1960s
Liz Thomson
Sixty years after her debut at Club 47, Harvard Square, Joan Baez this year bows out of formal touring and recording with an album every bit as remarkable as her 1960 debut, preserved by the Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry. Now 77, she’s reached an accommodation with a voice once famously described as “an achingly pure soprano”, which wrapped itself effortlessly around Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras #5. Once a bright-white diamond, it is now a deep topaz, still an exquisite instrument in the lower registers in which Baez is most comfortable.Whistle Down the Wind, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
During the British Invasion years, a Cleveland, Ohio band called The Choir ploughed a Brit-focussed furrow from late 1964. Initially and tellingly, they were named The Mods. Their prime mover, Dann Klawon, was a subscriber the switched-on UK monthly Rave, had missed a Mods show to hitch-hike to a Rolling Stones concert and was the first Clevelander to own a copy of “Purple Haze”. His band became The Choir in 1966, played on Who and Yardbirds’ bills, and went through continuous line-up changes. Even so, they issued three singles over 1966 to 1968 beginning with the classic “It’s Cold Outside Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Guillermo del Toro has laid down markers as a wizard of the fantastical with such previous works as Pan’s Labyrinth and Crimson Peak (though we’ll skate nimbly around Pacific Rim), and now he has brought it all back home with The Shape of Water, as its 13 Academy Award nominations might suggest. It’s a film that doesn’t want to be categorised, but it’s no trouble at all to lose yourself in its swirling currents.In outline, it’s a Cold War monster movie mashed together with an unearthly love story, alchemised by an infatuation with old Hollywood. Del Toro’s main human protagonist is Elisa Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For Britain, 1965 began with The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” at the top of the single’s chart. In December, the year bowed out with their double A-side “Day Tripper” / “We can Work it Out” in the same position. But 1965 was not just about The Beatles.According to the writer Jon Savage, “1965 was the year of Dylan, folk-rock and protest, and the year when the post-beat bohemian subculture took over from traditional showbiz as the principal youth culture. Suits and group uniforms were out: denim, suede and long hair in. It was also a vintage Motown year. It wasn’t like an Austin Powers film, with a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Watching what remains of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (L’Enfer) serves to remind us just how good his earlier work was. Inferno marked the beginning of the end, its shambolic production beginning Clouzot’s descent into obscurity. But Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s documentary is a treat, the film’s tragicomic history interspersed with archive footage and new dramatisations of key scenes. The hugely anticipated Inferno was started in 1964, four years after Clouzot’s previous film, the Brigitte Bardo-starrer La vérité, which had been a huge box-office success. What was potentially Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The “insider’s guide to the music business” tag attached to Hits, Hype and Hustle: An Insider's Guide to the Music Business (BBC Four) dangles the carrot of all kinds of clandestine scams being exposed, such as extortionate recording contracts, systematic chart-rigging or Mafia rackets involving cut-out records. Instead, this episode was merely a meander through the history of live performances in rock music.Our host was John Giddings, a veteran agent and promoter who has worked with almost everyone you can think of, from the Stones and U2 to Genesis, Bowie and Madonna, and currently runs the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The official reissue of The Beatles’ Christmas records is a major event. Since Live at the BBC was issued in 1994, archive Beatles’ releases have fallen into two categories. There have been releases devoted to or drawing from archive disinterments: Live at the BBC and its 2013 follow-up, the Anthology series, the unreleased studio sessions included in the recent Sgt Pepper’s package and so on.Then, there have been reconfigurations of existing releases: 2003’s Let it be…Naked, the egregious Love compilation, the satisfying Magical Mystery Tour box, a box set of mono albums and this year’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Monterey Pop Festival in California in mid-June 1967 was a key event in the history of festival culture. There had been music festivals before in the US – Newport Folk springs to mind – but Monterey marked the point where the whimsical trend for “renaissance fairs” combined with the rising first blaze of rock music, born of psychedelia, all marinated thoroughly in LSD-flavoured happenings and love-ins. And, of course, it was filmed by DA Pennebaker, making it a visual blueprint, ripe for imitation, influencing countless generations into the idea of festivals as miniature countercultural Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title Northern Soul's Classiest Rarities Volume 6 suggests this 24-track compilation might be a rag-bag; a collection of random musical floor-sweepings which couldn’t be collected under any other heading. Not a bit of it. Instead, every contribution is a gem. Anyone into soul – Northern, or any of its forms – will get a buzz from this collection.“High-quality dance records from across the Northern Soul spectrum – floor-fillers, chin-strokers, the esoteric and the sometimes obvious” are the words summing up the contents on the back of the package. This nails it though it’s hard to see how Read more ...
David Nice
Director Richard Jones watched all 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone as research for this Almeida production. I've never seen a single one, to the amazement of the American fan on the tube home who saw me reading the programme and, having grown up with the TV series in the early 1960s, told me a lot more about the skill of creator/scriptwriter Rod Serling and which instalments I should seek out. I shall now.The question why may trouble all but diehard enthusiasts as the opening actions unfold and intertwine, but by the end of this giddying evening Twilight Zone virgins may feel they've been Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A nineteen-minute adaptation of “Jack Orion” took up the whole of Side Two of Cruel Sister, Pentangle’s fourth album. It's the highlight of the smart but blandly titled 115-track box set The Albums 1968–1972. Up to this point in 1970, British folk rock had not spawned anything comparable to the epic “Jack Orion”. Extending a traditional song to this length in such spellbinding fashion was ambitious and while some of John Renbourne’s electric guitar suggested the fluidity of Quicksilver Messenger Service’s John Cipollina, the overall effect was of a band magnificently pushing what they did to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Beneath the creamy overlay of gowns, crystal chandeliers, palaces, uniformed flunkies and a sumptuous (albeit CGI-enhanced) Royal Yacht, a steely pulse of realpolitik fuels The Crown, returning to Netflix for its much-anticipated second series. Vaulting straight back on the horse, creator Peter Morgan pitches us into a royal marriage heading for the rocks, a weak and wobbly Prime Minister getting sucked into a disastrous escapade in the Middle East, and the story of the Queen’s troubled younger sister trying to a find a place in the world away from the flotsam of European royalty offered up Read more ...