Ren Harvieu October tour including Stanley Theatre Liverpool

Ren Harvieu October tour 2012 including Stanley Theatre Liverpool

REN HARVIEU

OCTOBER UK TOUR

and FESTIVAL APPEARANCES

“An impeccable debut... two feet in the past and one open mouth pointing towards a very bright future” NME 8/10

 “Singing that switches without warning between bruised restraint and majestic assertiveness – a glorious throwback to peak-period Dusty Springfield, Shirley Bassey and Peggy Lee” Sunday Times Culture

“A voice to die for” Grazia

“Utterly startling...Greatness beckons”.” MOJO

“A stunning debut album of cinematic orchestral pop and stirring torch songs.” Q 

21 year old Salford born singer Ren Harvieu, whose breathtaking  voice has had the critics reaching for the superlatives and whose critically acclaimed debut album “Through The Night” stormed into the UK chart this week at no. 5, has announced her first UK tour for October 2012.  In addition to these shows Ren will also play a very special one off acoustic show at the beautiful and ancient St Pancras Old Church in London on Wednesday 30th May - St Pancras Old Church, London (acoustic) - doors: 7:30pm.

October 2012

Sunday 7th                 Glasgow                      Oran Mor 

Monday 8th                Gateshead                   Sage 

Tuesday 9^th                 Manchester                 The Ritz 

Thursday 11th          Liverpool                   Stanley Theatre 

Friday 12th                 Birmingham               Academy 2 

Saturday 13th           London                       O₂ Shepherds Bush Empire 

Monday 15th                          Portsmouth                Wedgewood Rooms 

Tuesday 16th                          Bristol                          Thekla 

Tickets for all of the above dates will be available through a special fan pre-sale at 9am tomorrow Tuesday 22nd May. Tickets will then go on general sale at 9am on Thursday 24th May. Fans will get the chance to catch Ren and full band live at T In The Park - 6- 8th July, Camp Bestival – 29^th July, V festival 18/19^th August and Bestival – 9^th Sept.

Ren Harvieu, just turned twenty one, is self-made, not your typical modern day popstar.  She sounds one way and looks and acts completely differently. No Brit School training, no showbiz connections, just a young girl with a truly remarkable voice and a set of songs that will stir your soul and break your heart. Ren sang in the odd local talent show, one called ‘Salford Superstar’ and attended what she calls the Primark version of a performing arts school where she was told she couldn’t sing. Through a chance meeting she recorded a couple of songs which the guy who was to become her manager heard. Immediately realising he had come across a truly unique talent, he helped her record properly and soon after, on the strength of a handful of stunning songs, they had a deal with Island Records.

“Through The Night” was originally set for release in the summer of 2011 when Ren suffered a terrible accident which left her with a broken back and not knowing whether she would ever walk again. Following a harrowing spell in hospital, Ren began to make, what the doctors called, a miraculous recovery. She’d just been to the US for the first time to record a song with rapper Nas, who had heard and instantly fallen in love with Ren’s voice, made her first video and found out that she was to perform on the BBC Introducing stage at Glastonbury. Things couldn’t have looked any rosier. Then completely randomly, a guy, messing about at a party vaulted over a hedge, hurtled through the air, and landed on Ren’s spine. One of the few bright moments during her 2 month hospital stay came when she received a phone call from one of her childhood heroes, Johnny Marr. He had heard she wasn't well; he had also heard Through The Night, and had tweeted about this fabulous new singer from his hometown. He wanted to meet her, and make music with her, when she was ready to. Thankfully after two months of operations and intensive rehabilitation, Ren left hospital and is now finally set to let the world hear and see hear sing her wonderful songs. Ren has also recently recorded a cover of the Vashti Bunyan classic “The Train Song” with Karen Elson. The two met via a mutual friend and have just shot a video for the song in Nashville.  

http://www.renharvieu.co.uk/

Article posted by Musicmafia

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The Smiths Indeed - Liverpools Stanley Theatre October 28th

                  The Smiths Indeed

Who will be performing The Queen is Dead in it’s entirety to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of the album’s release

"A brilliant tribute to The Smiths" (i-D Magazine)

 

If, in the Autumn of 1982, you were a pair of budding young songwriters and performers about to unleash a series of wounding pop songs about sexual attraction and solitude upon an unsuspecting Britain and were surrounded by bands with names like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Ed Banger & The Nosebleeds and Slaughter and the Dogs, is it a surprise that your retort would be a name such as The Smiths?

