Album Review: Billy Liar

Billy Liar

The Ghosts Of Punk Rock

(Make That A Take Records)

The achingly sharp and self aware alt/folk/punk one man band

Cultural geography recounted with uncluttered realism and a hand on heart narrative in chapters and lines from the debris of devout emotional sincerity, Billy Liar has an incredible sense of dynamics upon which his bottomless pit of frustrations can be unfurled. It’s his natural aesthetic this folky/punk/country doom method of lyrical expressionism that captures  every lurching mood swing within the simplistic frame of a man and his guitar. He can move from melancholic to jubilant as seamlessly as human nature does, and though the instrumentation he employs is sparse it heaves with a sturdy uppercut of sound when merged with the words he writes. Opening track ‘Change’ is possibly his greatest summing up of exasperation so far, a seriously melodic creation, beginning with the volleying echo of the chorus thundering out of the silence it opens up into catchy greatness with the added enhancement of skilled jack of all trades - Ed Ache (I.C.H, The Domestics) punk’s virtuous layman and personification of versatility -   whose background contribution seeps through to the foreground and brings added depth to every corner this song stretches to. The finger pointing swipe aimed in the general direction of blandness and those who saunter in jaded comfort zones offering up nothing but tired re-runs of former glories pours from him in floods of vitriolic rhyme as he furiously muses  ‘I want to see your blood spilt on the stage, I want to hear your heart beat through the PA, I want to hear true adolescent rage, I want to be inspired, I want to see something change!’  The title track pays homage to The Exploited, a personal tribute to the band who inspired him most, he name-checks former members Gary ’Savage’ McCormack and John ‘Big John’ Duncan from amid the cheerless squalor of a ‘windowless kitchen of a Tolcross flat’ and the equally drab ‘basement tenement flat’ before moving onto a ‘crowded bar’ where he philosophises with Wattie Buchan and finishes by reminding us, with endearingly fierce fan loyalty that ‘it was him that wrote Army Life, not you!’

Profound reflection unearths the romance in grime through a series of poetic bursts and a cantering acoustic soundtrack on ‘The Difference’ with its utopian flow through city streets where ‘beggars sleep’ and there is ‘romance in the rooftops, beauty in the billboards’, the simple, everyday things that sit below the radar of today’s peace and quiet merchants who scramble to the countryside because they ‘long for the trees, the hills and the mountaintop’ is, he casually declares; ‘the difference between you and me’. Last track ‘Leaving Town’ is a wistful ballad for the lonely hearts and languishes somewhere between a sorrowful Johnny Cash malady and the self inflicted crown of thorns lament of the lost public bar serenader who croons about leaving town and ‘never coming back’. A poignant tale that carries enough emotional ammunition to leave its mark long after the last chord has been played. Billy Liar earns his stripes in the real places among the real emotions, the tough graft and long hours of empty gigs and loneliest nights where self doubt snaps the backbone of self belief and pulls every last twitching sinew of self worth from your shattered remains before holding up what’s left in front of the people, and the people laugh and the people cheer and the people forget you ever existed. But living in that misanthropic wilderness of society is where he flourishes best - so fuck mainstream acceptance anyway, eh!

*Published In Subba Cultcha*

BILLY LIAR HOMEPAGE