Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
It is the absurdity and cruelty of modern life that with even the best intentions you can miss a great artist’s work and not hear about it till months after the event. It somehow underlines the age, places a big huge marker against the 21st Century when looking back at the annals of history that a talented musician can go vastly unnoticed and yet somehow, somewhere someone is laughing with a maniacal grin and wringing their hands as if having purchased a tonne of glee and were now beaming at the thought that television had finally killed the true artist.
If nature abhors a vacuum, then it has a tremendous way of throwing up a musician in which to take delight to, even if it almost a year since they released their latest album. In former The Bluetones member, Mark Morriss, the Birmingham 02 Academy collectively and metaphorically rose as one to acknowledge a great set and in defiance of the tremendous and abundant cacophony of sound coming from the next door hall as Machine Head and their support added a very different shade of music to the evening.
Mark Morriss is self effacing, disarmingly so, and before his set is complete he raises the expectancy of The Wonder Stuff’s evening of acoustic gems like offering a destitute man a gold bar and then telling him there is a whole crate round the back with his name on and no questions asked.
Mr. Morriss opened the evening with the enjoyable and perhaps openly defiant statement of intent, It’s Hard To Be Good All The Time and the cracking Blue Tonic. It is like opening the flood gates of appreciation. The riveting noise coming from the next hall could have put off lesser support acts but Mark Morriss is made of stuff so stern that it makes an Edwardian House Master seem like a giggling school girl in the first throws of adolescent love
The absurdity of life is not lost on the huge crowd inside the Academy, with more people poking their head round the door all the time, it’s surprising that nobody took a census check of the audience in the other hall, for it certainly seemed that like a progressive Pied Piper, Mark Morriss was drawing in more than those that had paid to get into Academy 2.
Other tracks to be played on the evening included, the excellent Consuela, Duchess, the well played Space Cadet and a thrilling and charming swipe armed and primed with a sly smile, a cover of East 17’s 20 year old hit Stay Another Day.
As absurd as life is, occasionally it allows a second chance to be had, to glimpse into the melting pot of good music in which those with an entirely and destructive agenda would like to see you enjoy.
Mark Morriss plays at the East Village Arts Centre in Liverpool on April 17th 2015.
Ian D. Hall