Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
It could be Rotterdam, Rome or anywhere but as December’s cruel thoughts turn to the end of the year, as the office parties began to stack up and the songs from karaoke machines began to rotate on mass, there is in amongst the freeze to come the knowledge that it is Liverpool that Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott once again find themselves in and producing a night of music in which to dance and reflect the night away.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Paul Duckworth, Michael Fletcher, Stephen Fletcher, Hayley Hampson, Lindzi Germain, Andrew Schofield, Keddy Sutton.
Band: Ben Gladwin, Greg Joy, Emily Linden.
Choir: Jay McWinen, Elaine Collins, Dee Spencer, Teresa Loughlie, Joan Pinnington, Rob Liston, Linda Martin, Barbara Davenport, Gretta Southern, Julia Hayes, Paul Davenport, Melanie Robson, Molly Madigan.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Adam Keast and Francis Tucker in this year’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Panto The Little Mermaid. Photograph by Robert Day, used with kind permission of the Everyman Theatre.
Cast: Danny Burns, Tom Connor, Stephanie Hockley, Adam Keast, Greg Last, Jamie Noar, Elizabeth Robin, Lucy Thatcher, Francis Tucker, Imelda Warren-Green.
Christmas is the time for the Fin-tastic, the spectacle and the promise that the coming year will be an ocean worth swimming in, that the days of floundering will be a dim a distant memory; it is the days when the special, the extraordinary and the beautiful should and must be seen with equal authority, that compassion for all be observed and to every-fin under the sea, a powerful performance and laughter ensured.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Adam Lambert at the Echo Arena, Liverpool. November 2017. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.
The entrance tickets would have been smouldering away in the pockets of the audience for months, they would have been hidden in secret draws and in the realms of closets, opened every so often just to make sure they were still there, not squirreled away by jealous borrowers or fanatical fans who had not been able to secure a ticket of their own. On a night which temptation was possible, in which the heat of the performance would have burst into raptures of flames; Queen and Adam Lambert made good on a long standing unspoken promise and came to Liverpool to raise the roof.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Time, as noted by the singer and the audience, is a peculiar animal, it can snarl all it wants, it can find ways to give new perspective to eras in which some saw the end of a kind of order and were frightened by the prospect and in which other relished and rubbed their hands in glee as the future and bold vision opened up before them.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
To make the audience focus completely on the drama unfolding before them takes consummate skill, a deftness of spirit, the potency of allure and the mystery, the sense of living through a moment so tangible that it seems all the functions of the human body stop what they are doing and just sit in the honour of the spectacle; to focus so much that you cannot hear a crowd breathe during a song and then applaud like a series of rolling thunderstorms across an empty desert, that is the absolute found.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Lisa Dwyer Hogg, Michael Balogun, Trevor Fox, Susan Lawson-Reynolds, Ekow Quartry, Andrew Sheridan, Imogen Slaughter, George Somner, Aimee Lou Wood, Matilda Ziegler, Ellen Warwick, Natalie Ann Boyd, Emily Jane McNeill.
To beat addiction you need to stay away from the triggers that send you off the rails, to recognise those People, Places & Things which can harm you and your self belief and then start by being honest, more than you have been before in your life. Addiction is such that you don’t recognise it for what it is and to watch someone go through it, in which ever form it takes, is to understand the depths that a human being can sink to when nobody listens to them silently scream.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Everything comes full circle and in some cases it is with anger, the rage and resentment that what you first fought and rallied against in your younger days, somehow becomes the very political ideal that you have to fight and lyrically wrestle with once again; to see in your life time the hatred that others wear like lounge suits and serious ties return is to know that the battle against tyranny and vile fascism is an ongoing struggle but one that must always, with the keen eye of vigilance, be waged.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Port cities have this unnerving ability in which to produce musicians which captivate the love of vocabulary and language; perhaps it comes down to the use of words on the docks, the different ways of having a conversation between two people from places which have nothing in common but the sea that breathes between them. Whatever the answer may be, some who hear the words somehow manage to make new worlds out of it and spread that verbal onslaught towards those willing to listen and take heed.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Ricky Ross at the Capstone Theatre, Liverpool. November 2017. Photograph used with kind permission by David Munn Photography.
It seems a strange departure when you first see the piano on the stage at the Capstone Theatre, the audience knows full well it is not going to be a performance in which the roof of the Echo Arena would shake and feel the storming pull of wave after wave of pop hits and the shake of expectation of Deacon Blue favourites that have become a staple on the Liverpool calendar since the venue opened. However, when it comes to Ricky Ross, almost anything is possible and the Capstone Theatre roof must have been concerned for the future of its position.