One of the great seats of learning may have been a few short miles away.
An eternity on a bike but on clear Oxfordshire days the journey was the best.
Past Wendlebury, past Stella’s house, a journey I undertook many times back and forth.
Bicester in the winter felt desolate, days when all you wanted to do was go into town,
Down Sheep Street and look in the record shop, spend hours looking at one creative album sleeve
As the man behind the counter played the same music over and over again.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
If any more proof were needed that the Metal scene in the lands that make up the large expanse of Scandinavia, a huge resounding piece of musical evidence makes its way via Spinefarm Records in the form of Finnish band Kalmah and their brand new album Seventh Swamphony.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Diane Lane, Kevin Costner, Laurence Fishburne, Antje Traue, Ayelet Zurer, Russell Crowe, Harry Lennix, Christopher Meloni, Richard Schiff.
The least said about the 2006 Superman Returns film the better, the small screen adaptations although kept the legend alive were filler, more fluff than in a room full of pillows and for the films that made Christopher Reeve the deserved star he would be, there was so much wrong with them, so many parts miscast, so much playing for laughs that it can be often surprising to think that they three sequels.
I found peace in Ginsberg County without the aid of new patois and peyote to bring forth
Dreams. No hard beer or soft women from the broken Morrison’s Hotel to keep words flowing,
All I was left with was the terms of a contract not yet signed. Kerouac yawned and smiled
With his teeth showing, baring at me across the table, daring me to join in some inspired anarchic
Game, a ritual, a joyful disease that saw leaflets dropped and new words learned.
Keep the flag flying high, the dream alive whilst offering me a full glass of dirty Bourbon.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
It only takes a second for the iconic theme tune to get underway before you realise just how much music from the James Bond series of films means to the collective conscious of the enormous crowd at the Philharmonic Hall and the wider world.
Whether you watch the films in the privacy of your own home or in amongst the massed thrall at your local cinema, one of the key ingredients that makes the film such a blistering event is the score, the musical prelude that heightens up the tension and gives the audience the prickly sensation of what is in store for M.I.5’s greatest ever spy.
I have the familiarity of a journey
Yet to be taken, yet one step away from you and drive
Deeper into my Internal Haze. It is voyage,
A tumble through what remains of what is to come as
you go and start and star in a wonderful life…
I cannot hold on to you.
I would rather drown a thousand times than let you throw me
A ring of comfort, a sign of help I badly want to hold because I know that in the end
I may well be then on higher ground away from the raging tempest
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Somewhere between Ashbury Keys debut album being unleashed and the release of Dancers in 2001, the Texas Power pop trio took a trip from very good into the territory of the outstanding band they would become.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Christopher Benjamin, Trevor Baxter, Lisa Bowerman, Conrad Asquith, Toby Longworth, Matt Steer, Alex Lowe, John Banks, Alex Mallinson.
The final episode of Jago & Litefoot’s adventures, at least for as season one goes, sees the common thread of the machinations of Doctor Tulp finally revealed and for Gordon Henry Jago and Professor Litefoot it is a case that brings danger to the front door of the two friends and amateur detectives.
Liverpool has more than its fair share of visiting musicians and theatre groups ready to entertain their genial hosts; sometimes there are those that are conspicuous by their absence but the prodigious home grown talent that runs through the very heart of Merseyside more than makes up for that. What is missing is the poets, the speakers of lines with no music attached in which to give the people of Liverpool their other fix, the well placed word in the right place that can topple Governments, bring the idiotic to their knees…or even just put a smile on a face and inspire the next breed of would be poets.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Even the disinterested and unfathomable will concede somewhere, no matter how begrudgingly and with fists clenched in anger, that Status Quo must be doing something right to have released 30 albums and over 70 singles. The music that in part defined an era for their fans still has the power to get a broad smile from almost anyone at some point, to nod in agreement should it come on a pub jukebox and enjoy the brief respite the simply crafted songs offer. It is up-beat and sometimes can be shockingly great stuff.