Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The very name evokes images that split the heart, the mind and the emotions contained within. To some San Francisco is a by word of an era that never lived up to its potential, a symbolic gesture now dashed upon the rocks of commercialism, of a thought that has come to despise such notions of free love, radical politics and anti-war truth and made to cheapen them, made to see the age of Aquarius as nothing more than a desperate attempt to lead humanity away from the dogma of Capitalism.
The Leaving of San Francisco is a wonderful representation of that once powerful and alluring dream, sang with the British side of the Atlantic angst but heartfelt sorrow and regret to a city of emblems and ideals which has now been split between radical conservatism and the pursuit of leading the charge against those that would damage the very essence of humanity, San Francisco is not the place to ever believe you could depart from but if you must leave then taking Stuart Todd along with you is the right thing to do.
Stuart Todd once again hits home with a beautiful serenade surrounded by the heart wrench of melancholy, a quintessential retrospection of a love perhaps faded, not soured or in the realms of dormant personal loathing, but just one glad to have happened and with the knowledge on both sides that it is time to move on whilst being friends is possible.
Mr. Todd has a genuine ability to see something that others might dismiss, a keen observer of the moment that is not in plain sight and like the marvellous 173 (Is Just A Number), The Leaving of San Francisco is beautiful for all the right reasons, the eye witness to an instant that others just walk on past and the feeling of the fully prepared just in the off chance that it should actually happen, that you too might feel that moment.
Stuart Todd scores incredibly high again with this new track, an offering by a stalwart of the Liverpool acoustic scene which makes the removal of one’s self from a place so far away seem the most natural thing in the world.
Ian D. Hall