We talked for a while, the great Detective writer and I
about his work, the meaning of crime
in the fields of Oxfordshire
and the bounty involved with novel murder,
between the pages,
in one sentence, the last moment of a book’s life
should be that the suspect is named
with a gasp and then nothing
else to follow,
with perhaps the damning of yet another
advert or list of books that the voyeur,
the seer of slaughter and unlawful death,
must own, at least
There is a yellow council skip
outside the house,
a small number of items
left there by a man in a hurry.
I feel cheated,
I have nothing
that I want to dispose
of but my soul.
Ian D. Hall 2017
Next month sees the Playhouse welcome Theatre6 on their U.K. tour of Moira Buffini’s powerful war drama Gabriel. Starring Liverpool’s own Paul McGann, the tour will be stopping at the Williamson Square venue Liverpool Playhouse Tuesday 4th – Saturday 8th April.
Thirty years since establishing his name in the iconic cult film Withnail and I, Paul McGann, past Doctor Who from Kensington, returns to his home city on his first U.K. tour with Gabriel. Paul’s previous work includes television productions Hornblower and Luther, the film Alien 3, as well as theatre roles including Helen at Shakespeare’s Globe, Butley in London’s West End and Mourning Becomes Electra at the National Theatre. Paul will play the role of Von Pfunz an army commander stationed in Guernsey.
With their glorious new album Jump On Board coming out April 21st on B.M.G., Texas announce 21 UK dates this autumn including a very eagerly show at the Philharmonic Hall on Friday 29th September.
Written and produced by Texas stalwarts Johnny McElhone and Sharleen Spiteri Jump on Board is the first new Texas studio album since The Conversation in 2013 and promises to be nothing short of a pop classic.
New single Let’s Work It Out – with a divine video featuring Thierry Henry – has been playlisted at Radio 2 while the band are set to perform on the Chris Evans Radio show with Sharleen also appearing on Saturday Kitchen and BBC Breakfast soon.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
This House, not one that is in the ownership of the artist, but one that perhaps is more comfortable to be within, to reside with the words and lyrical abandon, the soft soulful tearing apart of everything you know and all that could have been. In This House all is possible because it is a place where there are secrets to be spilled, images to wrestle with and the sweet song of beauty to impart. It is not any old house, it is Fabia’s house and it is one that she makes all welcome to visit.
You scrubbed yourself over me,
making me feel dirty, a wash of panic
in soapy suds and irritating flakes,
a seventies child with memories
of you in the classroom and digging deep
in the dirt of my stomach to quell
the beast of panic, pushed harder
over and over again till people thought
perhaps I was driven, maybe I was,
but it came from the feelings of being unworthy,
push harder, I may as well be an unborn child
in the womb, push harder,
2017 marks the 50th anniversary of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and to celebrate the occasion The Mersey Beatles will be performing the whole album live at The Epstein Theatre on Saturday 1st April.
Liverpool’s favourite Beatles tribute band returns to perform at the venue named after the Fab Four’s famed manager, Brian Epstein. This special set will constitute the first half of an unforgettable Beatles experience. The second half of the show will see the boys return in the familiar black suits of Beatlemania and via a quick change they will take the audience on a trip down Abbey Road with 20 golden greats from across the Beatles back catalogue
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
There is so much to like, to love about Toyah Wilcox that she really does get inside the soul of those who have been touched by her aura of rebellion, her sense of searching for a truth and her physical spirit. For many she embodies an age where the first signs of female dominance in her craft come forth, not with the handshake of patriarchal consent but with determination and drive of the post war feminine guile, wit and strength that carried the country past its outdated Victorian lies and into one of colour, of Punk, of resplendent anarchy and into a thankfully socially more entertaining age.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The 80s were to be seen a boom time for British pop, if there was one great sweeping movement that could see away the frenzied but short lived beauty of Punk it was surely the sometimes sensitive, the occasionally brash, the always fruitful and never ashamed decade of the 1980s and the music that truly dominated it and cursed in many ways the decade the followed.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Elfin Bow cuts a figure of radiant cool as she stands upon the stage at the Epstein Theatre, bathed not only in the glow of spotlights that change with the mood of the song, not only caught in the appreciation of an audience who have travelled the distance with her, but one who with a sense of serenity captures the mood of an album launch to its very finest interpretation, a show, a feast for the crowd, ones who are sated and comfortable, enriched by the experience of what has come before them, an offering by an artist.