Between October 1982, when The Smiths performed their first gig supporting Blue Rondo A La Turk at the Ritz in Manchester, and the release of their seminal album The Queen is Dead in June 1986, that same pair of songwriters, Morrissey and Marr, in conjunction with Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, had written, recorded and performed a series of brilliantly illuminating pop songs that gave hope to a generation struggling to guide its way through the morass of a grey, turgid Britain blighted by the Falklands war, the Miners strike and Margaret Thatcher.

To celebrate the 25^th anniversary since release of The Queen is Dead the album will be performed in its entirety by The Smiths Indeed, who reproduce with uncanny accuracy, the energy and the pomp and ceremony of The Smiths during this period of the 1980’s. The Smiths Indeed have been performing since 2005 and developed a rapturous following of their own amongst the notoriously hard to please hardcore Smiths fans both old and new. Due to an increasing demand for their incredible ability to reproduce the atmosphere of a Smiths show, The Smiths Indeed will be moving their performance into larger venues, enabling them to incorporate a more sophisticated concert containing state of the art lighting and video content without losing the feel of a 1980’s gig.

The Smiths Indeed will perform The Queen is Dead and a Greatest Hits set at the following venues on the dates listed below:

 

Friday 28^th October – Liverpool University’s Stanley Theatre, Liverpool £13.50

Saturday 29^th October – Academy, Sheffield £13.50

Thursday 3^rd November – King Tuts Wah Wah Hut, Glasgow £12.50

Friday 4^th November – Doghouse, Dundee £10.00

Saturday 5^th November – The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen £12.50

Thursday 10^th November – HMV Institute, Birmingham £13.50

Friday 11^th November – The Old Fire Station, Bournemouth £13.50

Saturday 12^th November – Academy, Oxford £13.50

 Thursday 17^th November – Garage, London £13.50

Friday 18^th November – Komedia, Brighton £13.50

Saturday 19^th November – Academy, Leicester £13.50

Thursday 24^th November – Academy, Newcastle £13.50

Saturday 26^th November – The Ritz, Manchester £13.50

MORE DATES TO FOLLOW

http://www.thesmithsindeed.co.uk/

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Julian Cope - Liverpool Stanley Theatre October 27th

 

 

THE MUSIC CONSORTIUM PRESENTS

JULIAN COPE

Thursday 27^th October 2011

Liverpool, Stanley Theatre, University Of Liverpool

160, Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5TR

Tel. 0151 794 6868 www.lgos.org

£17.50 advance doors 7.30

 

 

Julian Cope is a singer, poet, occultist and photographer who has enjoyed a 30-year career in the rock business, and is described by his Bloomsbury book publishers as a ‘visionary rock musician and musicologist, hip archaeologist and one-time front man of the Teardrop Explodes’. During that time, Cope has released over 20 solo albums, countless collaborative projects, and six acclaimed books, including his autobiography HEAD-ON and the much-lauded KRAUTROCKSAMPLER.

 

Cope began his career in 1977, as bass player in the short-lived Liverpool punk group The Crucial Three, alongside future Echo & The Bunnymen singer Ian McCulloch, before forming the Teardrop Explodes in late ’78. This band’s four-year reign as a Top Ten chart act collapsed at the end of 1982, when Cope’s infamous love of munching LSD onstage proved too much for both his management and record companies.

 

An attempt to re-launch his career ended in disaster in March 1984, when Cope ignored the presence of several important media figures in his Hammersmith Palais audience, and proceeded to lacerate his stomach in a drug-induced frenzy. A brief wilderness period ensued, during which time he and his young American wife Dorian moved back to Tamworth, the Staffordshire town of his childhood. Now remaining indoors for long periods and collecting 1950s Dinky Toys, it was during this time that Cope’s legendary FRIED album was released, featuring his signature death-and-resurrection lament ‘Reynard the Fox’ and clad in a record cover that showed Cope naked save for a giant turtle shell.

