1980s
Kieron Tyler
During the first week of February 1982, Theatre Of Hate got as close to the mainstream as they’d ever get. They opened that week’s edition of Top of the Pops with a run through of “Do You Believe in the Westworld?” which was then at 40 in the Top 40 – the highest position they’d reach in the single’s chart.Though the band mimed, frontman Kirk Brandon sang live. So intense, he looked close to exploding. Musically, the song’s spaghetti western guitars voguishly echoed the “Stand and Deliver” Adam and the Ants of the previous year. The lyrics went “The cowboy turned the gun on himself as he sang Read more ...
joe.muggs
Tears For Fears were an odd non-presence through their most successful years. They were right up there in the premier league of stadium rock-pop bands, but had none of the Celtic romantic bombast of U2 and Simple Minds, weren’t as weird as Eurythmics or Depeche Mode, as muso as Sting, nor as showbiz as Duran Duran or late Queen. Their Songs From the Big Chair album sold eight million copies, and everyone of a certain age can just about chant along to “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, but what really was there to them? It was all very earnest, Roland Orzabal Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Souvenir Part II apparently concludes Joanna Hogg’s fly-on-the-wall drama about a woman film student's emotional evolution as the victim of both her older boyfriend's abuse and the disdain of her male instructors. It’s a psychologically perceptive drama full of acute observations, yet it’s disconcerting in its social complacency.Hogg’s sequel to her semi-autobiographical 2019 drama finds the callow aspiring director Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) channelling her grief for her dead lover, the mysterious drug addict Anthony (Tom Burke), into her film school graduation project. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Memory Box is that rare thing, a glimpse into a lost world from its traumatised inhabitants. Made by the Lebanese artist-filmmakers, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (a husband and wife team), it’s an intergenerational drama split between Beirut during the Eighties (the height of the Lebanese Civil War) and present day Canada. During the war, over a million people fled the country, including Hadjithomas’s best friend, a teenage girl who moved to Paris.They kept in close touch sending each other notebooks filled with photos, drawings, magazine cuttings and recorded voice messages on Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The Gun Club were true originals and Jeffrey Lee Pierce a genius. They were the inspiration behind many bands, I myself never thought about being a singer until I dropped the needle on Fire Of Love and in that instant I knew what I wanted to do with my life. Jeffrey was funny, smart and generous. He taught me so much about songwriting that I could never repay.”Mark Lanegan’s tribute to Jeffrey Lee Pierce – who died in 1996 at age 37 –and the band he co-formed is revealing as it makes plain an often unacknowledged truth. Now it’s said, it’s obvious. The spirit of Pierce, his LA-born band and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The archive release which had the greatest impact, and still does, was Linda Smith’s Till Another Time 1988-1996. After it turned up, the reaction to a first play was instant. How could this have escaped attention? The compilation opened the door on a brilliant artist, one previously known to a particular audience.Till Another Time raises the point that it’s impossible to keep on top of everything, to know about everything. Even though she issued new releases until relatively recently, Smith had slipped through a personal knowledge crack. Thankfully, that’s now rectified.That’s one aspect of Read more ...
David Nice
“It was the hand of God,” says the Neapolitan family patriarch about a rather unexpected consequence of Maradona's coming to play for the city’s team. That gives us a date, 1984, and, while the adolescent protagonist Fabietto remains in Naples, a fleeting sense of time and place.Paolo Sorrentino never resorts to the dully realistic or overdoes the period detail, though. This location for a transfigured autobiography is rarely the noisy, vivacious place which brands itself on the memory in most books, films or touristic experience. At the start of a film graced throughout by Daria D'Antonio's Read more ...
Harry Freedman
On hearing that I had recently written a book about Leonard Cohen, someone asked me why I thought Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature rather than Cohen. Not being a Nobel prize adjudicator I couldn’t answer the question but I did agree that although Leonard Cohen is best known as a singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen was first and foremost a poet extraordinaire. One of the things that makes listening to him so compelling is that his songs are poems set to music.A hallmark of Leonard Cohen’s musical poetry is its deep spirituality. But unlike most spiritual poetry drawn it Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Madness frontman Suggs is asking the capacity crowd at the Brighton Centre if any of them are in school-age education. Quite a few are. There are actual young people here! Some are with parents (even, possibly, grandparents), but gaggles of teenagers are also in evidence on their own. They shout out. We all know what’s coming… a Madness song about school days… “Naughty boys in nasty schools, headmaster’s breaking all the rules…” And, we’re off again, jogging on the spot to perennial Eighties classic “Baggy Trousers”, a sea of shaven heads, red fez’s and porkpie hats bubbling with happy Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Back in 2013, Gina Gershon chewed up the scenery in the daytime movie House of Versace. Focusing on the murder of Gianni Versace, it was a tacky, cheap drama that knew what it was, and was all the more entertaining for it. The same can’t be said of Ridley Scott’s new drama which focuses on an equally prestigious Italian fashion house and a murder. The film masquerades as a crime drama with an impressive gloss, but it can’t mask its daytime TV mechanics. Scott’s second film in as many months, House of Gucci follows box office failure The Last Duel. Sitting somewhere between bad opera and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A persistent moan of this writer in recent years, about gigs attended by those his own age (54) and up, is that, however good the band is, the audience are stationary, staring, semi-catatonic. They don’t twitch or move, facing stage-wards earnestly, silent, as if watching Chekov at the theatre. Their joy, if it exists, is internalised, unreleased. Dancing something forgotten long ago. Such gigs are flat, disappointing, like the airless, staid classical concerts I was taken to as a boy, contemplative and half-asleep. It is, then, a blissful surprise to find Eighties synth-pop outfit OMD’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
One of the most interesting tracks on Essiebons Special 1973–1984 Ghana Music Power House is Joe Meah’s mysterious "Dee Mmaa Pe". It’s not mentioned in the compilation’s accompanying booklet, and Joe Meah doesn’t figure in any of the standard discographies littering the world-wide web.Despite this inscrutability, Essiebons Special’s second cut has a surprisingly familiar touchstone. Mainly instrumental with stabbing brass, a sax solo and odd vocal interjections it has a shuffling soul vibe. But the keyboard part dominates. What’s played nods so overtly to The Doors’s “Light my Fire” that it’s Read more ...