Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Alison Green at The Cavern Club, May 2018. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.
Some musicians and artist exemplify their surrounding so much that it is impossible to think of them in any other way, that the Cavern, the older, the more insistent part of Liverpool’s heritage in musical terms, should see the Independent Pop Overthrow return with such spectacular vision as to have within its ranks for a fifth straight year, Canterbury’s own but Liverpool loved, Alison Green.
Whether under the pseudonym of Ginger Whisky Johnson or the modesty of her own name, there has never been any doubt in how Alison Green takes the craft of song-writing, a sense of passion is always fruitful but it always needs to have alongside it. The agility to make a song stand out, and reminiscent of the Canterbury set of old, like her fellow 21st Century troubadours and wandering minstrels that make the often seen as pilgrimage to the capital of British music and popular lyric. Alison Green doesn’t just sing and play the guitar delightfully, she lives the tale she has weaved, the words flowing like the finest of stories told in childhood and remembered as adult for all the best reasons.
Whilst Canterbury and Liverpool are separated geographically by hundreds of miles, perhaps in some ways ideological as well, there is no doubting the connection one feels that exists between the two cities, both rivals in their time to London, both having reasons to look to the spiritual guide and truth of their own writers to convey the message and meaning of the songs sung with beauty and instruments played with drama and muscle.
It might be the fifth time that Alison Green has performed on one of the two stages inside The Cavern Club, but her music, her stance, always feels fresh, the great discovery over and over again. If there is one thing to learn from her time in Liverpool during each I.P.O. is that she deserves to have a night on a stage such as the Music Rooms at the Philharmonic Hall and given a wider audience to those that an afternoon can honestly muster.
With two new songs sitting squarely at the heart of her set, surrounded by graffitied names and scrawled out monikers faded by time but not memory on the walls of the famous old club, Ms. Green performed once again with simple and endearing style, with her own radiant bubble unhindered by the interested day trippers angling for their photographs, and as songs such as On An Island, the magnificent Whisky and Cigarettes, Travelling, King’s Lynn Blues, Take Me Home, Heavy, and the superb Ghost Boy added to the weight of the signatures and visiting artist’s home grown love of the building, Alison Green once more put her stamp down of being arguably one of the most fascinating song writers of the last ten years.
A beautiful reminder of what is missed when an artist only comes to your city once a year, a tremendous addition as always to the I.P.O. line-up.
Ian D. Hall