 

In the late ‘80s, however, Cope made his welcome return to the charts with the single ‘World Shut Your Mouth’, and attendant album SAINT JULIAN, which was followed in the ‘90s by such acclaimed albums as PEGGY SUICIDE, JEHOVAHKILL and AUTOGEDDON. However, Cope now moved away from the rock’n’roll business and turned his attentions instead to making a detailed first-hand study of the occult, mythology and Britain’s prehistory.

 

Throughout the mid-90s, Cope scoured the British Isles for lost stone temples of the first monument builders, incorporating three tours of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the process. After eight years of research, these results were published in his best-selling tome THE MODERN ANTIQUARIAN, a full colour 484-page hardback that shocked the publishing world by selling over 50,000 copies.

 

Five years later, Cope followed up this extraordinary achievement with an even larger sequel entitled THE MEGALITHIC EUROPEAN that covered mainland Europe plus many of its islands. Cope has performed live with Sunn0))), also appearing as lead vocalist on their acclaimed album WHITE ONE, and has recorded three albums with his proto-metal power trio Brain Donor. He has also lectured three times at the British Museum. In October 2007, Cope’s JAPROCKSAMPLER was released to critical acclaim, thereafter he hosted Manchester University’s William Blake exhibition BLAKE’S SHADOW, at the Whitworth Gallery in January 2008. In May of the same year, his new album BLACK SHEEP was released to tremendous acclaim, and has since formed a band of the same name. Cope is currently working on two books, the first entitled LIVES OF THE PROPHETS: A NEW PERPECTIVE, and his first novel, a road trip set in Sardinia entitled 131.

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Emmy the Great @ Stanley Theatre Liverpool October 2011

EMMY THE GREAT

Friday 7^th October 2011

Liverpool, Stanley Theatre, University Of Liverpool

160, Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5TR

Tel. 0151 794 6868 www.lgos.org

£12.50 advance doors 7.30pm

Two years after her critically acclaimed debut First Love, Emmy The Great released her second album Virtue earlier this year. Written and recorded under very different circumstances to her first, Virtue began as a series of stories Emmy embarked on after her engagement to an atheist, but took on a very different shape when he left her for the church.
Using symbols borrowed from fairy tales and mythology, Emmy added the icons that have replaced them in our modern consciousness – industrial buildings, mushroom clouds, West London’s Trellick Tower. This was Emmy’s personal collection of myths that she fitted to her music – a genre she refers to as digital medieval. She’d noticed that women only make it through the woods in big myths if they keep their virtue and she felt lost in the woods twice while writing the album, first when she got engaged, the second time when the stitches came apart.
When her fiancé left, Emmy had to pick up the pieces. She hid in the country, lost herself in books about saints, archetypes, and folk tales, trying to make the world work. But she didn’t want the album to be about her. It had to save her from what had happened, but be about everything.
Virtue was made in London and Sussex. This time round, Euan Hinshelwood, her long-term musical collaborator, and Emmy took the reins, rather than develop the songs with their full band in the studio. Euan came up with the guitar palette, strange, ambient, twisted and atmospheric, while Emmy wrote backing vocals for different characters she voiced herself. The ghosts of the Cocteau Twins and Suzanne Vega feature, as well as the stories of Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter, and the writing of cultural theorists like Marina Warner. Emmy wanted a cast for this album, to lift up the world she was trying to conjure, and kept albums in mind that have similar ambitions – Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea; Janelle Monae’s The Archandroid. While making it, she listened to girly pop like The Bangles, tempered with religious choirs, folk from the South Pacific, while Euan became obsessed with post-punk and Bulgarian choirs. They even spent a night Googling Enya.
Producer Gareth Jones (These New Puritans, Depeche Mode and Grizzly Bear) indulged their romanticism, but understood their wish to make the music sound precise, rather than precious. Emmy also knew she had to let go – to confront things without fear, to throw her head high, say what she thought, things she couldn’t say to herself without music. It’s this record, she says, that’s made her feel like a person and that she hopes will speak to others who’ve endured and survived.

