Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
It could be argued that we don’t look for the mystery anymore, that we are not content with allowing the enigma of a feeling to grow inside of us and revelling in how it makes us look at the world, how it makes us connect with places, people, Time; instead we sanitise it, we take the pleasure and allow it to be broken and the magic to dissipate in the air, the spirit allowed to drift onto the next island of curiosity.
The four in the morning
Buzz, the phone
lets out
a dying squeal of save me
in electronic Morse.
The screen is lit up
for a moment
with the legend,
battery low…
I sigh and continue to write helplessly
with a million words in mind,
all running towards
Oblivion
and I think to myself,
it’s not a competition
but I do know
how you feel.
Ian D. Hall 2017
I remember the conversation held
between the man in the stylish looking hat
and the woman who had asked him
about his inconsistent and doomed affair
and giving him advice on how to finish
with his lover; the fifty ways she mentioned
and whilst I only heard five that she recounted,
I hung around to listen further
as he pondered on how she would deal
with the same situation.
A moment, a second of silence
before she answered matter of fact,
“If all else fails Paul,
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
You have choices in life, you can take the road of responsibility and look after your heart and soul or you can give in temptation and rock the guts out of life, you can stand in the corner, a hint of vague wallflower about your persona, or should the feeling be right, be just, you can party on in the knowledge that the Universe has created such great music for you to be entranced by. If you stay in the shadows you won’t get Chills & Fever but if you come in to the light and embrace the work of Samantha Fish then that fever, those chills, will be glorious.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Hearing a new song from Roxanne de Bastion is like holding hands with an old friend, there is so much warmth in that moment, so much energy to share between the art and the soul that it connects and fuses, the organs melding into one and finally let go as the love is embraced and jointly nodded at in appreciation of what brings to the other. To not get a tingle down the spine, to not enjoy the sensation is surely to suggest that you have a Heart of Stone.
Ground down cocaine
derivative coursing through my early morning
veins, my dinner time blues and late night
saturated fat on old Jazz music
of which I cannot play a beat,
yet hear every note that the Sax man plays
in earnest down on 77th Street gun alley
where only the night before a man was killed for less
than murdering a rag time special
and looking at his killer’s broad
with a funny eye.
The late November sun catches my eye
and through the glass I take a look around the street,
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Jake Abraham, Lindzi Germain, Paislie Reid, Catherine Rice, Andrew Schofield, James Spofforth, Lenny Wood.
The place, the city, may have changed but the character, the soul of Liverpool is still so deeply engrained that that the River Mersey cannot be seen as anything other than an artery that feeds lifeblood and is the connection between the spirit and the heart of a community raised on memories, brought up on hard times, an identity that is unlike anything else in the country and one in which the soul is above all.
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
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.