This year’s Liverpool Music Week truly has been a thing of beauty, with a perfectly curated mix of musical styles. From the feel-good factor of a huge selling artist like Chic at the Echo Arena and the polished retro-soul pop of critically and commercially successful Jungle, to the joy of discovering Japanese Breakfast (really, listen to their album!) in the basement at EBGBS, with truly special moments like Simon Raymonde’s Lost Horizons performing their debut gig and of course the Queen of Reggae herself Dawn Penn.
One of the great things about this format is, often with 1 day or weekend festivals, they lead to sensory overload. You see a great band, and before you get a chance to fully assimilate it, there’s another, and another, and in the end they all meld into one.
Liverpool music week on the other hand is more like traditional gigs with a manageable number of bands, and if you’re short on your holiday allocation you don’t even need time off work, and can buzz through the working day listening to the bands you saw the night before, on spotify.
It was my first time at Liverpool Music Week, and I’ll be back for sure!
I must admit after a week of gigs, I was flagging a bit by the closing party on the Saturday. I’ve never really been too fussed on Everything Everything, and I couldn’t face staying up to 1am for Tea Street Band, much as I wanted to see them. I was really looking fwd to Orielles and Zola Jesus as I’ve never seen either and heard nothing but good things about them, but they were playing the small stages of North Shore Troubadour, and I couldn’t face the inevitable squeeze, so I bailed out early.
Some stand out acts though: God on my right, Ali Horne, Trudy and the Romance, She drew the Gun and of course Pink Kink. It’s about the 5th time I’ve seen Pink Kink this year, some bands if you see them twice in a year they get a bit boring as they basically do the same performance, but not Pink Kink, every time you see them they are fresh.
Well that’s about it from our Liverpool Music Week 2017 roundup, here are my reviews of the week. Until next year!
Chic
Dan Croll / Jalen N’ Gonda
20 Years of Bella Union – Lost Horizons / BC Camplight / Hilang Child
Japanese Breakfast / St Jude the Obscure / Mary Miller
Jungle / Steeling Sheep / Makeness
Dawn Penn
Closing Party