www.emmythegreat.com

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Emmy-The-Great/49401939332

http://twitter.com/#!/emmy_the_great

http://www.myspace.com/emmythegreat

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Puressence live @ Stanley Theatre Liverpool

PURESSENCE

Plus special guests

Saturday 8^th October 2011

Liverpool Guild of Students, Stanley Theatre,

160, Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5TR

Tel. 0151 794 6868 www.lgos.org

£9.50 advance doors 7.30pm

2011 saw Puressence release their new single, ‘When Your Eyes Close’, an edited version of the track found on their brand new album ‘Solid State Revival.’
A soaring, emotion-soaked beauty, ‘When Your Eyes Close’ features the guest vocals of luminous American folk-rock legend Judy Collins alongside those of the band’s frontman James Mudriczki. Collins’ pure vocal dovetails beautifully with that Mudriczki, the owner of an extraordinary and distinctive vibrato bolted to raw power and a fantastic range.
Collins, a convert to the Manchester-based band since she heard their 2007 album ‘Don’t Forget To Remember’, says Puressence, “swept me off my feet when I first heard them. They’re a very moving experience, very, very special indeed, and they have such amazing songs. And where did James learn to sing like that? His voice is an instrument of such clarity and purity and flexibility, it just does you in.”
Puressence have always been about the emotion since they formed in the early nineties after schoolmates Mudriczki and Tony Szuminski (drums) first met Kevin Matthews (bass) and founding guitarist Neil MacDonald on the bus to The Stone Roses’ legendary Spike Island show in 1989. Puressence married the presence and attitude of the Roses to a haunting and molten guitar rock that last hit the heights during the era of Joy Division and Echo & The Bunnymen. After two singles on Manchester’s 2 Damn Loud label in 1992 and one for Rough Trade’s singles club, Island Records won the race to sign them. 1996’s self-titled debut album and 1998’s Only Foreverfollowed, with ‘This Feeling’ breaking the UK Top 40 single chart that year. “All I Want” was another Top 40 hit, as was ‘Walking Dead’ from 2002’s beats-laced Planet Helpless album.
All these tracks were included on their 2009 compilation ‘Sharpen Up The Knives’, which drew on the band’s Island Records years between 1996 and 2002. Plus there was Mudriczki’s spine-shivering solo version of ‘Che’, originally recorded for 2008’s Judy Collins tribute album Born To The Breed, also featuring the likes of Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Chrissie Hynde and Dolly Parton, though Collins thinks ‘Che’, “was the most interesting thing on the whole album. So different and wonderfully fresh.”
On stage, James’ thousand yard stare is legendary among fans (though he always breaks into a broad smile between songs): “it is a really draining experience for me, to get out what I need to for the tunes,” he says. “I can’t just casually let the words drip from my mouth; I have to really feel it. The intensity comes from believing it, and letting it out. It’s like when you hear Scott Walker and Ian Curtis – no way were they faking what they were singing about.”
That intensity can be traced to growing up in North Manchester, “one of most deprived parts of the country. I can only draw on my life experiences, to those people close to me, and channel that in the music. I'm singing about love, deceit, being let down, good times, bad times. Stuff people in Victorian times wrote about, that people will be writing about in five hundred years. But it proves that good can come from the bad.”
Not forgetting the band’s first independently released album in ‘Don’t Forget To Remember’ (with new guitarist Lowell Killen in place), ‘Sharpen Up The Knives’ represented the band’s real big new beginning, as it included two new tracks ‘Raise Me To The Ground’ and ‘Our Number’s Oracle’. Both signalled a return to Puressence, knives sharpened, back to their brilliant and most emotionally charged best. Judy Collins likes the album so much, she sings on a second track too, the album’s smouldering seven-minute opener “Swathes Of Sea Made Stone”.
Especially loved in their Manchester homeland and also Southern Europe (they play to tens of thousands in Greece), Puressence are, as July Collins says, very, very special. Starting with “When Your Eyes Close’, let Puressence sweep you off your feet too.

www.puressence.co.uk

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Puressence plus special guests Stanley Theatre Liverpool

June 2011 sees Puressence release their new single, ‘When Your Eyes Close’, an edited version of the track found on their brand new album ‘Solid State Revival.’

