Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
When an album can grab the listener’s attention at four in the morning, when the dust of the day has settled upon layer upon layer and yet with gratifying force can shake it off like a volcano shedding years of pressure in one gigantic explosion and the sleep that you thought needed is replaced by the urge to rage, pound and live.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
In music there is no such thing as a fluke, there is no such thing as a happy co-incidence and despite the many one hit wonders that have littered and worried for a short while both the album and single charts around the world, it still takes skill, dedication and talent to have got even that far let alone become good enough to be recorded live as from Songs From The Road.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Timothy Spall, Samantha Morton, Georgie Smith, Archie Cox, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, Bebe Cave, Georgie Brinkworth, Annette Crosbie, June Whitfield, Emma Curtis, Inis De Clercq, Libby Easton, Bob Goody, Maya Gerber, Jack Harris, Billy Howle, Jessica Hynes, Teddie-Rose Malleson-Allen, Finn Bennett, Matthew Steer.
English literature may have moved on from the view of the world that was afforded writers between the two wars that shrouded Europe and the greater world in dusky veil of black, the pastoral has certainly suffered greatly since the ever encroaching urbanisation and the near submissive approach to building on more and more land.
We have become the orphans of a broken promise.
The product of discarded point of view
that stopped being relevant the moment their mouths closed
and the hum of the ignored became louder.
We are the orphans of deceit, lies and digital tape,
of meaningless thought and the near dispiriting
words of gathered hope that dissipates and fades
into the wind at the breath of the merest gentle gust
that tussles with our hair, pats our shoulders with thunder
and yet is as invisible as the join between
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
If you’re going to go big, if you aim to go bigger than the Vienna Opera House then there really are only two places you can go. Either you spend a week putting the glitz and glamour into perspective at the Royal Albert Hall or you take on the history associated with New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Everything else in between is straddled between beautiful venue after interesting city or going all out and serenading 200,000 people at Rock In Rio; Radio City Hall is as big as it gets without going over the top.
Time passes,
the poet once wrote
but in amongst the autumn
thoughts and withered unseen tears
I dream of you,
I dream of you because my childhood
in amongst leafy Oxfordshire lanes
and burnt blue skies,
of winter depths in which a broken heart nestled
and turned to a poet’s words for comfort,
in spring when the fire in my stomach blossomed
and war and unimagined kiss wrestled
within the summer heat away,
I dream of you often for Time has not passed,
Time…
Homelessness and the spectre of being too poor to even afford food and the basics of life in Britain in the 21st Century is on the scale of being a national disgrace. Yet with each passing day those supposedly in charge of the nation’s welfare are to be seen as taking a view of moral disgust at the people who find themselves in such positions rather than the root cause of the issue, that of greed and corruption, of allowing Capitalism to smash the lives down of ordinary people in the ever increasing hunt for the spare pound note. It is an attitude that does the Government no good at all and can be seen to further sever the ties between the haves and have nots in society.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
A night at the theatre can mean many different things to different people. To educate, to entertain, to allow a sarcastic monkey the reason to be adored are perhaps just three out of a multitude of reasons that the crowd who piled in with beaming faces and who left the Playhouse Theatre in a state of comedy fulfilment would have come to see and take part in.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, Michelle Gomez, Julian Bleach, Jami Reid-Quarrell, Joey Price, Nicholas Briggs, Barnaby Edwards, Nicholas Pegg.
Two-part stories within the world of Doctor Who have a habit of being lost in the storm, the build up can be a let-down or the finale such a disappointment that the whole structure of the tale becomes a series of woes and misbegotten anecdotes struggling to breathe in the weight of expectation.
My mouth is shut yet the words flow
like crushed diamonds flowing
over the edge of a winter’s cascade,
the avalanche of all that you have sowed,
scattered to the winds in an attempt
to confound and confuse the issue
all dealt with a sneer, the face of a person
who believes themselves to be a God
to dictate to a lesser mortal
what they must say in praise magnificence…
You are not a God, a divine spirit of spoken word
and I am not your doll to do your bidding,