Issue 91 / August 2018

ISSUE 91 / AUGUST 2018
NEW MUSIC + CREATIVE CULTURE
LIVERPOOL
THE VRYLL SOCIETY / PUSSY RIOT
WAYNE SNOW / MELODIC DISTRACTION

Wed 29th Aug
Jake Clemons (USA)
Wed 29th Aug
Thu Jake 30th Clemons Aug (USA)
Protomartyr (USA) + Sauna Youth
Thu 30th Aug
Fri Protomartyr 31st Aug (USA) + Sauna Youth
WSTR
Fri 31st Aug
Tue WSTR 11th Sep
The Stairs + Silent-K + Peach Fuzz
Tue 11th Sep
Sat The 22nd Stairs Sep + Silent-K + Peach Fuzz
Spring King
Sat 22nd Sep
Sun Spring 23rd SepKing
Fish
Sun 23rd Sep
Mon Fish25th Sep
Pale Waves
Mon 25th Sep
Fri Pale 28th Sep Waves • SOLD OUT
Half Man Half Biscuit
Fri 28th Sep • SOLD OUT
Fri Half 28th Sep Man Half Biscuit
SPINN
Fri 28th Sep
Sat SPINN 29th Sep
Red Rum Club
Sat 29th Sep
Red Rum Club
+ The Jackobins + Life At The Arcade + Columbia
Wed + The 3rd Jackobins Oct + Life At The Arcade + Columbia
The Magic Gang + The Orielles
Wed 3rd Oct
Fri The 5th Oct Magic Gang + The Orielles
The Night Café
Fri 5th Oct
Fri The 5th Oct Night Café
Jilted John + John Otway
Fri 5th Oct
Sat Jilted 6th OctJohn + John Otway
Definitely Mightbe
Sat 6th Oct
Wed Definitely 10th Oct Mightbe
Maribou State
Wed 10th Oct
Thur Maribou 11th Oct State
Mo Gilligan AKA Mo the Comedian
Thur 11th Oct
Fri Mo 12th Gilligan Oct • Mountford AKA Hall, Mo Liverpool the Guild Comedian
of Students
The Coral
Fri 12th Oct • Mountford Hall, Liverpool Guild of Students
Fri The 12th Coral Oct
Elvana: Elvis Fronted Nirvana
Fri 12th Oct
Sat Elvana: 13th Oct Elvis Fronted Nirvana
Reverend And The Makers
Sat 13th Oct
+ RedFaces + Sophie & The Giants
Reverend And The Makers
Sat + RedFaces 13th Oct + Sophie & The Giants
The Men They Couldn’t Hang
Sat 13th Oct
Thur The 18th Men Oct They Couldn’t Hang
Bugzy Malone
Thur 18th Oct
Fri Bugzy 19th OctMalone
The Sherlocks
Fri 19th Oct
Fri The 19th Sherlocks
Oct
The Vryll Society
Fri 19th Oct
Sat The 20th Vryll Oct • SOLD Society OUT
Tom Grennan
Sat 20th Oct • SOLD OUT
Sun Tom 21st Grennan
Oct
Dermot Kennedy
Sun 21st Oct
Dermot Kennedy
First Aid Kit (SWE)
Thu First 25th Aid Oct Kit (SWE)
Neil Hilborn (USA)
Thu 25th Oct
Sat Neil 27th Hilborn Oct (USA)
The Southmartins
Sat 27th Oct
The Southmartins
Wed 24th Oct • Mountford Hall, Liverpool Guild of Students • SOLD OUT
Wed 24th Oct • Mountford Hall, Liverpool Guild of Students • SOLD OUT
Beautiful South & Housemartins Tribute
Fri Beautiful 2nd Nov South & Housemartins Tribute
Bad Sounds
Fri 2nd Nov
Sat Bad 3rd Nov Sounds
Ladytron
Sat 3rd Nov
Sat Ladytron
3rd Nov • SOLD OUT
Old Dominion (USA)
Sat 3rd Nov • SOLD OUT
Old Dominion (USA)
facebook.com/o2academyliverpool
twitter.com/o2academylpool
facebook.com/o2academyliverpool
instagram.com/o2academyliverpool
twitter.com/o2academylpool
youtube.com/o2academytv
instagram.com/o2academyliverpool
youtube.com/o2academytv
Fri 9th Nov • Mountford Hall, Liverpool Guild of Students • SOLD OUT
George Ezra
Fri George 9th Nov Ezra
Less Than Jake & Reel Big Fish (USA)
Fri 9th Nov
Fri Less 9th Nov Than Jake & Reel Big Fish (USA)
Shaun Ryder’s Black Grape
Fri 9th Nov
Sat Shaun 10th NovRyder’s Black Grape
The Carpet Crawlers
Sat 10th Nov
Perform ‘Selling Foxtrot By The Pound’
The Carpet Crawlers
Fri 9th Nov • Mountford Hall, Liverpool Guild of Students • SOLD OUT
Sat Perform 10th Nov‘Selling Foxtrot By The Pound’
Antarctic Monkeys
Sat 10th Nov
Fri Antarctic 16th Nov Monkeys
Absolute Bowie Presents
Fri 16th Nov
50
Absolute
Years
Bowie
of Bowie
Presents
Sat 5017th Years Nov of Bowie
UK Foo Fighters
Sat 17th Nov
Sat UK 17th Foo Nov • Fighters
SOLD OUT
Johnny Marr - Call The Comet Tour
Sat 17th Nov • SOLD OUT
Thur Johnny 22nd NovMarr - Call The Comet Tour
Limehouse Lizzy - 25th Anniversary Tour
Thur 22nd Nov
Fri Limehouse 23rd Nov Lizzy - 25th Anniversary Tour
Stillmarillion
Fri 23rd Nov
Sat Stillmarillion
24th Nov
Pearl Jam UK
Sat 24th Nov
Sat Pearl 24th Nov Jam UK
Heaven 17 + Propaganda (Ger)
Sat 24th Nov
Wed Heaven 28th Nov17 + Propaganda (Ger)
Natty - 10th Anniversary
Wed 28th Nov
Thur Natty 29th Nov - 10th Anniversary
Bars and Melody
Thur 29th Nov
Thur Bars 29th and Nov Melody
The Damned
Thur 29th Nov
Fri The 30th Damned
Nov
The Doors Alive
Fri 30th Nov
Sat The 1st Dec Doors Alive
Alabama 3
Sat 1st Dec
Fri Alabama 7th Dec 3
The Lancashire Hotpots
Fri 7th Dec
+ Stu Penders & Spladoosh
The Lancashire Hotpots
Sat + Stu 8th Dec Penders & Spladoosh
Slade
Slade
Sat 8th Dec
- Merry Christmas Everybody 45th Anniversary
Sat - Merry 8th DecChristmas Everybody 45th Anniversary
CKY + Sumo Cyco + Bullets and Octane
Sat 8th Dec
Sat CKY 8th Dec + Sumo • Mountford Cyco Hall, + Liverpool Bullets Guild and of Octane Students
Miles Kane + Cabbage
Tue Miles 11th Dec Kane + Cabbage
Bjorn Again
Tue 11th Dec
Fri Bjorn 21st DecAgain
Sex Pissed Dolls
Fri 21st Dec
Sat Sex 22nd Pissed Dec Dolls
Ian Prowse & Amsterdam
Sat 22nd Dec
Ian Prowse & Amsterdam
Cast
Sat Cast 22nd Dec
The Smyths
Sat 22nd Dec
Wed The 16th Smyths Jan 2019
Enter Shikari
Wed 16th Jan 2019
Sat Enter 26th Jan Shikari 2019
The ELO Show
Sat 26th Jan 2019
Tue The 5th ELO Feb 2019 Show
The Dead South (CAN)
Tue 5th Feb 2019
Thur The 7th Dead Mar 2019South (CAN)
Trixie Mattel
Thur 7th Mar 2019
Sat Trixie 25th May Mattel 2019
The Icicle Works
Sat 25th May 2019
The Icicle Works
Sat 8th Dec • Mountford Hall, Liverpool Guild of Students
Sat 22nd Dec • Mountford Hall, Liverpool Guild of Students
Sat 22nd Dec • Mountford Hall, Liverpool Guild of Students
WED 8TH AUG 7PM
STEVEN PAGE
WED 8TH AUG 7PM
STEVEN SAT 11TH AUG PAGE 7PM
MASSAOKE: GREASE VS
SAT 11TH AUG 7PM
DIRTY DANCING
MASSAOKE: GREASE VS
DIRTY SAT 18TH DANCING
AUG 9PM
WEAREYOU
FT. SAT WILL 18TH AUG ATKINSON, 9PM JASE
THIRLWALL WEAREYOU + MORE
FT. WILL ATKINSON, JASE
THIRLWALL TUE 21ST AUG + MORE 7PM
JAKE SHEARS (USA)
TUE 21ST AUG 7PM
JAKE WED 22ND SHEARS AUG 7PM(USA)
PUSSY RIOT:
WED 22ND AUG 7PM
RIOT DAYS
PUSSY RIOT:
RIOT FRI 14TH DAYS SEP 7PM
THE ANOMALY
FRI 14TH SEP 7PM
THE SUN 16TH ANOMALY SEP 7PM
JARET REDDICK
SUN 16TH SEP 7PM
JARET SAT 22ND REDDICK
SEP 6PM
CATHERINE MCGRATH
SAT 22ND SEP 6PM
CATHERINE MON 24TH SEP 7PM MCGRATH VILLAGERS
SAT 27TH OCT 7PM
THE LAFONTAINES RHYTHM OF THE 90’S
MON 24TH SEP 7PM
SAT 27TH OCT 7PM
- THE UP TOUR
THE LAFONTAINES RHYTHM MON 29TH OCT OF 7PM THE 90’S
- SAT THE 29TH UP SEP TOUR 6.30PM
THE BLINDERS
MON 29TH OCT 7PM
THE BLUETONES
SAT 29TH SEP 6.30PM
THE SAT 3RD BLINDERS
NOV 7PM
THE THU 4TH BLUETONES
OCT 7PM
TIDE LINES
SAT 3RD NOV 7PM
WILD FRONT
THU 4TH OCT 7PM
TIDE SUN 11TH LINES NOV 7PM
WILD FRI 5TH FRONT OCT 6PM
BRIX AND THE
SUN 11TH NOV 7PM
ODDITY ROAD
EXTRICATED
FRI 5TH OCT 6PM
BRIX AND THE
TUE 13TH NOV 7PM
FRI 5TH OCT 6PM
EXTRICATED
ODDITY ROAD
SHEAFS
THE DANIEL WAKEFORD TUE 13TH NOV 7PM
FRI 5TH OCT 6PM
EXPERIENCE
SHEAFS
SAT 17TH NOV 7PM
THE DANIEL WAKEFORD GRUFF RHYS
EXPERIENCE
SAT 6TH OCT 7PM
SAT 17TH NOV 7PM
A BAND CALLED
GRUFF SAT 24TH NOV RHYS 6PM
SAT 6TH OCT 7PM
MALICE
MORGAN JAMES - FROM
THE A BAND DEFINITIVE CALLED
SAT 24TH NOV 6PM
TRIBUTE TO WHITE TO BLUE TOUR
THE MALICE JAM
MORGAN JAMES - FROM
THE DEFINITIVE TRIBUTE TO WHITE FRI 30TH NOV TO BLUE 7PM TOUR
THE SAT 6TH JAM OCT 10PM
CLEAN CUT KID
SONNY FODERA
FRI 30TH NOV 7PM
SAT 6TH OCT 10PM
SAT 1ST DEC 7PM
PRESENTS: SOLOTOKO CLEAN CUT KID
ONLINE
SONNY FODERA
TOUR
THE WANDERING HEARTS
SAT 1ST DEC 7PM
PRESENTS: SOLOTOKO
SAT 8TH DEC 7PM
ONLINE WED 10TH OCT TOUR 7PM
THE WANDERING HEARTS
SAINT PHNX
GLASVEGAS
SAT 8TH DEC 7PM
WED 10TH OCT 7PM
10TH ANNIVERSARY SAINT SAT 15TH PHNX DEC 7PM
TOUR
GLASVEGAS
THE WEDDING PRESENT
10TH ANNIVERSARY SAT 15TH DEC 7PM
TOUR
THE WEDDING PRESENT
TICKETS FOR ALL SHOWS ARE AVAILABLE FROM
TICKETMASTER.CO.UK
TICKETS FOR ALL SHOWS ARE AVAILABLE FROM
TICKETMASTER.CO.UK
90
SEEL STREET, LIVERPOOL, L1 4BH
90
SEEL STREET, LIVERPOOL, L1 4BH
JAKE
CLEMONS
PLUS SPECIAL GUESTS
PLUS SPECIAL GUESTS
&
&
THUR 11TH OCT 7PM
THE SHE STREET BAND
THUR 11TH OCT 7PM
THE FRI 12TH SHE OCT STREET 6.30PM BAND
OMYO
FRI 12TH OCT 6.30PM
OMYO FRI 12TH OCT 6.30PM
NICK MULVEY
FRI 12TH OCT 6.30PM
NICK TUE 16TH MULVEY OCT 7PM
SUPERORGANISM
TUE 16TH OCT 7PM
SUPERORGANISM
WED 17TH OCT 7PM
HER’S
WED 17TH OCT 7PM
HER’S FRI 19TH OCT 6PM
KILA
+ FRI BILL 19TH BOOTH OCT 6PM
KILA
+ SAT BILL 20TH BOOTH OCT 7PM
WE ARE SCIENTISTS
SAT 20TH OCT 7PM
WE MON ARE 22ND OCT SCIENTISTS
7PM
ADY SULEIMAN
MON 22ND OCT 7PM
ADY THUR SULEIMAN
25TH OCT 7.PM
VILLAGERS
THUR 25TH OCT 7.PM
presents
presents
ticketmaster.co.uk
ticketmaster.co.uk
o2academyliverpool.co.uk
11-13 Hotham Street, Liverpool L3 5UF
o2academyliverpool.co.uk
Doors 7pm unless stated
11-13 Hotham Street, Liverpool L3 5UF
Doors 7pm unless stated
Venue box office opening hours:
Mon - Sat 10.30am - 5.30pm
ticketmaster.co.uk Venue box office opening • seetickets.com
hours:
gigantic.com Mon - Sat 10.30am • ticketweb.co.uk
- 5.30pm
ticketmaster.co.uk • seetickets.com
gigantic.com • ticketweb.co.uk
WEDNESDAY 29 AUGUST 2018
WEDNESDAY O2 ACADEMY2 29 AUGUST LIVERPOOL 2018
O2 ACADEMY2 LIVERPOOL

What’s On
September– November
Friday 21 September 8pm
Music Room
Trembling Bells
Thursday 11 October 7.30pm
Richard Thompson
Saturday 13 October 2018 7.30pm
On the Waterfront: Film
with Live Orchestra (cert U)
Saturday 20 October 8pm
Music Room
Liverpool Irish Festival
The Hot Sprockets
Friday 26 October 8pm
Owen Jones:
Building a New Britain
Sunday 25 November 2.30pm & 8pm
Music Room
A Theatr Mwldan Production
Catrin Finch &
Seckou Keita
Box Office
0151 709 3789
liverpoolphil.com
LiverpoolPhilharmonic
liverpoolphil
liverpool_philharmonic
Principal Funders
Principal Partners
Media Partner
Thanks to the City
of Liverpool for its
financial support
Image Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita

RAFFLE
CONSTELLATIONS PRESENTS
SUMMER
BBQS
WEDNESDAY -
SUNDAY
BBQ MENU AVAILABLE
A
DJS AT THE WEEKEND
SUBJECT TO CLOSURE DUE TO PRIVATE
HIRE OR TICKETED EVENTS
NEW
BIRD
SKATE
PARK
FUNDRAISER
MUSIC / RAFFLE / FOOD & BEV
SUNDAY 5TH
AUGUST
5PM - 12AM
CONSTELLATIONS PRESENTS
CONSTE
LIVE MUSIC
THURSDAYS
SUMMER
BBQ PARTIES
02/08/18
NEIL CAMPBELL
09/08/18
ANWAR ALI & DAVE OWEN
CONSTELLATIONS
a_ Greenland St, Liverpool
ol
w_ constellations.co
e_
info@constellations.co
t_
0151 3456 302

Festival of
Contemporary Art
14 July – 28 October
Free
biennial.com
Liverpool Biennial is funded by
Founding Supporter
James Moores

CONTENTS
New Music + Creative Culture
Liverpool
Issue 91 / August 2018
bidolito.co.uk
Second Floor
The Merchant
40-42 Slater Street
Liverpool L1 4BX
Publisher
Craig G Pennington - info@bidolito.co.uk
Editor-in-Chief
Christopher Torpey - chris@bidolito.co.uk
Media Partnerships and Projects Manager
Sam Turner - sam@bidolito.co.uk
Features Editor
Niloo Sharifi - niloo@bidolito.co.uk
Live Editor
Elliot Ryder - elliot@bidolito.co.uk
Digital and Social Media Officer
Alannah Rose - alannah@bidolito.co.uk
Design
Mark McKellier - mark@andmark.co.uk
Branding
Thom Isom - hello@thomisom.com
Student Society Co-Chairs
Daisy Scott - daisy@bidolito.co.uk
Sophie Shields - sophie@bidolito.co.uk
Proofreader
Nathaniel Cramp
Intern
Jude Torpey-Aldag
Cover Artwork
John Johnson
Words
Christopher Torpey, Del Pike, Becca Frankland,
Craig G Pennington, Josh Ray, Stuart Miles O’Hara, Julia
Johnson, Niloo Sharifi, Elliot Ryder, Sam Turner, Georgia
Turnbull, Conal Cunningham, Ailsa Beetham, Ian R
Abraham, Richard Lewis, Sinead Nunes, Cath Bore,
Jennie Macaulay, Joel Durksen.
Photography, Illustration and Layout
Mark McKellier, John Johnson, Robin Clewley,
Gareth Jones, Ryan Fallon, Alexander Sofeev, Ken
Grant, Tom Wood, Martin Parr, Meg Lavender, Kevin
Barrett, Keith Ainsworth, Freakbeat Films, Mook Loxley,
Adam Szabo, Daniel De La Bastide, Tom Gill.
Distributed by Middle Distance
Print, distribution and events support across
Merseyside and the North West.
middledistance.org.uk
9 / EDITORIAL
Editor-in-Chief Christopher Torpey embraces
the winds of change, as we welcome three new
members to our editorial team.
10 / NEWS
The latest announcements, releases and nonfake
news from around the region.
12 / THE VRYLL SOCIETY
Liverpool’s astral voyagers justify their
confident swagger with a debut album that
extends their cosmic trip into regions of
experimental discovery.
14 / MELODIC DISTRACTION
Liverpool locked in: the internet radio station
embracing the ethos of pirate broadcasts in their
attempt to provide the city with high quality 24-
hour radio.
16 / PUSSY RIOT – RIOT DAYS
Immortalised through their public acts
of defiance and revered by revolutionaries
across the globe, PUSSY RIOT’s latest act as a
collective has been described as “the greatest
punk show in the world”.
18 / ONE WOMAN SHOW
Josh Ray catches up with DAISY ERIS
CAMPBELL as she shoulders her father’s legacy
in Pigspurt’s Daughter, taking his story to the
end of the line while feeding into the narrative of
a new counterculture.
20 / NEW BRIGHTON REVISITED
Looking For Love in The Last Resort: three
decades of social change in New Brighton, told
through the photography of Tom Wood, Martin
Parr and Ken Grant.
22 / WAYNE SNOW
“I want to communicate with the language of
my time.” 12 hours in Liverpool with a strident
new voice in the global game of cosmic funk.
24 / JOHN MOORES
PAINTING PRIZE
The 60th anniversary of “the Oscar of the
British painting world” shows that contemporary
painting is still a blockbuster artform.
28 / SPOTLIGHT
We take a closer look at some artists who’ve
been impressing us of late: Yank Scally, Hannah
And The Wick Effect and Annexe The Moon.
30 / TABLE SCRAPS
The Birmingham-based heavy garage trio
talk about originality, the Strange Collective All-
Dayer and why they feel at home on Merseyside.
31 / WIRRAL NEW MUSIC
COLLECTIVE
A run of innovative live shows are bringing
some of Wirral’s most recognisable locations to
life in August – we look at what there is to look
forward to.
32 / TINY RUINS
From the River Avon to Auckland, Hollie
Fullbrook’s blues-tinged method of storytelling
is rooted the in the environment that has
nurtured her.
33 / PREVIEWS
Looking ahead to a busy August in
Merseyside’s creative and cultural community.
36 / REVIEWS
Roger Waters, Katy Perry, Dauwd and
Liverpool Calling reviewed by our team of
intrepid reporters.
46 / THE FINAL SAY
The news of Constellations’ closure, Craig
G Pennington believes, is an opportunity for us
to cast off the comfort blanket of protest, and a
chance to take matters into our own hands.
The views expressed in Bido Lito! are those of the
respective contributors and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of the magazine, its staff or the
publishers. All rights reserved.

