Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The much admired Jodie Schofield, the founder of the mantra Be Lovely Day, may have found herself in a different climate this last few months, but even having relocated to Cornwall, another pasture with its own sense of identity and which mirrors Liverpool perfectly, the artist’s excellent work carries on in a city that will never forget the music of SheBeat.
Be lovely, pass on a moment of your life with a smile, pay in advance for the person behind to have a coffee, speak to someone with purity in your heart and not with intent, it is a message that Ms. Schofield carried with pleasure and now passes on whilst she watches from a distant field, one in which no doubt she has started spreading her own gospel of.
As well as hosting the event inside Brink this year, the master of ceremonies, the vendor of such great tunes, Derek King, played a short but wonderful set in which a truth was revealed and one that brought a huge smile to the face of anyone who may have caught it played out for the first time.
Derek King has opened his heart on more occasions than it should be possible without inflicting damage on the man, on the sleeve he wears his anger, his thoughts and musings, and his reflections of humanity in all its guises and complications. His songs carry depth and beauty but they also find themselves at times being the point of a story in which the fury he feels is transferred and made real in your own pit and stomach; a good man is slow to enrage but when you do be prepared to feel Vesuvius burn.
On Be Lovely Day though, the wonderful sleeve of a magic man at work was only concerned with the finer things, the nicer played out part and the songs Sometimes, Better and Sally, with a refrain of notes in the middle which graciously reminded the psyche of the blessings of The Who’s I can’t Explain but sounded more natural, grounded and in with deep heart resonated more than what the 60s legends could muster; this is what Jodie Schofield would have imagined at Brink, be lovely, pay the smile forward and more than anything allow the superb Derek King to be cool, a statement easily matched by the man in question at Brink.
Ian D. Hall