Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

The international Pop Overthrow remains one of the really great festival ideas to make its way to the Liverpool spotlight; the home of British popular music the perfect venue, the sense of graft and hard work overwhelming, yet for each band, for every artist, there is the goal of performance. For Lloyd and Daly, not only did they take The Beatles stage to task earlier in the week but on the busy Saturday, the day when the music gets deep, down and dirty, when the weekend kicks off and the social butterflies and serious music lovers intermingle amongst the memorabilia and the memory.

Whereas the set on The Beatles stage was obviously enjoyable, as it was tender as it was creatively cool, the Saturday afternoon on the larger stage was always going to be the moment in which the duo would shine beyond belief, the setting suiting their absolute talent right down to the ground and the larger space carrying their vocal and sound right around the room.

For fans of Lloyd and Daly this was a magical experience, the unfiltered meeting the magnificent, the poise mingling socially with the smooth and the casually excellent; to pull off two mesmerising sets within a couple of days of each other and to not take the crowd’s appreciation for granted, is a sign of humility, of being prepared to take the corner of the stage and make it whistle with contentment as much as the spotlight glaring down in the middle.

Whilst repeating the set from earlier in the week, there was a huge sense of privilege and honour attached to the afternoon sounds of music, the respect shown by both Dave Lloyd and Lauren Daly to the crowd was one that was mutually reciprocated and as songs such as the openers Riverside and Starry design, Time To Burn, Coming Down and Sad Sunday were given the applause and the shouts of true encouragement they deserved.

Two distinctly superbly sounding gigs by two genuinely musically creative people, Lloyd and Daly gave this year’s I.P.O. at The Cavern a resounding sense of security and passion.

Ian D. Hall