Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/0
To suggest we come from nothing is to dismiss all that your ancestors, close relatives or long since forgotten forebears achieved in their lifetime and passed in down through memory and tales, it is to suggest that lives were of little consequence to the world, that it is only through your own existence that Time has been fortunate and that yourself have the power of changing history.
Everybody Comes From Something, it might not appear much to the naked eye of the beholder, but it is a truth that must be acknowledged, that talent, that sense of righting wrongs, battling injustice, all traits, qualities and characteristics must, and do come from someone else down the line, and in that regards, whether it is nature or the nurture of opinion and belief, we all cling to our history; it is what has shaped us.
Alan O’ Hare, a musician, a lyric writer of observational genius, holds a poet’s soul, and it is in the poet’s search for connection that Only Child’s latest single ahead of the Straight Lines album release, Everybody Comes From Something, that the ease of conversation and listening to another person’s story comes to bear fruit.
The insistence of not coming from something is either the attempt of humbly sidestepping praise, or the belief that you also are not worthy of having history remember your name; the acceptance becomes easier to carry if you maintain the conviction that you, yourself, are not valuable, not admirable, or precious enough to be part of the fabric of the overall story of your family, of your hometown, or of society.
It is of course regretful to think that nobody will ever want to talk to you about what makes you, you; and in this incredible reminder of the connections we seek out, Alan O’Hare, along with the erstwhile Amy Chalmers and Jon Lawton, brings a social voice to a place where others prefer to see the vulnerable, the mislaid, the invisible, to the fore front and allow the audience to hear a heart beat in time with the soul of those we should all appreciate.
Never a foot wrong, never a thought out of place, Only Child have more than laid the groundwork for an album of significance to be heard.
Ian D. Hall