AUGUST BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND
FEAT
BALEARIC DISCO - ANDY CARROLL & ROBIN JACKSON
BBQS / BERNIE CONNOR / BIDO LITO DJS / BUDDY KEENEN
GIN & LEMONADE - BEYONCE V JAY Z SPECIAL
RUMOURS OF FLEETWOOD MAC 40TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL
40 SLATER STREET, LIVERPOOL. L1 4BX
THEMERCHANTLIVERPOOL.CO.UK

EDITORIAL
Photo by Tom Gill
“Change is a vital
part of our DNA: it
prevents us from
becoming prisoners
of history”
Over the course of eight years and 91 issues, Bido Lito!
has had two Editors. It’s time for a change.
Change is coming in the form of our brand-new
editorial team, who we’re delighted to welcome on
board to the good ship Bido Lito! Features Editor Niloo and Live
Editor Elliot, ably assisted by our new digital guru, Alannah, will
be in charge of the next phase of the Big Pink Adventure. I, for
one, am massively thrilled by the whole prospect. Passing over
the Editor’s reins is an exciting, if slightly terrifying step: exciting
because the people picking them up will take the magazine in
all-new directions, bringing about a new lease of life for the pink
pages; and slightly terrifying because not even I’m sure which
way we’re going next! Once the initial wave of control-freakery
dies down, however, I’ll no doubt settle on a feeling of curiosity
and intrigue about what gems and stories our new editorial team
will unearth.
This change is coming because it is necessary, because it is
healthy, and because it is a whole lot of fun. Change is also a vital
part of our DNA, and we must respect that: it prevents us from
becoming prisoners of history.
We see change all the time in the stories we highlight come
across in the magazine, and there is so much we can learn from
its effects. We see it in the set of photography of a seaside
resort, taken from three different perspectives over a period of
three decades. We see it in the evolution of a group of musicians,
growing from buzz band to scene stalwarts, from first support
slot review to front cover artists. We see it in a dissident group
with a revolving cast of members who stay true to a revolutionary
message, and in the continuation of a Discordian ethos, passed
down from father to daughter. Sometimes the location stays the
same and the people and customs alter over time; sometimes
the people stay the same and the passage of time changes them;
sometimes it’s the message that stands the test of time while the
mouths speaking it differ. Whichever way the story unfolds, we
can learn a lot from change and the way we respond to it. And
it’s a subject that’s never going to get boring.
It is also with a pang of sadness that we see change being
visited on Constellations. Their situation – the expiry of their
lease and the decision of the landlord to sell the land on – is a
shitty one, like having the rug pulled out from underneath you.
It’s a similar situation to the one The Kazimier and Nation faced
in 2015 when their tenancies were cut short by another, more
lucrative development deal. This is something I’m reminded of
every day as I walk through the concrete jungle that is left of
Wolstenholme Square, once the epicentre of our community, now
presided over by apartment blocks. The reminder is also there in
the Cream logo painted on the wall of the office we now occupy,
and in the faded Kazimier sticker on the long-defunct buzzer on
the wall beside the door. These visual cues don’t cause me to
gnash my teeth at the injustices visited upon these much-loved
institutions, though. Venues come and go all the time, changing
name, changing location, even changing which trendy part of
town to settle in; it has ever been thus. Instead, they serve as
reminders that change is just part of the process, and that it
needn’t always be a barrier to success. Let’s hope that this is
true for Constellations – in fact, you can help make sure that their
upheaval is relatively unpainful and short by helping to support
them in their crowdfunder, which is live now.
Although I’m cautious about too much reminiscing about
the way things were, we can – and should – rally against
unnecessary disruptions to our creative environment that
threaten any future development. There’s only so long the
creative and artistic community can take being booted from one
undesirable part of town to the next before people just bugger
off. In writing this, I looked back at the first editorial I wrote in
2014, and I found a line that is as true now as it was then: “What
is without doubt is that there are an awful lot of creative oddballs
doing their own thing in this small corner of the world, not cowed
by the weight of the past, and forging their own paths. Perhaps
this is our greatest export.”
If Liverpool is to remain at the forefront of creativity and
excitement around all forms of culture, it is my view that Bido
Lito! needs to still be around in eight years’ time, and another
eight years after that. Why? Because this amazing place is going
to continue nurturing talented people with great stories who
make and dream up and do great stuff, and there needs to be
a way of documenting it. To be in with a chance of publishing
another 91 issues of comment and analysis of this weird and
wonderful place; to continue to inspire and challenge and profile
the next generation of Kazimiers and Stealing Sheeps; to truly
understand what it is that drives the amazing people who make
up this rich and diversely talented place – we need to embrace
change, as part our own desire to stay, if not ahead of the curve,
then at least to keep up with it. Whoever’s hand is on the tiller,
we owe it to the people of this fiercely talented city to make sure
that Bido Lito! remains a critical voice and a vital resource.
In another of my early editorials, I said that putting together
a record collection was a form of storytelling, in that the
selections and omissions you make from the vast amount of art
out there forms a narrative that is unique to you. (And having
just alphabetised my own record collection, I’m acutely aware
of how many curious twists and turns these tales have.) Putting
together a magazine is a very similar process, and it’s something
that I’ve enjoyed doing immensely; it has led me down various
unexpected paths of discovery, and I’ve learned so much about
the environment around us and how we each cultivate a different
relationship with it. I also look forward to seeing what stories our
new Editors are going to tell through the pages of Bido Lito! –
and I’m positive that you will too. !
Christopher Torpey / @CATorp
Editor-in-Chief
09

NEWS
Save Constellations
Constellations has been a bright star attracting people to the
Baltic Triangle in droves for the past five years. Now, perhaps
defeated by the allure of its own shine, its land is being
purchased by residential developers. Their lease is up at the
end of 2019. Perhaps this is the fate of all “up-and-coming”
areas that become bastions of cool. Nevertheless, Constellations
refuses to take a defeatist approach – they are determined to
make their last 18 months count. They are inviting creators,
promoters, artists, designers, musicians and anyone who’s ever
wanted to host an event to pitch ideas – events, art projects,
workshops, festivals, family days and collaborations. They’re also
launching a crowdfunding campaign to aid their exit strategy
from Greenland Street. So, if Constellations holds a dear place in
your heart, and you’d like to be part of their future, keep an eye
fixed on the heavens – you may have a role to play in securing the
place of Constellations in Liverpool’s ever-expanding cityscape.
Constellations
Indy Biennial
The sister festival to the Liverpool Biennial, the INDEPENDENTS BIENNIAL will be
celebrating grassroots artists and local talent in the city centre all the way through August.
Showcasing hundreds of artists in dozens of venues, you’ll have to consult the programme
online to get the full scope of what’s happening, but there are a few highlights for us. The
stately, disused George Henry Lee building on Church Street will be reopening to the public
as three floors of exhibitions and a pop-up cinema (more about that below), showcasing
work by Unio Collective, Tom Mallon and Disparity Collective. In the same vein, St. John’s
Market is being repurposed as a cultural and artistic gathering point. A series of emerging
artists will take over vacant units among the market stalls, threading a marketplace of
ideas through a bustling centre for commerce. Another group of artists, Not Just Collective,
will also explore the grey area between art and the material world, creating site-specific,
eco-friendly works to be displayed in a strip of green space – Rimrose Valley – currently
under threat with plans for an expressway. For more info about all of their events, visit the
Independents Biennial website.
Dasparity Colective
Anywhere Can Be A Cinema
The Craft
EMPTY SPACES CINEMA have been taking over odd spaces across the city, often under-used or
forgotten, and transforming them into cinemas, with pop-up screenings of cult and classic films. Their
aim is to reimagine vacancy as a social opportunity; emptiness is just a space that is yet to be filled.
Starting in August, Empty Spaces have a three-month residency in the basement of the old George
Henry Lee building on Church Street as part of the Independents Biennial. They opened with an
International Short Film festival in July, and each upcoming month’s screenings are themed. August
is Don’t Cry, Shopgirl, celebrating Saturday jobs, going to school and the joys of working on the
front line in retail. It’s The Craft (5th August), Shop Around The Corner (12th August), Clerks (19th
August) and Little Shop Of Horrors (26th August) make up the run, and you can buy tickets now from
emptyspacescinema.com.
Sound City: From Liverpool To Korea
As part of its growing artist development project, SOUND CITY is inviting UK musicians to apply
for an exciting opportunity in South Korea. South Korea’s music industry is fast growing, and Sound
City has been engaged an initiative to forge links between it and UK artists. Successful applicants
will showcase their work in early October at two of South Korea’s most important industry events:
MU:CON and ZANDARI FESTIVAL. Sound City will provide funding to attend the showcases,
alongside Arts Council England’s International Showcase fund. This is the fourth year that Sound
City will take artists to MU:CON and Zandari: artists looking to apply should be based in England
and include details of their current UK and international activity in their application as well as links
to their music. The application process closes on 27th July – head to soundcity.uk.com to fill out the
form. For the non-musical among us, we are content to know that the planning of next year’s Sound
City is already underway, and will take place between 3rd and 5th May, 2019 across the Baltic
Triangle and Cains Brewery.
Nelson’s Coming Home
Bido Lito! favourite MC NELSON makes his Liverpool debut as a headline act
for Punch Records’ second Welcome To MY City tour. Punch have selected
five artists making movements in their local music scene, and will visit each of
their cities on tour, with each event headlined by that city’s artist. This will be a
triumphant moment for London-based rapper MC Nelson, finally bringing home
his meticulous, many-layered rhymes and jarring jazzy beats to the city that
helped create them. He will be joined at EBGBS on 29th August by a talented
line-up, each also working in the exciting grey area of ‘hybrid’ music: with
London genre-bender JEROME THOMAS’ soothing RnB-infused tones, soulful
offerings from Southampton-based SVGA, Birmingham rapper LADY SANITY
and VANESSA MARIA, Manchester’s celestial synth-popper, the tour will be an
eclectic tasting menu for the future of UK music.
Back In 89
Bold Street Coffee
It was with a huge sigh of relief that we saw BOLD STREET
COFFEE get over the line on their recent Kickstarter campaign,
but we needn’t have been overly worried; they ended up
comfortably over their £30,000 target, and have since started
work on renovating the premises at 89 Bold Street. The new
space is going to be split across two floors, with an extended
kitchen serving even more food options, and with more space
available for events and exhibitions. The extra proceeds
pledged by their backers will be put to use installing a bar, so
that we can enjoy the delightful Bold Street Coffee atmosphere
over some cool beers as well as cool frappés. We genuinely
can’t wait to get back in there – well done to all involved!
10

DANSETTE
Stephen Fitzpatrick and Audun
Landing – aka Her’s – reveal the
influences on their debut album
Invitation To Her’s.
Big LIMFin’
LIMF Academy’s three Most Ready artists
were announced back in June, representing
the cream of Liverpool’s emerging talent
crop. The trio – KYAMI, LUNA, and RAHEEM
ALAMEEN – were named as the artists
who would receive a suite of incredible
development opportunities and funding to
take them on a step or two in their bright
careers. To celebrate the start of their journey
with LIMF Academy, Bido Lito! invited all
three into the sunny surrounds of Lark Lane’s
Motor Museum Recording Studios to each
lay down a track. Sitting pretty on bidolito.
co.uk now, you can witness the future of
Liverpool music in three fabulous VTs.
Kyami
The Internal Chaos
Fresh from her first solo show in Berlin, THAT GIRL, aka Johanna
Wilson, brings a series of hand-pulled screen print artworks to
Buyers Club for her first UK exhibition. Launching on Wednesday
8th August at 6.30pm, The Internal Chaos is a collection of surreal,
cut-and-paste CMYK collages that Jo has been working on since
the beginning of the year, each one restricted to a small batch of
10-15 to enhance the limited-edition nature of the run. This lovingly
put-together exhibition shows a different side to Jo’s creative output,
which readers may be more familiar with from the milieu of gig
posters and prints. Often working with musicians and events in
Liverpool, Jo works with fellow artist Laura Kate Draws to create
a number of prints for other artists under the banner of The Paper
Moon. Entry is free for the duration of the exhibition, with a launch
event on International Oatcake Day (8th August) from 6.30pm – the
first 20 people through the doors will receive a free A3 colour screen
print, and a complementary oatcake!
Martin Rev
Mari
Infidelity
We draw a lot of inspiration
from early synthy bands
such as Suicide and also
Martin Rev’s solo work. The
New York synth punk scene
has always appealed to us, with its sensitive leather clad
rockabillies singing of romance and dreams. In particular,
Rev’s 1980 track Mari stood out to us as a point of
reference. It’s driving and hypnotic, but also melodious. It
builds towards a climax with layers of synth and harmony
while the drum machine simply drives on, much like how
we started out. AL
R. Stevie Moore
Cuss Me Out
R. Stevie Moore
Cassette Club
As we’re both mega fans of
Ariel Pink it’s only fitting that
we’d be strong supporters
of the godfather of home recording, R. Stevie Moore. He’s
always there for us when we’re looking to incorporate
more lo-fi sounds. Whether it’s putting delay on a crooked
sounding acoustic guitar, or running synths through
various dumb pedals, it’s usually an attempt to recreate
some of that R. Stevie magic. SF
Tusk For Life
Pam Hogg
That Girl
Bido Lito! has been in the mixtape lab with art aficionados
The Royal Standard to come up with the perfect playlist
for Baltic Triangle hub TUSK. The bar restaurant sits in the
heart of the Northern Lights complex, which is home to
a wide range of creative enterprises from Sort Rehearsal
Rooms to Ethos magazine. As such, we will be creating
an imaginative mix of sounds perfect for whiling away
the daytime hours in the Baltic base. Many of The Royal
Standard’s 46 studio members will be feeding into the
mix, which is sure to stimulate the mind and be the ideal
accompaniment to an afternoon August latté.
Boss Bank Holiday
The ingredients to a perfect bank holiday weekend are as follows:
plenty of booze, good food, boss company and the finest party
tunes. Whether you’re into Fleetwood Mac, Balearic bangers or
psych nuggets, this 24th-27th August, The Merchant has you
covered. The award-winning Slater Street bar has an action-packed
roll call of DJs including ANDY CARROLL & ROBIN JACKSON and
BERNIE CONNOR plus nights devoted to everyone’s favourite
RnB power couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z plus a celebration of the
40th anniversary of Fleetwood Mac’s album Rumours. There’ll also
be barbecues, Nightcrawler’s famous pizzas and Bido Lito! DJs
spinning some jams.
Pam Hogg’s Divine Disorder
Running until 26th August, the Liverpool Gallery presents iconic
fashion designer PAM HOGG’s first solo exhibition. Known for
challenging traditional concepts of feminine style since the early
80s, Hogg has left an indelible mark on pop culture history. Her
band, Doll, opened for Blondie in 1993 and The Raincoats in
1994. Her iconic skin-tight designs have been worn by Debbie
Harry, Siouxsie Sioux, Björk, Kylie Minogue and Paula Yates.
Pam Hogg continues to create, direct, produce and style her
collections, shown each season at London Fashion Week.
Her appeal has endured; her clothes are requested by today’s
mainstream pop artists regularly. Curated by Pam Hogg and
DuoVision, this exhibition will feature art, portraits, clothes and
pieces from a career re-defining popular culture.
Santo & Johnny
Tear Drop
Canadian-American
Records
One of the few duos we
listen to; Santo & Johnny are
our go-to guys for slide and
Hawaiian influences. These two practically soundtracked
the one summer we had when living together, which made
for some exceptional bonding. So it’s no surprise that we
featured some similar sounds on the album. SF
Minnie Riperton
Lovin’ You
Epic
We’ve got a lot of history with
this song – from an impromptu
cover we nervously performed
at our second gig, and a
drunk YouTube video of the performance uploaded by our
manager at the time, its haunted us ever since. Somehow it
seems there’s always someone at our gigs who requests it!
We love the track, too, so we started off this entire album
cycle by recording our own version of it, which definitely
set the tone for things going forward, you can even catch
some bird song hidden on the album! AL
Invitation To Her’s is released on 24th August via Heist Or
Hit. Head to bidolito.co.uk now for a full list of song choices
on the Her’s Dansette.
NEWS 11

12

Liverpool’s astral voyagers justify their confident swagger with a debut
album that extends their cosmic trip into regions of experimental discovery.
The swirling noise and confident swagger
of THE VRYLL SOCIETY feels like part of
the furniture, with the band having been an
integral part of Liverpool’s live circuit for some
four years. Rarely does a gig from the five-piece go by
without a barrage of positive reviews, and the group’s
fanbase is growing beyond the boundaries of the city. It’s
been a steady build and, with their first full-length LP due
this summer, it’s difficult to recall a more highly-anticipated
debut album.
Course Of The Satellite is the most summery album you’ll
hear this year and its achingly retro cover alone is enough
to cause tremors in the most hardened of musos’ hearts. The
trippy world of dream-like geometric patterns may conjure up
an essence of prog – and comparisons to Floyd, the Stones and
early Verve are rife – but the band are very much in the here and
now. The music has been described as many things, but shining
out from its soul at all times is a ray of pure psychedelia, made all
the more palatable by tight arrangements and sweet vocals from
Ian Brown-alike frontman Mike Ellis.
The album follows on the heels of a string of wildly satisfying
singles, which have been unspooling into ever more proggy
territory since 2015’s Pangea EP; the recent Self Realization/La
Jetee double A-side in 2016, followed by last year’s taster singles
Shadow Of A Wave and Sacred Flight. Course Of The Satellite is a
seamless progression from this, and finds the band pushing forward
into uncharted territories, while retaining the sound that has built their
following so far.
Guitarist Ryan Ellis is the brother
of vocalist Mike and very much an
ideas man. Together with bassist Ben
Robinson, he joins us to discuss the
four-year gestation period of Course Of
The Satellite, which Ben admits “came
out much better than we thought… When
we go to the studio it’s all under the
microscope. In the practice room you can’t
hear certain things, but in the studio you
can hear everything and it’s all ironed out
perfectly.”
The band are clearly pleased with the
album and are eager to talk about it. Like many
Liverpool musicians, they are young and hugely
grateful with the way fate has led them to this
point. Throughout the course of the morning it’s
refreshing to share in the laughter and pick up on their enjoyment of simply being
in a great band. Still, I ask them if the four-year wait for an album was part of any
kind of master plan or them dragging their heels.
“Halfy-half,” admits Ryan. “We stayed in the practice room for a while making
sure everything was perfect before we went out touring. Then we had to just wait for
some money to come in so we could actually go and do the album.”
“We toured too much,” adds Ben, with a certain frankness. “Too many gigs, too
close together. After a couple of years of doing loads of festivals we kind of stopped for
a bit to focus on planning the album. Three or four of the songs on the album were only
written two months or so before we went into the studio. We knew what we needed for
the album and if we didn’t have it then we needed to write it.”
The Vryll live experience is much more visceral than the album sounds, with a certain
amount of control exercised on the recorded material. I ask if this is a conscious decision –
or even something they notice?
“When we play live we don’t want to just sound like any other band playing, y’know?”
explains Ben. “We want to sound amazing and as good as we possibly can, so we’ve
tightened it up a lot and introduced some new sounds.”
It has been well documented that the band were founded and nurtured by the muchmissed
Alan Wills for his now iconic Deltasonic label, but this is a vital part of the Vrylls’ story.
The label’s stable of great bands (including The Coral, The Zutons, Hidden Charms and now
Psycho Comedy) are all vital to Liverpool’s musical geography, and The Vryll Society are an
integral part of that picture. The band were a major component in Alan’s future plans, and their
success feeds from his legacy.
“It’s a very big deal for us to be on that label,” Ben tells me. “Alan was there for us from the
start, he came to our praccy room when we were rubbish, he came down and said, ‘You need to
do this and that’. His take was, ‘If you want to do this – do as I say and if you don’t then don’t’. We
were just like, ‘Fucking hell!’ cos he was so harsh, but it was so worth it.”
“In the end you just think it’s hilarious, how harsh some of the stuff he’d say was,” agrees Ryan,
to which Ben adds: “He didn’t give a fuck – he said what he thought and that was it. If he didn’t
“Each time we go into
the studio we find out
what works and what
doesn’t work, and we
keep what works. You
can’t just stick with the
same sound forever”
like it, he didn’t like it. But the thing was, he’d proved himself, he was able to have
that cockiness. Now as Ann [Heston, Alan’s partner] has taken over, she’s helping so
much, doing so much work for us; they’re both so important to us.”
Intrigued by how far they’ve come since first being taken on as Wills’ last
protégés, I ask if they think Alan would be satisfied with the album all these years on.
“Yeh, I reckon he would,” says Ryan.
“He’d probably still be finding things to improve,” Ben adds, a smile starting to
creep across his face. “He’d be prowling round the studio going, ‘Get rid of it’ and we’d
be going, ‘We don’t know what it is!’ [laughs].”
Joining in the joke, Ryan mimics a Wills saying: “‘What’s that frequency there?!’”
“The thing is, we’ve done everything he told us to do, so I’m sure he’d be happy,”
Ben says, and the catch in his voice speaks volumes about the reverence they still
have for their old mentor.
Since their early outings, originally as Dirty Rivers, The Vryll Society have seen a
lot come and go in the city’s music scene – and they’re also keenly aware of what’s
gone before them. Now that they’re part of the high watermark for guitar music in the
city, I wonder if they’re at all daunted by the weight of history.
“It’s not a competition is it?” Ben replies. “We’re doing our own thing and those
bands were doing their own thing, so it’s all good. We don’t try to maintain a Liverpool
sound; all our main influences are American and German, like Kraftwerk and Can, so
we don’t take too much inspiration from other Liverpool bands, not purposefully. But,
coming from here you’re always going to have a certain swagger.”
The artwork for Course Of The Satellite, by Jack Hardwick, points to another of
the band’s many strings, that of a strong visual aesthetic. It’s a clear reflection of the
music inside and I ask the band how the imagery came about. Ryan whips out his
phone to show me images by Victor Vasarely, the Hungarian-French op artist who has
been their main influence. “It’s incredible how these Technicolor psychedelic images
are from the 1930s,” he says.
The album cover is a continuation of themes
introduced on the sleeve of their Andrei Rublev single
which appears to be a mix of Dali and the Red Room in
Twin Peaks. Film influences also loom large in The Vryll
Society’s world. I ask if they’re happy to be connected
to the world of prog that the sleeves reflect, and find
them quite defensive of the genre.
“No, no, we’re into all that stuff,” asserts Ryan.
“Some of it’s really good anyway, so it doesn’t matter
that much, as long as it looks good.”
With song tiles like Andrei Rublev, Metropolis and
La Jetee appearing on Course Of The Satellite, it can’t
be ignored that classic European cinema is also an
influence on the group.
“That’s Mike. We dabble in it, but he loves his old
films,” clarifies Ben, which Ryan expands upon: “If I’m
watching a film and I hear some good sounds, then I’ll
take a bit of it; but Mike writes about the films in his own way, he knows what’s going
on. He puts the stories into his own words.”
In a previous interview with this publication, frontman Mike elaborated on these
influences in his own way, giving more of a background on where his lyrical dexterity
takes the band: “It’s easier for me to write abstract, instinctual stuff inspired by movies
and other things – bits of jazz that I hear. I like soundtracks, really patient pieces of
music with a feeling that the story is beneath them.”
“It’s more than just listening to the music,” Ben says, when asked about how all
of these elements contribute to a direction the band is heading in. “We want to make
our shows more than just going to a gig, more of an experience. We’ll be going on tour
in October, too, putting on a show for the album. We’ll be getting this thing built for
the back of the stage, it will be completely unique to us, no-one else will have one, it’s
never been done before. It’s going to be quite 3D.”
Throughout our conversation, the band naturally dip back into their influences,
namechecking Air and Pink Floyd alongside wig-out stuff from the Disco Halal label,
and even “electronic dance and weird Norwegian shit”. Theirs is an outlook that is
constantly evolving and open to new ideas, and it bodes well that this album hasn’t
been rushed from the first thing they settled on. It’s indicative of another trait they’ve
learnt from Alan Wills: that you don’t rush things until all the pieces are in place.
“Each time we go into the studio we find out what works and what doesn’t work,
and we keep what works,” says Ben. “You can’t just stick with the same sound forever.” !
Words: Del Pike / @del_pike
Photography: John Johnson / johnjohnson-photography.com
soundcloud.com/the-vryll-society
Course Of The Satellite is released on 10th August via Deltasonic Records, with a
listening party at Jacaranda Records Phase One on 3rd August.
FEATURE
13

