Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

There have been many artists who endeavour to take us back to a time when our world, our field of views and opinions were less rigid, when all we had to worry about, we hoped, was playing with our friends and hoping that we would survive school. Whether for good or bad, ill or fortunate, to think back to the person you were and the dreams you had, it is rare to see that person remain; like a ghost of oneself, to think back to childhood is too often not recognise the hero of the story.

Gary Maginnis takes that imagery in his latest single, When I Was A Child, and gives the listener an arguably personal account of life for the young artist, the portrait perhaps of the life, in all its glory, of the times when all could have changed, or indeed could have stayed the same; it is in that realisation that we think through every potential scenario of who we are and what could have been based on a split decision that makes childhood seem so rosy, so perfect and often so confusing.

Gary Maginnis’s feel for the subject that childhood is meant to be something so tangible that you hold on to it for the rest of your life, is in stark contrast to the way we, as adults, protect the children from themselves and from the world around them, that glorious rainbow was really a thunderstorm in passing, that chance to play I spy whilst at a standstill on the motorway was the result of an accident further down the road, protection of the fertile mind so it doesn’t see the pitfalls to come, it is only right that Gary McGinnis takes this subject on and frames it in a song that is fundamental to self belief.

A wonderfully captured song whose lyrics resonate beyond that of the child-adult relationship and to whom thanks must be given, for to step back into the shoes of the child you were and relive moments in which was filled with those rainbows and not the thunderstorms is something perhaps we all desire.

Ian D. Hall