1980s
Thomas H. Green
Alongside Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada were one of the last big acts to blossom from the 1990s boom in clubland and DJ culture. They are responsible for bona fide classics in “Superstylin’”, “At the River” and “I See You Baby”, and also founded the Lovebox Festival, which was named after their fourth album. Their last albums, the Black Light/White Light pairing, arrived a decade ago, and mined Eighties electronics to decent effect. Such biographical positivity is included to counterpoint the fact their latest album is a yacht rock horror story, possibly seeking the ears of Balearic ironists Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What happens when the hits dry up? And what happens a little further down the line, as the years of being on the charts recede into the past? For Helen Shapiro, the questions are answered by the intriguing Face The Music: The Complete Singles 1967–1984, a 25-track compilation collecting all her pop singles from the period covered by the title. Her work in jazz is not heard. The latest tracks were originally issued by Charlie Gillett’s Oval label and became her final singles.Helen Shapiro is the UK’s first home-grown female pop star. At age 14, she charted high in 1961 with “Don’t Treat me Read more ...
David Nice
Monologues and duets rule the stage right now. We can only dream of the day when theatre steps up to the classical music scene’s boldness and manages to have more performers gathered together, albeit suitably distanced (not so easy when the drama needs physical contact, though there are plenty of plays that don’t). That said, it would be hard to imagine a more impressive roster of performers than the magnificent Bridge Theatre has managed to summon for its one-person season. None can be better than Monica Dolan and Lesley Manville in this instalment of its four Alan Bennett Talking Heads Read more ...
Katie da Cunha Lewin
Selva Almada’s newly translated work has a stark title in both English and the original Spanish: Dead Girls, or Chicas Muertas. That apparent bluntness belies the hybrid sensitivity that makes up the pages. Its subject matter is the murders of three young women during the 1980s, spread across different provinces of Argentina, a country where murders of and violence against women are unbearably commonplace. This book, originally published in 2014 and now out in a translation by Annie McDermott from Charco Press, gives space to what is left over: the immediate grief, shock, and confusion that Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It hasn’t been an easy ride for Josh Boone’s New Mutants. Delayed production, reshoots, the acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney, Covid-19, and accusations of whitewashing, have all contributed to it being dubbed a ‘cursed’ film. Now, with little fanfare, this YA horror has finally limped onto cinema screens three years after production wrapped.Updated from the original 1980s setting, the film opens in the mid-90s in the spooky surroundings of Essex House, an asylum for unruly teenage mutants (far removed from the hallowed halls of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters). This Read more ...
joe.muggs
This documentary is bittersweet viewing on quite a number of levels. First, it’s got all the glory and tragedy of the most compelling music stories: a Liverpool band struggling from humble beginnings, trying to find an identity, fraternity and fallings-out, coping with huge success and its aftermath – not to mention sex, drugs, mental illness and death. On top of that there’s a constant layer of narrative about the endless pressures of racism on black British musicians, told brilliantly both explicitly and in the micro-details of 1960s and '70s life.Maybe most devastating thing of all, though Read more ...
joe.muggs
When does the avant-garde become folk? Both of the participants in this album have certainly been on the very cutting edge of sound-making, on multiple occasions. Conrad Schnitzler was a student of radical artist Joseph Beuys and leading light in the utopian thinking and radical soundmaking of 1970s West Germany as a member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster. Frank Bretschneider was, bravely, an underground musician in East Germany in the 1980s, in partnership with Olaf Bender – and, again with Bender and later with Carsten Nicolai, in unified Germany in the 1990s and on was responsible for some Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The feather in this particular cap is a DVD of director John T. Davis’ 1979 film Shellshock Rock. Filmed from October 1978 to April 1979, its 50 minutes thrillingly catch the Troubles-era Ulster getting to grips with punk rock. Vox pops from disgusted Belfast shoppers vie with live footage of Stiff Little Fingers, The Undertones, Protex, Victim, the thoroughly unvarnished Parasites and more in a gritty verité portrait of a scene which, due to its contemporary context, was beyond being a pose for the region’s punks. A nervy Stiff Little Fingers are seen admitting they were scared that the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“These are African rhythms, passed down to us from the ancient spirits. Feel the spirits, a unifying force. Come on, move with the spirits. Stand up. Clap your hands. Groove with the rhythms. Get down. Get off.”So begins “African Rhythms”, originally released in 1975 as the opening cut from an album of the same name by Oneness Of Juju. It was issued on Black Fire, their own label.As a thematic mission statement, “African Rhythms” lays it out. As a musical mission statement, “African Rhythms” was equally explicit. With its clamorous percussion bedding, the track is driving, funky, jazzy and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Strange Destinies” is the first track. “Take your eyes off me Svengali” is its memorable opening phrase. Conjuring up Van Morrison, Tom Petty, Mike Scott, Bruce Springsteen and even The Boomtown Rats when they were aping the first and fourth of those, the song clangs along with a powerpop chug and sports a hook-filled melody. Great.Despite this memorable opening, a triple-CD retrospective dedicated to Philip Rambow might seem like a cult item. Especially when no tracks from The Winkies, the band which first brought him to attention, are included. But there’s definitely a story.The Winkies Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Razorcuts formed after Tim Vass discovered Alan McGee’s Living Room club. In the booklet accompanying the reissue of his band’s first album Storyteller, Vass says of the weekly London promotion that “The headline act would often be someone like The Membranes or Alternative TV, but it was the unknown support acts that blew me away: The Jasmine Minks, The June Brides, The Loft.”Suitably inspired, Vass brought his friend and fellow Luton-dweller Gregory Webster along to The Living Room and Razorcuts were soon in business. Both were previously in the Television Personalities influenced outfit Read more ...
Anonymous
The eyes have it in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, which is in no way to discount this venerable writer's gift for words. Time and again in this vaunted series of dramatic solos, ten of which have now been remade alongside two new ones, a character will interrupt a thought only to be seen peering at us or into the middle distance or directly into the dark heart of psychic disturbance. Now 86, Bennett anatomises lovelessness and despair with a mastery second to none, and the timing of these as we emerge from lockdown tallies directly with a collection of people who themselves know a thing or Read more ...