Niamh Jones, The Bluecoat, Liverpool. August 2014. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Niamh Jones is a woman with such a sparkling voice that it is no wonder at the age of 15 she was given the opportunity to impress all who attend the highly respected nights hosted by the people at Liverpool Acoustic. Two years on, Niamh Jones is something special to behold, and inside The Bluecoat on an August day which betrayed the thought of blistering sunshine blasting its rays upon the multitude of people making their way to take in a day of music, Niamh Jones again showed the reason why she is thought of so well.

No matter where you come across Ms. Jones for the first time, you will not forget the experience, it will be engrained into your memory, it will be seared like a brand into the fabric of the society…and she gets better and better with every occasion you find she is performing.

There are some performers that no matter how many songs they have to play in a set will somehow cause you to smile from the opening note to the final flourish in which the event would have been as dull as a school dinner served on a Wednesday in January, the taste of liver and onions forever hanging in the air, had they not appeared to take you out of the musical melancholy. With five songs in which to showcase her sound and in which to place a banner around the launch of her debut E.P. in September, Niamh Jones certainly caused a ripple of excitement around the room, not just a ripple, it was like watching dropping a rock the size of a house into the middle of Coniston Water and seeing the wrinkle of the aquatic marine life scurry and rock as the ripple rampaged to the outer edge.

Her own compositions were received well, especially the sensitive opening tone of Move For Me and Ride Fast and compared well with the rather hauntingly beautiful acappella version of the traditional Irish song Parting Glass and the broadening smile inducing cover of the Labi Siffre classic It Must Be Love . If Move For Me can cause the heart to flutter then to hear a song so emotionally loved, a song which has the mental connection of always being thought of having a distinctly male flavour, that to hear it as if from the women’s point of view is startlingly cool. It gives a balance to the idea that while women obviously feel deeply about love as a man, they can also find the humour in the strange affairs of the heart.

Niamh Jones is burgeoning talent and if 15 she was good enough to play for the rightly respected Liverpool Acoustic, at 17 capture hearts beyond her years, then the future is hers to behold, those ripples will only get larger and larger as her reputation spreads.

Niamh Jones launches her selt-titled E.P. at Leaf on Bold Street on September 12th.

Ian D. Hall