“Radio should be
a safe space that
is accessible
to everyone”
MELODIC
DISTRACTION
Liverpool locked in: the internet radio station embracing the ethos of pirate broadcasts in their attempt to
provide the city with high quality 24-hour radio.
The tiny front window on the corner of Jamaica Street
and Brick Street could be easily missed by passers-by,
but the modest space within the Baltic Triangle is well
worth taking note of once you know what’s inside. It’s
the home of MELODIC DISTRACTION, a bustling internet radio
station, online magazine and events programmer, responsible for
bringing together local talent and international artists across all
genres.
The passion project between directors Josh Aitman and
James Zaremba started through event promotion back in 2015,
but with such a wide range of artists and promoters on their
doorstep, they decided they wanted to do more – they wanted
to archive one of the most exciting music scenes in the UK. And
so, the foundations for Melodic Distraction as we know it today
started to take shape.
“We found the physical location of the studio in October
2016,” recalls studio manager Tom Lye. “It was rubbish, there was
nothing in here, there was a porcelain toilet in the middle of the
floor that wasn’t attached to anything.” These days, its shabby
beginnings are almost unimaginable: the space is fully kitted out
with studio equipment, a huge corner couch and – scanning your
eyes across the room – there are frequent nods to people who
have been involved in making Melodic what it is; a flyer here, a
sticker there and a friendly face popping in on the hour.
Melodic Distraction has become a place for Liverpool’s music
community to explore, meet and promote, while becoming an
online destination for all to access. But it’s never been just about
supporting artists, the team have been working towards getting
budding creatives involved and exposing them to an occupation
which isn’t always advertised in schools.
Nina Franklin, who was initially employed by MD through the
council-funded projects called Ways To Work, tells us, “None of
us have gone through formal music training or have degrees in
music, but there’s so many different jobs in the industry, there
are ways to make it work.” And through community-focused
creative workshops and internships, the team are successfully
introducing young people to one of the most exciting professions
and hobbies out there.
“You’ve got to look at the people who don’t have access to
music education,” adds Tom. “If they put out a radio show, or get
introduced to a certain type of music, they can then realise how
accessible it all can be.”
But, as with most projects of this nature, funding is often
the crux. “It’s been 10 years since Liverpool was the Capital of
Culture,” Tom points out, “and there have been lots of benefits,
the Baltic Triangle wouldn’t be what it is today without a lot of
the funding which came through from it, plus we have some
great museums and events. But how much more good stuff could
there be?”
So far, the team have welcomed underground selectors like
Scuba, John Morales, Jayda G, DJ Boring, Tim Sweeney, Crazy P,
Ross From Friends and many more as guests alongside heaps
of local talent, and they are currently broadcasting six days a
week, through afternoon and evening slots. But now, the team
have just embarked on probably their biggest mission to date –
making the station broadcast 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
To help make this happen they have launched a Kickstarter
campaign, which will help fund a brand-new website, a mobile
app for Android and iPhone and loads more radio shows, parties
and community-focused projects. To accomplish this, they are
looking to raise £10,000 to pay for the digital infrastructure
required to achieve full-time internet radio capacity.
“We’re always pushing to improve the station,” explains
Tom. “This will allow the crew here to keep on top of radio
shows while having the ability to increase shows and
realistically do so. Radio should be a safe space that is
accessible to everyone so that they can experiment and play
music that they like, but it can only be that if the support
is there for it to happen. Which means additional tech and
getting more and more people involved in the music industry in
Liverpool.”
The undoubtable importance of Melodic Distraction within
Liverpool reflects the significance of internet radio as a whole
within the music industry, and more specifically for local scenes.
“It’s a modern day pirate radio in a way,” says Tom. “And you can
tune into a station which is broadcasting out of Moscow, or you
can listen to someone who is coming out of LA or Peru. Internet
radio stations are important because they’re a little archive of
what’s going on at a certain time in a certain place.”
Melodic Distraction sews together musicians, promoters,
record collectors, labels, producers, bloggers, festival organisers
and more, and their impact will be commented on by almost
any of their extended family. “It’s like joining dots between
everything that goes on,” continues Tom. “I think, historically,
Liverpool has had a strong music scene for sure, it’s been
stronger in certain areas which haven’t allowed others to grow.
This is hopefully allowing people to focus on what they enjoy
doing within music, it can be anything and everything, which is
why I like to see the archive of shows that we’ve got.”
When exploring the archive online, it’s clear to see the
all-encompassing approach Melodic Distraction takes. From
house to bass, reggae to techno, hip hop to disco, there really
is something for everyone. “Listen to some of the shows,”
encourages Tom, “some of them you might not like, some of
them you might like, some of them you won’t have heard and
some of them you will. But you never know what you might find
that paves the way for a new interest or relationship.”
In a climate where almost everything independent feels
threatened, there’s no better time to support something so
triumphantly local, and so boldly community-led. “Liverpool has
an enormously proud identity,” boasts Nina. “People who are not
native Scousers, they move here, fall in love and stay. To date
there haven’t really been any major channels which shout to the
rest of the country about the city. That’s what we try to do, not
just prove it to other people in Liverpool, but we’re shouting to
everyone else.” !
Words: Becca Frankland / @beccafranko
Photography: Ryan Fallon / @filmfallon
Tune in to the latest broadcasts from Melodic Distraction at
melodicdistraction.com, where you will also find how you can
support them via their Kickstarter project.
14

Independents Biennial
2018
14 July - 28 October
Let the art take over
200 artists
250 new works
70 locations accross Liverpool, St Helens,
Wirral, and Sefton
Putting Merseyside artists on the map
www.artinliverpool.com
@indybiennial
#IB18
in partnership with
supported by

PUSSY RIOT
– RIOT DAYS
16

Immortalised through their public
acts of defiance and revered
by revolutionaries across the
globe, PUSSY RIOT’s current
touring performance has been
described as “the greatest punk
show in the world”. Liverpool,
you have been warned.
Nobody does contradiction like Russia. A state that
venerates its 20th century socialist history despite
going gaga for free-market capitalism since 1991. A
dangerous place for the LGBTQ community, where
there is no distinction between paedophilia and homosexuality
in popular opinion, with gay beaches on the Moskva river. You
can fly a rainbow flag with pride – provided you know it’s the flag
of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (one of Russia’s most distant
federal subjects, bordering China’s Heilongjiang province). A
place where Eastern Orthodoxy and the state operate in each
other’s pockets: see the 2014 film Leviathan, which depicts the
struggle of a Murmansk mechanic as the crooked mayor extorts
him out of the land under his house, the eventual site of a lavish
new church. The film was part-funded by the Russian Ministry of
Culture.
Marya (Masha) Alyokhina’s new book Riot Days hasn’t seen
any of that money. It tells of her participation in PUSSY RIOT’s
performance of their anti-Putin Punk Moleben (Punk Prayer)
in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in February 2012.
She and two other members, Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova
and Yekaterina Samutsevich, were tried in 2013 in a case that
captured the attention of the democratic free(r) world thanks to
the actions of Alexander (Sasha) Cheparukhin (more from him
later). The following year they were released under amnesty,
but not before Nadya started high-profile correspondence with
Slavoj Žižek, and Masha was nominated for the 2014 Hannah
Arendt Prize for Political Thought. 2012 was a while ago, so it
might be worth revisiting Pussy Riot. They’re a loose collective
of Russians musicians, activists and video artists known for
guerrilla performances in Day-Glo balaclavas. It’s ironic that
their rise to fame outside of Russia was driven by Masha,
Nadya and Yekaterina’s court appearances in mufti. Indeed,
through punk values-as-PR, they’re now better known outside
of Russia, though they have pro-Putin and pro-church media to
contend with at home. They staged protests at the Sochi Winter
Olympics, and most recently on the pitch at the World Cup
Final in Moscow, although the western media didn’t report their
treatment at the hands of Cossack security in anything like as
much detail as their arrests in 2012.
Riot Days is a performance piece based on Masha’s memoirs
from this period, but is more than just a blow-by-blow account
(most prisoners of the Russian state can show you the bruises).
Researching this piece, I saw an American review that really tried
to appraise Riot Days as a musical performance, commenting on
the basslines and exactly when the saxophone was deployed.
But that’s putting the cart before the horse. When John Robb
of Louder Than War described the Manchester date (“Where
the chemistry and heat between the band and audience were
hottest,” says Sasha) as “the best punk show ever”, he means the
whole thing: the attitude, the form, the content, the atmosphere.
Pussy Riot could be just a band writing songs, but Masha et al
have transcended that.
“The thing is, I wasn’t even the first person in Pussy Riot,”
she says. “I was maybe the 27th. I wasn’t one of the main
guys. And I can get kind of crazy with the attention, being the
front person of this show. I got the book deal and Sasha – who
organised the PR campaign during the trial and got support from
musicians like Madonna, Sting, and Peter Gabriel – he spent a
year trying to persuade me to make a show out of it, before the
book was even published. So the book came first, but we did the
first show before anybody read it. This is the best way to do the
book on stage.”
The conversation, beamed from a dressing room in Slovakia
where the collective are currently touring, soon turns to their
Liverpool appearance at Arts Club on 22nd August. I mention
the reactionary tendency in Liverpool, be it contentious – Militant,
rioting in the 1910s, 1980s and 2010s – or fruitful – strong
political awareness marked by allegiances which, at times, have
rejected or pre-empted the national electorate. There’s also the
creative manifestation of that attitude, such as the output (more
than mere verse) of Adrian Henri, or the early work of Craig
Charles, amongst the first punk poets to bear that title.
“We’re hoping for a good show in Liverpool,” Sasha chimes in
– he’s acting as tour manager. “You know when I started writing
to celebrities [during the trial], I wanted to get in touch with Paul
McCartney, because he’s a god in Russia, bigger than any of
those other guys. But, of course, when he visited, it was under
the state, Putin was his personal guide around the Kremlin. But
when I wrote, he responded in under an hour with an incredibly
strong statement. Later, he sent two handwritten letters,
addressed to the specific judges of one of the trials and the
parole hearing. So they were presented in court as statements.
He means much more than all the signatures together.”
The book had to be self-published in Russia, with positive
reviews in the underground press and a very rare accolade from
dramatist Vladimir Sorokin, who described it as “honest, bitter,
and brilliant”. That’s the equivalent to a soundbite from Ian
McEwan. She’s published by Penguin in the UK, but this isn’t a
typical book tour. What will people see when they come to Riot
Days?
“It’s a personal story,” Masha replies, “telling of the escape
from the police, from trial to prison to prison colony. It’s not a tale,
though, it’s a punk manifesto, with a lot of poetry and literature.
On the tour, people will see/hear readings from the book, in a
combination of music, like the most important early songs by
Pussy Riot, theatre and visual elements.”
Who else is on this tour with you?
There is Nadya, who has been my friend since we were nine
and introduced me to Pussy Riot. She wrote some of the songs,
and plays the saxophone while her boyfriend Max plays bass:
together they’re known as AWOT – Absent Women On the
Telephone. And there’s Kiril, a Belarusian actor who toured the
UK with me for a theatrical project called Burning Doors. So, four
people on stage, and Vasily, who is the Pussy Riot VJ, he does live
stuff from inside the group, and there are [sub]titles too because
the readings are in Russian.
Where have you taken the show so far?
Everywhere, probably 60-70 shows so far. Both coasts of
the USA – Olympia, WA was probably the most rock ’n’ roll –
Australia. In the UK we played Glasgow, Manchester, Brighton,
two shows in London, Falmouth. Then Germany, Austria,
Switzerland, Poland and Slovenia. We only played two shows in
Russia, an alternative theatre and an art gallery, both in Moscow.
We couldn’t get booked anywhere else. People didn’t want to
take that risk, in case of a possible backlash.
Did you notice different reactions depending on where you
played?
Yes and no. The show is, in a way, universal. It’s not just Putin’s
Russia. It’s about people’s will wherever you are. There is no
country around the world where people have no fear, no place
where you can’t risk personal and psychological comfort to say
something against injustice.
Is there a need to protest wherever you might be, irrespective
of time and place?
Anywhere there is a reason, an agenda, yes. Maybe not
continually, but freedom only exists when you work at it every day.
Is this show a kind of protest?
“Everyone
can be [in]
Pussy Riot”
Yes. A protest against fear, against cynical conformism and
passiveness. It says you can do anything, but you have to do it.
My spell in prison wasn’t hopeless. I won three of four cases! But
what Pussy Riot did was still, in the eyes of the law, illegal. And
after it, propaganda did a lot too.
You’ve campaigned for prisoners’ rights in Russia. Have you
noticed an improvement, or at least some effect since 2012?
So… legislatively, things are worse in prison. That whole wave of
2011-12 protest caused a reaction. But though laws are harsher,
prisoners’ rights are much more in the public interest. It’s very
difficult in this repressive system, but it can be very effective too.
The behaviour of the state became worse, but we created Zona
Prava (justice zone), the only topical media outlet to focus on
[government malpractice], monitor that behaviour, and we got
some of the best lawyers too. It’s now between 7th and 8th place
in media ratings – that is, rate of quotation – so we’re rivalling
some of the big channels and being read by those who buy
newspapers and keep abreast of the mass media.
I notice you played Falmouth… that’s a different locale to your
other shows.
Sasha: That wasn’t through a booking agent, a personal invite. It
was where Masha rehearsed the Riot Days show. It was tiny but
completely full, and everybody was really into it.
This is key to punk – a grain of attitude which became a
cultural pearl, but whose greatest legacy is too often a cheap
necklace, costume jewellery a million miles from the oyster.
Recently Tor Ekeland, the son of a World War Two Norwegian
resistance fighter, tweeted about his dad’s recollection of the
war. He mentioned that acts of resistance don’t all need to be on
a large scale, or conclusively yield results, but can be small and
personal, provided they disrupt the status quo. Likewise, a small
venue at capacity may not contain multitudes on a national scale,
but in that room, you can have everybody onside, 100 per cent of
their attention, and then they take that small act of protest with
them when they leave and go their separate ways.
Pussy Riot aren’t a GOAT-discography-hit-single band.
They’re the musical, vocal, and visual expression of an ideology.
As Masha says, “Everyone can be [in] Pussy Riot”. !
Words: Stuart Miles O’Hara / @ohasm1
Photography: Alexander Sofeev
Pussy Riot: Riot Days takes place on 22nd August at Arts Club.
“It’s not a
tale, it’s
a punk
manifesto”
FEATURE
17

“You pull a cosmic
trigger and what you
release is a tsunami
of personal meaning
that you’ve then got
to make sense of”
ONE
WOMAN
SHOW
Having heroically wrangled the
chaos of last year’s Welcome To
The Dark Ages happening, Josh
Ray catches up with DAISY ERIS
CAMPBELL as she shoulders her
father’s legacy in Pigspurt’s Daughter,
taking his story to the end of the line
while feeding into the narrative of a new
counterculture.
How do you follow an act like Ken Campbell? A master
raconteur who could weave the most intricate
and hilariously surreal narratives, he was also a
cosmically-charged director who constantly smashed
the boundaries of theatre. He embodied a Pan-like presence
who’d thrust people towards realising their true genius (albeit,
often traumatically), and, most importantly, he possessed an
imagination so powerful it could turn myth into truth.
When Ken left this mortal coil 10 years ago, his daughter
DAISY ERIS CAMPBELL was faced with this very question. How
on earth was she meant to take the reigns of the Campbellian
tradition? How could she come up with an idea that his prolific
mind hadn’t already conjured up? How could she go “farther than
her father”?
Exploding onto the scene with his Ken Campbell Roadshow
in the early 70s, the formidable character directed the
fantastically insane Illuminatus! – first shown at the Science
Fiction Theatre of Liverpool ahead of the National Theatre –
before going on to explore the outer edges of improv in a 22-hour
endurance production titled The Warp, also breaking his way
onto TV screens on numerous occasions. Ken wrote prolifically;
from anarchic children’s plays to fictitious Canadian manuscripts,
above all else he was constantly weaving his own personal
myth, fully realised in a series of late-80s and early-90s one-man
shows: Furtive Nudist, Pigspurt and Jamais Vu.
Some pretty hefty footsteps to follow in… But luckily, Daisy
had been sufficiently prepared: “I was in deep from the age of 16.
I gave up school, kind of with his encouragement, and joined the
Tilly Matthews Academy Of Bizarre and Adventurous Education,
of which he was the only teacher and I was the only pupil.”
The Academy left her with everything she needed to direct
the revived behemoth, The Warp, at 18, keeping it alive for
another three years before co-creating a pidgin adaptation of
Macbeth alongside her father. Eventually she tried to find her
own path in life, but always found herself gravitating back.
“Whatever he was up to was totally where it was at!”
“His creative genius never switched off, even at home,” Daisy
continues. “If there was a way to do things that were unexpected,
joyous, mad and funny, he’d find it.” Ken was no different on
stage than he was at home and it was almost as if he’d stepped
into a role that he never left. “Life imitates art. I think that’s
what he discovered, and he was a person prepared to make the
sacrifice fully; of really becoming the character that he created. All
the way through – like Brighton Rock.”
Daisy laments the time she could have spent with him, had
she known he’d have left this planet so soon, but at the same
time she needed to blaze her own trail. “It was hard to find my
place within such a huge personality orbit,” she admits – but
she’d find herself back in the midst of the Campbellian narrative
soon enough though, and this would of course lead her to
Liverpool.
Ken had found Scousers to be highly adept in actualising
his visions during the 1976 Illuminatus! production and he
was constantly telling people, “Look, if you really want to get
anything done, on any kind of scale, go to Liverpool. That’s where
everyone will say yes – they love it!” Greg Scott-Gurner would
be one of those to take heed and would consequently start up
MelloMello and The Kazimier in disused buildings.
It would be in The Kazimier that Daisy became firmly reentangled
in her father’s web, using it to host a fundraiser for her
2014 Cosmic Trigger production, having been nudged towards
her father’s footsteps in adapting a work of Robert Anton Wilson.
The former Playboy editor had co-authored the mind-fuck
epic Illuminatus!, which has the potential to unravel the most
comprehensive belief systems with its perilous mix of paranoid
conspiracy, guerrilla ontology and hyper-complex in-jokes that
revolve around the veneration of the Greek goddess of Chaos,
Eris.
It became apparent to Wilson that he’d pulled a ‘cosmic
trigger’ with that book and in doing so unleashed unpredictable
forces on the world. Author John Higgs has most succinctly
defined its effects: “You pull a cosmic trigger and what you
release is a tsunami of personal meaning that you’ve then got to
make sense of.”
Wilson attempted to make sense of all this newfound
meaning in his 1977 book, Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret Of
The Illuminati, and this is what Daisy manifested in a mindexpanding
weekend at Camp and Furnace with a production
that would live on in London. It connected previously disparate
groups, creating a new underground culture that John Higgs’
multi-dimensional book The KLF: Chaos, Magic And The Band
Who Burned A Million Pounds has become a ‘gateway drug’ for.
One half of The KLF, Bill Drummond had built sets for Ken
on Illuminatus! and imbued all of his later work with the same
maverick thinking as his early mentor, forging his own mythos
alongside Jimmy Cauty when they rejected their mainstream pop
music acclaim and set their remaining profits alight in a disused
Jura boathouse.
When it was time for them to return last year after a 23-year
moratorium, they of course gravitated towards Liverpool, and as
these mythologies have a tendency to overlap, it was no surprise
to see Daisy had been whipped up into their plans for The JAMS’
Welcome To The Dark Ages. “It was intense. I mean, for three
days I was more-or-less the only person who had any inkling
about what was going to happen next. That was quite a full-on
thing to experience. I felt like I had been on the front line of some
kind of art war.”
Trialling and then highly rewarding, one thing that really
crystallised for Daisy during that experience was her already
developing idea of ‘Choice 5’ – a narrative so self-referential and
multi-layered that it essentially becomes a three-dimensional
entity among a clued-in network of like-minded seekers.
“It’s a living thing, which gives me a lot of excitement about
what people will come up with! It’s this virtuous circle of
everyone inspiring everyone else… I’m really into Hakim Bey’s
‘immediatism’ and the idea that it’s really about the building of a
culture. So we do it for each other, and we gather and some more
people join, because they can sniff out the authenticity of it.”
With Pigspurt’s Daughter, Daisy is able to throw all kinds
of heady new ideas into the pot, drawing from her father’s
wide-ranging leftfield influences to help keep the narrative vital
and ensure it expands in healthy directions. “There’s something
genuine happening here,” states Daisy. “If you try and bottle it
and sell it, you know, very quickly you risk killing the culture or
overwhelming it with people who aren’t sufficiently woven in to
keep it going. It’s a subtle thing, it’s a storytelling game that we’re
all playing. And it’s fun!” !
Words: Josh Ray / @josh5446ray
@DaisyEris
Pigspurt’s Daughter takes place at the Hope Street Theatre on
23rd August. Tickets are free in advance – pay what you decide
on the door. Head to bidolito.co.uk now to secure your advance
tickets.
18

