1960s
Saskia Baron
One of the sadnesses of covid is that films like Judas and the Black Messiah have been held over for release in the hope that cinemas will reopen. Immersive, intense features like this deserve to be seen in a darkened theatre with no distractions. But as the pandemic drags on in the UK, distributors are forced to debut big films on the small screen and it’s a real shame in this instance. Writer-director Shaka King tells the true story of two young men whose fates intertwined in the civil rights movement in Chicago in 1969. Daniel Kaluuya plays Fred Hampton, the charismatic Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Joseph Andras wastes no time. “Not a proud and forthright rain, no. A stingy rain. Mean. Playing dirty.” This is how his debut novel kicks off, and it’s a fitting start for his retelling of the arrest, torture, one-day trial and subsequent execution of Fernand Iveton, the only Algerian-born European (or “pied-noir”) to have been subject to the death penalty during the conflict. It remains one of the most ignominious episodes of the Algerian War of Independence. Ignominious but largely forgotten. Iveton’s case received attention from the likes of Simone Beauvoir, Sartre and Camus, a “pied Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sure, Roald Dahl wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but is that any excuse for a film quite so saccharine? He of all challenging and complex men, with a temperament to match, seems an odd subject for the sort of weightless, paint-by-numbers biopic that would be hard-pressed to muster much attention even as TV filler on a particularly dead night.As it is, made for the screen on what would appear to be astonishingly modest means (let's just say that Hollywood has rarely looked less convincing), this reckoning of Dahl's stormy first marriage to the Oscar-winning American actress Patricia Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Dorian Benediction” begins with a muted organ and spectral chorale. Minimal drums, an electric piano, vibes, melancholy saxophone and a jazzy solo guitar fill out the picture. Over its four-and-a-half minutes, the atmosphere is haunted and haunting. This is music which appears to have seeped from the walls of a baroque church. It’s the final track of The Free Design’s third album, 1969’s Heaven / Earth.“An Elegy” is more direct but still as mysterious. It’s also jazzy and strings colour the arrangement, but there’s an epic quality as the song moves though a series of crescendos. This time, Read more ...
Richard Bratby
A darkened stage; a pool of light; a solitary figure. And then, flooding the whole thing with meaning, music – even it’s just a soft chord on a piano. It’s no secret to any opera goer that even the barest outlines of a staging can magnify the dramatic potential of a piece of music to a point when it can seem like a completely new work. And if – like English Touring Opera’s director James Conway – you’ve spent much of the 21st century creating large-scale drama in small venues with minimal resources; well, it all starts to look deceptively easy. Conway makes a pairing of two song cycles by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The First Generation 1965–1974 is a 35-CD box set dedicated to the blues maven and propagator John Mayall. As well as the discs, there are three books: one a hardback, another reproducing fan club material, and the third a facsimile of the press pack for his first album. Also included are two posters and a signed photograph of Mayall. Five thousand copies have been made. As it sells for £275, the 3.8 kilogram The First Generation will not be a casual purchase.What’s encompassed by The First Generation is not the well-defined narrative of a standard band or musician. Mayall’s Sixties band Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When the concept album first properly took flight, in the late 1960s, before it became slave to the bloated artifice of prog-rock, it was an extension of the LSD-soaked times: “Songs aren’t big enough, man, I need a bigger canvas!” Famed albums by The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Kinks and The Pretty Things sum up this golden period. The second album from singer-songwriter James Wallace’s Skyway Man persona is a psychedelic concept piece, but in line with this wide-eyed period, rather than crap by Yes and the like. Wallace’s psychonaut indie ruminations are, thus, loaded with opaque visionary Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Veteran Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky has gone back to his beginnings for his latest film. The real-life events on which Dear Comrades! is based took place in June 1962, when social unrest over rising prices saw strikes break out in Novocherkassk, an industrial town in Russia’s south, culminating in street protest against the Soviet regime. The very idea of such an uprising was, of course, anathema in the “workers’ paradise” that was the communist system, and it was brutally suppressed by the Kremlin. The extent of the casualties was concealed, the dead secretly buried, and the events Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
In 1964, Cassius Clay, NFL superstar Jim Nathaniel Brown, soul legend Sam Cooke and political firebrand Malcolm X gathered for one night in a dingy room at the Hampton Motel. It was a meeting that became a symbol of hope for black Americans. A photo, taken by Malcolm X would make the moment iconic, marking a shift away from the horrors of Jim Crow America to the passing of the Civil Rights Act. The events of that evening became the basis of Kemp Powers' 2013 play, and now form the directorial debut for Oscar-winning actress Regina King, who most recently played Sister Night in HBO’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two of the four CDs in this set are of a live performance taped on 16 April 1964. The other pair of discs were recorded on 9 July 1975. Each show issued on Charles Mingus @ Bremen 1964 & 1975 was captured by the north German regional broadcaster Radio Bremen. There was an audience of 220 at the earlier show, 440 at the later.While each performance runs to just short of two hours, the contrasts between them are not limited to representing different periods in the career of double bassist/pianist Charles Mingus. The compositions played are unique to each show, and there's a different Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An old saw relating to The Doors says their ambition when they formed was to be as big as Los Angeles-based garage-psych sensations The Seeds. After listening to Lost Innocence – Garpax 1960s Punk & Psych, it’s hard not to wonder where the bands heard were aiming. What’s collected is from 1965 to 1969. All these combos operated in California, generally working in and around the LA area. All were produced by music biz maverick Gary S Paxton, whose company was named Garpax. He had been behind the novelty hits “Alley Oop” and “Monster Mash”.The Buddhas, Limey & The Yanks (whose frontman Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The winter solstice occurs tomorrow, 21 December. Stonehenge, one of this island’s most significant structures, is constructed in alignment with the setting sun on that day. After the solstice, the days lengthen and a new cycle of the year begins.An image of what could be Stonehenge appears inside the back cover of the booklet coming with Sumer Is Icumen In – The Pagan Sound Of British & Irish Folk 1966–1975. Inside its front cover, a similar edifice is seen. Within it, a circle of woman kneel each with arms outstretched. The image is taken from the 1973 film, The Wicker Man and the Read more ...