Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Time asks nothing more of us than we can actually do, it might cajole or urge with a hint of bitterness in its rasping, fog like voice to do more and more, but in the end Time has a habit of letting us know that the job is done and to think back on all we have created or even regretfully destroyed. Like the fact that no poem is ever finished, no piece of art is ever truly completed; Time to always add one more note to the ever changing puzzle before us.

For the stalwarts of the British music industry Colosseum and their latest album, Time On Our Side, it is a very bitter-sweet and almost heart-breaking fact that Time as an entity has had more than a hand in calling the cast to the stage for perhaps its final but utterly compelling and fully deserved bow. The unspecified approach to music, the only seemingly pre-requisite in that it must be true and a lot of fun, is adhered to fully and the undercurrent of sadness that is evident, but not self-pitying, plays like a moonlight serenade in busy city street, the cap on the floor of a local busker in a throng of late-night shoppers perhaps the only true friend in a very busy world.

Time also shifts perceptions, from one view point, a slice of it seems melancholic and perhaps abandoned in its own more, in another’s eyes, the happiness it exudes is like a ray of sunshine dancing on the very tip of a falling raindrop and for Colosseum and Time On Our Side, it is a very cool and dramatic mixture of both upbeat collective craftsmanship and the thought of a solitary tear running down the cheek.

In songs such as The Way You Waved Goodbye, the groove of Dick’s Licks, the sensation of You Just Don’t Get It and the superb Anno Domini, that winning twin combination is just heartbreakingly wonderful and defies Time completely.

For Jon Hiseman, Dave Greenslade, Clem Clempson, Mark Clarke, Chris Farlow and of course the stunning Barbara Thompson, Time On Our Side is nothing short of a colossus, a giant striding confidently across the land but with the gentle and groovy heart of a new born lamb frolicking in the spring sunshine, Time is most certainly on their side.

Ian D. Hall