To combine poetry and music is a realm many dream of, yes the lyrical genius of many a song-writer is steeped in the stuff of Zeus’ sentiment to humanity, the gentle coaxing of the heart stopping shock and adoration laid down by Jove in the guise of the Balladeer to their latest muse. However, it takes great wit and fortitude to delve between the two states of deliberation, the twin flirtations with an audience and not be seen as anything than heroic whilst upon the stage.

We Shall Overcome is the watchword of the week, the anti-austerity movement formed in Liverpool, the musical express that gives, the ideology that nobody should be made to suffer for the mistakes caused by the ills, the disease of Government policy. It is perhaps also the tag line to a musician who also revels in the nature of the poetic, to whom the lyric and the ode are joined at the hip and where some might scoff and deride such actions, Tom George simply smiles with an enigmatic deliberation and goes off in search of an ear to make Jove’s musing’s blush.

To come across Tom George is to have good fortune, the day, already bright, cheerful, full of hope as the October sun made allusions to a misplaced summer, somehow was made even more thrilling inside Sound Food and Drink’s participation in We Shall Overcome.

The poet or the musician, in many respects they come as one, to have a lyric that is repeated often in the confines of a shower, in the comfort of a weak five minutes when the strain of life is such that you cannot but help sing to get you through the day, the lyric is poetry, but sometimes the poem is anything but a song and it takes a great mind to achieve it.

In the mix of tunes and poetry, Tom George captured the crowd’s attention with songs such as In My Private World, the sublime Dance With My Shadow, Drifter and Lost and the ode Surrender and Like A Poem. It was enjoyable, heart beating and completely cool, a moment in which the world could stop and be reborn if it was possible.

Tom George might be elusive, exclusively wonderful to listen to and hovering between two states of poetic delivery but he does it so well and is altogether a member of a select breed, a wonderful addition to We Shall Overcome 2016.

Ian D. Hall