1960s
Thomas H. Green
The venom with which Abiodun Oyewole spits “America is a terrorist”, the key repeated line to “Rain of Terror”, has startling power. The piece is an unashamed diatribe against his nation. Beside him his partner Umar Bin Hassan rhythmically hisses the word “terrorist” again and again while, behind, percussionist Donn Babatunde provides minimal backing on a set of three congas. “Take a black woman, a pregnant black woman, cut her belly open and let the foetus fall out, stomp the baby in the ground.” Oyewole is raging and it feels good. There is no meta here, just pure countercultural fury Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
French director Michel Hazanavicius made a name for himself with his OSS 117 spy spoofs, Nest of Spies (2006) and Lost in Rio (2009), set in the Fifties and Sixties respectively and starring Jean Dujardin as a somewhat idiotic and prejudiced secret agent. But it was with The Artist in 2011 that he hit the jackpot, marrying his gift for period recreation with a story of genuine depth and warmth. A black-and-white silent movie about the silent era itself, starring Dujardin alongside Hazanavicius's wife and frequent collaborator Bérénice Bejo, The Artist Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Aerosmith’s guitarist Joe Perry put it, “there’s a certain amount of fuck you-ness in everything Jeff does.” Perhaps it’s this which has allowed Jeff Beck to achieve the rare feat of surviving into his seventies as what you might describe as a guitar legend without portfolio. He does what he wants when he wants to, is revered by the great and good of the electric guitar universe, and has avoided being trapped into playing The Yardbirds’ greatest hits until the end of time.He isn’t known as an eager interviewee, but the Beck on show here seemed relaxed and vaguely amused to be taking a Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Back in the early Sixties Lucian Freud was living in Clarendon Crescent, a condemned row of houses in Paddington which were gradually being demolished around him. The neighbourhood was uncompromisingly working class and to his glee his neighbours included characters from the seamier side of the criminal world. It was around the time of his fortieth birthday when the wrecking balls drew near and, Bentley-owning but broke and generally neglected by the art world, his work began to develop into what is now known as late Freud. In relative obscurity eking out extravagance from precarity and Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On Wednesday night, the music world took a small step closer to the realms of science fiction. Roy Orbison, 30 years dead, stood in front of a packed Hammersmith Apollo. It wasn't a resurrection, of course, but a hologram, and a damn fine one. Virtual Roy wiggled, turned around and occasionally thanked the audience. At one point he even looked like he was going to pick his nose (it turned out to be just a wipe). The audience responded with plentiful applause and open-mouthed wonder.The evening started in a very human way. The organisers had had the good sense to find a support act which Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Born into the late 1950s, I was too young to be a 68er, though I remember watching it all on TV: the protests in Red Lion Square and Grosvenor Square, where Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave were the leading lights, demonstrating against Vietnam; Paris, where student protests, strikes and sit-ins quickly spread across the country, and General de Gaulle fled briefly to Germany; the riots across the United States that followed Martin Luther King's death, and at the Democratic Convention in Chicago; and of course the Prague Spring, so brutally snuffed out by Soviet tanks. I was a student in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The press ad for Spirit’s debut album wasn’t shy. “Five came together for a purpose: to blow the sum of man’s musical experience apart and bring it together in more universal forms. They became a single musical being: Spirit. It happens in the first album.” Of the band’s bassist Mark Andes, it declared “the strings are his nerve endings”. Drummer Ed Cassidy apparently “hears tomorrow and he plays it now”.Now was February 1968 and such hyperbole would have been baseless if the band being bigged-up wasn’t special. As it happened, Spirit actually were. Their eponymous album was packed with great Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
David Bailey taught Nureyev to dance at the Ad Lib club in London in the Sixties. “He was very stiff. He could do all that Swan Lake stuff but he couldn’t do the twist,” remembers Bailey in one of My Generation’s voiceover interviews, some vintage, some in conversation today.Directed by David Batty and presented by Michael Caine – the film was his friend and producer Simon Fuller’s idea, inspired by Caine’s anecdotes – with a script by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, it features great archival footage of those glory days when London swung and everyone smoked. Who can resist Twiggy giggling Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This year the state of Israel marks its 70th birthday. Which means it will also be the year Palestinians remember the Nakba, the catastrophe, the mass dispossession. With that in mind, the Public Theater in New York commissioned this adaptation of a short novel by the acclaimed Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, who was killed in 1972 by a Mossad car bomb.Returning to Haifa was possibly the first work of fiction in which both sides of the divide were presented with equal sympathy. Kanafani’s novella traces the impact of the events of 1948 and their aftermath on two families – one Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“That colourful character Zoot Money has recently been writing at length in support of psychedelic music. Now, what’s the score Zoot, has it got a contribution to make to the scene?” It’s 14 January 1967 and BBC presenter Brian Matthew is putting his guest on the spot.“I think so,” responds Money. “It’s an art form. Everything has to be broken open and seen in as many different ways as possible. I suppose that’s why we’re here, to break it open and find out what’s inside, that it was there all the time.”Six months later, Money announced the break-up of his group the Big Roll Band and Read more ...
David Benedict
“What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” Hang on a minute, Tytania, there are no flowers. Instead, as Britten’s ominously low strings slither and tremble up and down the scale, the curtain rises on a huge, near-acidic emerald green hilly slope lying against a seemingly fathomless International Klein Blue cyclorama broken only by a glowing crescent moon. Except it’s not just a hill: it’s also a giant bed; the perfect bed, in fact, in which to spend one wonderful midsummer’s night. This physical metaphor is both central to and typical of director Robert Carsen and designer Michael Levine’s Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Chestnut-brown canary, ruby-throated sparrow” sang Stephen Stills in his “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”, a song from CSNY’s 1969 debut album to Judy Collins, with whom he was ending a two-year affair. Collins’s big baby-blue eyes haven’t faded with time. Nor has her voice – indeed, it is far more secure now than it was 40 years ago, when she was battling pills and booze, a fight she’s documented in a number of books.Collins was a star in 1969; CSNY were making their celebrated Woodstock debut and that iconic first album had harmonies that were spine-chillingly beautiful and pitch-perfect. The tie- Read more ...