Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Art inspires art.

History is replete with the historical and the past endeavours of an artist enthusing the soul of the student, of the long distant sculpture illustrating to the modern cartoonist just how to capture form and feeling, of the novel displaced in time being captured like lighting in between a leather cover performing miracles in the world of music long after the authors have passed their way into the next realm.

To find the inspiration between two art forms can be a moment of glee or reveal; Genesis for example alerted many a fan to the beauty of Emily Bronte in the album Wind and Wuthering, Pink Floyd’s wonderfully observed Animals that was framed by George Orwell’s Animal Farm, or Metallica bringing to life Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, all inspired by the historical art, all framed by the thoughts of one moment of originality.

Such a sense of discovery is the ideology that is bought to the fore by Gareth Williams in his extraordinary feat of endurance, the lavish and beautiful Songs From The Last Page.

The tracks that encompass the album are born from the transformation and blend of music and literature as a final line from a novel or a tale is given its own breathing space, its own fierce life.

With contributions from the sublime Justyna Jablonska and Aisling O’Dea, Songs From The Last Page lives up to the promise of exploration, of allowing art to live on beyond what others may declare its final living statement, and as books such as How To Be Both, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, The Valley Of Fear and News Of The Dead, all legends derived from the minds of great Scottish writers, the title and intention of the song makes it declaration clear….Song From The Last Page Of….and puts the listener in mind of how they too have gone beyond a last word and imagined the world of continuance, of prolonging the heart that has found love in a meaningful farewell.

A superb methodology of approaching art in inspiration, an album that proves there is always life even a final fitting last line.

Ian D. Hall