Liverpool
David Nice
After 14 years as principal conductor, Vasily Petrenko has left the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in top-league shape. The players must be as thrilled as we are that his successor, Venezuelan Armenian Domingo Hindoyan, carries the flame, catches the spark, call it what you will, with a distinct personality of his own, combining clariy and elegance in baton-wielding with a very watchable physical freedom. This Proms programme was well-tailored to presenting the new incumbent and the skills of each orchestral department in equal measure, and the star soloist, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
“On the Ordinance Survey map, it has no name”, writes Andrew Michael Hurley, of the wood that nevertheless gives its name to his essay. “Clavicle Wood” provides the first chapter in the Test Signal: Northern Anthology of New Writing. It is a mediation on meaning, bountiful in its praise of a place that is, above all else, a repository of memories: “We’ve come to call it Clavicle Wood, my family and I, on account of my eldest son breaking his collarbone there twice when he was younger". Like all the writing in Test Signal, it belongs to the contemporary. Amid the terror of the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Merseyside rock’s taste for glowing lysergic locales defines The Coral’s tenth LP, Coral Island, a double concept album which makes them the house band in a seedy fairground full of sepia memories and sawdust spirits. Put this Island on the map with the acid-blot evocations of The Beatles’ concept single “Penny Lane”/“Strawberry Fields Forever”, and “Villiers Terrace”, the 1980 address where Echo & the Bunnymen first found the hot glow of youthful imagination and excess.Keyboardist Nick Power’s linking narration is voiced by singer/co-writer James Skelly’s 85-year-old grandfather Ian Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Breaking away from the outlandish shenanigans in Little Big Bear in the Canadian wilds of its first two series, this third outing for Tin Star brings Jack Worth (Tim Roth), wife Angela (Genevieve O’Reilly) and daughter Anna (Abigail Lawrie) back across the Atlantic to Liverpool to confront dirty secrets they’ve been running away from for 20 years. As you might expect, power, corruption and oodles of bloody violence are the order of the day.After the peculiar mixture of Ammonite preachers and Mexican drug cartels in series two, this return to basics could have proved to be a blessing, adding a Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This documentary is bittersweet viewing on quite a number of levels. First, it’s got all the glory and tragedy of the most compelling music stories: a Liverpool band struggling from humble beginnings, trying to find an identity, fraternity and fallings-out, coping with huge success and its aftermath – not to mention sex, drugs, mental illness and death. On top of that there’s a constant layer of narrative about the endless pressures of racism on black British musicians, told brilliantly both explicitly and in the micro-details of 1960s and '70s life.Maybe most devastating thing of all, though Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The enduring status of The Beatles shouldn’t distract from them having been one amongst many Liverpool bands while they found their feet. In October 1961, local impresario and Cavern Club DJ/MC Bob Wooler worked out that there were 125 active bands in Liverpool and its environs, and that he knew of 249 overall since he began working with music in the city.At that point, like The Beatles, King Size Taylor and the Dominoes were on the rise. They had come together in 1958 in Seaforth, north of Liverpool, as a union of rock ’n rollers The Dominoes and six-foot-five guitarist Ted “Kingsize” Taylor Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s a good few years since Judy Collins last toured Britain and Ireland, though in the US she’s rarely off the road. Over the last couple of years she has notched up more than 100 concerts (and an album) with Stephen Stills, who famously celebrated their 1960s love affair in the magnificent “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”. Her latest album, Winter Stories, with Jonas Field and Chatham County Line, had American critics reaching for superlatives and put her in the charts once more.Her eyes are still as blue and even up close you’d never guess she celebrated her 80th birthday last May Day. The pink Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In July 1961, the first issue of the Liverpool music paper Mersey Beat put three items on its front page. One was a surreal article by John Lennon titled Being a Short Diversion on the Dubious Origins of The Beatles. Another was a photo of Gene Vincent “at the Rialto Ballroom earlier this year, [signing] autographs for two young Liverpool beauties, Mary Larkin and Terry Shorrock.” The third was a piece on “Swinging Cilla,” “a Liverpool girl who is starting on the road to fame.” She has, readers were told, sung with The Big Three and the Hurricanes.Exactly two years after she became front page Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
It wasn’t really the orchestra’s night. Nor the soloists'. Nor, even, the conductor's. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir totally stole the show, well surpassing the incredibly high standards which they already regularly attain and performing not as a large symphonic chorus but as a something akin to one of the highly specialist choirs with which this country is blessed.That is not to say that all the others on the platform at Philharmonic Hall were at all under par – indeed, they were far from it, setting not one foot wrong in a performance which evidently stirred the audience. Sir Read more ...
Tom Baily
Shane Meadows has said that he always wanted to make a film where people didn’t talk. It’s homage to the European cinema he loves, with its preference for atmosphere over action, ambiguity over resolution, but it is also a way to confront an experience that lay dormant within his own life for too long. That is the trauma of the sexual abuse survivor, who is locked in silence and trapped by what cannot be said. If there were periods in The Virtues (Channel 4) that ambled along too slowly, or were simply too unbearable to watch, Meadows has achieved a redeeming climax in this final episode Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Circa Waves, the guitar-band from Liverpool, go over a storm at festivals and large venues. With simplicity, tightness and concentrated energy, they know how to play with the tension that can build between soft and hard, the yin and the yang of rock forms that continue to sound fresh because they're delivered with a sense of fun and the joy of making party music with catchy lyrics.This is their third album, and they live up to the promise they offered back in 2013, when they first burst on the scene with punchy and uncomplicated power pop, crafted to please, little jewels of songwriting, with Read more ...
james.woodall
Documentaries about the 20th century’s most fabled quartet keep coming. There’s no special call for The Beatles: Made on Merseyside (BBC Four), which looked at the group’s Liverpool beginnings, though at a stretch it could be argued that in the 50th anniversary year of their horrible break-up we need reminding of pop’s Biggest Bang in 1963. This was almost the film to do it. Yet for such an explosive moment in cultural history it was curiously downbeat.That might be because, as we were reminded throughout, the group’s genesis was scruffy and full of false starts. Liverpool in the 1950s seemed Read more ...