“The idea of repatriating
the work and starting a
conversation with people
who actually pass through
the pictures, that gets
really quite interesting”
Ken Grant
Tom Wood
NEW BRIGHTON
REVISITED
Looking For Love in The Last Resort: three decades of social change in New Brighton,
told through the photography of three of Tom Wood, Martin Parr and Ken Grant.
Martin Parr
Ken Grant
20

New Brighton is the seaside town that time nearly forgot.
Perched on the north-eastern tip of the Wirral peninsula
where the River Mersey churns into the Irish Sea, its
glory years came in the early 20th Century when it
boasted a tower larger than Blackpool’s, the UK’s largest open-air
swimming pool and a bustling trade of holidaymakers. Even after
the tower was dismantled in 1921, the resort still commanded
large crowds of day trippers and revellers right up until the 60s,
charmed by the fresh sea air, arcades and a ballroom that played
host to The Silver Beatles. Having been brought up just down
the road in the 90s, New Brighton was practically home – but
by the time I came to know it, its glamour had long since faded.
Like many British seaside towns, New Brighton fell foul of the UK
holidaymaker’s discovery of package holidays, and the general
social and economic decline that hit much of the North West in the
80s. The Leisure Peninsula had lost its pizzazz.
It was during this period that three of the best-known
contemporary British photographers all spent a period of time
in New Brighton, and each took to documenting the resort and
its people in their own unique way. MARTIN PARR’s fame was
launched by the collection The Last Resort, which depicted a town
and people caught in the grips of this decline, the flashbulb of his
camera capturing some memorable images of families eking out
some enjoyment from their fading resort. TOM WOOD spent the
longest amount of time in New Brighton, having moved there from
Ireland in 1978. Wood was a frequent and sympathetic documenter
of his adopted home, becoming that regular a sight on the buses and
promenades that he gained the affectionate local nickname Photie
Man. KEN GRANT learnt his trade as a documentary photographer
during the time when both Parr and Wood were active in the
area, and his bank of work follows the habits and customs of New
Brighton’s locals in a period up the end of the 90s, when the outlook
for the resort wasn’t quite as bleak.
As part of the 2018 Independents Biennial, NEW BRIGHTON
REVISITED brings together work from all three photographers
(including some never before seen material) for the first time in a
group exhibition. The Sailing School on New Brighton’s redeveloped
Marine Point has been converted into a gallery space where work by
each photographer can be viewed while looking out over the modern
day resort, thriving once more after a period of redevelopment. The
backdrops are familiar, as are some of the faces, but the story has
moved on somewhat.
Prior to the exhibition’s opening, which saw the gallery packed
out with locals and photography aficionados alike, I spoke with Ken
Grant about his own views on the intersecting stories attached to
the images, and how he feels about taking them back home.
Where did the impetus for the exhibition come from?
It was Tracy’s [Marshall, Northern Narratives and Open Eye Gallery]
idea originally, the idea of repatriating the work. It was her who
realised that so many people have passed through New Brighton
and photographed it. She knows Tom [Wood], she’s worked with
Martin [Parr] before in Belfast, but she was the first person to put
together the fact we’ve all lived – not quite at overlapping times – in
New Brighton for extended phases of our early careers. Tom was
probably the longest, me for a decade and then Martin when he
was doing The Last Resort. So, it was her suggestion initially: ‘Has
this combined work ever been shown in New Brighton?’ Which
of course, apart from maybe informally now and again, it hasn’t.
So the idea of putting the work back into a place and starting a
conversation with people who actually pass through the pictures,
that gets really quite interesting. It’s probably the first time since
1986 or 1987, when the work was showing in Liverpool, that The
Last Resort has been shown in great extent in the area.
What do you think the reaction’s going to be to it, because I know
The Last Resort has had a mixed reception over the years.
Mixed reactions I think when it was further afield. When it was in
London there was often a kind of, I suppose, by proxy outrage or
concern. But there’s also a kind of unwritten side to a lot of it, in the
sense that Martin gave a lot of the pictures back to people who were
part of the work and has very great loyalty and correspondence with
people who were in the pictures, even now. So the shorthand is to
say that it caused quite a reaction, and even now when you speak
to some of the older people who were maybe part of local history
groups, they might speak on behalf of New Brighton, and speak
about the fact that it was not shown in the best light. But, of course,
people like me grew up in the 80s and realised that this was kind of
normal – I didn’t see any distinction between Martin’s wider pictures
from the same time that he made in Birkenhead, or over in Liverpool.
You realise in the wider current of living in that time, the North West
was going through a really, really difficult phase and things weren’t
necessarily as clean, or as replete as they are now. There are lots
of pictures from the inner city before [the redevelopment], certainly
down the bottom of Byrom Street and Scotland Road in Liverpool,
where things were still in the process of needing to be redeveloped.
New Brighton is probably, by extension, part of that conversation.
Martin and Tom worked on The Last Resort as a joint show at
Open Eye in 1986: did you ever cross paths with them at that time?
Yeh, I was training as a technician in Central Park in Wallasey,
and Tom told me how to process film, very, very quickly. He was
instrumental because, even though we were training to do technical
jobs – most of which have been made redundant now because of
our digital age – he’d also be introducing people to really beautiful
portraiture by some of the people who he really admires – Lee
Friedlander or E. Chambré Hardman, his pictures of the Ark Royal
in Cammell Laird. So, you’d get a sense of an extended possibility
for picture-making. Working with him for a couple of years, you
wouldn’t break a stride – you’d go out with him on the buses, or
you’d go out with him to the football – well, I go to the football
anyway – and you’d realise that was as legitimate an approach as
any other. It’s really quite beautiful to have that and, over time, just
those conversations still going.
Martin was different because he went to work training in Farnham
in Surrey, and did a degree in photography and video, as it was at
the time. You used to look at people like Martin who’d call up once
a month, and would have several projects on at one time… it was a
very different relationship to Tom, but really enjoyable to have those
different voices, and both of their support in very different ways.
How do you think your work’s going to be interpreted by locals
now?
It’s hard to know… I don’t spend too much time reacting to reactions.
It takes me a long time to get a show together, and even doing this
took, without any exaggerations, 18 months of looking at stuff and
pulling work out and going into things for the first time. It’s only now
that I’m putting together and trying to work out what I was doing,
what I was looking at, what I was preoccupied with. And it’s a bit
of a shock sometimes, because you start to see things that hotwire
right into what was going on at the time in your life. The idea is that
I try and make some kind of sequence or narrative that seems like it
relates to what I was doing at the time.
So, in terms of people understanding it or coming to terms with
it, I just hope that they’ll find them interesting – they’re very quiet
pictures, a lot of them. Some pictures are just to do with the land and
just to do with the time I’ve spent in town.
Do you think that being a resident of the area for a period of time
changed the way you shot, or the outlook of what you wanted
to achieve with the pictures you were making? Can you see any
similarities in the styles of all three of you?
I’d like to think there was great distinction between each body of
work for different reasons. Tom lived here for an awful long time,
but he would probably have different interests to me in why he’d
photograph. But he always says I’m more of an insider than him.
When you’re making pictures you don’t feel that so much... you’re
just still making pictures, you’re still outside of something. There’s a
pull about being part of something, but just enough outside to try
and figure it out.
These kinds of hot days, sitting here talking now, are really beautiful
because they’re buoyant, busy, people are jumping into the overflow
there, they’re living their life to the full. It’s buoyant, you can smell it.
But then when you’re living here, you’ve got the quiet times as well.
I was working a freelance life, which meant there’d be feast and
famine. I’m responding to that – I might be sitting on the rocks for
hours and just working things out that I was going to do next, but
I’d be photographing at the same time. It’s not as if you go out with
a particular project in mind, or a piece of the jigsaw puzzle waiting
to fit. Just using it as a place to get a breather and take stock, you
know? I’m more kind of nurtured and, I suppose, intuitive at the time.
It seems a bit like, just because of the nature of you going about
it documenting life around you as you were living your own, that
your photos follow your own personal experiences a little bit more
than say, Tom’s and Martin’s have done.
Yeh, I think so – it would’ve been very easy to drop in other pictures
of my daughter in here, and people who I knew from different places.
Some of the pictures are made right out there [pointing to the edge
of the river, where it merges with the Irish Sea] when the tide goes
right out at night. You just go out and you realise it’s just you and a
few fishermen. You turn back and you realise New Brighton seems a
thousand miles away, and that Ireland feels closer.
It’s a strange place. Those freedoms, the state of mind, or just being
able to understand how time flows – I don’t suppose I spend much
time doing that. I do like being able to go into that kind of space.
Something happens when you do, I think you go into a certain kind
of zone of figuring things out... and that might make you make
different kinds of work, or force you to think about the place in a
different way, even if you weren’t making pictures.
When you look at New Brighton now, what do you see? Do you
see some of the similar stories and the similar lives?
Well, in the course of the last 20 minutes while we’ve been sitting
here, a lad came round the corner with his shirt off on his bike, who I
recognised from 20-odd years ago. So, a lot of the people are making
the same kind of routines, looking as fit and as energetic as ever.
What I like about here is that it’s this other little space, slightly cut
off by water sometimes. It’s got its own routines, it’s got a respite
from Liverpool – the city which I really love. When I first started
living here in the early 90s, I loved the fact that you could get the
train 20 minutes and just feel like you were so close to somewhere,
but you knew you were back in your own backyard. And you had the
water... Some of the early pictures I made were by the edges of the
water, and looking at Martin’s pictures that he made not long after
finishing as a student – which we’ve got in the show here – he’d
come to New Brighton and he’d photograph really beautiful scenes
of people right at the edge of the river and the Irish Sea; same kind
of thing. Something pulls you into those particular places. And I
recognise that kind of energy, and I do recognise a lot of the people
who’re here. Probably in the last few months since we’ve been doing
it, some of the usual suspects have started to crop up again. I’ve
touched base with a few people, had a few invitations to Stanley’s
Cask which I’ve managed to avoid so far, because they probably
don’t do a lot of things like they used to anymore! !
Words: Christopher Torpey / @CATorp
northernnarratives.org
New Brighton Revisited is showing at the Sailing School Gallery,
Marine Point until 25th August.
P. LEE
I S …
LOOKING
FOR LOVE
P. Lee explains how he
came to write an album
based on one of Tom Wood’s
best-known photography
collections, Looking For
Love.
The first time I saw images from the Looking
For Love collection was in an article in VICE
a few years ago. It was an article about
Tom Wood’s photography in the Chelsea
Reach, about it representing the lead-in to acid house
or something like that. I loved the style, normality,
simplicity and message in it. Then, a while later, I was
talking with Nick Power about his Small Town Chase
work, and the correlation between that and the Looking
For Love stuff, and I looked into it properly and I just fell
in love with it.
Being from New Brighton myself it spiked an
interest: you always care about stuff that’s around
the corner, local history. I think the book, as much as
wider context and themes, is about the people and
places that make up communities, and these weird,
outpost seaside towns have more than their fair share
of individuals.
I might have a bit of a strange perspective on it,
but the themes of youth, potential, memories and stuff
like that jumped out at me – but it also got me thinking
about the nostalgic side of things. Like, if I was in the
photo, I would be remembering all the people and
wondering where they are now, thinking about the
people who weren’t here anymore; how you never
realise how good you have it with your whole life
ahead of you until it’s behind you.
I think everyone in the area will have a connection
to the Chelsea somewhat, and probably a few relatives
in the pictures too! One of the main things that
connected me to it was that me and my mates’ first
nights outs were in the Chelsea, at the tail end of when
it was still open as a nightclub: all turning up in cream
jeans, Rockports, dads’ shirts – the works.
The whole concept of Looking For Love resonated
with me, and I only realised after a while that I got
together with my wife, Ashley, properly in the Chelsea
on one of the last nights the club was open. I started
the album a few months before we got married, so the
album is also has a personal resonance.
Primarily the songs are about the emotions,
feelings and moods I accompany with the process
of nostalgia, looking back and reflecting upon our
pasts. But I have also tried to make it specific to ‘our’
past, as in the people who view the images, places
and people with a sense of oneship, rather than a
general idea or general period of time. A few songs are
written drawing specifically from images in the book
and others are stories with very little basis in fact, but
drawing on some of the places and faces people from
around here will recognise.
The album took just over a year to make, from start
to end. Most of it was recorded up in Ghost Town in
Leeds, where we did a lot of The Loud stuff and where
Wild Beasts did all their early stuff. Some parts were
recorded in Fresh Goods in Birkenhead with Matty
Freeman, who has played on a few tracks. But I play
most of the instruments.
I feel like it has come full circle somewhat, because
it was from talking with Nick Power that the album
really became a thing. One of the tracks is based on
a short story he sent me, so from that to having the
album coming out sounding as it does is something
which I’m proud of.
pleemusic.com
P. Lee is… Looking For Love will be released in late
summer 2018.
FEATURE
21

22

WAYNE
SNOW
“I want to communicate with the language of my time.” 12 hours in Liverpool with
a strident new voice in the global game of cosmic funk.
It is a white-hot 30 degrees in Constellations’
garden at the core of the Baltic inferno; yet,
the searing heat won’t keep us from spending
a day in the company of WAYNE SNOW,
immaculately decked-out in a brilliant white
T-shirt, chinos and trabs. Snow is simply Cooler;
as the opening track to his debut long player,
Freedom TV (which has been an ever-present on
the Bido Lito! turntable since it landed in 2017)
suggests.
The album is a sanguine marriage of nu-jazz,
deep house and electronica, all delivered with the
energy and groove of his native Nigeria’s highlife
traditions. A work of beauty, wisdom and guile,
the record is the product of Snow’s experience:
having left his homeland as a teenager, Snow has now settled in Berlin.
Luminaries and collaborators such as Max Graef, Neue Grafik and Nu
Guinea have provided inspiration and guidance along the way, but
Freedom TV is the work of an artist with a deep sense of his craft and the
responsibility he weights upon himself to make music which resonates
with the contradictory, bewildering times in which we live.
Some artists have a confidence verging on arrogance and an overcooked
sense of their own self-importance. Wayne Snow is not such an
artist, but he is man blessed with a deep and humble sense of his gift and
the responsibility that comes with such a talent.
“I know that I can make beautiful music,” he tells me slowly,
deliberately, each nugget delivered with an infectious lethargy. “That’s one
thing, but it bores me to just do that. I want to feel like I’m useful. I want
to mix up things here and be able to communicate, with the language
of my time, to the people that are here. I feel like you can easily fall into
a nostalgic thing. You take my voice, it’s soulful, right? I can go back and
bring out some Motown shit, like, Marvin Gaye, you know. They’re all
great, but for me, it doesn’t move me much. I really have to feel like I’m
incorporating the ideas of my time.”
By such a measure, Freedom TV can be regarded as nothing short of
a blistering success. Traversing the smoky, disorientating staccato stabs
of Cooler, via the frenetic fizz of The Rhythm and the gorgeously plump,
lolloping Rosie, the record is both an essential document of our times
and an affirming, positive and elevating listening experience. It reaches
its zenith with lead-single Red Runner, a track which grooves as if The
Whitest Boy Alive were bitten by jazztronic cool. Snow is an artist who,
in time, will sit as comfortably alongside LCD Soundsystem as he will Oko
Ebombo and Chip Wickham.
The record is dense, plural in its reference points and inflections.
A deep-seated soulfulness runs throughout and is laced with
experimentation and a heavy helping of nu-jazz. I wonder how much of
Snow’s musical upbringing is woven into the LP’s many layers?
“All of it,” he confirms, but jazz came a little later. “I used to randomly
read these magazines with Louis Armstrong, just the classics. I kept
listening to it, Dave Brubeck and so on. I was trying to learn all the
improvisation that you had on the record. I didn’t actually understand the
music at first because I was brought up in Nigeria where they listen to a
lot of Motown, of course, a lot of disco. Jazz was a bit complicated. I didn’t
understand if I should enjoy it with the soul, because I was trying to find
a way to just get into it. There was something missing. So, it took me a
couple of times to start using my head, to understand it.”
Using the head over the heart was a new way of translating music
for Snow, as was the Western obsession with labelling, organising and
chronicling. “Something you should know is, let’s say, naming things
and putting some kind of reference on them is something I learned in
Europe,” he says. “The way you grow, you’re surrounded by music, as if
it’s like breathing. You never ask yourself why you’re breathing, you just
breathe. It’s the same way I was brought up with music. So, I always had
many influences. My native music, all local music with percussion mostly
and voices, no harmonic instruments. From there to highlife and then, of
course, Fela Kuti. I just grew up with these things.”
“Music is central
to people. We
don’t know what
this drug is but
we need it more
than anything”
That process of growing took Snow to
Berlin, via Paris. I wonder what was it was about
Berlin, as a city, that made Snow feel he could
realise the music he had inside him? “At first, I
dreamed of machines. Synthesizers,” he tells me
with a deep concentration in his eyes. “I started
composing, writing music with a huge amount
of synthesizers from the 80s. I saw Berlin as
this industrial land. I felt like the landscape,
the places, the clubs were perfect to allow me
to express this feeling. In Paris, I felt like they
weren’t ready for machines. When they saw
me as a black, Nigerian guy, they still think of
drums, tan-tans, percussion and so on. Not using
machines. When you’re listening to techno, it’s
very reminiscent of African drums and percussion.”
It was this rhythmic, percussive nature of techno that appealed to
Snow, and drew a natural link between his musical upbringing and a new
future. “It’s completely minimalist,” he energetically confirms. “When you
go to clubs like Berghain in Berlin, you really feel like you’re in this jungle
and it’s crazy. It’s very raw. I experienced this back home in Nigeria, when
I was a child. When we had a feast, we played drums for hours and
hours, days and days, and you had this pumping, boom, boom, boom. I
felt Berlin was the perfect place for me to go and do this without having
to justify it.”
Snow is in Liverpool for the first time and is playful, excited about
being here, in a city which is so synonymous with music. Like Berlin, music
is very much at the centre of our culture, what our city means in the world
and what it means to our people. The openness and inclusiveness of
Berlin has always played out in its music and culture. I wonder if Snow, as
an artist, feels that within the environment of the city?
“Yes. It’s crazy,” he says, with simmering enthusiasm. “When you go
there, there is a lot of concrete, but you feel like the concrete has been
humanised, like, given a heartbeat. That’s why there are more artists
going there. We feel like it’s not cold, there’s a soul somewhere. You can
reach it. I started understanding that this city, it is actually made by the
people and just for the people. So, it’s not like the government decides
what people should do in Berlin; it’s the people in Berlin that decide for
themselves.”
And the government responds to it? “Yes, and the music also, it has
the same kind of energy. Music is everywhere and you feel like people are
easy with that. Berlin, I think, is the first place I really found that, actually;
we can listen to different music and it doesn’t have to be the hyped ones.
People have different tastes, very underground or whatever, and they
have fun with that.”
This open-mindedness has framed Berlin’s experience in recent
decades and inflected the city with an alternative, electronic, more
progressive music at the heart of Berlin’s modern folk culture. I wonder
what role Snow thinks music plays in Berlin’s collective identity? Is it key
to bringing people together?
“I think it’s central,” he asserts. “Music is central to people. We don’t
know what this drug is, but we need it more than anything. I’ve always
felt like the most political tool we have is music; the musician himself
cannot be political. It’s way beyond that. The reason of music is to always
connect people. When you’re into music, you just stop being black, blue,
whatever, any colour. Even feeling-wise, you just have the same emotion.
I’ve always seen music as something of a high level, like, spiritually the
highest thing we can ever, ever experience. As a musician, if I call myself
so, I think I’m blessed. To be able to connect or to be able to feel things
and rearrange them and make people feel them through music. I’m very
happy to be giving some kind of insight.” !
Words: Craig G Pennington
Photography: Robin Clewley / robinclewley.co.uk
wayne-snow.com
Freedom TV is available now via Tartelet Records.
FEATURE
23

