Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Paul McGann, Nicola Walker, Ruth Bradley, Alex Macqueen, Chris Porter, David Dobson, John Dorney, Nicholas Briggs, Brian Shelley, Ian Brooker, Adrian Mackinder, Andrew Knott, Joseph Radcliffe, David Silby, Jo Castleton, Ian Hallard, Jacqueline King, Natalie Burt, David Shaw-Parker, Frank Skinner.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Tom Burke, Santiago Cabrera, Peter Capaldi, Howard Charles, Luke Pasqualino, Amy Nuttall, Tara Fitzgerald, Ryan Gage, Alexandra Dowling, Hugo Speer, Tamla Kari, Ben Adams, David Burke, Michael Kucera, Simon Merrells, Phil Snowden, Curtis Matthew, Madelyn Marcella.
When your biggest enemy is your mother you really have problems. When she is plotting to bring about your downfall and replace you with someone younger, more pliable and easily moulded to her will, then your problems become seemingly insurmountable and terrifying.
The Stranglers at the o2 Academy, Liverpool. 2014. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
This is the Gospel according to the Men In Black, to the musicians who have shaped more than one generation’s musical taste; the men who stuck two fingers up to the doubters, the unbelievers, the down-right miserable and doom laden and who have had the final incredible laugh for the last 40 years. The sermon to the already converted and to those who have come along in the intervening years, the thank you to all who gave The Stranglers room in the heart and who filled the room at The Academy in Liverpool to bursting. The Gospel surely reads, “Thank You.”
Over the past decade or so, music fans and artists alike have found themselves lamenting on the decline of the music industry. With new technologies developing all the time, it is now cheaper and easier for our consumerist society to access music – for free – anytime, anywhere. On the one hand, this modern lifestyle invariably means that more musicians have a much broader fan base. However, on the other hand, it is becoming an increasingly less profitable endeavour to be in a band and the argument remains that this is putting a lot of talented people off.
Originally published by Ace Magazine on-line on 3rd March 2014.
In 1999, just after Manchester City had gained promotion via the playoffs and Manchester United had won the Champions League, there was a suggestion cheekily suggested by some journalists the national papers that there was something in the water to have produced two thrilling moments in football history. For Manchester City it was the start, a true beginning back to the land of redemption after years of lacklustre and almost abject football. Times change, City no longer have the tag of being a big time laughing stock but they don’t half cut it close to becoming so at times.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
No matter how many years go by, nothing ever really ever seems to change at all. No matter how hard you try to see the difference, time has not erased any of the anxiety or difficulties that affect ordinary lives.
However, sometimes you can’t have enough of Too Much Pressure though and with ever graceful Pauline Black and The Selecter making their way to Liverpool to celebrate the bands 35th anniversary, the pressure is absorbed, danced too, sang with great gusto and with an abandon that you would expect as perhaps arguably the greatest Ska band of the period rolled back the years and showed that class is always permanent.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
March may have been blown in the back of the worst set of winter storms in living memory but the thought of sunshine, weather so perfect you could just turn on the radio and dream of Henry Blofeld delivering a perfectly delivered and seamless soliloquy in praise of a six by Curtly Ambrose and strawberries being placed in your mouth by a toga wearing Roman is never too far away. That dream of summer, of the lazy perfect day was bought ever closer by the Leicester band By The Rivers who were support for the legendary Ska band The Selecter on the opening day of March.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Performers: Paul Taylor, Elaine Stewart, Edwina Lee, Esther Dix, James Bray, Helen Kerr.
Writers: Mark Anthony Rossi, Anthony Ellison, Mary Vigar, Sally Fildes-Moss, Mark Konik, Richard Lyon Conlon.
In September of 2013 Grin Theatre paved the way for a new way of looking at writing and performing in Liverpool with six monologues crafted by writers who weren’t known to the public. These six monologues formed the basis of the first Voices performed at 81 Renshaw Street. If something works as they say, keep going, and Kiefer Williams and Helen Kerr of Grin Theatre have done just that by hosting a very cool night of six different monologues for Voices 2, each individual, each creatively interesting and all carried out by the various performers’ voices with great care and reverence.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Tilda Swinton, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Anton Yelchin, Jeffry Wright, Slimane Dazi, Carter Logan, Aureile Thpaut, Cody Stauber, Kamal Moumad, Yasmine Hamden, Ali Arnine.
Where else would you find vampires consorting with the great Kit Marlow, where a man who has lived for centuries has inspired and guided some of the great musicians in human history, where melancholy reigns with perverse glee and in which the layered messages of moral vampires go hand in hand with a judgement of humanity’s ever increasing faults but in the cinema.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Roger Allam, Sophie Nélisse, Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson, Heike Makatch, Julian Lehmann, Gotthard Lange, Rainer Reiners, Kirsten Block, Nico Liersch, Ludger Bökelmann, Paul Schaefer, Nozomi Linus Kaisar, Oliver Stokowski, Robert Beyer, Hildegard Schroedter, Levin Liam, Ben Schnetzer, Sandra Nedeleff, Rafael Gareisen, Carl Heinz Choynski, Carina N. Wiese, Stephanie Stremler, Rainer Bock, Sebastian Hülk, Barbara Auer, Matthias Matschke, Jan Andres.
When Death speaks, it is wise to listen…