Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

How we honour those that have been part of our lives but who leave it before we are ready to understand the reasons why, is often one that is simply recognised with a gesture of acknowledgement, a note of principal that is unafraid to show the respect due, of the influence that the person was able to install in your life; and when that happens to an artist, to a group that moulds music to the benefit of the heartstrings of the public, then the morning stars and the nighttime suns blaze all the brighter for it.

For Liverpool’s On Tick, Si Birtles, Si Brown, Fynn Brown, Barry Cooper-Finch, the sense of honouring the beauty and the nobility in a single human being is one that consumes the notion of saluting the ones who share our stage, whether it is on the boards and encircled by staring eyes and the light that exposes our delights and insecurities to the world, and it was with trust, and with a respect returned by the wife of Graham Trust, On Tick unveils one of his songs as a marking of absolute regard and pleasure.

Venus Girl is a song of veneration and processing, of focusing on a grief, but continuing to feel the breath of elation, in memory, in recollection, and as the music from the much-admired group strides and struts as each seamless word carries with it the love felt, so entwined in the music does the relationship develop that it is only right that the listener takes note of the dichotomy at play; one of drama and the measure of true Liverpool expression and Punk undertones, the other of empathy for a fallen warrior.

It is important to see the stride, to know that in spite of grief there is no shuffling or trundling of feelings, for it sends a message of balance and the song is there to be equilibrium of a life lived; and Venus Girl with its sentiment and glory achieves that with pride.

A glorious and reverential single, in honour of Graham Trust.

On Tick release Venus Girl on January 11th.

Ian D. Hall