JOHN MOORES
PAINTING PRIZE
The 60th anniversary of “the Oscar of the British painting world”
shows that contemporary painting is still a blockbuster artform.
The biennial JOHN MOORES PAINTING PRIZE is a
highlight of the city’s cultural calendar, and is as much
of a big deal in national art circles. Nowadays it’s held
concurrently with Liverpool Biennial, but has become
defined as its own institution over its 60-year existence. The list
of alumni of the prize since it was first awarded in 1957 reads
as a history of some of the most well known names in British
painting, from David Hockney and Peter Doig to Sarah Pickstone
and Rose Wylie. The JMPP is an award coveted as one of the
most prestigious in British art, and its home has always been
right here in Liverpool.
The Walker Art Gallery is the home of the £25,000 John
Moores Painting Prize, and on the day of the prize announcement
the venerable gallery attracts a buzzing, interested crowd. Artist
Lubaina Himid CBE, a member of the 2018 jury for the prize,
explains why she thinks it is so coveted and what it has to say
about the state of art in Britain. “I think it certainly shows that
painting is very, very vigorous in this country,” she says. “People
still care about it. They’re all passionate – you have to use that
word about the show, and that’s great. It’s so brave.” Even now
when contemporary art utilises more media forms than ever
before, it’s painting that perhaps still has the most ability to
shock and surprise. The Walker is a perfect venue for the prize
exhibition in many ways, not least because it’s a gallery that tells
the story of painting since the 13th Century through artworks
and objects of the highest quality. If the works by Cranach and
Rembrandt tell the story of painting’s traditions, then the John
Moores Painting Prize casts an eye on the state of contemporary
painting – and what a healthy state it is.
This is perhaps one of the most diverse shows in terms of
style and presentation that I’ve ever seen from the JMPP. It’s
impossible to say that there’s anything staid or samey about what
the jurors have chosen: there’s abstraction and realism, figurative
work and dreamy visions. In size, meanwhile, the pieces range
from postcard-size to enormous declarations of intent. Nor is
this confined just to British art, either – since 2010 the prize has
also established a parallel in China, and the five prize-winning
paintings are exhibited here alongside the 60 selections for the
British prize. It’s a move that reflects how art made in different
cultural contexts may present issues from new perspectives.
More than this, though, it celebrates the strength of painting on
not only a national, but also a global scale.
It was the scale, according to Himid, that was one of the
biggest surprises when the jury first came to view the works.
“It certainly shows
that painting
is very, very
vigorous in this
country. People
still care about it”
Each juror first sees the 2,700 entrants for this year’s prize on
computer documents, which leaves plenty of time for surprises
when they begin to narrow them down in real life. “Even though
it says the scale, of course you’re busy looking at the work
and doing whatever comes into your head when you look at
paintings. Inefficiently, I don’t think many of us engaged with
the scale except when we really need to think, ‘Surely that isn’t
enormous!’”
So, from almost 3,000 entrants, how on earth do the jury set
about deciding which should be featured in the final exhibition
– and which should ultimately win? Himid’s description of what
is considered in the judging process is twofold; technique, yes,
but fundamentally it’s about emotion. “When you’re in the room
with [the paintings], you fall deeply in love with some. And you
think, ‘I am not gonna let that go, whatever these other jurors
think’.” This is not to say it was not at times a frustrating process:
from the potential pitfalls of the anonymous entry system to the
self-agonising about which paintings to settle on (“Sometimes
things that were on the ‘no’, we say ‘I need to drag that back’”).
As well as knowing the prestige of the prize, however, Himid
and her fellow juror Bruce McLean both understand the impact
of institutional recognition, what it can mean for an artist’s
profile. McLean won the JMPP himself in 1985 with Oriental
Garden, Kyoto, while Himid was last year’s deserving and widely
celebrated winner of the Turner Prize. Having a jury with this
insight and passion means that, as ever, this year’s decisions
about, as the Walker Art Gallery’s website quotes from the
Royal Academy’s Sir Norman Rosenthal, “the Oscar of the British
painting world”, is once again a decision that can be trusted in
form, intention and emotion.
Thus the exhibition becomes settled on 60 paintings, and
from these, five prize-winners were selected – five paintings
which happen to reflect five very different artistic concerns. From
the strong unknowability of the figures in Shanti Panchal’s The
Divide, Beyond Reasoning to the careful illusory construction of
Billy Crosby’s Quilt, there’s something different to admire in each
work.
This year’s prize went to Jacqui Hallum for King And Queen
Of Wands. It’s an enormous work spread across multiple cotton
sheets, a statement piece that very much declares its place as
a work of art. Hallum explains how the roots of the piece lie
in both the aesthetic and spiritual aspects of the tarot deck.
“Depending on where the cards lie in the deck, it gives them a
different meaning. So, if you move the sheets around, you would
get a different reading between the King and the Queen. But as
they are they’re in a kind of stasis, and there’s a kind of electricity
between them, like there’s something about to happen.”
It goes without saying that Hallum is delighted with her win.
“I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and I slog away at it, and then
finally somebody recognises it and you think, ‘Oh my god, it’s not
real’.” Hallum is also delighted and amazed at the fact that her
triumph was a unanimous decision. As Himid explains, “We all
saw something in it. It wasn’t at all one of those compromises.
It was [more like]: ‘Do you know something? This could stand
the test of time’.” As to what exactly that ‘something’ was, “Look
at it! It’s bold, it’s playful, it’s taking huge amounts of space, it’s
complicated to hang, it’s not painted to a formula, it’s ‘this is what
I want to paint’.”
This year’s win was based on acknowledging the passion of
painting, of painting existing as a conduit for putting emotions
and thoughts into the world for us all to admire. Thanks to the
Walker Art Gallery’s policy of bringing the winning prize into its
own collection, King And Queen Of Wands will become part of
the history not just of the prize, and of an individual triumph, but
of Liverpool’s history. !
Words: Julia Johnson / messylines.com
Photography: Gareth Jones
The 2018 John Moores Painting Prize is exhibited at the Walker
Art Gallery until 18th November
24

25 Parr St, Ropewalks, Liverpool, L1 4JN
OPEN 12pm - 3am
5pm til 9pm - SUNDAY TO FRIDAY
£2 Slices
£10 Pizzas
2-4-1 cocktails
cheap plonk
12pm ‘til 3pm Mon to Fri
Choose 2 Slices

Presented by Fit The Bill and Royal Albert Dock Liverpool
24th-27th AUGUST - ROYAL ALBERT DOCK LIVERPOOL - FOLKONTHEDOCK.COM
FREE DOCK STAGE HOSTED BY JANICE LONG
CHRIS DIFFORD
DAOIRI FARRELL ROBERT VINCENT TINY RUINS
GIZMO VARILLAS WINTER WILSON ROXANNE DE BASTION
THE LUCK IVAN MOULT BLUE ROSE CODE
H E A L REN MEGAN O’NEILL
THE SAIL PATTERN ISEMBARD’S WHEEL MARTIN LLOYD-CHITTY IORA
EVIE MORAN KING AND BYRNE OLLY FLAVELL GUY CALLED GREG
TWO BLACK SHEEP JONCAN KAVLAKOGLU STEVE MCCARTNEY
FREE STAN AMBROSE STAGE
JASMIN NASH SARAH LUCY DOLE JOSEPH HICKLIN TIMOTHY HOAD
VISION THING SCOTT BECKETT MELODY CAUSTON KENNETH NASH
CAT-UNA FOUNTAIN HEAD XENIA HORNE THOM MORECROFT
KATIE ELLEN IONA LAINE JOAO TERRA JOHANNA ALBA
CALLUM SPENCER ALEX OHM JOANNE LOUISE EMILY MAGPIE
FESTIVAL OPENING 24 AUG MUSEUM OF LIVERPOOL
MICHAEL HEAD & THE RED ELASTIC BAND
LUCA NIERI CAMPBELL L SANGSTER
ALSO INCORPORATING THE LIVERPOOL SHANTY FESTIVAL
LIVERPOOL ACOUSTIC S TAGE, TATE LIVERPOOL & REVOLUCION DE CUBA
10 FREE STAGES, OVER 200 ARTISTS, ARTISAN FOOD, BARS
AUGUST BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND

Liverpools iconic Royal Albert Dock plays host
to Folk On The Dock festival during the August
Bank Holiday weekend (24–27) this year. It will
be the third edition of the free festival, which
has proven to be incredibly popular in the past,
with more than 90,000 people attending over
the course of the weekend in 2017.
CHRIS DIFFORD
This year’s event will see over 200 artists play
across ten stages around the Royal Albert Dock,
as well as the completely unique Liverpool
Shanty Festival – where live performances take
place on boats around the water’s edge and in
the Liverpool Maritime Museum.
The one ticketed gig of the weekend, a special
launch event from Michael Head at the Museum
of Liverpool on the Friday evening, is already
sold out.
ROXANNE DE BASTION
Liverpool’s own broadcasting legend Janice
Long will be home to host the festival’s main,
contemporary Dock Stage, headlined by
Squeeze co-founder Chris Difford, who will
treat the crowds to an acoustic set on the
Saturday. Another Merseyside native in the
shape of award-winning singer/songwriter
Robert Vincent will also take to the Dock
Stage, having previously made his debut
Folk On The Dock appearance further down
the bill two years ago.
In keeping with Folk On The Dock’s desire to
celebrate the role that Liverpool’s waterways
have played in exporting and importing music
from around the world, Daoirí Farrell,
winner of two BBC Folk Awards in 2017,
will be leaving the port of Dublin to perform
on Monday 27 August.
There are a number of exciting, emerging
artists to look out for across the bill as well,
such as Gizmo Varillas, Ivan Moult and H E A L.
GIZMO VARILLAS
"It fills me with absolute pride to be involved
with the third Folk On The Dock here in my
hometown of Liverpool,” says Janice Long.
“Long before rock and roll, folk music was
coming in to the port of Liverpool as well as
being made here. It’s apt that Folk On The Dock
unites wonderful storytelling musicians in a
place that is so special to everyone who lives
here and for those of you who are joining us
from other places.”
So there is plenty to fill your days with folk,
roots, acoustic and shanty music to enjoy
throughout the holiday weekend.
LIVERPOOL’S INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF FOLK, ROOTS AND ACOUSTIC MUSIC
24th-27th AUGUST, ROYAL ALBERT DOCK LIVERPOOL
www.folkonthedock.com | @FolkOnTheDock | #FolkOnTheDock

SPOTLIGHT
YANK SCALLY
One of the city’s most underrated sound designers, YANK SCALLY’s
experimental pop is a result of a joyous musical obsession that’s as
inspiring as it is uplifting.
“I’m working on a
very dramatic,
OTT live set. I
want to blow
people’s minds”
YANK SCALLY is a mysterious figure, who reached out from
the ether into our inbox with a single line – “hello. im from toxteth”
– and a link to his SoundCloud page. Intrigued, we opened it to find
a veritable goldmine of slickly produced, experimental electronic
music that spanned styles and genres effortlessly. Three Thousand
is an indie pop banger, fully ready to play in the background of a
Thomas Cook advert. His 1980s series is modern, pitch-perfect
repurposing of nostalgic 80s synth sounds, as naturally trendy
as Stranger Things. But we were shocked to see that most of his
songs have less than a hundred plays. Realising that we may have
discovered a secret gem before the rest of the world catches up,
we reached out to him to find out more.
“I’m completely self-taught, no teachers and I don’t even
watch YouTube guides,” he tells us. But somehow, with an
intuitive process of trial and error, which has been ongoing for
“a little over 10 years” with “a very minimal set-up”, Yank Scally
has attained a level of sonic virtuosity that is hard to find. “Never
had monitors or anything like that,” he says. “I got a Roland SH
201 on my 16th birthday and learned synthesis.” He describes
his upbringing as “not particularly musical”; the seeds of musical
passion were sown in him immaculately, by God, or maybe by
Daft Punk.
“On my 11th birthday I was given a mp3 player, it could only
fit about three or four albums on there. I got LimeWire out and
the first songs I got were from that Discovery album,” he recalls.
“It was the track Nightvision that I heard while riding my bike
around, headphones in, that affected me the most… I wanted to
do this, I wanted to do what these robots did and make music.”
A lack of access to resources has never deterred him. When
we visited his home studio, we were surprised to find that he
produces his pristine tunes on shitty speakers and FruityLoops.
He doesn’t care; he’s ambitious. “I’m working on a very
dramatic, OTT live set,” he says. “I want to blow people’s minds.”
This, however, is not to say that he is in any kind of rush. He
is a perfectionist, intent on delivering Yank Scally in its purest
form. In fact, if you visit his SoundCloud page, you won’t find any
of the tracks that intrigued us in the first place – he has wiped it
completely, and released three new songs. Previously, it was like
a tasting menu, with offerings like Burial Copy, an homage to one
of his favourite producers. It is as though all the musical genres
present themselves to him as a palette, and he is free to take a
dab of this and that as he sees fit. He sees himself as a sound
designer: “You can design a song and you can make it sound like
whatever you want. If I put a jungle tune over a slow indie song,
and it goes off, it adds a whole new level and feeling to it. A once
dismal song could become a danceable bop, and vice-versa.”
For a natural musical shape-shifter, it can take time to
find out how everything will fit together. His new songs bring
together the breadth of his influences, and the new album he
is working on is founded on the same concept: “I really want to
get, like, the polar opposites to collaborate on one track. Like
instrumentalists, rappers and singers that are so far apart.” If
anyone is capable of acting as a bridge, it’s Yank Scally – the
hybridity of identity is the cornerstone of his work. He calls
himself Yank Scally because “it is two words that I can identify
with. I’m half American and I grew up in rough parts of Liverpool”.
A silent mover, friends with rappers and donk DJs alike, Yank
Scally is one to watch.
Words: Niloo Sharifi
soundcloud.com/yankscally
28

HANNAH
AND THE
WICK
EFFECT
Square-peg indie? Saturn punk?
Spiky riot grrrl meets Veruca Salt?
Whichever way you choose to
describe Hannah Brown’s music,
you’ll not be disappointed with its
ability to make you feel.
“It’s easy to keep writing
about the things you
know… I’d like to stray
away from that”
If you had to describe your style in a sentence, what would you
say?
I’ve described my music in different ways before, but I’ll go for
angry poetry slam meets the campfire in Abba’s Fernando music
video.
Can you pinpoint a live gig or a piece of music that initially
inspired you?
Martha by Tom Waits. When I first heard it all I wanted was the
ability to write like that. It sounded like perfection and still does.
Do you have a favourite song or piece of music to perform?
Not as such, because I enjoy performing different songs for
different reasons. But if I had to choose it’d be State. I love it
because the verses are really sparse and the focus is on the voice
and the lyrics. When the drums kick in it starts to build into a Pink
Floyd-esque guitar solo at the end. My favourite lyric to sing is
“She says I’ve got a sharp tongue but she doesn’t mind when it’s
between her teeth”. When I sing that it feels like I’m lighting a
match then everything goes a bit mad.
What do you think is the overriding influence on your
songwriting: other art, emotions, current affairs – or a mixture
of all of these?
My songwriting is influenced by so many different aspects. A lot
of it is just my own emotions and personal stuff, and often the
song ends up writing itself. I find that starting a song off with a
‘meaning’ is restrictive and the meaning or the story of the song
changes, even long after the song has been written. It’s easy to
keep writing about the things you know and stay in that territory,
and I don’t want to get stuck there. I’d like to stray away from
that.
Do you have a favourite venue you’ve performed in?
There’s a cool venue back in the North East, where I’m from,
called the Surf Café. It’s absolutely tiny and it’s right next to the
beach. It’s cosy and lovely and always packed. I prefer small
venues, there’s something more personable and there’s a different
atmosphere that you don’t get with bigger venues.
Why is music important to you?
Music is crucial as an art form. For me it’s a means of expression
and a career. I was lucky enough to learn guitar at school when it
wasn’t expensive, otherwise my parents wouldn’t have been able
to afford it. Now I’m worried that kids who can’t afford lessons
or instruments aren’t going to get a fair chance at music, and
it’ll become limited to the kids whose parents can. It’s no secret
that funding is poor and music is being eradicated from school
curriculums. Music is vital; I’m very fortunate.
soundcloud.com/hanwickeffect
ANNEXE
THE MOON
With a revolving line-up of
members, this troupe of jangly
psych-poppers turn their
collective sunny disposition into
insanely catchy gems. The group’s
two core members take a break
from their efforts to tell us what
makes them tick.
“A menagerie
of glibly gliding
gobbledygook”
If you had to describe your music in a sentence, what would
you say?
Jamie Whelligan: A menagerie of melodies and musical
soundscapes – or glibly gliding gobbledygook, if you may.
Phil Channell: Psychedelic melodic electronic/guitar pop that
echoes our favourite moments from 70s and 80s alternative
bands.
How did you get into music?
PC: There were a lot of successful musicians that lived on my
street where I grew up in the 1980s. Alan Gill, the guitarist
from The Teardrop Explodes, had a studio a few doors down
from my house. Being a piano player and hearing what sounds
could be made with synthesizers and samplers, I really wanted
one and it was an obvious route to follow. The only problem
I had was that they were massively expensive, I was still at
school and my parents certainly couldn’t afford it. Alan, being
the kind neighbour we all knew, offered to let me to use his
Ensoniq Mirage keyboard. Like a kid in a sweet shop I dived
right in and with the help of Alan letting me use his studio,
within a year I’d started producing and recording my own
music.
JW: Though I’ve always been a bit of a lazy sod where
learning the intricacies have been concerned, I’ve always loved
listening, talking and, in a crude way, mimicking music that I
heard. Being the youngest of 10 music-loving kids, there were
always loads of different records, from Zappa to The Beatles
to The Dead Kennedys, being played in the family house –
often at the same time. In that environment, it was almost
impossible not to get into music.
Can you pinpoint a live gig or a piece of music that initially
inspired you?
JW: The gig that first inspired me to go back home and write a
song was probably seeing my mates The Blakeys playing at The
Alex in Birkenhead... a great little combo.
What do you think is the overriding influence on your
songwriting: other art, emotions, current affairs – or a mixture
of all of these?
JW: I think most of my favourite songwriters are good observers
of the mundane minutiae of society – like Nigel from Half Man
Half Biscuit, Paul Heaton and, in his better days, Morrissey – but
as I can’t compete with them, I probably have to rely on halfbaked
emotions filled with a collection of major seventh chords
and layered with lashings of lyrical nonsense. Which Phil then
masterly bakes at 200°C.
PC: It’s got to be film as my biggest influence: whenever I produce I
always have a movie/video of the song flying around my head.
Why is music important to you?
JW: I can’t escape music, and it’s pretty much tied up with
most things I do both pleasure-wise and earning a crust – I
also ply my trade as a busker on the London Underground. So, it’s
pretty important that I make it pleasurable and entertaining, at
the very least for myself.
annexethemoon.com
Annexe The Moon play the Bido Lito! Social at 81 Renshaw on
23rd August.
SPOTLIGHT 29

PREVIEWS
“We’ve been
treated really well
by the weird side
of Liverpool”
GIG
TABLE SCRAPS
Strange Collective All-Dayer @ Constellations – 11/08
The Birmingham-based heavy garage trio talk about
originality and why they feel at home on Merseyside.
Birmingham three-piece TABLE SCRAPS are a band to watch out for, if you haven’t
already heard of them, that is. With a tongue-in-cheek manner embedded in the two
albums they’ve mustered to date – More Time For Strangers and Autonomy – they
seem to encapsulate what iconic garage acts such as The Gruesomes and The Gories
created, but skewed with a dark and doomy undertone that has their sound bordering on metal
and has garnered attention not only from the indie press but also publications such as Metal
Hammer. Ahead of their return to Liverpool, Georgia Turnbull asks TJ, Poppy Twist and Scott
Vincent Abbott about what makes them stand out from the growing garage scene and their
involvement with Liverpool’s premier garage fest.
Your most recent album Autonomy is an album firmly rooted in heavier, garage rock roots. With
contemporaries creating that similar vibe all around the globe, what do you think sets you apart
from them?
Poppy Twist: I don’t know what sets us apart, to be honest. It’s quite a cheeky album. It’s eclectic
and dips its toes into a lot of things without falling into pastiche or parody. I think there’s quite a
lot of humour to it and it doesn’t take itself too seriously even when it’s at its most bleak, which is
probably us all over. It’s quite hard to see rock music that’s very straight-faced these days; it may be
too easy, but stuff that is so straight down the line – ‘this is rock music’ – doesn’t feel like it serves
as much of a purpose as someone who goes to gigs and buys records. I think you’ve got to have a
lot of self-awareness about it because, unless you’re pushing boundaries, you’ve got to be aware
that somebody’s always going to be there to point out what you’re doing isn’t that original. What
matters is your delivery and the way you do it. A lot of the ‘garage’ bands that [we] get lumped
with are just four chords and rehashes of the first Black Lips album – if you’re having fun with that
there’s nothing wrong, but you can’t be walking around acting too serious when you’re doing that.
Especially when everyone is more skint than they were before: like, who are you kidding? You’ll be
blagging for a bus fare home from the coolest venue in town either way, no matter how seriously
you take yourself, so just have fun with it. Liverpool’s quite well set up for this sub-genre, not
necessarily in terms of the bands we’ve seen, but also the understanding of it from gig-goers and
listeners. It all seems in tune with how we approach it.
What were your main influences during recording and writing songs for the album?
PT: It’s pretty hard to reference other things. Like I say it’s a quite eclectic album, but, with creating
Autonomy, getting Tim in the band and becoming a three-piece, it started to become more
noticeable that I was writing songs that sounded distinctly like us – in the way that somebody else
would listen to a track and go “that’s a Table Scraps song!” But in terms of influences, I can’t even
begin to list the amount of things that we’ve ripped off. Everyone rips off and everyone has to.
When we were on tour with Monster Magnet, Dave Wyndorf came up to Scott and asked, “Where
do you get the ideas for your songs?” and Scott goes, “I just ripped them off.” And Dave Wyndorf,
who has been there, done that, toured with Metallica, toured with Marilyn Manson, goes “Same!”
It’s something everyone does, it’s how it’s always worked, so why would you try and go out of your
way to say, “I’ve created something truly original”? You can try creating something original, but then
you realise that you’ve still accidentally ripped [someone] off. I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly ripped
anything off, it’s always just been part of the process of writing that is subconscious. Even if you
wrote a song that you wanted to sound just like Nirvana, someone would come up to you and say,
“That’s really good, sounds like The Velvet Underground.” It doesn’t end up what you set out to do
in the first place, so don’t let the ‘ripping off’ process be a limit because you’d never write down a
note. You see a lot of people that are so anxious about it so they end up never releasing anything
and playing few gigs because they’re so conscious of what they’re doing, saying, “This isn’t right,
this is too much like X. I need to change it up to match what cool bands are doing at the minute.”
Bands like this end up never doing anything. You’ve got to forget about all the external stuff and
hunker down.
What inspired you to reissue your debut album More Time For Strangers?
Scott Vincent Abbott: The original pressing that we released ourselves had sold out. There was still
quite a demand for it, and the boss of Zen Ten [the record label] was a big fan of the album anyway.
Touring with Monster Magnet was the catalyst for the re-release really, because we needed stuff
to take as merch to sell to rabid Germans. They’ll try and buy all your records, all your stuff, maybe
even the clothes off your back. So we were in this position where we’re about to go on a big tour
and all of the touring party from Monster Magnet were like, “Bring as much vinyl as you can, get
it sorted,” so we were like, “Shit, we better get this done.” Fortunately, the stars did align in that
aspect, we managed to get it turned around in less than eight weeks which is a miracle considering
how much of a nightmare it is to get vinyl pressed these days and how expensive it is. We also got
to revisit the artwork, which was great. We had better hair on the cover, longer hair; Poppy doesn’t
have a vape pen in her hand, which pleases me [laughs]. It used to be a trademark that she’d be
clutching her e-cigarette, but now she’s gone back to just smoking.
You’re part of the Strange Collective All-Dayer too. Any special plans for your set, and how do
you feel to be involved in such a unique event?
TJ: We’ve been treated really well by the weird side of Liverpool. All the places who have taken
us on, such as Bristol Psych Fest and the Acid Box guys down in Brighton, are part of a close-knit
garage-y psych collective. Meanwhile, Liverpool have really taken us on and never questioned it.
Because we’re from the Midlands, we’re always really suspicious of people’s motives, [thinking
that] any help is an elaborate plot somewhere down the road [laughs]! But we did Sound City and
Wrong Festival, and the guys behind Wrong have always been very supportive. And so were the
Strange Collective lot, who we hadn’t heard of until they dropped us a message saying, “We really
want you to do this, we think you’d be a perfect fit on the bill.” We dug into the line-up a bit and it
was like, “Where has this been all our lives?” It’s perfect and we’re really psyched not just to be on
it, but headlining it. It’s big shoes to fill, but we’ll fill them. And we might stay over and hang out in
Liverpool, too. !
Words: Georgia Turnbull / @GeorgiaRTbull
Photography: Meg Lavender
tablescrapsband.com
Table Scraps headline the Strange Collective All-Dayer at Constellations on 11th August. Autonomy
is available now via Zen Ten.
30

