1960s
Graham Fuller
In John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving (1962), draughtsman Vic (Alan Bates), still reeling from a drunken binge and a fight with his typist wife Ingrid (June Ritchie) and her mother (Thora Hird), staggers into the railway station of their grim Northern English town. To leave or not to leave? That is the question that also tests the mettle of another young Northerner (Tom Courtenay) in another Schlesinger film written by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall.Whereas getting on a train with sometime girlfriend Liz (Julie Christie) would prove the manhood of the hero of Billy Liar (1963), for Vic it Read more ...
David Nice
Superior light music with a sting, done at the highest level: what could be better for a summer lunchtime in the light and airy Cadogan Hall? Our curator was that most collegial of top soloists, trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger. He'd invited colleagues of many nations, all of them first rate, but it was almost a given that chansonnier-composer HK Gruber would steal the show.That's not to undervalue Hardenberger's own unique contributions, kicking off as piccolo trumpeter with Academy of St-Martin-in-the-Fields strings in the fireworks-strut of fellow Swede Tobias Broström's Sputnik. Jan Lundgren' Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A two-bar flurry of guitar lays the table for a skip-along beat, handclaps, and an arrangement and melody akin to Martha and the Vandellas’ March 1964 single “In my Lonely Room”. This though was not a Motown production and did not tell the story of a girl so distraught at her boyfriend’s dalliances that all she could do was take to her lonely room and cry. On “The 81”, Candy & the Kisses sang of a dance craze for anyone “tired of doing the monkey, tired of doing the swing.”Despite being a knock-off of the Detroit sound, the irresistible “The 81” did not sound like a Motown record. It Read more ...
bella.todd
Watching Cameron Mackintosh’s joyful revision of this Sixties musical, it’s possible to believe for a moment that all the world needs now is love sweet love and a shit-ton of banjos. With a new book by Downton Abbey behemoth Julian Fellowes, new numbers by the pair behind hit musical Mary Poppins, and design that delights at every turn of the multi-revolve, Half A Sixpence seems destined to follow a flush of previous Chichester Festival musicals into the West End. It also puts vintage stars around the previously unknown name of Charlie Stemp.Charlie Stemp. Isn’t that just the best name? It’s Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Womanising detectives, shapely dames, gangsters and convoluted criminal conspiracies: Richard O’Brien and Richard Hartley’s 1982 musical take on Carter Brown’s California-set whodunit fiction is pulp noir to the max. However, unlike the pair’s previous collaboration, the indelible Rocky Horror Show, this is more homage than send-up – arch but fairly straightforward storytelling in place of riotous, risqué pastiche.That’s problematic when Sixties sensibilities are presented to a modern audience with only the flimsiest attempts at subversion. The male gaze dominates, unashamedly, in Read more ...
joe.muggs
If last night made anything clear it's that some things are still some way beyond the reach of hipster reappropriation. The audience in Hyde Park for Carole King was 99% white and middle-aged, with the very few younger people scattered about appearing to be teenagers there with their parents. Within that, though, there was a broad spread of class, and – reflecting the appeal of King's Tapestry album at the time of its release – everyone from grizzled old hippies to a whole legion of straight-as-a-die mums and dads of the kind who have probably only bought half a dozen other albums since the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Pictured above is the label of an exceptionally important Pink Floyd record issued last November. Only a thousand people bought a copy. That was the amount that hit shops. Pink Floyd 1965: Their First Recordings was a double seven-inch set with a historic importance inversely proportionate to its availability. It was the first ever outing for the earliest recordings by the band and, as such, the earliest compositions for them by its prime songwriter Syd Barrett. He died on 7 July 2006 at age 60, and a look at this hard-to-find yet significant release is a tribute to his memory.The band is the Read more ...
mark.kidel
In 1969, just before he made M*A*S*H, the innovative film that launched him in the world, Robert Altman had made his first proper feature. That Cold Day in the Park was a piece of period weirdness, all but forgotten in the shadow of his iconic Korean War black comedy "debut".An uptight upper-class Vancouver spinster rescues an apparently mute homeless teenager she finds drenched with rain on a bench in the park. She becomes fascinated by the boy, as years of repressed desire give way to an obsessive passion that comes out all wrong – tainted with shades of perverse fantasies she can hardly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps as a hopeful harbinger for Paul Simon's new album Stranger to Stranger, Disturbed recently topped Billboard's Mainstream Rock Songs chart with their flabbergasting version of Simon's 1965 song "The Sound of Silence". However, while vocalist David Draiman could launch a career as a new kind of Wagnerian baritone on the strength of his extraordinary performance, Simon himself is headed in a less stentorian direction. Stranger to Stranger is his 13th solo studio album, finds him reuniting yet again with his old production buddy Roy Halee, and successfully manages to blend together Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Janis Joplin bio-doc has been a long time coming. The rock star’s family were notoriously cautious about exposure: who wouldn’t be, with a career so tragic and brief?As it happens, their collaboration made possible the inclusion of the rock star’s poignant letters home, which the documentary uses to great effect throughout, revealing something of the singer’s inner life and vulnerability, in contrast with her careful self-presentation as a mixture of bad girl, sex bomb and Etta James impersonator.Some of her inner torment may have been caused by a continuing and profound sense of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Ladies and gentlemen, in view of the controversy already aroused the producers of this film wish to re-emphasise what is already stated in the film: that there is no established scientific connection between mongolism and psychotic or criminal behaviour”. With these opening words, Twisted Nerve instantly defined itself as a film out to attract attention. Despite this questionable exploitation aspect, the genuinely unsettling 1968 work is ripe for reassessment.Like their predecessor feature The Family Way, Roy and Thomas Boulting’s Twisted Nerve starred Roy’s then wife Hayley Mills. She Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Sunshine came softly through my window today..." How fortuitous that veteran Scottish tunestrel Donovan should have picked London's glorious first day of summer to stage his "Beat Cafe" event at the Palladium. The plan was to rove across his back catalogue to celebrate his 70th birthday (which actually falls on Tuesday) as well as his half-century in the music business.The cavernous Palladium space wasn't packed out, but the loquacious and ever-exuberant troubadour didn't seem to have noticed as he bustled about the stage like a small pixie with an outsized guitar. He clearly has a healthy Read more ...