Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

John R. Chatterton has the unnerving ability to make songs that you have listened to perhaps a million times before sound somehow fresh and new. Tracks, that despite having been on the end of radio play and being sat in people’s records collections gathering dust, mean a great deal to people but have become stale and repetitive. In the hands of this superb musician, the music, his own compositions and those he covered were played with aplomb, a defining skill and instrumental ability that is hard to imagine anybody else being able to do.

As part of the International Music Festival taking place all over the city centre, the docks and the huge gathering going on at Sefton Park, it was the serene setting of the Bluecoat Garden and it’s sense of history that Mr. Chatterton laid down his guitar at the end and took in the great pleasure shown to him from a upbeat audience who had been enraptured by the music.

Liverpool Acoustic and especially Graham Holland who does much for the scene in Liverpool certainly scored a big hit by having John R. Chatterton perform on a Saturday afternoon. By starting with his own work, a track simply titled Blues Piece, the afternoon took a turn down a road in which lyrics were abandoned and the guitar became undisputed king. By adding on the very sweet track Robin’s Dance to the set list, the guitar didn’t just become king, it became a tool in which to entrance, the sound of strings pulling in the sensitive, the unabashed and the unsure with the ease of a qualified hypnotist.

August Bank holidays are special, for many it could be the chance to take in the final long days off before the build-up to the winter period begins in earnest, the option to revel in the afternoon sun and take in smooth music before the speed in which life dictates more and more that for some reason to be pushed to do more and more is a good thing. To take time out to have your soul stroked by the sound of real music and not the plastic sounds of commercialism is not a bad thing and by performing incredible stringed versions of I Shot The Sheriff, the hauntingly beautiful Whilst My Guitar Gently Weeps and a bold take on Led Zepplin’s Stairway To Heaven, John R. Chatterton added more to the 2013 summer Bank Holiday that could be thought possible.

Music is a healer when in the right hands, and in the carefree but talented hands of John R. Chatterton, music becomes something to cherish and nurture.

Ian D. Hall