WIRRAL NEW MUSIC COLLECTIVE
Alongside a rallying cry of tackling the lack of infrastructure around music in the
borough, WIRRAL NEW MUSIC COLLECTIVE recently set up a Live Music Innovation
Fund to seed some activity in an area that is known as a hotbed of musical talent.
Using funding from Wirral Borough Council and The Beautiful Ideas Co., WNMC has
granted pots of money to people who wanted to put on a show in one of the area’s many spaces,
to highlight the kinds of innovative and interesting things that could happen if the region had but a
single music venue.
Over the space of four weeks in August and September, five shows will take place under the
Wirral New Music Collective banner, showcasing not only the wealth of ideas and artists that call the
peninsula home, but also a number of buildings that are ‘hidden gems’ in Wirral’s crown.
“Music brings people together through shared experience, emotion and an understanding of
the human spirit…” says Adele Emmas, vocalist for ST. JUDE THE OBSCURE and one of the artists
curating a show in the run. “There are so many beautiful places in Wirral that get overlooked,
people just usually head over to Liverpool for gigs. Even if musicians are from Wirral, they get
banded in with the Liverpool music scene. It’s about time that some of the great spaces in Wirral
were recognised and that people started coming over this side of the Mersey, too.”
Leasowe Castle
GIG
Fresh Goods Batch One
Fresh Goods Studios – 4th August
In the hope of incubating a new collective of artists around
a repurposed creative space, a team comprising of Astral Coast,
Eggy Records and War Room Records are bringing together a
line-up of their favourite local artists for an intimate recorded gig
in a studio in the heart of Birkenhead. Fresh Goods Studios is a
converted warehouse space near Birkenhead Park, which has
seen the likes of Beach Skulls and EYESORE AND THE JINX pass
through its doors recently to record their stellar new material.
Eyesore are one of the acts returning for this show at the
beginning of August, alongside BEIJA FLO, BILL NICKSON and
SPQR. The show will also be recorded, with two tracks by each
artist being bootlegged to create a lasting artefact of the event
and the special energy around the studio.
Eyesore And The Jinx
Williamson Art Gallery
GIG
Ancient Dreams Of Youth
Williamson Art Gallery – 16th August
An exploration of music’s power to help us see issues around
mental health through a new prism, ANCIENT DREAMS OF
YOUTH brings a night of contemporary classical music to the
heart of Birkenhead. Led by Wirral-based composer TANER
KEMIRTLEK (recently graduated from the Royal Conservatoire
of Scotland), the event features a specially commissioned piece
for piano trio. Kemirtlek is composing a brand new chamber
work for piano, violin and cello around the theme of mental
health awareness. Each of the other participating musicians –
violinist JORDAN GARBUTT, cellist ELIZA CAREW (both at Royal
Northern College of Music), guitarist/singer HELEN DOWNEY and
ALEX SCOTT’s Liverpool-based SINGING BOWL ORCHESTRA
– will contribute something of their own in response to the piece
on the night.
GIG
St. Jude The Obscure
Birkenhead Priory – 18th August
Dating back to around 1150, Birkenhead Priory is the oldest
standing building in Wirral, and was home to the Mersey’s
first regulated ferry crossing, which lasted for 400 years. The
birthplace of Birkenhead is surely the perfect place, then, for an
evening of mystical music hosted by noir pop duo ST. JUDE THE
OBSCURE. Adapting their particular brand of haunting synthpop
to reflect the feelings the Priory’s chapel evokes in them,
expect a fairly stripped-back set from the pair, with the potential
for a surprise inclusion of some choral backing singers, as well
as support from SMOPH and KING HANNAH. SJTO’s vocalist
Adele Emmas is keen to make the event as special as possible for
the 50 who manage to get tickets, particularly as events like this
“highlight spaces that people aren’t necessarily aware of, which
is why we’re so happy to be able to bring some attention to this
wonderful church”.
St Jude The Obscure
TVAM
GIG
A Day In The Sun
Treasury Annexe, Cleveland Street – 25th
August
Put together by the team behind the popular Emotion Wave
nights, A DAY IN THE SUN is a daytime show celebrating a
range of experimental electronic artists from Merseyside and
beyond. Taking place in a 1970s brutalist ex-council building
just off Hamilton Square in Birkenhead, the event aims to play
on the surreal, extra-sensory experience of the non-standard gig
surroundings, breaking down the boundaries between musician
and performer. Two contrasting stages will host the action until
the sun sets over Hamilton Square, including a hidden garden
performance area. A clutch of the most progressive producers,
record labels, promoters and radio shows that have helped define
the region as a welcoming space for auteurs and outsider artists
will be on show, including REEDALE RISE, ISOCORE, S>>D,
BREAKWAVE, THE GULFFIRE and TVAM, fresh from the news of
the imminent release of his debut LP, Psychic Data.
FESTIVAL
Skeleton Coast
Leasowe Castle – 1st September
SKELETON COAST FESTIVAL returns bigger and bolder
for its third year, taking over a decadent venue overlooking
the Irish Sea on Wirral’s stunning coastline. Leasowe Castle’s
period spookiness makes for the perfect location for headliners
THE CORAL to launch their eighth album Move Through The
Dawn, with the castle’s two halls and chapel characterised by A
Warning To The Curious kind of oddness. TIM BURGESS AND
THE ANYTIME MINUTES share headlining duties, but it’s below
this that the real fun of the Wirral New Music showcase comes to
life. Fast-emerging gutter punks THE MYSTERINES will join THE
FERNWEH, MARVIN POWELL and NIAMH ROWE in flying the
flag for the region on a packed undercard, showing the richness
and diversity of talent we have around us. The past two years
have seen both the festival and James Skelly’s Skeleton Key
go from strength to strength, so you can bet that it’s a surefire
proving ground for the next wave of chart botherers.
The Fernweh
PREVIEWS 31

PREVIEWS
“Folk is storytelling
at heart and stories,
by design, are for
the long haul”
FESTIVAL
TINY RUINS
Folk On The Dock – 29/08
From the River Avon to Auckland, Hollie Fullbrook’s
blues-tinged method of storytelling is rooted in the
environment that has nurtured her.
TINY RUINS began as a solo project for New Zealand-based Hollie Fullbrook almost 10
years ago. Since then, the Bristol-born singer-songwriter has accrued band members
and collaborated with a variety of artists. Her stripped-back, minimalist sound has
wooed critics with a duo of albums on Bella Union featuring poetic, spacious sonics
that brings to mind Joni Mitchell. Tiny Ruins is this year’s Bido Lito! Presents pick for Folk On
The Dock, the annual festival of folk and roots music, which takes place at Albert Dock over the
August Bank Holiday weekend. Speaking from her Auckland base, Fullbrook tells Sam Turner
about recording with David Lynch, the direction of her long-awaited third album, and signing to
Courtney Barnett’s record label.
How are you feeling about your tour in August and how long has it been since you visited the UK
and Europe?
I was there last in 2016 with rogue drummer Hamish Kilgour of The Clean. We did a three-week tour
of mainly the UK, including the Scottish Highlands. I termed the tour Kilgour & I – it was just the two
of us hooning about in a little car filled to bursting with an extensive – too extensive! – drum kit that
I’d unwittingly bought off Gumtree. So, I’m thrilled to be returning – this time as a four-piece band. It’s
about time.
You were born in Bristol before moving to New Zealand at the age of 10; does coming to the UK
feel like returning home or do you very much identify as a Kiwi?
It does feel like coming home in a very simple sense, especially when I approach Bristol on the
motorway – my heart rate increases, as though it’s a reunion with an estranged but much-loved
friend. I usually get teary when I see the Severn Bridge or the Avon. Ten years old is quite a
sentimental age and I feel like returning unleashes those childhood sentiments in some ways. It’s
surprising – I suddenly have urges to get a sherbet Dip Dab from my old newsagents, for instance. Or
walk along an old brick wall I used to try to avoid the cracks on. I’m a real mish-mash and don’t feel I
fit in anywhere, particularly. But New Zealand is my ‘strongest’ home connection and I do identify as
a Kiwi, broadly speaking. To you, I would probably come across as fully Kiwi.
What does it mean to you to be part of Courtney Barnett’s Milk! Records label?
It means a hell of a lot. I’ve admired Milk! for ages – years – and I love so much of the music they
put out. We played a show recently in Melbourne with Courtney and Jen Cloher, and the energy
surrounding the whole enterprise is just incredible. It’s a tight-knit community of artists at its core,
and they all know first-hand the lengths we go to in order to keep working, writing, releasing and
touring. For me, they feel like the future. As I see it, they represent hard work, independence, diversity
and true love for their fans.
Would you describe New Zealand as a good place to produce music?
To live in NZ, you’re on the further edge of the planet, looking out at the vast Pacific Ocean –
which may bring a sort of meditative calm or desperation, depending on your make-up – and low
expectations for most musicians, which in turn might allow for more to happen. My hometown
of Auckland has a few precious DIY spaces left where you can quietly chip away at things and
experiment, and my bandmates and I seem to work well in the conditions we’re in, albeit slightly
more slowly than if we were in a more competitive environment. It’s a slower pace, but we get good
results.
How much do you think your music is a reflection of where you’re from, geographically?
I guess it filters through in so many ways. But things I have referenced in my songs recently – mud,
silt, dirt, leaves – could be referring to the Avon as much as the mangroves down in the bay below
where I live. I guess you’re always making connections between where you are, where you’ve been,
and then other invented or imaginary places.
You recorded the track Dream Wave with director par excellence David Lynch; how did that
collaboration come about and what was the experience like?
David sent an out-of-the-blue tweet about Tiny Ruins one day to his followers, saying he’d
discovered a band he really liked. Somewhat unnervingly, I’d been talking about him the night before
to a friend. It was like I woke up to him saying ‘I heard you’. The whole thing was pretty spooky. So,
he was a fan, and I was a long-time admirer of his work. A bit of a universe-implosion for me, like I
was in a simulation. But anyway, the following year I was on tour in the US and a young Kiwi upstart
by the name of Lorde had the cojones to ask David if he’d like to record with me, and he liked the
demo I sent of Dream Wave, so I headed for those Hollywood Hills right away. The experience was
just how you’d imagine it: beautiful and memorable.
It’s been four years since your last LP, what can fans expect from the third album?
It is the best I’ve made, I think. Such a lot went into it. It takes things further and it’s bold – it gives a
lot more, far less restrained. It’s pushing out the edges of my experiences more; it’s squelching your
feet right into the silt and looking closely at the leaves rotting away and new shoots popping up.
Someone even said it’s “in Technicolor”. It’s all about abundance, the bursting forth of life, but then
also mortality, the seasons, memory, escape, freedom. It’s pretty big for me, and I’m all in on it, giving
it my best shot to get it heard. The band play the best they’ve played – there are so many moments of
theirs that I’m proud of. I’ve actually been through the wringer a bit with the entire process, it having
been so long, but at every moment I’ve felt like, ‘at least the album is good’, y’know?
Including Folk On The Dock here in Liverpool, you are playing a couple of folk festivals on this
tour. How do you think, as a genre, folk continues to stay relevant to new audiences?
Folk is storytelling at heart and stories, by design, are for the long haul, right? Stuff you come back
to, that lingers. This album is certainly pushing the boundaries of being considered folk, but the
songs have come from stories and experience, and Tiny Ruins draws from folk and blues alongside
indie and pop and stuff. For me, as the lead songwriter and guitarist, folk is very close to my
heart. Hopefully there won’t be a Pete Seeger [folkie who famously took umbrage to Dylan plugging
in at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival] yanking any cables back of stage. But as a true music fangirl
with broad tastes, I think I see things and yearn for things to be much more nuanced and more of
a patchwork. I’m never going to stay sitting in one genre, and this album is certainly a little bit of a
departure – in ways I feel that our current fans will embrace.
And finally, for the uninitiated, what can festival-goers expect from the Tiny Ruins performance?
Alternate tunings, fingerpicking guitar, beautiful electric guitar jangles, ladies who slay, variance,
dynamics, dreaminess and stories. !
Words: Sam Turner / @samturner1984
tinyruins.com
Bido Lito! Presents Tiny Ruins at Folk On The Dock Festival at Albert Dock on Monday 29th August.
32

Sunflowers
GIG
Strange Collective
All-Dayer
Constellations – 11/08
STRANGE COLLECTIVE have typified the quality of Liverpool’s
psychedelic exports in recent years, and the release of their
debut album is set to provide an authoritatively stamped
quality mark on the band’s reputation. From noisy newcomers
to established rabble-rousers known for leaving little to the imagination
on stage, the band have followed a trajectory akin to turning it right up
to 11 and still asking for more volume. To mark the occasion of their
album release, the four-piece will be firmly planting their kaleidoscopic
flag in the heart of the Baltic Triangle to signal the arrival of their now
famous All-Dayer. Moving away from the North Docks and taking over
Constellations with 12 bands for the best part of 12 hours of senserattling
sonic delights, the afternoon to evening show welcomes a vast
array of sounds alongside their own headline performance.
Once again, the All-Dayer will offer a stage for Liverpool bands, but
this year has also turned its attention further afield than the Republic
of Merseyside and landed on the psychedelic underbelly of Portugal.
Porto’s SUNFLOWERS, however, seem as though they’ll have no trouble
fitting in. Widely regarded as one of the Portuguese music scene’s prize
assets, Sunflowers have become renown for death-defying live shows,
their displays of controlled destruction carried out with artistic flair. The
best feedback beating or your money back, so it goes.
This one doesn’t stop with the music, though. Each of the 12 bands
performing throughout the day will be paired with some of the best
emerging local artists to create 12 bespoke screen prints. In between
printing and face-melting, there’s also the opportunity to indulge in
some face painting, gawp at clown showmanship, or even raise your
jaw after watching a “ceremonial artist hanging”. Yeh, we’re not sure
either, so it’s best to go and see for yourself. Where better to let off a
bit of steam after this scorching summer than in the belly of the Strange
Collective fire pit.
FESTIVAL
Creamfields
Daresbury, Cheshire
23/08-26/08
It’s become something of a pilgrimage for this city’s electronic
music fans to find themselves somewhere between Liverpool
and Manchester, somewhere between euphoria and rain-induced
reality, come the August leg of festival season. Now in its 21st year,
CREAMFIELDS shows no signs of slowing down. The festival returns to
Daresbury over the Bank Holiday weekend for one of its most diverse
musical offerings to date. This year sees dance music collide head on
with its classical lineage as the 40-piece KALEIDESCOPE ORCHESTRA
make a rare appearance to reimagine some of the biggest dance tracks
of the last 40 years. Elsewhere, however, the festival hasn’t steered too
far from the blueprint that’s helped establish Creamfields as one date
consistently circled in the calendars of worldwide electronic musical fans.
It’s not hard to understand Creamfields’ global appeal with a cohort
of international superstars consistently on hand to orchestrate the party.
This year is no different, with the likes of TIESTO, FATBOY SLIM, ERIC
PRYDZ, ABOVE & BEYOND, DIPLO, AXWELL & INGROSSO and MARTIN
GARRIX weighing in for what’s sure to be one of the biggest musical
bouts of the summer. Alongside the swathes of big hitters, there’s no
shortage of underground tastemakers on hand to carry Daresbury as
close to the stratosphere as humanly possible. SVEN VÄTH will be
known to most who’ve experienced the Balearic Islands, as is the case
with MARCO CAROLA, JOSEPH CAPRIATI, LOCO DICE, JORIS VOORN,
JAMIE JONES and KOLSCH, all of which regularly apply their craft behind
the decks of the biggest clubs in the world. Those with a taste for more
than 4/4 consistency can look towards other notable names on the lineup
such as drum and bass godfather RONI SIZE, ANDY C, pirate radio
and sitcom TV stars KURUPT FM and DCI Luther himself, IDRIS ELBA.
Of course, you can never keep Liverpool out of the party
equation with Circus head honcho YOUSEF and lively hometown duo
CAMELPHAT appearing across the weekend.
PREVIEWS 33

PREVIEWS
GIG
Bishop Nehru
24 Kitchen Street – 10/08
Bishop Nehru
Having learnt his trade under the watchful eye of your favourite
rapper’s favourite rapper, long-time MF Doom associate BISHOP
NEHRU hasn’t hidden within the enigmatic shadow of his mentor.
Sure, his full-length debut, Elevators: Act I & II, may only have been
released earlier this year, but his talent has long been touted by
those with an ear to underground hip hop. A serial collaborator
and prolific producer, this young MC is mature beyond his years,
blending ethereal jazz samples with stark observational lyrics. It will
be a night where the protégé becomes the teacher once the mic is in
hand, as Nehru brings a taste of New York to the Baltic Triangle. Be
prepared to take note.
GIG
Haley Heynderickx
81 Renshaw – 24/08
Singer-songwriter and emotive horticulturist HALEY HEYNDRICKX is fast
becoming a stand-out star on the folk circuit. Brandishing a vocal range that
compounds assertive operatic tones with shades of honest vulnerability, the
Oregon native of Filipino descent doesn’t lack the confidence to openly define her
trials and tribulations through music. Her records serve as open invitation to her
emotional standing, but the true force is further intensified when she’s front and
centre guiding the narrative on stage. You need only look to the success of her
debut LP, I Need To Start A Garden, for evidence of her captivating musical craft.
Expect to be dazzled by a broad spectrum of harmonious acoustic instrumentation
and illustrative songwriting. To top it all off, the show is taking place in the intimate
confines of one of Liverpool’s best spaces.
Haley Heynderickx
FESTIVAL
Shout About It Live
Constellations – 18/08-19/08
A hybrid festival that brings together live music and gig photography together,
SHOUT ABOUT IT is striding forcefully into its second year with a line-up of music and
photography that spans the globe. The musical part of the festival spreads over two
days, featuring some emerging acts on the festival touring calendar – HIMALAYAS,
REWS, VISTAS, The Voice star EMMANUEL NWAMADI, soulful beatmaker MANE
– performing alongside some of our own crop of festival headliners-in-waiting –
MEMORY GIRL, ELEANOR NELLY and SCARLET., among others. The aim of the festival
is to create a space in the music industry where musicians, artists, photographers, fans
and all those behind the scenes can come together and celebrate all of the constituent
elements of live music. If you’re down with that, get down.
FESTIVAL
Folk On The Dock
Albert Dock – 25/08-27/08
FOLK ON THE DOCK is striding into its third year having proved to be a winning success
down on the waterfront. The festival will be spread across seven stages, each with its own
distinctive character, from Cuban flavour right through to shanty romanticism. This year
scouse music stalwart MICHAEL HEAD, backed by his RED ELASTIC BAND, has been given
the honour of rounding off the festival’s opening night from within the striking centrepiece
of the dock’s 2008 regeneration, the Museum of Liverpool. The weekend features highlight
performances from Squeeze frontman and Ivor Novello winner CHRIS DIFFORD, with
DAIORI FARRELL’s sounds crossing the Irish sea both in the musical and physical form.
Local singer-songwriter ROBERT VINCENT also completes his graduation from the festival’s
smaller stages to claim a spot on the mainstage.
CLUB
Max Graef
24 Kitchen Street – 04/08
Max Graef
Establishing yourself in the electronic music scene of any bustling city is a tough ask. Making your name known on
the Berlin DJ circuit? Well, for many, that’s the pinnacle. For MAX GRAEF, this ascent was acknowledged before he’d
even reached his mid-twenties. But, what’s harder than making it as a DJ and producer in Berlin? Just ask any female
DJ, in any city. One strand of this triple promotion, Sisu, will be looking to change this perception. Throughout the day
Liverpool local BREAKWAVE will be leading a Sisu-run workshop aimed at females in the city with an interest DJing.
Sure, Graef is a must see for his stirring blend of soulful house, hip hop and jazz, but we recommend getting down early
to catch the array of top female residents spinning records across the two spaces.
EXHIBITION
Lost Castles
Various venues – 09/08-12/08
In celebration of a decade since Liverpool was crowned European Capital of Culture, French
artist Olivier Grossetȇte will descend on the city region for a community led art project on a
grandiose scale. Near neighbours Wales may be more famous for its collection of castles, but
that’s set to change this August. Grossetȇte is renowned for creating enormous architectural
structures from cardboard, sticky tape and lashes of community spirit, and that’s exactly
what he’ll be doing in Liverpool. Over one weekend in August, members of the public will be
invited to lend a hand to recreate Liverpool’s lost castles across six separate sites across the
region. Castles, expected to be as tall as 20m high, will be springing up in Williamson Square,
Knowsley Safari Park, Norton Priory Museum, Ashton Park, North Park and Victoria Square in
St Helens. Visit lostcastles.co.uk for information on how to get involved.
Lost Castles
34