A soaring, emotion-soaked beauty, ‘When Your Eyes Close’ features the guest vocals of luminous American folk-rock legend Judy Collins alongside those of the band’s frontman James Mudriczki. Collins’ pure vocal dovetails beautifully with that Mudriczki, the owner of an extraordinary and distinctive vibrato bolted to raw power and a fantastic range.

Collins, a convert to the Manchester-based band since she heard their 2007 album ‘Don’t Forget To Remember’, says Puressence, “swept me off my feet when I first heard them. They’re a very moving experience, very, very special indeed, and they have such amazing songs. And where did James learn to sing like that? His voice is an instrument of such clarity and purity and flexibility, it just does you in.”

Puressence have always been about the emotion since they formed in the early nineties after schoolmates Mudriczki and Tony Szuminski (drums) first met Kevin Matthews (bass) and founding guitarist Neil MacDonald on the bus to The Stone Roses’ legendary Spike Island show in 1989. Puressence married the presence and attitude of the Roses to a haunting and molten guitar rock that last hit the heights during the era of Joy Division and Echo & The Bunnymen. After two singles on Manchester’s 2 Damn Loud label in 1992 and one for Rough Trade’s singles club, Island Records won the race to sign them. 1996’s self-titled debut album and 1998’s Only Forever followed, with ‘This Feeling’ breaking the UK Top 40 single chart that year. “All I Want” was another Top 40 hit, as was ‘Walking Dead’ from 2002’s beats-laced Planet Helpless album.

 All these tracks were included on their 2009 compilation ‘Sharpen Up The Knives’, which drew on the band’s Island Records years between 1996 and 2002. Plus there was Mudriczki’s spine-shivering solo version of ‘Che’, originally recorded for 2008’s Judy Collins tribute album Born To The Breed, also featuring the likes of Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Chrissie Hynde and Dolly Parton, though Collins thinks ‘Che’, “was the most interesting thing on the whole album. So different and wonderfully fresh.”

On stage, James’ thousand yard stare is legendary among fans (though he always breaks into a broad smile between songs): “it is a really draining experience for me, to get out what I need to for the tunes,” he says. “I can’t just casually let the words drip from my mouth; I have to really feel it. The intensity comes from believing it, and letting it out. It’s like when you hear Scott Walker and Ian Curtis – no way were they faking what they were singing about.”

That intensity can be traced to growing up in North Manchester, “one of most deprived parts of the country. I can only draw on my life experiences, to those people close to me, and channel that in the music. I'm singing about love, deceit, being let down, good times, bad times. Stuff people in Victorian times wrote about, that people will be writing about in five hundred years. But it proves that good can come from the bad.”

Not forgetting the band’s first independently released album in ‘Don’t Forget To Remember’ (with new guitarist Lowell Killen in place), ‘Sharpen Up The Knives’ represented the band’s real big new beginning, as it included two new tracks ‘Raise Me To The Ground’ and ‘Our Number’s Oracle’. Both signalled a return to Puressence, knives sharpened, back to their brilliant and most emotionally charged best. Judy Collins likes the album so much, she sings on a second track too, the album’s smouldering seven-minute opener “Swathes Of Sea Made Stone”. 

Especially loved in their Manchester homeland and also Southern Europe (they play to tens of thousands in Greece), Puressence are, as July Collins says, very, very special. Starting with “When Your Eyes Close’, let Puressence sweep you off your feet too.

 Saturday 8^th October 2011

Liverpool Guild of Students, Stanley Theatre,

160, Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5TR

Tel. 0151 794 6868 www.lgos.org

£9.50 advance doors 7.30pm

http://www.puressence.co.uk/

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Julian Cope live at The Stanley Theatre - Liverpool

THE MUSIC CONSORTIUM PRESENTS

JULIAN COPE

Thursday 27^th October 2011

Liverpool, Stanley Theatre, University Of Liverpool

160, Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5TR

Tel. 0151 794 6868 www.lgos.org

£17.50 advance doors 7.30

Julian Cope is a singer, poet, occultist and photographer who has enjoyed a 30-year career in the rock business, and is described by his Bloomsbury book publishers as a ‘visionary rock musician and musicologist, hip archaeologist and one-time front man of the Teardrop Explodes’. During that time, Cope has released over 20 solo albums, countless collaborative projects, and six acclaimed books, including his autobiography HEAD-ON and the much-lauded KRAUTROCKSAMPLER.

