The Lord of the Onion Rings
Master of the Hula Hoops
Cheesy crunchy Monster Munch
I am the Lord of the Onion Rings
Giant bag of Krips Crisps to crunch
Addicted to Cheese Cheddars
And original Ritz crackers
just can’t stop eating them!
The Tubular crisps
will clog my arteries
and place on the Porcelain
Kingdom of thrones
The Lord of the onion rings
will be on unexpected journey
to Bogtroll land once more!
John F. Hall
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The urge to praise the spectacle of the new day is something that runs deep in our D.N.A., the terrors of the night is the inherited backlash from our primordial days of soup and mist and one that cannot be denied easily; the salute we offer to the hopeful sunshine ahead is the inner thought of Good Morning Sky, the persuasive chant that might guarantee a nice day and the memory to hold close when night rears its head again.
The night you were in town,
I could not get to see you,
was that planned,
was it just the latest
in a long line of inside
out misunderstandings,
that if I bumped into you,
if I should set my eyes
on your supposed beauty,
would I just crumble
into dust
or would I rise like a tiger
in the cage, mad, bad and dangerous
to approach trapped and with my own eyes
blazing, burning bright.
The night you came to town,
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
A spoon full of sugar may indeed help the medicine go down, however, when you have the Sugarmen close at hand then who needs a remedy, you have the antidote to the beige and the dull right at your hands; no Doctor could find a better way to dispel the blues.
It is with the album Local Freaks that Sugarmen cement and build upon what is already a huge and surely unbreakable bond in Liverpool between band and gig goer, and to which can only make them one of the biggest influences to come as more people found out just how infectious they are to listen to and how they relish in the contagious aspect of their studio and live performance.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Time is the mystery that never reveals itself until the final moment; it is almost as if it has a secret desire to be seen cloaked in a black cape, twirling a 19th century melodramatic moustache and hitching up at the last moment to pronounce to the awaiting world that it was indeed it that set the wheels in motion.
Whether it be the inspiration for a novel, the first anticipated kiss under the moonlight with the one you have lost your heart for, or just making sure the fates collide and the wheels move smoothly under a band’s intriguing set-list once again; Time is always the hero and the villain combined, twirling moustache always optional.
The Christmas seasonal jumper,
knitted who knows where,
on sale, colourful,
advertised on line,
a few happy smiling faces
no doubt, a few jokes
and dig in the rib expense
as photographs are shared
in the immediate world,
secretly hoping to make it big
as a meme;
a Christmas jumper,
be it still September,
and sharing space
with the devastation
and ruin that has torn
Puerto Rico apart.
But it is O.K., Christmas is here
always early.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The very name Gentle Giant evokes such memories that the sheer complexity of their music is one to always remember fondly and with a stirring beating smile that suggests without them, many of the Progressive bands we know and love today, might simply not have recorded their own offerings in the same fruitful manner.
It is to the past that the future often looks to and in musician/producer Steven Wilson, Gentle Giant’s sense of layered introspection, of the purity that each album strived for over the course of a decade, is captured and given his incredible technical talent the urge to once more digest so much of a band and give the listening public a sense of the dramatic that was lost in earlier productions. Â
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
There are many instances in which the tongue can reel off all that the Victorian era offered on a disingenuous plate was to the detriment of humanity; not the great inventions and breakthroughs in science and medicine, but the way that all it displaced suddenly became superfluous and got seen as the waste, the feckless and the easily controlled.
However for all of this and perhaps arguably because of the underlying guilt that such damning treatment of the living would have caused in some quarters; what it brought instead was a disturbing interest in the macabre, in the dead and those who were thought of as monsters.
How long since you were on the map for anything,
small hamlet off Dogpool Lane,
squeezed between Stirchley, Selly Oak
Edgbaston, Moseley, and the Bourneville dark,
it is hoped
that W.H Auden drifted and mused along
the once leafy roads as he conjured
a rhyme of two along the Pershore Road
or dreamt of ducks at the top
end of the old potato fields
where children would force the Rae
to go round a makeshift dam.
Chinese Burn in make shift
Playground and the illegally drunk
Men in white coats, Scientists of the mind
Coming to take me away
to be fully institutionalised
I’ll have my own padded cell
and Savile Row straightjacket
liquid cosh to keep me Quiet
They will arrive in a non descript
Laundry van to disguise their activities
hidden in plain sight, denial plausibility
extremely clandestine covert plan
The Men from U.C.L.A.!
John F. Hall 2017