SPOKEN WORD
WORD
Everyman Bistro – 14/08
Violette Records will be bringing poetry and wordsmithery to the
forefront of their usual musical offerings with a night of spoken
word performances downstairs at the Everyman Bistro. The label
and promoters have amassed a collection of the city’s dedicated
artistic orators – as well as some from further afield – for what
looks set to be a compelling evening. Regular Bido Lito! contributor
CATH BORE is one standout talent on the bill, along with local
playwrights PAUL BIRTILL and GERRY LINFORD. Drifting between
the lines of reality to make every the everyday appear surreal, as
you might have noticed on Twitter via @bad_wool9, Dingle’s finest
wordsmith, to our knowledge, ROY will also offer a much-needed
dose of personal musings in this ever-turbulent world.
CLUB
Folamour
Constellations – 04/08
If you’re eager to lace up your dancing shoes
and practice your dancefloor stretches ahead of
Liverpool Disco Festival this Autumn, then look
no further than FOLAMOUR. The French beat
maker is a party provocateur extraordinaire.
Adept at blending swinging mirror ball grooves
with pumping house rhythms, the Frenchmen
is more than equipped to keep arms raised to
the roof for the majority of the evening. Trust us,
this will be one of the most enjoyable workouts
you’ll undertake this year.
EXHIBITION
Carter Preston Prize
The Bluecoat – 04/08-22/09
Adding to the rich collection of exhibits on offer throughout this
summer in Liverpool, the biennial held CARTER PRESTON PRIZE
EXHIBITION returns with the six shortlisted works set to go on show
in the Bluecoat Display Centre. All of the artworks in the running have
been created in the last two years, with the competition serving as a
platform to highlight the works of emerging artists still within the first
five years of completing their training. Selected by an independent
judging panel, the six works will be all be in contention of scooping
a £1,000 prize. Visitors to the exhibition will also be invited to cast a
people’s vote which will grant the winner with an In The Window solo
exhibition in 2019. Get out there and support emerging artists!
GIG
Protomartyr
O2 Academy – 30/08
Having graduated from Hardly Art to Domino, and collaborating
with The Raincoats and Mica Levi, you could be forgiven for
thinking that Detroit post-punks PROTOMARTYR were dialling
down the rusty dynamics and gritty riffs for their third album –
but then, you probably wouldn’t know Protomartyr that well. The
quartet’s 2017 album Relatives In Descent was their first on the
Domino label, and it saw them confronting existential dread and
the unknowable nature of truth in their usual coruscating fashion.
If you need any more convincing that your presence is required
at this show, perhaps the rollicking funk-punk of support act
SAUNA YOUTH will tip you over the edge.
Protomartyr
FILM
The Bothersome Man
Output – 02/08
The Bothersome Man
OUTPUT has proven to be a welcome alternative to the long-established art institutes
housed in Liverpool. Alongside providing a space dedicated to local artists, the gallery
will be continuing its free cinema programme in August with the latest instalment
featuring a screening of Norwegian film THE BOTHERSOME MAN. Directed by Jens
Lien, the film offers a surreal imagining of a man residing in a soulless dystopia with
seemingly no escape from its abused goings on. This sense of emotive despair is
only further enhanced by the use of Evard Greig’s compositions, which are delicately
applied throughout the film. The film itself has been chosen for the screening by
Michael Lacey who will be exhibiting an album playback of his recent work on 9th
August.
GIG
OMNI
Shipping Forecast – 16/08
Born out of one-part Deerhunter, one-part Carnivores and held together through a life-long friendship, OMNI,
Frankie Broyles and Philip Frobos’ latest creative vessel, certainly have a knack for effervescent guitar-led pop.
In the space of two years, their paring has bounced ideas back and forth and kept the output flowing with
two studio albums and a live recording session already to their name. The latter, a session for Audiotree, is
a display of disciplined studio craft which offers the listener an up close and personal listen of their intricate
playing. If the records don’t take you close enough, we recommend you experience the full force of their jolty
melodies when the trio squeeze into the lower confines of the Shipping Forecast.
OMNI
GIG
Bido Lito! Social w/ Seatbelts
81 Renshaw – 23/08
Roll up! Roll up! Our pink pages are dropping for the final time of
what has been a hot, sticky summer. Fear not, this doesn’t mean
we’re not bringing the heat one more time before we head into
autumn. To celebrate the release of Issue 92, we’re heading back
to 81 Renshaw with another top collection of artists that we feel
should be on your radar. Headlining we’ve got Hooton Tennis
Club offshoot SEATBELTS, plus two helpings of avant-garde
guitar pop from THE ALEPH and ANNEXE THE MOON.
Seatbelts
PREVIEWS 35

REVIEWS
“It feels like a festival
built on the purest
of premises: a bill
chosen out of the
organisers’ genuine
passion for the bands”
Pulled Apart By Horses (Kevin Barrett / @Kev_Barrett)
Strange Bones (Kevin Barrett / @Kev_Barrett)
Liverpool Calling
Various venues – 22/06-23/06
After taking a fallow year in 2017, the 2015 nominee for
Best Metropolitan Festival at the UK Festival Awards is back and
booming in and around the city centre and the Baltic Triangle.
Across a weekend saturated with over 50 bands, LIVERPOOL
CALLING lives up to its mantra of a grassroots festival by offering
Liverpool a huge collection of unheard-ofs, lively up-and-comers
and potential next-big-things. It feels like a festival built on the
purest of premises: a bill chosen out of the organisers’ genuine
passion for the bands. With many less-familiar names appearing
alongside local and national big-hitters, the weekend is charged
with the spirit of discovery.
Friday night’s action is focused around the centre of town
and particularly Phase One, the new music-focused venture by
the Jacaranda team, which lives up to its promise as a fine new
addition to the city’s gig scene. Similar to the recent success of
Sound City, the short walk between venues helps to produce a
vibrant atmosphere around certain venues. On the Friday night,
Phase One hosts an exciting array of talent to festival attendees
and casual drinkers alike, such as the excellent MONKS, who
boast an interesting blend of indie-rock, synthesizers and
trumpets, and the confident Welsh-rockers HIMALAYAS, with
their enjoyably melodic blues-rock. THE HOLOGRAMS combine
an Arctic Monkeys sensibility with 70s-influenced riffs, while HEY
CHARLIE, the London-based three-piece, give a short but electric
set, broadcasting their infectious grunge-pop sound and leaving
Parr Street’s Studio 2 amid shouts for encore.
Unfortunately, the enthusiastic atmosphere isn’t spread
across all of the Liverpool Calling venues. Many people seem
to quickly leave the in-your-face heavy rock at the Jacaranda
and EBGBs is less than half-full for most of its performers.
Nevertheless, FOREVER IN DEBT don’t lose their hardcore
energy despite a few technical issues and, after a quick taste of
something heavier, it’s back to Phase One in time to see it really
come to life for STRANGE BONES. The performance by the
Blackpool punks sets an impressively high bar for showmanship,
which also incorporates a surprising range of headgear. Bobby
Bentham is a captivating frontman who exudes energy and
conviction, and his work is rewarded by the enthusiasm of the
crowd who’ve come along to be part of the ride.
Saturday sees events move over to the Baltic Triangle. It’s
a warm, sunny day and the acts playing in the Constellations
garden each complement the vibes created by the weather in
their own way. The line-up of bands inside, however, is of a
quality that makes it well worth stepping into the darkness for.
With more well known bands performing, the the festival gathers
much more momentum and a sense of anticipation. SPQR’s
performance in this venue is yet more fuel to the fire of their
status as rising stars of the Liverpool scene. They’re a band who
know how to put riffs and rhythms together to make art-rock
which is both serious and often seriously danceable.
PEANESS are the only band of the day who feel like they’re
in the wrong place – their indie guitar-pop style and summery
harmonies would be even more perfect in the Observatory’s
sunshine. Their music works its magic, though, and songs
ranging in subject from the joy of solitude to the scourge of food
waste, the Chester trio’s highly amiable stage presence does a
good job of bringing the sunshine feeling inside.
Pysch-goth-punk-rock – THE WYTCHES’ sound is difficult
to define, but it’s one which draws the biggest crowd of the
weekend so far. Kristian Bell’s vocal style is almost more
shouting than singing, but it works, filling each song with a
sense of immediacy. Constellations heralds some of the bigger
names on the bill with DEMOB HAPPY and PULLED APART BY
HORSES really pushing the tempo of the night into full throttle.
Pulled Apart By Horses deliver a similar sense of urgency to
The Wytches, although in their case, by being utterly relentless
in their energy. The riffs keep coming and the crowd lap it up,
pulling dance moves that both encapsulate and enhance the
sense of utter joy in power of the musical moment. Even the dad
of lead singer Tom Hudson gets – very literally – carried away
in the enthusiasm of it all. With their raucous energy and heavy
guitar riffs, Pulled Apart By Horses in particular put on a show
that proves them worthy headliners of smaller festivals like this,
as the crowd returns their energy with an almost insufferable
enthusiasm for pits and crowd surfers.
Just around the corner, with its minimalist layout, Brick
Street proves an intimate hit for smaller acts of the future.
ORCHARDS impress with their pitch-perfect frontwoman Lucy
Evans complementing their catchy, dream pop guitar riffs, yet
it’s Sheffield rockers SHEAFS who really steal the show. They’ve
already supported the likes of PRETTY VICIOUS and IDLES, and
their headline set garners quite the eager crowd, suggesting
they’ve already made a name for themselves among music lovers
with an appetite for the fresh and exciting. As they take to the
stage, guitar-less frontman Lawrence Feenstra flips between
enigmatic and charismatic, going from staring at the back of the
room to crowd surfing in the space of a few numbers. Their hightempo,
volatile and spirited set includes impressive tracks This
Is Not A Protest and Mind Pollution, and ultimately epitomises
what Liverpool Calling is all about. The chance for music-lovers
to find a new and enthralling band, and the chance for bands
like Sheafs to prove the only way they are going is up. This is not
simply a return for Liverpool Calling – it’s a return to form. Here’s
hoping with anticipation that Liverpool Calling can build on the
momentum of this success for its return in 2019.
Conal Cunningham / @conalcunningha
Julia Johnson / @messylines_
36

Dauwd
+ EABS
Wide Open @ The Reeds – 07/07
Bodega
Get It Loud In Libraries @ Birkenhead Library
– 09/07
Sardonic is one of those words that’s seemingly on the
decrease. There’s very little ‘sardony’ in music these days, with
cerebral wit becoming much more at ease with the day-to-day
advances in social meeja and vocabulary transition. Hurrah, then,
for New York post-punkas BODEGA, whose sardonic worldweariness
is set to a semi-Kraut and pop-fuelled, post-everything
noise. The realisation of this occurs a third of the way through
their bizarre gig in a listed building just south of Birkenhead
Central. OK, a library; an old, old library that has more relevance
to sepia-tinted childhood memories than watching three girls and
two boys leap around as though they were headlining Radio City
Music Hall.
For some utterly brilliant reason (and much more than a
soupçon of hard work) the Get It Loud In Libraries network has
decided to place a very cool band in a very uncool space on
the Wirral. The dichotomy of the loud and socially wry Bodega
wrapped in the peaceful and learned confines of Birkenhead
Library on a sticky summer Sunday afternoon is not lost on this
busy and expectant all-ages crowd.
Bodega are touring their debut album Endless Scroll, but
rather than this being a snatched at experience to play for anyone
Dauwd (Mook Loxley / mookloxley.tumblr.com)
at any time, this performance is seemingly at ease with what
the band stand for. “A gig in a library? Sure. Just so long as we
change NOTHING.”
And they don’t shift their performance a bit for a crowd
clearly baffled by the venue, but clearly moved by the five-piece’s
attempt at hamming it up in the children’s section.
Musically, Bodega suffer from the Parquet Courts comparison
(understandable as PC’s Austin Brown recorded and produced
the record), but there is a deeper veneer that reveals itself live;
The B-52’s, Pink Military, Devo and Le Tigre all snuggling into
a Duggee hug with Talking Heads. The blatancy of this is offset
with a depth of lyrical thought that makes up for the perceived
lack of musical integrity. Songs about dating apps, female
masturbation and varying degrees of social boredom (with the
pressures of modern life contained therein) are note perfect. A
stand-up drummer is heaving with the cool of Moe Tucker and a
duet girl/boy vocal has the potential to fall, but at no point, in the
45-minute set, does it. From an intro where Ben Hozie shouts
poetically from the book Punk – The Whole Story that he finds on
the bulging shelves in front of him, to the sorrow-laden Charlie,
about the loss of a friend, to the extended, almost shoegaze
buzzfest of Truth Is Not Punishment, Bodega swept all before
them and are in the process of creating a new legacy for bands
from New York. There’s been a gap, you see, and as we grapple
in an asphyxiating post-Trump era, here’s a voice you’ll recognise.
Smothered in truth. And books.
Ian R Abraham / @scrash
The entire back wall of the softly lit, plant-scattered venue
The Reeds is a tight fit for the seven-piece Polish jazz band
EABS, an appropriate set up mirroring the intimacy and artistic
vibes of the night. Among the keyboard, decks, drums, guitars
and trumpet, the saxophone takes centre stage. The relaxed
ambiance of the night is stirred up by saxophone improvisation
boldly playing over fast percussion, tied together with a blend
of hip hop samples and jazz. Both bass and electric guitars take
on unexpected roles within the pieces, which appear to develop
seamlessly into a pool of genres including swing and psychedelic
rock.
Songs like Neikochana give light to all instruments within
an eclectic and varied few minutes, impressively maintaining the
attention of everyone in the room throughout what can only be
described as a hectic collection of timbres and sounds. Elements
of 70s rock and modern hip hop and jazz are fused together to
create one of the most interesting performances to grace London
Road in many a year.
The use of colourful patterns on the back wall is replaced
with a dark orange hue, setting the stage for DAUWD’s transition
into a synth-heavy, deeply layered set. Repeated percussion is
introduced, layered with synths to produce a unique approach
to dance and techno music such as in Macadam Therapy. A
multitude of sounds are introduced and transitioned out of the
songs, allowing for slow yet satisfying development. It is hard
not to compare the songs of Dauwd to literature or poetry; each
song has an underlying theme guided by strong percussion
yet within each piece we find irregular structures and specific
arrangements, arguably designed to lead us through the song as
if it were a journey. The atmosphere is warm and relaxed, held up
by the deep bass playing under the array of echoes and sounds
so carefully placed within the pieces. The flow is easy-going and
deliberately unhurried, showing off his ability to make relatively
quick tempos feel relaxed and gentle.
People here dance or sketch; the energy created from the
intoxicating development of sounds absorbed by the audience,
eager for more of the psychedelic and reserved approach to
dance music Dauwd has crafted. Exaggerated bass is used
over the sample of Only You (originally by Steve Monite) in a
successful shift from light underplayed techno developments
to more substantial dance vibes; displaying the capability of his
production and his use of genres within a set. His flow guides
us through each song to create an overall display of music
that grasps the audience and joins us together, yet also allows
us to be captivated individually. An enticing and impressive
performance displaying the range of musical talent Dauwd has at
his fingertips.
Ailsa Beetham / @ailhbee
Bodega (Freakbeat Films)
Bodega (Freakbeat Films)
REVIEWS 37

REVIEWS
Boy Azooga
+ Seatbelts
Harvest Sun @ Shipping Forecast – 07/06
Katy Perry
Echo Arena – 21/06
What is the point of pop music? Is it art, or is it a form of
mainstream hypnotism, designed to sedate and appease its
listeners? In the past, artists such as John Lennon, Frankie Goes
To Hollywood and MIA have all made it to the top of the charts
with hard-hitting lyrics promoting peace, or opposing capitalism,
suggesting that popular music can be both political and catchy.
For the most part though, it is just catchy; pop princesses
talk about young love, boy bands sing about the sort of breakups
that see teenagers sobbing in packed-out arenas, and other
chart-topping artists repeat mind-numbing lyrics about clubbing,
sex and fame. In 2014, the Journal Of Advertising Research
published a study which found that the success of most singles
in the Top 100 can be predicted, based on whether the song is
about one of the following themes: loss, desire, aspiration, breakup,
pain, inspiration and nostalgia. Not Brexit or the NHS then.
But what of the flipside, the joy that pop music brings to
millions by being simply and proudly pop? Artists like Little Mix,
Zayn and Meghan Trainor are less concerned with reminding their
listeners about the fact that the cost of living is constantly rising,
than they are about distracting them with some meaninglessly
danceable lyrics: “I’m all about that, all about that bass, no treble/
We gon’ take it to a whole another level”.
Does it matter? Therein lies the debate. Tonight, I’m throwing
caution to the wind by attending my first ever pop concert: KATY
Katy Perry (John Johnson / johnjohnson-photography.com)
PERRY at the Echo Arena. As a staunch goth in my teenage
years, the very idea of Perry’s bubblegum pink antics was
uninviting at best, with my adult cynicism around the value of
pop stars and the horrific expense of tickets (how do they expect
working-class families to afford to take their kids to see their
heroes?) solidifying that resolve.
Nevertheless, into the standing area we dive, giving
ourselves up to this capitalism-fuelled Teenage Dream. Cue
hordes of backing dancers with multiple costume changes (each
as garishly colourful and over the top as the last), plenty of latex,
unnecessary trapeze interludes and gigantic puppets ripped
off from the stage shows and videos of other, more critically
acceptable artists.
All this as Perry wails, warbles, shouts and croons her way
through a catalogue of hits so recognisable it was as if they had
been etched onto some gigantic public subconscious (no doubt
reinforced by the enormous all-seeing eye at the back of the
stage). California Girls, Roar, I Kissed A Girl, Firework. ‘Why do I
know the words to this song?’ I think aloud. Does this mean I like
Katy Perry?
The vacuous space that is pop music is often construed
negatively, but how often do we consider the emotional value
that stars like Perry bring to our lives? For a night, we’re on a
different planet, being entertained by an otherworldly character,
who connects to her audience through chant-able lyrics and
ridiculous routines. We have fun. And that’s what these things
are about, right?
Sinéad Nunes / @SineadAWrites
SEATBELTS centre around the proven songwriting
partnership of Ryan and James from Hooton Tennis Club and
are a side-project of sorts, but one that’s taken on a distinct and
rather intriguing identity of its own.
The four-piece have the alternate singing and songs formula
we’re used to from the two men; It Is As If I Am A.I., Hey, Hey
Tiger!, Capitalist Confession are all strong but it’s Song For
Vonnegut – not the poppiest song by a long stretch – that’s the
major ear-botherer tonight. It’s worth noting all eyes are on Abi
Woods out front on keyboards here at the Shipping Forecast;
her vocals are bloody terrific and once she whips out her cowbell
we’re 100 per cent sold.
The last time BOY AZOOGA played Liverpool supporting
fellow Cardiffians Estrons across town at Buyers Club, they
assembled a sign onstage made up of oversized scrabble tiles
announcing who they were. The string of letters were the sort
that light up so you can see them better, you couldn’t help but
notice the bloody things, fully visible from space, probably.
Six months is a hell of long time in music and we have no
need for such an information service at this, their first headline
show in the city. Now signed to Heavenly, the band are rarely off
the wireless, they made their telly debut a few weeks earlier on
Later... and the debut album is due to hit the shelves within hours.
If we want to get technical, the album 1, 2 Kung Fu! is
released minutes after Boy Azooga finish their set this evening,
so it’s very much the night before Christmas for noticeably thrilled
frontman Davey Newington. We get an inevitable celebratory
atmosphere as a result, although with Newington a sugar-rush
sense of excitement at every stage of the band’s development is
evident and it’s giddily infectious.
It’s a fun gig, this, and an inevitable cheeriness about a singer
who uses a big woolly sock as an impromptu mic pop shield. A
lucky sock, maybe? No need for any good luck charms, as it turns
out. Audience participation is a big thing at Boy Azooga shows,
sleigh bells handed out and obediently rung in time, out of time.
Who the hell knows, it’s the taking part that counts. The audience
totally taking possession of William Onyeabor-inspired Face
Behind Her Cigarette both during and after the song is finished is,
quite frankly, brilliant.
“We should play Liverpool every night,” grins Newington,
in response. OK, the crowd slaps the ceiling so hard there is a
concern at one point it might bloody well fall in, but let’s go with
the spirit of this.
Boy Azooga are not a band to stay still. The album might
have taken five years to make and many more to write, but
over the hour we get songs not on 1, 2, Kung Fu!, and an
interpretation of The Keys’ I Tried To Find It In Books, a song
covered for Annie Mac’s Radio 1 show a couple of months ago.
Newington’s songwriting strikes a chord with people. Take
Loner Boogie, the tale of an outsider looking in – everyone’s
felt like that at some point. Jerry is a simple tribute to pleasing
memories, no high art metaphor or hidden meanings, not that I
can work out anyway, sometimes a song is about someone or
something that needs to be remembered and made permanent
and fixed. There’s a grounded, irony-free sense of honesty about
that. The line in Jerry “Where did you go to get that smile?” is a bit
soppy, but who can’t help but understand exactly what he means.
Boy Azooga should play Liverpool every night, you say?
That’d be nice.
Cath Bore / @cathbore
Beach Skulls
+ Brad Stank
+ Eyesore And The Jinx
Harvest Sun @ Shipping Forecast – 16/06
On the opening track of their second album Las Dunas
BEACH SKULLS plead, “Sun, when will you come?” The Liverpool
surf-rock trio are ensuring the California sunshine returns this
summer with their follow up to 2016’s Slow Grind.
Away from the sunshine and first on in the dimly-lit
basement of The Shipping Forecast we have the most politically
charged act of the night in EYESORE AND THE JINX. Despite
only releasing one single, Gated Community, the Liverpool postpunk
trio are a tight outfit, blending the ferocious rockabilly punk
of The Gun Club with Peter Hook-esque basslines. Vocalist and
bassist Josh Miller leads the band through whiplash-inducing
time changes like the jolt of an aging roller coaster. The band
is able to rocket between breakneck blues-tinged punk and a
screwed up 1950s twist with incredible precision. The highlights
of the set are a rendition of their furious single and Shitbag, the
band’s answer to Nazi Punks Fuck Off by the Dead Kennedys. It
is always a pleasure to see punk alive and kicking in 2018.
Trudy And The Romance’s drummer Brad Mullins has a work
ethic to be admired. In between touring with Trudy, Brad has
been steadily dropping tracks for his solo dream-funk project
BRAD STANK which sees him out from behind the kit to play his
first Liverpool show tonight. Brad takes things down a notch,
delivering neo-soul soaked grooves that serve as the perfect
soundtrack for a smoky post-sex cry. Wearing an Erykah Badu
T-shirt and lefty Strat in hand, Brad and band drift through
singles Pond Weed, Daddy Blue, and O.T.D; lazy grooves
comparable to Homeshake, but stretching further to 1970s jazz
and soul influences. The set culminates with a steamy rendition
of his slow jam Flirting In Space, which exploded online since its
release last year. Brad’s unique brand of lo-fi baby-making music
translates extremely well out of the bedroom and onto the stage
and he’s definitely one to keep an eye on.
Channelling the 1960s psychedelia of The 13th Floor
Elevators and shoving it through a cathedral-sized amount of
reverb, Beach Skulls start with the slow-burner Ain’t Easy, akin to
the dream pop of The XX’s Intro, albeit with the dark, beachy vibe
that the band’s name suggests. Both Ain’t Easy and new single
That’s Not Me, the second song tonight, share an insanely catchy
guitar riff prompting those at the front to join in a sing-along.
The set is a mix of old and new, including some of the fan
favourites that helped them carve out their sound on the first
record, such as Heavy Pound and Baby’s A Liar. The band is
never fixed on one tempo and the set is filled with wild time
changes, which gives the set a spontaneous, almost punk feel.
The highlight comes from the ballad Love And Sex for which they
enlist the help of backing singer Lara Boundy to perform Brian
Wilson style vocal harmonies. It’s a clear crowd favourite, despite
only being released two weeks earlier. For me, Las Dunas is the
sound of Liverpool’s summer.
Joel Durksen / @Joeldurksen
38

