You can call me a Tw**
I won’t take offence, call me a piece of
dirt, a shit, an arse, a f***,
Knob, Di**,
cuss me all you like, damn
me to Hell, liken me to porn,
if you feel cheap,
lazy even
forgo a letter, knock yourself,
find a better word than git,
Smeg is perfect, possibly,
it appeals to the Red Dwarf fan in me,
however,
don’t stand there and call me Hall,
that’s a No No;
you are not a N.C.O.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *
Cast: MyAnna Buring, Ben Batt, David Leon, Emma Fryer, Jamie Sives, Clive Wood, Pearce Quigley, Jessica Gunning, Georgia Tennant, Ashley Walters, Sophie Bloor, Matt King, Tim McInnerny, Lee Boardman, Alice May Feetham, Fisayo Akinade.
There is always a police drama in which to rifle through, to borrow, sometimes wonderfully well, from literature; yet somehow television and film always seem to rely heavily on certain authors the vast majority of times without searching beyond the known and easily marketable. For every Christie there should be someone of unequal note, for every Ian Rankin there should be a new novelist writing with clarity and sensitivity of plot being given their chance to have the characters they painfully created, up on the screen.
I have nothing against your left eye,
it is the pupil that you know will
pass its eleven plus
and go onwards to University
and despite falling in love
with many a pretty girl,
all mysterious and from a foreign field,
the pupil will become a good egg,
concentrate mostly on the study at hand
and leave with honours,
the gratitude of the pool table
and the smiles of the women
as a reminder of what it was to have
a good eye.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
For many, the idea of loss of any kind is too much to openly show, a hangover from the Victorian era, a residue of the lamentable act of being stoic, of not showing your true self or worth to the world. Loss is hard, not being able to grieve properly is worse, an almost despicable act forced upon society at large by a system that wanted nothing more than the idea of grieving to be shown as weak and destructible to civilisation; a hangover from an era that saw the phrase of the British stiff upper lip appallingly coined and many a generation living in the shadow of the Waiting.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Emma Stevens has been heroic and sensual in her music as she releases songs and plays live to audiences, now in To My Roots, the singer/songwriter, written with long time friend Charlie Midnight, takes the next step on her journey and strikes out of the whisper and into the realm of the tigress prowling her domain, protecting the creativity that has been nurtured but also knowing with bold assuredness that they stand on their own two feet and roar willingly on their own accord.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
We look to America to provide a solid warmth when it comes to music, a sense of genre that for all the greatness the British possess when it comes to music writing and undoubtedly the home of pop music, Folk and the spiritual home of Heavy Metal, we just cannot truly get to grips with Americana or the Country ballad, some bands capture it but as a whole the difference between the two musical empires of the past comes down to the structure and lay out of the country itself.
I was never in,
save if there was a new album
in which Monday mornings
spent flicking through covers
and memory
of songs heard on the radio
during the weekend
were too much for my psyche
to let go, the hook,
the lyric became my needle.
Never in, always out,
what was the point in self imposed prison, surrounded
by walls, decorated by posters to cover
the stark white oppression and unhappy warden;
now I stay in, the world has become
my prison, for the body and mind cannot
I might be a Manchester Blue,
so old school that I used to have slate
and chalk to calculate City’s
progress up
and invariably down the league.
A fan since the days of Dennis Tuert,
Willie Donachie and Asa Hartford, yet
still as the new season approaches,
I salute one of the special ones,
the soothing
Voice of Anfield,
the heroic stance in the box
of echoes and history,
the voice of football
in a world gone mad with the overpaid
and the undeserving, George’s timbre
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Everything that goes around will eventually find its way back home, in terms of music you will come across a song that reminds you so much of the days when the radio was the true emperor of all it surveyed, when bands could be assured they would be listened to and earn respect, when a female vocalist could tear your heart out with absolute joy and you would love her for it; when everything comes back around in your life, you had better make sure that 50ft Warrior are right at the head of the queue.
And social media loses its mind…
a phrase that seems to strike panic,
what am I missing out now,
the in word, the gossip,
the click bait, celebrity rumour mill
going round and round
and round, till the spin dries and what
is left is nobody’s business
at all, the opinion of a guru,
the judgment of a stylist,
the belief of the uninformed,
does it matter, at all, truly…
all is gas.
Ian D. Hall 2017