1960s
Kieron Tyler
The Beatles loomed over everything else. It wasn’t inevitable, but the arrival of the revealing Revolver box set and Peter Jackson’s compelling Get Back film confirmed that there is more to say about what’s known, and also that there are new things to say about popular music’s most inspirational phenomenon of the 20th century.Just as it was when The Beatles were operational, the Revolver box and Get Back gave other things out there standards to aspire to. This pair of archive releases became a wholly unexpected yardstick for 2022. Obviously though, brows at labels aren’t furrowing about Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Each new Beatles album offered a chance for other acts to record their own versions of songs which didn’t make it onto singles. What was on the long-player could pick up attention if it was covered. Revolver was no exception. Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers’s version of “Got to Get You Into my Life” was in the charts the August 1966 week Revolver was issued.Revolver’s “Here There and Everywhere” was recorded by The Fourmost. “For no One” was covered by Paul McCartney sound-alike Marc Reid, “Yellow Submarine” by The She Trinity. None were hits, and The She Trinity were gazumped by The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any reminder of the greatness of Love is welcome, and Expressions Tell Everything does this in fine style. A box set, it contains eight picture-sleeve seven-inch singles, a book and a couple of postcards. It’s very stylish.The period dwelt on is 1966 to 1969, over which the original band changed line-ups, fell apart and was then resurrected with new players behind main-man Arthur Lee for the Four Sail album. On record, Love began in 1966 as a hybrid of folk-rock and The Rolling Stones, and went on to incorporate Bossa Nova and jazz for the late-1966 second album Da Capo. The magnificent Read more ...
graham.rickson
Slovak director Eduard Grečner wrote the first draft of a screenplay for Dragon’s Return (Drak sa vracia) in 1956 but didn’t have the confidence to direct it, this adaptation of a novella by the Slovak author Dobroslav Chrobák that he finally realised 12 years later.An elderly but spritely Grečner appears in one of this disc’s bonus features and there’s a fascinating 2015 interview with him transcribed in Second Run’s booklet, Grečner recalling his efforts to convey the author’s rich prose in cinematic form. Dragon’s Return is indeed visually spectacular, the rocky landscapes and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Merrell Fankhauser's first outing on record was with Californian instrumental surf band The Impacts, who issued their sole album in 1963. Thereafter, he was the prime mover in an unbroken succession of pop, psychedelic and freak-rock bands. His first solo album arrived in 1976.Commercial success? None that was measurable. The Impacts had a track titled “Wipe Out” but The Surfaris scored a hit with a different instro with the same name. His top-notch psychedelic-era band Fapardokly were only heard as part of an album with random other Fankhauser-related tracks which was issued in early 1968. Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Owl Service is instantly unsettling, Bridget Appleby’s credit sequence cutting between flickering candles and shadow puppets while a plaintive Welsh folksong is drowned out by the sound of a motorcycle. Alan Garner’s uncompromising 1967 fantasy novel is a spare, elegant fable told mostly through dialogue; in Philip Pullman’s words, “everything we need is there, and nothing we don’t need.”Granada TV’s eight-part 1969 adaptation boasts a screenplay by Garner and was directed and produced by Peter Plummer, the series filmed, unusually, on location in North Wales in full colour, though a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
How many excellent comedies involving the Nazis are there? To Be or Not To Be, The Great Dictator and perhaps The Producers, but Jojo Rabbit was a mess and My Neighbour Adolf is no better.And it’s also hard to know who the intended audience is for this curious co-production between Poland and Israel (where its Russian-born director Leonid Prudovsky lives). It was filmed in Colombia and most of its dialogue is in English. After a nostalgic pre-title scene involving a Jewish family gathering together to take a group photograph in pre-Holocaust Poland Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
John Lennon does not appear on “Love You Too” and “For No One”. With “Taxman”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “Here, There and Everywhere”, “Good Day Sunshine” and “I Want to Tell You”, his contributions are limited to backing vocals and, on odd occasions, some percussion too. He appears semi-detached from seven of Revolver’s 14 tracks.This realisation comes after reading the handsome book accompanying the Revolver box set. The pages with the track-by-track commentary have headings above each section of text, listing dates of recording, the studios used, the personnel and who played what. Leaf through, and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The release of Call Jane could not be more timely, just as the American midterms loom and liberals reel from the overturning of legislation that allow women access to safe and legal abortions in the US. This well-crafted drama tells the true story of a group of women in 1960s Chicago who ran a secret organisation that provided almost 12,000 terminations when to do so was a criminal offence. Elizabeth Banks plays Joy, a housewife devoted to her daughter and lawyer husband, living a perfect suburban life reminiscent of The Graduate and The Stepford Wives. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“You Turned my Bitter Into Sweet” sounds like a hit. The 1965 Mary Love single was issued by the Los Angeles-based Kent label and had a Motown flavour and a hint of The Supremes’s “Come See About me”, from the previous year. “You Turned my Bitter Into Sweet” was a killer 45.However, the single escaped widespread attention until 1982 when it became the opening cut of For Dancers Only, a top-drawer compilation of dancefloor-friendly soul sides. Its inclusion recognised that “You Turned my Bitter Into Sweet” had become a UK club staple when played out. In 1983, it reached even more ears by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the third week of April 1967, Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Somethin’ Stupid” topped the UK’s single’s chart. Sandie Shaw’s “Puppet on a String” was number two, and The Monkees’ “A Little Bit me a Little Bit You” snapped at her heels. Englebert Humperdinck’s recent number one “Release me” was at number five. All very pop, very mainstream.The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Purple Haze” was in running too then, as were Pink Floyd’s “Arnold Layne” and The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” / “Strawberry Fields Forever”. But other chart entries like Whistling Jack Smith’s “I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman”, The Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The release of each box-set in the BFI’s Blu-ray four-volume collection of Ingmar Bergman films is a delight. Volume 3 provides some of the Swedish master’s essential works.Most of them are as dark as they come. The Scandi Noir that has flooded our screens in the last few years is black in its own way, and despair is seldom absent from it, but "Bergman noir" is something else. Relentlessly – and the eight films in this set, from The Virgin Spring (1960) to The Silence (1963), from Through a Glass Darkly (1961) to Persona (1966), are equally relentless Read more ...