Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Time changes almost everything, fashion is lauded and then debunked in the blink of an eye, ideologies are stamped upon, new regimes of popularity take the clothes off the previous holders of the once admired and trend setting and claim that they thought of it first; time changes everything but the respect due to a band to whom can hold an audience’s attention and give them the insight into what made their music impossibly beautiful.
Aided by Vinzenz Benjamin, Lyndon Connah, Ben Lochrie, Phil G and the impressive TJ Davis, Cutting Crew took their responsibility to the crowd on with aplomb, with the wonderful range of respectful anger and the sincerity of a grin that could not be taken any other way but pleasure renewed, Cutting Crew gave the support slot a different edge that some might believe is the point of such bands. Everybody wants to see the top billed performer, yet there are some that won’t give any of their time to those that warm up the crowd; it is a shame and sometimes the nagging doubt of such action being akin to disrespect or just disregard.
The set may have only just over half an hour in length but in the hands of Cutting Crew, that time on stage was spent in a sense of delicious cool, songs that were new and perhaps unheard by the crowd before, mixed freely with the expected but undoubtedly passionate, of being asked of a specific memory and the reasons why walls and barriers don’t work, that soon the people don’t come to fear them, they come despise, to make plans to knock them down and no force on Earth can stop them.
If the night at the Philharmonic Hall was about anything other than timely reminisce in a decade of music that gave so much, then it was through Cutting Crew that it was made flesh and bone, change happens, but you must not be quick to destroy the faith shown by others in their memory, by taking apart and degrading the previous generations taste in music, you are showing them that you are controlled by an unpleasant dogma, of being just as narrow minded as those who believed that the Berlin Wall would stand forever.
As songs such as Any Colour, One For The Mockingbird and I’ve Been In Love Before, all taken from their 1986 debut album Broadcast, the biting Till The Money Runs Out, Berlin In Winter and the classic I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight received the applause and satisfaction due, it is to memory that all things must be felt to pass and to have a band such as Cutting Crew take to the stage in Liverpool was a reminder of what should have been, a call to the future perhaps that they should be asked to come back, a full night of passion surely awaits.
Ian D. Hall