Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
In the realms that the poet walks, what they seek is the proof of existence that only shaking the hands of Time can provide; a poet it seems does not, or at least should not take the idea of money as payment for their wares, but should seek pleasure in the way that what they observe is forever handed down and sang to the ages with a sense of harmony and the discourse of entropy all in one beautifully imagined moment.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Shaun Evans, Roger Allam, Sean Rigby, Anton Lesser, Dakota Blue Richards, Lewis Peek, James Bradshaw, Abigail Thaw, Sara Vickers, Caroline O’ Neil, Simon Scardifield, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Lydea Perkins, Judy Clifton, John Biggins, Edwin Thomas, Rosalie Craig, Simon Harrison, Thomas Coombes, Colin Mace, Hadley Fraser, Celeste Dodwell, Nicola Millbank, Justin Edwards, Jason Hall, Lizzy Watts, Mark Asante, Claire Ganaye, Leon Stewart.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
At its very best, Art should pull you into the subject at hand and make you feel like an invisible voyeur, a sense of the celestial moving silently through the void but touching upon the heavenly and the fire in that other place with equal charm and fondness; the Artist and Art, sometimes indecipherable, indistinguishable, often being drawn in the same breath and with same feeling of mysterious beauty thrown in for good measure.
I read
your biography, hand stamped
and correction liquid filled
till the paper stuck like glue
and the pictures,
all glory, had your head
on the shoulders of giants.
I heard your authorised memoir
through my ears and the hairs
wilted under the pressure, singed
by facts and figures
quoted by this somewhere man
whose ego arrives an hour
before his life;
I took your words and I let them blow away
into the sunset, a history, not secret,
no tale too tall which you could
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The Bad Flowers at Asylum 2, Birmingham. Photograph reproduced with kind permission by Mark Varney and Noble PR.
If you are not ready, focused and with your eyes trained on the 10 yards beyond the finishing line then no matter how hard you try, you won’t hear the Starting Gun and before you know it that finishing line has been reached and the possible enjoyment, the statement of intent and your mark upon the world has been sabotaged by your own reluctance to see how great you could have been.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Those Damn Crows at Asylum 2, Birmingham. February 2018. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.
The dragon lives long and breathes fire that catches everything around it alight, the initial spark that comes from the belly of the beast is soon glowing furnace hot and finds a way to demonstrate its wrath. The anger at having been penned in by a society that understands nothing of why the burning issues of the day are important, why just because one person is doing alright, that another should be ridiculed and shamed for not being able to see above the shoulders of those above them.
I wouldn’t have got far,
nowhere at all really,
if you had not come into my life
and shown me a new road in which
to travel, a crossing in which to pause
at and wait for the signal to move back,
and also to understand sometimes
that you have to step back
in which to gain momentum.
I would not have got anywhere
if you had not shown me how to break
using my feet and worn down sole,
I would have still been
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
If you can remember the 80s with a glorious smile and the passion of a beating heart rampaging through single after single of dominating pop and the explosion of culture that surrounded it, then you are one of that rare breed that wasn’t hemmed in and surrounded completely by the post-war early boom of rock and roll and neither were you fooled by the arrival of the almost far too beautiful but in some eyes sulky, almost akin to drama filled, 90s that followed.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Time changes almost everything, fashion is lauded and then debunked in the blink of an eye, ideologies are stamped upon, new regimes of popularity take the clothes off the previous holders of the once admired and trend setting and claim that they thought of it first; time changes everything but the respect due to a band to whom can hold an audience’s attention and give them the insight into what made their music impossibly beautiful.
Birthdays rarely fall
when they should,
a day in which to celebrate
and make good
of the hopeful
cheer that might come your way
would be better served in warmer climes,
not in the frozen pastures of February,
neither ought it tumble
onto the stony, unforgiving ground
of the weekday, wantaway Blues,
where grown adults of the current age
shake their heads and say,
not on a school night, despite
not having children to care for.
I will take my birthday when it comes,