Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

There is impressive and then there is confident, to have both relative strangers on stage at the same time is a rare commodity in which to draw breath, exhale deeply at the thought and then just let your heart go with it. For the confident and the impressive will always take the breath away, you may as well surrender fully and let the air escape your lungs voluntarily than let the preposterous and beige tell you that what you are seeing on stage is nothing, for those twin shades of humanity know nothing.

In Eddi Reader, impressive and confident are just the start of what you receive when listening to the music as it soars with certain majesty through the auditorium of the Epstein Theatre. There is a wish fulfilment that captures the soul so early into the long and admirable set, that fulfilment, whilst reached early, never lets go. The music supplied by Ms. Reader’s excellent musicians, Boo Hewerdine, John Douglas, Kevin McGuire, Alan Kelly, Steph Geremia and Ian Carr, is not content to just sit and rest on its laurels as the pinnacle is reached, it pounds away and makes the access to all in the crowd something to be aimed for, it offers unrestricted elegance and a thought of beauty in even the most supine of thoughts.

That elegance is captured fully in Ms. Reader’s voice, a voice that grabs the awaiting ear and gently lulls into submission, the faint stirrings of soothing, mellow lullaby, tempered with the ferocity of spirit that a woman of Glasgow offers in exchange for your capitulation for a couple of hours.

By opening the evening with the songs Dandelion, the enchanting Married To The Sea and Wild Mountainside, not only was the stage set, it was fully dressed, all lines learned and the lead actors were ready to receive the first of their due awards and rewards.

For anyone listening to Eddi Reader, the question of whether it is the personality that drives the emotion and the voice, or whether the expressive maturity and experience is what has honed the temptation to such a fine point of delivery, is to be fair a moot argument; in this one instance it matters not a jot which came first, for as songs such as Back the Dogs, Charlie My Darling, The Moon Is Mine, The Fairy Love Song, the sensational and heart breaking Moon River and even a short burst of Long Haired Lover From Liverpool the audience inside The Epstein Theatre understood with perfect clarity, true beauty is rare but when it is observed it has to be fully embraced.

A sensational evening of music delivered by one of the true great voices from Scotland, a voice that should never be held back or contained, Eddi Reader is a splendour waiting to be heard.

Ian D. Hall