Cope began his career in 1977, as bass player in the short-lived Liverpool punk group The Crucial Three, alongside future Echo & The Bunnymen singer Ian McCulloch, before forming the Teardrop Explodes in late ’78. This band’s four-year reign as a Top Ten chart act collapsed at the end of 1982, when Cope’s infamous love of munching LSD onstage proved too much for both his management and record companies.

An attempt to re-launch his career ended in disaster in March 1984, when Cope ignored the presence of several important media figures in his Hammersmith Palais audience, and proceeded to lacerate his stomach in a drug-induced frenzy. A brief wilderness period ensued, during which time he and his young American wife Dorian moved back to Tamworth, the Staffordshire town of his childhood. Now remaining indoors for long periods and collecting 1950s Dinky Toys, it was during this time that Cope’s legendary FRIED album was released, featuring his signature death-and-resurrection lament ‘Reynard the Fox’ and clad in a record cover that showed Cope naked save for a giant turtle shell.

In the late ‘80s, however, Cope made his welcome return to the charts with the single ‘World Shut Your Mouth’, and attendant album SAINT JULIAN, which was followed in the ‘90s by such acclaimed albums as PEGGY SUICIDE, JEHOVAHKILL and AUTOGEDDON. However, Cope now moved away from the rock’n’roll business and turned his attentions instead to making a detailed first-hand study of the occult, mythology and Britain’s prehistory.

Throughout the mid-90s, Cope scoured the British Isles for lost stone temples of the first monument builders, incorporating three tours of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the process. After eight years of research, these results were published in his best-selling tome THE MODERN ANTIQUARIAN, a full colour 484-page hardback that shocked the publishing world by selling over 50,000 copies.

Five years later, Cope followed up this extraordinary achievement with an even larger sequel entitled THE MEGALITHIC EUROPEAN that covered mainland Europe plus many of its islands. Cope has performed live with Sunn0))), also appearing as lead vocalist on their acclaimed album WHITE ONE, and has recorded three albums with his proto-metal power trio Brain Donor. He has also lectured three times at the British Museum. In October 2007, Cope’s JAPROCKSAMPLER was released to critical acclaim, thereafter he hosted Manchester University’s William Blake exhibition BLAKE’S SHADOW, at the Whitworth Gallery in January 2008. In May of the same year, his new album BLACK SHEEP was released to tremendous acclaim, and has since formed a band of the same name. Cope is currently working on two books, the first entitled LIVES OF THE PROPHETS: A NEW PERSPECTIVE, and his first novel, a road trip set in Sardinia entitled 131.

Read More

Emmy the Great Live at Stanley Theatre Liverpool

 

 THE MUSIC CONSORTIUM PRESENTS

EMMY THE GREAT

Friday 7^th October 2011

Liverpool, Stanley Theatre, University Of Liverpool

160, Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5TR

Tel. 0151 794 6868 www.lgos.org

£12.50 advance doors 7.30pm

‘Emmy The Great was one of the highlights of last month’s Sound City festival’

 Jade Wright, Liverpool Echo, June 2011

Two years after her critically acclaimed debut First Love, Emmy The Great is set to release her second album Virtue on Monday 13th June 2011.

Written and recorded under very different circumstances to her first, Virtue began as a series of stories Emmy embarked on after her engagement to an atheist, but took on a very different shape when he left her for the church. 

Using symbols borrowed from fairy tales and mythology, Emmy added the icons that have replaced them in our modern consciousness – industrial buildings, mushroom clouds, West London’s Trellick Tower. This was Emmy’s personal collection of myths that she fitted to her music – a genre she refers to as digital medieval. She’d noticed that women only make it through the woods in big myths if they keep their virtue and she felt lost in the woods twice while writing the album, first when she got engaged, the second time when the stitches came apart.

When her fiancé left, Emmy had to pick up the pieces. She hid in the country, lost herself in books about saints, archetypes, and folk tales, trying to make the world work. But she didn’t want the album to be about her. It had to save her from what had happened, but be about everything.

