Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The Devil may always take his due but the music will always belong to a higher authority when it comes to the muse and the sound of the joy that comes from within, The Angel’s Share will always be one that gets the most attention.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Kevin McNally, Katy Wix, Kevin Eldon, Robin Sebastian, John Culshaw, Robert Jack.
The beauty, pathos and reflection of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s writing can be seen fully in two of Britain’s greatest ever sitcoms, Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son, both written with consideration and absolute wit, performed by comedic geniuses and with the knowledge that even after 60 years in the case of Hancock’s Half Hour, the words and situations are timeless, that no matter how much we move on in society, we still are products of the post Second World War generation.
I wish
I could sit across
the table from myself
and look at the shell,
the bundle of broken nerves
and the uneasy anxiety, directly, squarely
in the blue eyes, those eyes
that have seen too much
and tell me
to let go, to damn myself
for my annoyance, for not having
the spirit to tell some
to go to Hell for their mistakes
and revelling too much in mine;
stupid boy, no answer
from your sallow lips and misty
eyed memories, holding back tears
Crazy paving, I’m cracking up
Stone cladding you ain’t so tuff
Cement ponds in Netherley hills
Concrete overcoats for unpaid bills
Crazy paving I’m walking over you
Laying down with the hardcore crew
Stone taxi I’m flagging you down
Take me to Mr. Flintstone in Bedrock Town
Crazy paving I’m cracking up over you
With your concrete mixer stir the stew
You’re out of plumb lines are not so true
Is you’re circle coloured blue
Crazy paving you’re set in your concrete ways
You’re going off in sedimentary clays
What have we learnt? Having lost all those
mothers and fathers – innocent bystanders –
to someone else’s misconceptions,
the news is still bleak. What have we really learnt?
Saddam had something, somewhere, maybe;
flames spread easily inside a tinder box;
David Kelly liked to go for walks;
the prayers of millions often go unanswered
but, of course, God bless America;
everyone is now a qualified chemist.
Conclusion: jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.
45-minute document airily
proves the dangers of information –
loose accuracy readily changes minds.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The great Rock Opera, derided by some for its excess and supposed almost pantomime exuberance, adored by many for its clarity of enthusiasm, the energy and dynamic beauty that is unleashed, set free from the chains of regulated time keeping and enclosed lyrics. Whichever camp you fall into, love it or loathe it, there can be no denying that it brings out the very best in some and when a partnership that has endured on and off for almost 40 years as Meat Loaf’s and Jim Steinman’s, that best is almost statesmen like, godly, true and infectious.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, George Mackay, Samantha Isler, Annalise Basso, Nicholas Hamilton, Shree Crooks, Charlie Shotwell, Trin Miller, Kathryn Hahn, Steve Zahn, Elijah Stevenson, Teddy Van Ee, Erin Moriarty, Missi Pyle, Frank Langella, Ann Dowd, Rex Young, Galen Osier, Thomas Brophy, Mike Miller, Louis Hobson, Hannah Horton.
It is on the face of it a seemingly small moment in cinema but Matt Ross’ intelligent and superbly argued script for Captain Fantastic captures the point of individualism and socialism in a world that only wants you to be a drone, a consumer, a person to whom history means nothing and whose appetite for the material and the edible is verging on obese and dangerously unhealthy. It is with a touch of grace that Captain Fantastic turns that rotten ideology on its head and offers a different view on how to live.
A rose by another name
would probably find it annoying
to have an extra vowel placed
somewhere in its heart,
the petals red
with shame as they try
to figure out the meaning
of being called rosee,
like some cheery greeting
in a flamboyant bar; come here
Rosee and have a drink;
Rosee could be a typo, a slip of the keys
but it still realises that the florist
takes great care to spell
Chrysanthemum correctly
and not call it Chrissi
for short.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Sophie Carmen-Jones, Hayley Tamaddon, John Partridge, Jessie Wallace, Francis Foreman, A D Richardson, Emily Warner, Waylon Jacobs, Lindsey Tierney, Ellie Mitchell, Nicola Coates, Francis Dee, Chelsea Labadini, Dann Kharsa, Justin-Lee Jones, Kerry Spark, Peter Nash, Adam Denman, Daniele Arbisi, Helen Siveter.
I have shut the world out,
It is not the first time
I have resorted to this
but it only stems from not wanting
to be in the way;
from wanting to leave
the world in peace
without it worrying
about me.
Safe
here in my hole, the King
of the darkness I survey,
here I am protected from my own
toxic trust, innocent
in my rusted pleasure;
here I sit dependable
for there is nobody to tell
me otherwise.