Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

If it is your friends that shape you as you stride the path ahead, then it has to be your family that make you what you are, you may not realise it, you may not even care, but it is your blood that has bought you to this point in time and the stories of your ancestors are just as, if not more important that your own. It is a realisation that Shakin’ Stevens has found and played within the realm of his new album, the enjoyable, the pleasurable and unrelenting Echoes Of Our Times.

We are not just the resonating sound of what has fashioned our existence, what has guided us as we grow older or the events that somehow twist our thinking. We have inside us stories that we can only fathom at, we may have gleaned a few of them when we listened to our grandparents when we were younger, the hidden secrets of the family photograph staring at us across time, but how many of us actually go further, not only looking for the relic of an idol whose name we venerate but that of the otherwise unearthed, the small detail in which makes them more than lifelike but breathes their name onwards.

Echoes Of Our Times is the memory we perhaps leave behind in the dust but one that we should be careful to leave a plaque of admission of love to, the grateful thanks that we can still find a way to treasure our own song, or that of another, for other generations to keep us alive; no one after all is truly forgotten to time if they are remembered by at least one person.

Shakin’ Stevens captures the memories of many of his ancestors, the blood that rages in his proud Welsh roots, the tin miners of Cornwall, those that were lost in the ravages of pointless war, the heroine of the Salvation Army, all forgotten voices, all made real with Shakin’ Stevens’ timeless voice.

In songs such as Behind Those Secrets And Lies, The Fire In Her Blood, Down In The Muddy Water and Last Man Alive, Shakin’ Stevens produces songs of candour, of homage and all backed off with the resounding beat and honest appraisal of a man to whom memory has surfaced. It is a moment in which to savour and whilst it might be lost on a section of society to whom the past is nothing more than a hindrance, a fleeting ghost to whom nothing is sacred, many will appreciate the force in which Shakin’ Stevens gives the past an honourable dedication.

A cracking album, Echoes Of Our Times is irresistible.

Ian D. Hall