Virtue was made in London and Sussex. This time round, Euan Hinshelwood, her long-term musical collaborator, and Emmy took the reins, rather than develop the songs with their full band in the studio. Euan came up with the guitar palette, strange, ambient, twisted and atmospheric, while Emmy wrote backing vocals for different characters she voiced herself. The ghosts of the Cocteau Twins and Suzanne Vega feature, as well as the stories of Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter, and the writing of cultural theorists like Marina Warner. Emmy wanted a cast for this album, to lift up the world she was trying to conjure, and kept albums in mind that have similar ambitions – Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea; Janelle Monae’s The Archandroid. While making it, she listened to girly pop like The Bangles, tempered with religious choirs, folk from the South Pacific, while Euan became obsessed with post-punk and Bulgarian choirs. They even spent a night Googling Enya. 

Producer Gareth Jones (These New Puritans, Depeche Mode and Grizzly Bear) indulged their romanticism, but understood their wish to make the music sound precise, rather than precious. Emmy also knew she had to let go – to confront things without fear, to throw her head high, say what she thought, things she couldn’t say to herself without music. It’s this record, she says, that’s made her feel like a person and that she hopes will speak to others who’ve endured and survived. 

 

www.emmythegreat.com

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Emmy-The-Great/49401939332

http://twitter.com/#!/emmy_the_great

http://www.myspace.com/emmythegreat

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Folk legend Judy Collins- Liverpool Stanley Theatre

 Judy Collins

Saturday 4th June 2011

Liverpool, Stanley Theatre, University Of Liverpool

160, Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5TR

Tel. 0151 794 6868 www.lgos.org

£17.50 advance doors 7.30

Singer Judy Collins, along with Joan Baez, was one of the two major interpretive singers to emerge from the folk revival of the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s. Judy Collins has thrilled audiences worldwide with her unique blend of interpretative folksongs and contemporary themes.

Her impressive career has spanned more than 50 years. At 13, Judy Collins made her public debut performing Mozart's Concerto for Two Pianos but it was the music of such artists as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, as well as the traditional songs of the folk revival, that sparked Judy’s love of lyrics. She soon moved away from the classical piano and began her lifelong love with the guitar.

In 1961, Judy Collins released her first album, A Maid of Constant Sorrow, at the age of 22 and began a thirty-five year association with Jac Holzman and Elektra Records. She interpreted the songs of fellow artists - particularly the social poets of the time such as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton.  Judy was instrumental in bringing other singer-songwriters to a wider audience including poet/musician Leonard Cohen – and musicians Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman.

Judy Collins is also noted for her rendition of Joni Mitchell's “Both Sides Now” on her 1967 album, Wildflowers which has since been entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Winning "Song of the Year” at the 1975 Grammy Awards was Judy's version of “Send in the Clowns,” a ballad written by Stephen Sondheim for the Broadway musical “A Little Night Music.”

Judy has continued an impressive musical career with an extensive catalog from every decade throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and up to the present.  On July 27, 2010, Collectors’ Choice Music will reissue (digitally remastered) nine CDs of Collins’ Elektra titles: Fifth Album (1965), In My Life (1966), Whales & Nightingales (1970), True Stories & Other Dreams (1973), Bread & Roses (1976), Running for My Life (1980), Times of Our Lives (1982), Home Again (1984) and Christmas at the Biltmore (1997). These albums contain newly commissioned liner notes by Ritchie Unterberger that include interviews with Collins.

Judy has authored several books, including the inspirational memoir Sanity & Grace, focusing on the death of her only son and the healing process following the tragedy; it speaks to all who have endured the sorrow of losing a loved one before their time. She is also co-director, with Jill Godmillow, of an Academy Award-nominated film about Antonia Brico, the first woman to conduct major symphonies around the world—and Judy's classical piano teacher when she was young. In 1999, Judy founded her own record label, Wildflower Records - a grass roots artist driven label committedtonurturing fresh talent. The aim of the label is to develop long-term relationships with artists and their representatives in a way that Judy’s own career was nurtured by major labels. For more information about Wildflower Records you can visit the label’s website at www.wildflowerrecords.com

Judy Collins’ social history has always been linked with her musical history.  Judy is drawn to social activism and is a representative for UNICEF and campaigns on behalf of the abolition of landmines, amongst many other causes.

