Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

We are only human after all, and we can all be lured by the seemingly ripe berries of another bush but in the end we always return cap in hand and contrite to a love that remains undiminished, one that greets us with a broad grin, a smile that is enchanting and real, not one engrossed in delivering a plastic set of rules. Instead, one who will come out on stage and perform with natural ease that time doesn’t just fly in their company, it purrs like a finely tuned vehicle along crowded British streets and one that the driver is more than happy to show you every single point of interest along the way.

A point of interest, in the hands of Glenn Tilbrook, it is more of tour of the borough created by his, and other creative musicians, imagination. It is perhaps the beauty of everyday observation, a musician’s easel which pinpoints and extenuates the passage of time of the ordinary and commonplace which marks Mr. Tilbrook out as one of the nation’s most admired song-writers. A sense of making the normal view on any street, any public house, classroom, chance meeting of neighbours, look extraordinary, a simple, familiar statement becomes drenched in the appeal of the exotic and colourful. A point of interest, there is no such thing, it is a tour de force armed only with guitar and rich inspiration.

For the crowd inside the Epstein Theatre who braved the thought of a dark winter’s night, the time was not just well spent, it was as welcome as finding a roaring fire inside a remote castle as snow gathers with pace around their feet, a glass of their particular poison warming their insides and allowing the day’s events to come to an end, never to be thought of in terms of sadness or melancholy again.

Across songs such as the evening’s openers, Ter Wit, Too Woo and The Day I Get home, across visions such as Little Ships, Up The Junction, Pulling Mussels (From The Shell), Black Coffee in Bed, Labelled With Love, Annie Get Your Gun, a tantalising rendition of Burt Bacharach’s and Hal David’s Always Something There To Remind Me, Cradle To The Grave, Is That Love, Untouchable and Schadenfreude, Glenn Tilbrook put the audience in a comfortable position of remembered grace and invited them to think of times when the seemingly ordinary was in fact monumental, that the blink of an eye in the right place is as memorable as a star exploding in the heavens.

A warm, generously played set, just one man and a few guitars, an inspiration captured for the Liverpool audience who, as always, gave Glenn Tilbrook the ultimate accolade, of treating him as one of their own.

Ian D. Hall