Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The name, the very thought of his face and the way he was even able to clear the pubs of any custom at his absolute peak, is enough to remember Tony Hancock for what he was, a genius of comedy, the master of stalled look at camera in which he carried a nations funny bone for over a decade until his untimely death in Australia in 1968.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * *
Time moves on and the brilliance of a band that came to the forefront of their country’s contribution to the Heavy Metal/Thrash genre seems to have finally come to a stuttering halt and whilst not completely disintegrating into fragments just yet, the signs are ominously there. For Annihilator and Jeff Waters in particular, the premiere of Canadian Metal, the band that bought out some illuminating and defining classics in their time, have bought out their 14th studio album, Feast, and it is regretfully anything but.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Iwan Rheon, Amaka Okafor, Rufus Sewell, Bill Nighy, Adrian Scarborough, Peter Marinker, Robert Blythe, Ben Crowe, Philippa Stanton.
Tom Stoppard’s pedigree goes before him, he is arguably one of the most prolific and important playwrights of the latter half of the 20th Century and his work has continued to be a source of inspiration and keenly watched and listened to. The idea though that he would come up with an original play that delved deep into the mindset of British Progressive Rock Kings Pink Floyd and their seminal 1973 best-selling album Dark Side of the Moon could be seen by some, if not many, as a voyage of linguistic artistry too far. However if anyone can do justice to the opus that revolves around madness then Tom Stoppard perhaps is one of the finest to even attempt it the daunting process.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Four albums in and Metallica confirmed their place as the world’s biggest Metal band with the release of …And Justice For All. As years in music go, 1988 was a phenomenal year for Heavy Metal of any sub-genre, Iron Maiden had released the superb Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, Queensryche had raised the bar to a new height with the epic Operation Mindcrime and Megadeth showed what was to come in the form of the interesting So Far, So Good…So What. …And Justice For All was the best of all worlds, the fusion of Progressive, the barbed sterile lyric feel in which the music reigned supreme and despite the incredible loss of Cliff Burton, the band were able to top the brilliance of the previous album Master of Puppets and give their audience perhaps arguably the finest album of their career. Out of such adversity facing the band with the loss of the superb Cliff Burton came the outstanding entrance of bassist Jason Newsted.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
With the festival season nearly behind him, Ed Harcourt made his way to Liverpool for the second time this year and gave the crowd attending this year’s Summercamp at Camp and Furnace something extra to hang their 2013 musical memories upon.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
If an E.P. or album can whet the appetite of seeing a group perform for the first time, then Me and Deboe’s fantastic self-titled recording released earlier in the year has had the same effect of being shown the menu of a five star restaurant which serves the finest food anywhere in the world and knowing you can eat there for free with a gift voucher but noticing you have to wait the best part of fifty years before you get even pick up a fork and smell the tantalising aroma.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
For a woman who has been performing for a little over 12 months, SheBeat catches audiences completely unaware, she sneaks up on them with arms outstretched and then takes her chosen audience on a journey that will stay with them for a long, long time.
The Bluecoat is a fascinating building; its history seems to seep out of every stone and edifice that makes the structure a must see, to wallow in its garden and sit and listen to the world and its joys, groans and ideas. With songs that showed great depth of character and an interesting take on life, SheBeat made sure that what she bought to the table would be enjoyed and chewed over as much as anybody else over the International Music Week Festival and rightly so.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
John R. Chatterton has the unnerving ability to make songs that you have listened to perhaps a million times before sound somehow fresh and new. Tracks, that despite having been on the end of radio play and being sat in people’s records collections gathering dust, mean a great deal to people but have become stale and repetitive. In the hands of this superb musician, the music, his own compositions and those he covered were played with aplomb, a defining skill and instrumental ability that is hard to imagine anybody else being able to do.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Some musicians just radiate warmth and a sort of musical love as soon as they step on a stage. Without even playing a note on a guitar, just by the simple motion of saying hello to a collected crowd, the affection is felt around you. Whoever has come to take in the musician’s work, be it friends, fans or the surprised newcomer, what comes palpably across is the thought that everybody who is watching just wants the musician to succeed. In that respect the warmth felt for Simon Cousins could keep a large town’s heating suppliers out of business for a long while.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
When a band puts out an E.P. or album that has the flash of inspiration attached to it by supplementing the musical aura with a touch of mystique, the ears tend to get just a little more excited and the brain digs just that little bit harder to understand what makes the group and the music tick. With The Last Scout layering secretive messages from the start with the sound of a pre-Second World War radio drama broadcast in which the idea of courage and making a stand is paramount, the E.P. brims with clever vocals and music which bounces along in a way that is reminiscent to the way that the much underrated Yorkshire band Dead Like Harry sounded.