Judy’s  two latest creative projects, due out  June 2010 are: a new CD, Paradise (Wildflower Records), a collection of 10 songs that include duets of Judy with the legendary Stephen Stills and Joan Baez; and Over the Rainbow(Imagine Publishing) a magnificent oversized children’s picture book and 3-song CD set, featuring artwork by renowned painter Eric Puybaret illustrating the lyrics of this #1 movie song of all-time, coupled with Judy Collins’ enchanting recording of the title song makes this destined to become a beloved classic storybook, delighting children of all ages for decades to come.

Judy Collins, now 71, is still writing, performing, and nurturing fresh talent. She plays 80 to100 dates a year around the country. Judy Collins, a relentlessly creative spirit, is a modern day Renaissance woman who is also an accomplished painter, filmmaker, record label head, musical mentor, and an in-demand keynote speaker for mental health and suicide prevention.  She continues to create music of hope and healing that lights up the world and speaks to the heart. 

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Matt Berry @ The Masque Theatre Liverpool

Fans of the IT Crowd, Dark Places and of the man himself gathered in the Masque Theatre to witness a one off unique event. Matt Berry had come to woo them with his silky vocal talents and his unique brand of musical entertainment, and he didn’t disappoint. Entering on stage like Elvis Presley after a 3 minute build u, holding onto a Jack Daniels bottle which was almost as big as him, Matt went straight into the first number. That all too familiar voice bellowing out over the musicians.

With such classics as snuff box and Witchcraft the crowd lapped up both the humorous lyrics and Matt’s laid back attitude. In between songs the banter between him and the crowd was almost as if it was scripted and as soon as “One Track Lover” was played the obvious Garth Merenghi fans applauded and sang along.

The musicians themselves were faultless. The guitar player in particular was something to behold. Looking like Rodney Trotter with a curly wig on, he played like a man possessed by the ghost of Jimi Hendrix. The music itself varied from “reggae” to out and out funk-a-delic that would make George Clinton and Prince happy men. The Musicians were tight and played to Matt’s outlandish behaviour.

The encore itself was truly a masterpiece of invention. Singing “Jesus Christ Superstar” Matt left no doubt to his pre-conceived notions of himself and to be honest they were well deserved.

My only complaint to the whole night was the lack lustre crowd that had turned up to see Matt Berry. I think even at times during the end Matt seemed to be getting tired of trying to get some sort of interaction with the majority of the crowd and quite rightly so. But apart from that, this was a tremendous gig. Full of enthusiasm, humour and barrel loads of laughs. This has to be seen to be believed and as Matt Berry himself says...”Liverpool...you’re clever.....I LIKE THAT”

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The Doors Alive @ The Stanley Theatre Liverpool

Friday night saw Stanley Hall transported back in time to the 1960’s as the UK’s number one
tribute band to The Doors paid a visit. As they took to the stage they had the look down to a tee,
especially “Jim” who was clad in leather pants, white shirt and love beads. The only thing that wasmissing was the obligatory bottle of Jack Daniels, instead they opted for Red Stripe as their on stage tipple.

With lead singer Willie aka Jim channelling Morrison to near perfection from the vocals to on stage presence, even staring off intensely into the crowd in between songs, Jim Morrison would be proud to know his legacy lives on in such a talented performer and allows the fans who never got to witness the actual Doors get a glimpse into what it may have been like.

With firm favourites like, Alabama Song (Whisky Bar), Light My Fire and Unknown Soldier recreated for you live, you can see why this tribute band has sold out gigs and back to back concerts at venues all over the UK.

Only let down for me and yes it’s a very minor one, was Roadhouse Blues. This is only because I love the live version by The Doors so much, mainly for Morrison’s live poetic on the spot lyrics and would personally have loved to have seen this recreated by The Doors Alive. Apart from that I can say with all honesty that this performance was faultless and would definitely go to see these guys again. They are back in Liverpool in January 2011 just in case you fancy a trip back in time.


Review by Alison Goggin

http://www.thedoorsalive.co.uk

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