A festival isn’t a festival unless you have Villy Raze somewhere in the vicinity, the marked poetic aggression, the sincerity of overthrowing the often deemed conventional, but one that is delivered with respect and the smile of a thousand Irish heartbeats making music in unison, no matter the place or venue, it has always been a pleasure to catch the live performance of this genial giant of music in full throw.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
It never matters what song is sung, or if the world is vocally silent whilst the humility of the performance is evident, what matters is that the tune carries the listener off to another place and allows them the privilege of thoughtful introspection, of wondering in the face of no lyric, what words they can conjure up themselves that would be fitting to the feeling they are experiencing.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
A deep and electronic heart, in the darkness the lights flicker, the wires that criss-cross and connect, flash, start to pulse and come alive, an eye opens, it looks towards where the sound is coming from and then with a distant memory of what may have tantalised the human brain before, the smile of recognition, a dream that once turned to faded brown, suddenly bursts into a living, breathing, cascading abundance of colour and sharp definition and the electronic heart whispers Build A Tower, build a monument because The Slow Readers Club have come to reclaim what went before.
Under the orange
glow of the back street
light, she wanted to hold
my hand, grip it tight,
and talk of the future,
I wanted
to live in the present,
I gingerly told her I wanted to kiss her
rouged red lips
and tell her I loved her,
we compromised
and that night
as the glow died down
at just before dawn,
we learned to dance.
Ian D. Hall 2018
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Anniversaries are special, they remind us just how far we have come in the search for ourselves and our time at the helm of our own personal blues, our backdrop of the fiddle pulsating away between the lyrics of the song we sing, as we take a pen to the wall and cross off yet another year, another celebration in the pursuit of an added dream. We cross off the years and then we look back, we survey the happiness and sometimes sour and we revel in them, for it is in the life we live that makes the anniversary special.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
There in the deep heart of England’s countryside town of Cheltenham, a place that holds secrets and listens in to the chatter, gossip and state sponsored espionage, a town surrounded by the thought of the country’s green and pleasant land, is the roar of the unexpected, of the disquiet and arguably unrest against the rule of tyranny dressed in shining suits and old school money; there is bellow calling out in this heart land of conservatism and rigid social structure and one that has I, The Lion as the leader of this surprising, but ultimately welcome, fight back against pre-conceived ideas and demanding social inequality.
Prayers
in a Catholic Church
by a full congregation
and the willing
smile of a good priest,
surrounded by images of God,
surely are just
Mass produced.
Ian D. Hall 2018
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
We all cannot be rock stars, we all can not all be heroes to the world, yet we do something that is heroic and takes real guts and determination, it can be a rock star choice, we can stop the hate, not just on certain genres but on people too, countries, individuals, we can bring an end to the practise of self proclaimed abhorrence to that which we either don’t understand or which we confess to never listening to in the first place.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9.5/10
We search all our lives for People Like Us, for those we see in the everyday, the faces that melt and merge with the one after another and the slow dawning that our standards are normally too high, that what we seek is impossible to define, all that we can hope for is that somewhere in the world the search is being undertaken, the same snapshot with an instant Polaroid result, that someone out there is looking for a person like you.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Ben Hardy, Olivia Vinall, Art Malik, Ricardo Scamarcio, Sonya Cassidy, Joanna Scanlan, Ivan Kaye, Ruth Sheen, Dougray Scott, Charles Dance, Nicholas Jones, Vicki Pepperdine, Kerry Fox, Christopher Fairbank, Clare McMahon, James Flynn, Cathy Belton, Jesse Magee, Matthew Lawson, Frankie McCafferty, Cole Currin, James Flynn, Carla Bryson, Frankie McCafferty.