"I sing what's inside me" / "Got a feeling there's so much more" - these two lines from the song Peace Of Mind sum up the main impetus behind this excellent album.
The eleven songs all seem ,in some form or other, to be posing the question: 'Is this all there is?' and the singer embarks takes us on a quest to find the answer; searching for purpose, serenity or even just a decent meal along the way.
For a man who averages twenty gigs a month, it's hardly surprising that travelling is a key theme of the album. The up-tempo title track documents some of the grim realities of a troubadour musician's life on the road with details of time spent being drunk, nursing a hangover or living on takeaways ("my last meal came wrapped in plastic").
Based in North-East England, Paul Liddell sings in a strong Geordie accent which I initially mistook for an Irish lilt (oops!). He is a self-declared control freak who writes, sings and plays everything.
His songs are committed and passionate to the point of being at times a little overly intense. An injection of humour here and there wouldn't have gone amiss.
One of the best songs is Game Show Host which is about the difficulty of keeping dreams alive despite the nagging sense that we are merely pawns in the bigger game we have no control over.
Faceless bureaucracy and trash television get his goat as illustrated in the song Long Sunny Days ("They can't change your life if your life has no meaning to them") and even more venomously on Kill-O-Gram in which he imagines himself as reaping personal justice on the "intellectual infidelity" of unscrupulous TV celebrities ("Is the fear in the media making us sick? Is the Pope a Catholic?").
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In a gentler vein, Footprints is a tender, nostalgic song about a former ,and probably unrequited, love which includes the great line : "love lived in a mobile phone".
The opening lines - "Goodnight children - goodnight people everywhere" make A Means To An End a strange choice for an opening track but it makes for a rousing opener and the album closes, more appropriately with a lullaby of sorts (Red Apple)
Liddell front loads his best material and the second half of the album doesn't really maintain the momentum. Still, this is a surprisingly strong set of songs from a talented songwriter who proves that the independent, DIY spirit is alive and kicking.
Paul Liddell's Website
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