Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Studio 2 has held many a night where the audience has been gripped by the performance; it has hosted Steve Macfarlane’s outstanding Sunday afternoon slots in which the occasion is always something to look forward to. It has seen the likes of Twisted Trees, the brilliant Little Sparrow, Matt Breen and Susie Jones perform on its stage and even had the legendary Brian Nash, John Gorman, Liverpool wordsmith Peter Grant and a whole host of poets and musicians give their all within the room. It even hosted the likes of Marillion and once upon a time as they recorded one of their many albums there and yet the ambient room has surely never hosted a band like Bad Pollyanna before.
The lights inside the venue were taken down low, they flickered and played with the senses and offered a glimpse through the darkness of a band that just roared into action, they steamrollered through the ambient affection in which Jazz nights, soft musical expressions and the odd Progressive Rock song had lived happily for years without being disturbed. Memory is everything and yet Olivia Hyde’s amazing voice threatened and demolished the comfortable feel that had been carefully, quite rightly, preserved and offered an insight into a world in which those memories that lingered openly inside Studio 2 never thought they would witness.
This wasn’t just a band perfected in the art of gusto, they took the word and placed it on the biggest Catherine Wheel and span it so fast that it will still be hurtling and fizzing away sometime in September 2017. For Olivia Hyde, Nikki Kentinen, Stephen Kilpatrick and Valerian Adore this was special, for the audience this was a rampaging, if genial, vocal monster, a beast of a group that just got inside the heads of every patron of Studio 2 and took them on a trip to Heaven and back.
Amongst the songs performed by the band were the opener Awake, the superb Define Me, Hollow, Monstrous Child and Where Does It Hurt. The band also had the incredible humility and time to highlight and talk about the Sophie Lancaster charity in which they recorded the haunting and beautiful song Invincible Girl. In a world that sometimes forgets exactly why music exists, to bring people together and not to tear them apart from society, this was a huge and wonderful statement to make.
To hear the passion of Olivia Hyde’s voice hit every single fibre of the Studio 2 room and seep into its past, present and future was a thrill that might never be repeated but it surely would be fun to observe should Bad Pollyanna decide to come back to the venue again, the way the foundation shook, the genre may well have found a new home in a city that never truly got the way Metal infiltrates the heart.
Ian D. Hall