Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

There is an approach which gets overlooked in the days of rush and tumble, rhetoric and brimstone, we have become so used to looking forward, urged on by fashion and supposed urgency, that we have in many ways disregarded what was perhaps more important, to look back at our lives and see it for the genuine series of events which made us happy. Not so much a reminisce, or a clouded sepia tinged photograph buying us the moments lost, but more of listening back to our own stories, the once written down, perhaps recorded on a tape deck; when life was just life, not a quest in which to be downtrodden and beaten with a large stick if we are seen to be unproductive for an hour.

Goodbye To Yesterday is Marc Vormawah’s almost sage like advice of how this phenomenon came to be and how, in his own way, he sees how that life was fortunate to be had, unlike the sorrow of today’s society and the mistrust and one up-man ship of today. Whilst we all look back on our younger days with a sense of carefree abandon, of unobserved gentleness and hopes to come, the reality is arguably something more treacherous, there were fights, falling outs, tantrums, tears and the stalking of terror in adult hood, yet we still look back with fondness, we see those days as character building, as a passion we once were able to hold.

Marc Vormawah captures that feeling with discerning beauty, one without the gilded edge or the shackle of embellishing a story for strangers who were not there, but with a quiet sense of duty, of remembering fully and even taking note of the times when the memory became stained and heated.

With contributions by Jon Lawton, Steve Pennington, Camilla Sky, Vanessa Murray, Laura McClain and Paul Thomas, Goodbye To Yesterday becomes an anthem, a salute to a youth that was not taken away by the onset of responsibility, but by the enemy and protector of us all, Time.

In the songs The Road To Yesterday, The Good Old Days, the marvellous refrain of A Big Boy Did It, I Don’t Want To Grow Up, The End of the Affair, Sorry Now and the album title track, Goodbye To Yesterday, Time is very much at the heart of the matter, a piece of our moment here on Earth that cannot be recaptured, but can still light the playful fuse made of putty and imagination and which can leave the smouldering explosion of hope a force to be reckoned with in the future; our futures.

A wonderfully envisaged album, one that strikes home about the way we view the past as lost but which still resides, beating in time, within us.

Ian D. Hall