Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

You can write as much as you want about the world, but if you cannot describe your own backyard and make people visualise every crack in the stone work, every weed doing its damnedest to poke its head up through the drains that run underneath, then perhaps the world that you believe is your oyster doesn’t deserve your casual eye cast over it.

For Rob Clarke and the Wooltones, the world is significant but as they have proved time and time again what they consider to be of importance, what should be noted with the same intense beauty across every town, city and village in every country, it is the poetry, the music and the imagery of the place you call home that requires the clinical and adoring eye cast over it.

The world moves on, quite often without us, but there is always the memory of our thoughts to which can spin us just as quick around the sun, as the refrain goes, “there are places I remember…” but there are people too and we all have those memories, the sudden guilt of thinking of someone for the first time in an age, the image of a well-known sculpture, the passing of a visited haunt in which beer and talk soon faded, all comes into focus when you see your home town as canvas in which to leave your thoughts upon.

In the songs Adrian Henri and Statue At The Pier, Rob Clarke and The Wooltones showcase these thoughts with their usual clinical but loving eye over the world created by Liverpool’s inspiration and passionate influencers. Whilst the words have the tone of winking derision attached to them, there is no doubt that the love of the effect that one of the Liver poets has swayed the band to take his life to task, to add to the pressure of the morose, but to inject, as is Rob Clarke’s right, a Liverpool edge to the man.

The two songs are gracious, whilst seeming to bite down on the guidance they have had on the locals and the area. This is not done out malice, it is the stimulating effect of parody that shines through, the course of overwhelming love that cannot be expressed with the soft words of amour, instead being captured by the comical, a truth to which we so often mistake as disrespect or scorn.

Adrian Henri and Statue At The Pier are wonderful examples of how Rob Clarke and The Wooltones music is appreciated, regarded, and one that asks that we take a closer look at our own space rather than interfering in the places of others.

Ian D. Hall