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REVIEWS
Psycho Comedy
Welcome To Smashville @ The Royal
Standard – 07/07
Roger Waters (John Johnson / johnjohnson-photography.com)
Jonathan Wilson on Dave Gilmour duties, reproducing the vocals
and guitar parts of Waters’ collaborator/frenemy in superlative
fashion. Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig from US indie pop outfit
Lucius are excellent vocal contributors, recreating Clare Torry’s
wordless vocal from The Great Gig In the Sky brilliantly.
An excellent rendition of proto-industrial cut Welcome To
The Machine is followed by a triple bill of tracks from Waters’
recent solo disc Is This The Life We Really Want?, which sees the
audience begin to fidget slightly. In contrast the crackle of radio
tuning that opens Wish You Were Here is greeted with elation and
the floor area rising to its feet as the acoustic guitar riff is sung in
unison.
A sequence from Waters’ high tide of inspiration The Wall sees
the most incongruous Christmas Number One single ever, Another
Brick In The Wall (Part II), assisted by a group of local schoolkids in
Guantanamo Bay-style orange jumpsuits lined up across the stage.
Removing the outfits to reveal T-shirts emblazoned with ‘Resist’,
the kids and the entire room assist on the band’s most famous
chorus.
Following the intermission, the second half shows where
the tour’s £4 million budget was spent. Having set the bar for
live visuals vertiginously high with The Wall Tour in 1980-81 (a
concert so arduous to set up it only visited four cites), to Waters’
immense credit the current show bears comparison to it. As a
rectangular structure descends from the lighting rig in the arena,
it becomes apparent the set of screens are a scale model of Giles
Gilbert Scott’s iconic Battersea Power Station, as featured on the
cover of Animals, complete with belching smoke and floating pig.
Effectively the heart of the show, Dogs and Pigs (Three
Different Ones) from Animals plus Money and Us And Them from
The Dark Side Of The Moon, revisit the band’s scathing attacks on
capitalism. Midway through Dogs the band, replete with animal
masks, hold a drinks party onstage, after which Waters holds up a
series of cue cards which culminates in ‘Pigs Rule the World’ then
‘Fuck the Pigs’, which receives an appreciative roar from the crowd.
Changing tack, the visuals that accompany Pigs (Three Different
Ones) mercilessly criticise the current White House incumbent.
Juxtaposing real and Photoshopped images reminiscent of Terry
Gilliam animations, along with verbatim quotes, several of which
provoke audible laughter, the “Ha ha, Charade you are” refrain is
sung en masse.
The sound of cash registers ringing out signals a return to Dark
Side, as the music video for Money is updated to include current
global leaders. After a beautifully poised rendition of Us And Them
and recent solo cut Smell The Roses, the final stretch of Brain
Damage and Eclipse are genuinely spectacular, as a laser prism
illuminates the front of the stage and a reflective sliver moon floats
around the arena evoking Rover, the bubble that pursues Number
2 in The Prisoner before crossing the laser prism and creating the
titular eclipse.
Returning for the encore – an elegiac Comfortably Numb
where the audience drown out Wilson’s chorus vocals – is a
brilliant valedictory flourish. If the tour represents Waters’ last
global jaunt, his swansong ensures this ranks alongside Floyd’s
mega tours, while still pushing the envelope for arena shows even
further. That said, he’ll probably be back in three years’ time.
Richard Lewis
It was somewhere on the rails between Oriel Road and New
Strand that the concept of Smashville begins to make sense
beyond the entry point of music, poetry and art. Somewhere
within this seeming normality we half exist in a concept of our
own design. For Shaun Powell, PSYCHO COMEDY frontman, his
concept may seem far out. Smashville is an unapologetic nod to
Ray-Ban-tinted views of apartment blocks, yellow cabs flickering
by like film reel and an urban rhythm, continuously rumbling
below the manhole covers. We all escape. It’s that some of us
bear an introspective perception worth projecting onto the walls
we face on a daily basis. The inward musings of a well-recited
train ride aren’t one; the elaborate curation of Smashville is.
Tonight, The Royal Standard is a whiteboard, and Psycho
Comedy are there to point us through their collective art as
though algebraic equations chalked up for the attendees to
decipher. This is quite literal in certain parts, with Powell
feverishly waving his hands in acknowledgement of the cold,
calm image of Patti Smith beamed behind the band as they take
the stage in performance space one.
First, however, the performance is eased in with the help of
a well-devised installation by Sophia Duff. Dotted around the
room are collections of the band’s photographs and a Warholesque
silent projection centred around the societal constant of
Coca-Cola. One collection that stands out shows a trip up the
coast to be amongst the insincere lights of Southport’s Funland.
There resides an unhinged madness, as the band put it, akin to
Coney Island’s Luna Park. It’s through this collection of images
that the notion of artificial perception begins to mushroom.
Smashville isn’t so far out and lost. These trips to the seaside are
the necessary escapes for minds bombarded and desensitised
by 70 years of pop-culture consumerism. Smashville is simply a
playground self-devised and half-lived beyond the artificial hours
spent in towns such as Southport. Alongside, the responsorial
prayer styled chorus of First Cousin, Once Removed, sprawled
on pinned up paper, rings through the head as the first lines of
poetry read by Matthew Thomas Smith and Powell rise from the
main performance space.
To follow, a film shot by Caitlin Mongan delves into hazy
depictions of Chinatown and serves as a prelude to the band’s
musical fibres. As Psycho Comedy assemble, the film is replaced
with punchy aphorisms beamed onto the rear of the level
grounded stage. “This Country’s On Its Arse” interjects between
images of the Ramones, The Velvet Underground and Patti
Smith, which sit behind as though formative shadows of the
band’s musical lineage.
The set chugs along with the band’s resident poet, Matthew
Thomas Smith, wavering in and out of the performance. He
serves as a rhetorical question in his brief appearances, offering
a sharp injection of composure – similar to Ian Curtis’ House Of
Dolls monologue on No Love Lost. There’s no real peak or dip in
the performance; just a continuous rumble that counts out the
hurried minutes spent in Smashville. Breathless, almost.
It’s intriguing to watch a band that constantly balances on
a knife-edge. At any moment, it seems, Psycho Comedy could
begin a meteoric rise, or renounce its art and plaster over all that
was Smashville in order start anew. The uncertainty of untimely
destruction brings a compelling urgency to their music. Who
can say when the Psycho Comedy bus could roll along the dusty
tracks away from Smashville and towards the next town. It’s best
you catch the band’s live exploits soon or risk being left behind.
Elliot Ryder / @elliot_ryder
Roger Waters
Echo Arena – 02/07
Over half a century since Pink Floyd arguably invented the
concept of ‘immersive experiences’ where the gig goer enters into
the band’s private world, ROGER WATERS is still pursuing the
vision of providing more than just a standard concert. With the
city’s love of Pink Floyd stretching back decades and showing no
sign of waning any time soon, after a near-interminable queue
outside the Arena (kicking around on a piece of ground in your
hometown, eh?), a full capacity crowd assembles for the former
Floyd man’s latest venture, the Us + Them Tour.
Where Waters’ most famous brainchild The Wall Tour
investigated the divide between performer and audience, Us +
Them – rumoured to be his last – tackles the divisions in society.
Returning to the sense of injustice that fired up many of his
lyrics both Floyd and solo, the show primarily hinges on the gap
between the one per-cent and the rest of the planet.
It’s the standard set up for a Floyd-related gig – all seated,
two sets, stunning optics and minimal crowd interaction, after all
mosh pits, crowd surfing and tiresome Dave Grohl-style ‘Do you
guys wanna fuckin’ rock?’ shouting has never been part of Waters’
lexicon. The lights dim and Speak To Me/Breathe blossoms from
the PA, succeeded by the space rock rush of One Of These Days
tracing a direct line from Wooden Shjips back to their antecedents.
With his voice in remarkably good shape, an injection of
new blood into Waters’ backing band sees acclaimed solo artist
Roger Waters (John Johnson / johnjohnson-photography.com)
40

The Psychedelic Furs (Keith Ainsworth / arkimages.co.uk)
The Psychedelic Furs
O2 Academy – 16/06
A group whose stock has risen deservedly in recent years,
THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS have picked up scores of new
followers due to their continuing appeal to filmmakers. Best
known for inspiring John Hughes’ cult 80s teen film Pretty In Pink,
the Furs’ recent inclusion on the OSTs to the highly acclaimed
likes of Call Me By Your Name and Stranger Things have done
wonders for their profile.
Beginning life as an angular post-punk outfit in the late
1970s, the band’s combination of melody and invention with
a soupçon of sneering punk attitude saw them stake out firm
territory among their contemporaries Joy Division and The Cure
(their next gig after tonight is at Meltdown at the invitation of
Robert Smith).
Drawing inspiration (like every band of that era) from Roxy
Music and David Bowie, the Furs have (perhaps wisely) avoided
releasing any new music since their 2001 reformation. With their
most ‘recent’ album World Outside released in 1991, the lion’s
share of the setlist comes from the five albums issued between
1980-87, ensuring their live set is an extended best-of run.
Opening with one of their greatest tracks – Dumb Waiters
from 1981 LP Talk Talk Talk – demonstrates the group’s early
approach in formidable style, combining skronking avant jazz
saxophone, art rock and straight-up pop. From the same album,
a barnstorming take of Into You Like A Train lands immediately
afterwards, Richard Butler’s voice and master of ceremonies
stage presence belying his 62 years. On saxophone, Chicago
jazz virtuoso Mars Williams is frankly incredible, his outstanding
Charlie Parker-esque solo on Sister Europe ripping through the
track’s Cold War gloom and concluding to huge applause.
Able to move easily between the Technicolor romance of
pop and the stark monochrome of post-punk, Heartbreak Beat
(covered live by The Killers) showcases the former, and the
sardonic lyric sheet of Mr Jones the latter. The intro to a beautiful
rendition of Love My Way receives a sizeable cheer, its inclusion
during an already semi-legendary scene of Armie Hammer
dancing during Call Me By Your Name has become a music video
in its own right.
The Ghost In You, meanwhile, featured in the second series
of modern classic Stranger Things (trainspotter alert: it appears in
Chapter Three, The Pollywog, where Jonathan and Nancy sit on
the bonnet of his car and eat lunch) like all of the material played
tonight sounds ageless. Elsewhere the lyrics to Reagan-era
polemic President Gas from the Todd Rundgren-produced Forever
Now (1982) sounds depressingly relevant in the current era.
Pretty In Pink understandably airs last, the era-defining cut
providing a Proustian Rush for those in thrall to Molly Ringwald
and the rest of the 1980s Brat Pack. A glorious demonstration
of how strong the band’s canon is, even if they don’t trouble
themselves with releasing any new material, the Furs’ back
catalogue should easily justify the band’s existence well into the
next decade.
Richard Lewis
Rakhi + Katya
Intimate Sonatas feat. Katya Apekisheva
Manchester Collective @ Invisible Wind
Factory – 29/06
The industrial setting of Invisible Wind Factory with its large
turbine and painted golden girder, juxtaposes with the intimate
performance of Manchester Collective, comprising KATYA
APEKISHEVA on piano and musical director RAKHI SINGH on
violin. The rapt audience has a mean age considerably lower
than that of a traditional classical concert. These are two of the
components that make this evening different to expectations.
Sitting in the round with sunshine streaming in from the
massive warehouse windows means there is nowhere for them to
hide. Everything, including the inside of the grand piano as the lid
is removed, is visible and it is this, along with the honesty about
their music, which helps to deconstruct the mysteries of classical
music and make it accessible for the uninitiated.
It is welcoming and a case of ‘Don’t know the titles of the
pieces? It doesn’t matter. Feel more at home hidden in the
darkness of a sweaty gig? Don’t worry, let us introduce you to the
world of chamber music.’ Come on in, be our guest.
The metal Invisible Wind Factory sign turns hypnotically in
the breeze above Singh and Apekisheva. Below there is a rug
and large lamp more at home in a suburban sitting room which
helps imbue the scene with a sense of domesticity: a neat visual
metaphor of how Manchester Collective makes their music
available to everyone.
It is so up close and personal that it is possible to read the
musical notes on Singh’s score. That perhaps some here can’t
name the pieces performed doesn’t matter: Manchester Collective
shows create a place where both novices and enthusiasts can
enjoy and get lost in the performances.
Between the two parts of the concert, there is a Q&A
session led by Manchester Collective’s Artistic Director, Adam
Szabo, which raises interesting questions and provides honest
answers: no, they hadn’t decided on the programme until the last
minute. Yes, changes have been made, and, yes, the piano does
sound a tad dodgy at times as a result of the humidity (to pretty
much everyone in the audience it sounds beautiful throughout).
Singh and Apekisheva are charming and gracious in their
explanations of the pieces chosen and the background to the
music, recognising that not everyone has the same level of
knowledge of the intricacies of classical music.
Singh explains it as a “journey”, smiling wryly as she
acknowledges the clichéd term, showing it to be very much
a work in progress. Both discuss their craft in an unassuming
manner only possible by those with a world-class talent.
And it is this talent and confidence which enable the original
and imaginative choices: John Cale and Bach on the same
programme, anyone?
Throughout the evening, their interpretations of the pieces
are nuanced and their passion for the music is infectious. Playful,
reflective and refreshing: this is classical music on a human
scale. Not in the least bit stuffy, even on the hottest of days.
Jennie Macaulay / @jenmagmcmac
Manchester Collective (Adam Szabo)
REVIEWS 41

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16TH AUGUST
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SAY
THE FINAL
“Just because the
culture-led gentrification
mantra has become a
staple overture within
our cities, does not
mean that this is a
hard, fast reality”
The news of Constellations’ closure, Craig G Pennington believes, is an opportunity for us to cast off the
comfort blanket of protest, and a chance to take matters into our own hands.
Anyone else feel like we’ve been here before? As Sonny
and Cher’s I Got You Babe lilts in the Baltic air and Bill
Murray is spotted wandering, bemused, along Jamaica
Street asking for directions to Punxsutawney, I’m hit
with a potent, heady sense of déjà vu. A nasty, bad-batch, ‘For
fucks sake, again, really?’ sense of déjà vu.
Yes, we’re here again, as much loved Baltic Triangle venue and
cultural hub Constellations is to close to make way for residential
development. Cue the customary online rabble-rousing, cries of
how this is further evidence of capital riding shotgun over culture, a
collective mourning.
We hear you. We feel the pain. But, surely, it doesn’t have to
be like this?
Much has been made of the article in The Times last year,
which declared the Baltic Triangle the “coolest place to live in
Britain”. It has been used as something of a qualifier for the Baltic’s
cultural and creative credentials and Constellations’ closure is
lamented by some as a body blow to this status. But really the
issue is implicit within the headline itself: the coolest place to live in
Britain. Not the best to create, enjoy music festivals, visit galleries,
collaborate and participate, but the coolest to buy an off-plan
apartment for £87,000. If you take a moment to revisit the article, it
makes alarming reading…
Topped with a photograph of Constellations’ RIBA Awardshortlisted
garden, the article declares, “Liverpool’s arts and party
scene is thriving, nowhere more so than in the Baltic Triangle
where abandoned factories have been repopulated by tech startups,
burlesque shows and pop-up club nights,” before going on
to celebrate that “you can buy a studio apartment in the Baltic
Triangle for £87,000”.
A little over 12 months later and one of the key cultural
institutions that has made the Baltic so investable in the first place
– and is pictured in the Times article – has been consumed by the
subsequent development it unwittingly encouraged.
As I said, we share your pain. But, what is important to
maintain throughout this is the understanding that this is not
an inevitable reprise. Just because the culture-led gentrification
mantra has become a staple overture within our cities, does not
mean that this is a hard, fast reality. It is not the universal truth. It
is not the unwritten inevitable. It is, however, the natural order of
things when one consideration is prioritised above all others: shortterm
profit.
There is an unfortunate and cruel irony at play within this
latest episode. If (and it is an if) the aspirations underpinning
the establishment of the new Liverpool City Region Music Board
and Music Office within the City Council are realised, we have
the opportunity to shape a new narrative. Music will enjoy a
new status as a central and influential lever in the economic,
cultural and social life of the city. This will result in new policy and
frameworks with music at their core, respecting and understanding
the issues our music community faces and prioritising music’s
development within the city. It will, however, come too late for
Constellations.
What we see with Constellations is not a case of an
unscrupulous developer looking to force a venue closure with
underhand tactics; it is the result of market forces. Property
developers are commercial entities, designed to create profit.
With an absence of any strategic vision which prioritises music,
this is the inevitable result. The Music Board and new structures
being established within the corridors of power must provide this.
There is an indisputable reality that, as a music community,
we need space. We need venues. We need studios. We need
workshops. We need space to commune, collaborate and
participate. And property developers need us to be doing this.
They need our oddness, our maverick spirit, our creativity, our
shows and our character. Because we are what differentiates one
glazed stack of sleep boxes from the next.
Herein lies a huge opportunity; one where planners,
developers, city-leaders and the music community sit around one
table and develop policy that allows both to coexist and flourish
in harmony, for mutual and collective benefit, financially, culturally
and socially. We can achieve development schemes that include
and prioritise the venues, studios and spaces we need.
But this needs strong leadership. It needs an active, engaged
and powerful Music Board.
At the time of press we still await details from the Liverpool
City Region as to the process through which the Music Board
will be constructed, when the Board will be established and the
particulars of how it will be structured. Once we have specifics
in place, Bido Lito! will, in partnership with a number of other
organisations in the music community, be convening an open
public meeting to discuss and debate the agenda that the Music
Board should pursue and ensure that as an organisation it is as
diverse, plural and as representative as possible, reflecting the
music community it seeks to represent.
What we do know is there is a call for Expressions Of Interest
open now for people who wish to have their voice heard. If
you wish to be involved, email iain@bop.co.uk with the subject
‘Liverpool City Region Music Board expression of interest’.
We love Constellations. The team there (and in particular
Becky) have been brothers and sisters in arms with Bido Lito!
from the start. It pains us to see so much love and hard work go
down in rubble.
As I type this, the cranes of Wolstenholme Square rattle
on stinking hot air through the jammed-open window at Bido
Lito! Towers. The falling bricks of The Kazimier, Wolstenholme
Creative Space and Nation provide an unwelcome and moving
daily soundtrack. Constellations will be next. The latest reminder
of how we as a community need to make sure we seize the
opportunity the Liverpool City Region Music Board will present
and not retreat to the comfort blanket of protest.
Words: Craig G Pennington
46

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