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,
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but with determination and drive of the post war feminine guile, wit and strength that carried the country past its outdated Victorian lies and into one of colour, of Punk, of resplendent anarchy and into a thankfully socially more entertaining age.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.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Marcus Henderson, Betty Gabriel, Lakeith Stanfield, Stephen Root, Lil Rel Howery, Ashley LeConte Campbell, John Wilmot, Julie Ann Doan, Rutherford Cravens, Geraldine Singer, Jeronimo Spinx, Ian Casselberry, Trey Burvant, Richard Herd, Erika Alexander, Yasuhiko Oyama.
A man enters a world that is as strange as it is uncomfortable, one where alienation is dressed up in smiles, style and a welcoming handshake, this is the experience of many around the world, the stranger in a strange land, not one to fit in, but one whose very existence is deemed to be a boost to the community in a very different way than may have been expected.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Sam Riley, James Cosmo, Fritz Kellermann, Kate Bosworth, Lars Eidinger, Maeve Dermody, Jason Flemyng, Jonathan Cass, Sam Kronis, Christina Cole, Lucas Gregorowicz, Louis Ashbourne Serkis, Andrew Bicknell, James Northcote, Michael Epp, Aneurin Barnard, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Danny Webb.
In the last century one of the defining moments for Britain is the Second World War, we seem to make the most of a single act of defiance that because of what could be perceived as arrogance by others, we cheerfully, and most times out of disrespect to the those we are trying to insult, love to tell the line about how Britain won the war.
Beyond Wigan Pier,
flat caps are worn with a sense
of irony
to the visiting football fan
that made their way through tunnels
and forgotten history book sampled landscapes
of the once industrial blackened soot North,
Orwell no longer in residence
and yet in this barbarous age,
a depression in all but name,
the great decline of the 21st Century,
but as long as you can get your nails done
and have the latest must have Playstation
diversion, then obviously the world is just great and green;
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
You may have a guardian angel watching over you, one that makes sure you don’t do anything reckless or stupid or just plain idiotic, you may have one that even manages to make sure you succeed in all that you endeavour to pursue; how many of these Imaginary Creatures though will go all the way, how many of us would see The Blood of Angels?
You will, no doubt,
receive your reward in Heaven,
she said to me with an air of superiority
and down at heel, run of the mill
lack of charisma; I knew she didn’t have the money
to pay me, I wasn’t doing it for reward,
just to help a fellow human being
in a moment of distress
but still
she had to bring Heaven into it,
she had to tell me that her belief,
the conviction that by doing something good
you must automatically become
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
March always brings its own personal bluster and rage along with it, it is a month that dominates in many ways its environments and whilst January and February can be particularly cruel and deceitful, March verges on madness, on a tight spring, a vicious beast coiled up ready to pounce and knock you over with unexpected results. To combat the madness thrown up by a month which doesn’t believe in just standing still, in which rain and shine are intermingled like a bad marriage, some restoration of beauty and calm are needed.