Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
What kind of world are we leaving for our children, what madness have we exposed our fragile souls and precariously balanced minds to, for we have become overwhelmed with the unpicking of the detail that we have either, through neglect or apathy, maybe even self-preservation and wilful ignorance, the big picture!
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
A collector never stops finding new ways to add to their bulging corpus, the body of work or the musical exchange of information which sheds lights and offers illumination to how the world turns for them; by fair means, or sometimes foul and once illegal, they find solace in being able to place another version of what they consider beauty on a pedestal and let the spirit of their find fill their soul beyond measure.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Steve Hogarth of Marillion, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, April 2018. Photograph used with the kind permission of Gordon Fleming.
It has been a long time since Marillion stepped over the Merseyside border, that near international boundary that separates the city of Liverpool from the U.K., not built in myth but in the very nature of its home grown and adopted sons and daughters strength of purpose and identity. As Steve Hogarth was heard to say during one enjoyable exchange of banter and nicely placed heckle, “We really are in another country now”.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
There are places on the planet in which Time and tradition suggests with a firm but pleasing hand that you should be on any given date. Marillion had already perhaps and with wonderful particular mischief, performed in the United States of America during the run up to the 2016 American Presidential election and their new album F.E.A.R. being an almost perfect backdrop to the constant drip feeding of reports and special analysis of what was happening across the water, across the great divide.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Halloween calls for the imagination to go into overdrive, a night in which revellers can mix with the weird, the wonderful and even Elmer Fudd’s Wassicly Wabbit if the call should be desired hard enough. Halloween is also the night of corporate holiday, the fast buck made, the night where perhaps some live very much in the moment of F.E.A.R.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Beware the anger of a patient man, don’t let his gentle voice, melodious, gentle and at all times spiritual speech, his wonderment of expression, fool you, don’t be deceived by the nature of the man because when he is angry, when he finally snaps and decides to come out fighting, that is the greatest wrath of them all and you can either batten down the hatches, join him in his fury or Fuck Everybody And Run.
If only I had kept all my tickets
from every train journey I had ever taken,
I have no doubt they would stretch
from here
to there
and back once more
and would only be exceeded
by the amount of music
I have filled my brain
with, track by track, song by song,
over countless miles
to Plymouth and my great grandfather’s
home by the cliffs in Saltash,
to Newcastle to watch a gig or ten
the hour it took to get to Birmingham
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
When all that remains is love, the human heart will feel peace. It is a love that has been kept firmly in the hearts of the tens of thousands of Marillion fans since the first moment they came across the band. When all that remains is love, then the complexity of human emotion can come shining through like the Lighthouse of Alexandria, it is talked of for all time and the beacon searches out both wrecks and salvation alike.
The Paris sunshine stretched out the morning
as though sheets of puff pastry
had been laid out and baked under a blasting
furnace and the fluffy flakes had found
time to build a type of intimate imitation
that the day
would be memorable.
The hotel was not the type of place
in which to soak up culture
and the talk of visiting Sacré- Cœur Basilica, success,
and finding the remains of Jim Morrison’s past, failure,
so the local French Arabia café became the pit stop
It was a secret,
one of those places you
were not aware of
until you were properly ready
to understand the significance of the change
it would bring
into your life and the preparation
into the adult that would stand bare naked one night
thirty years later
as the world became a more lonely place.
I found myself recalling the piece
that landed me my first part
inside the hallowed halls of the most exciting building
in the whole of Bicester and started to hum it,