1960s
Kieron Tyler
Beachwood Sparks: Desert SkiesBeachwood Sparks didn’t become Fleet Foxes, but their DNA is integral to the harmonious Seattleites. Both bands have been issued by the Sub Pop label, but after two albums Beachwood Sparks drifted apart in 2002. Fleet Foxes picked up the torch in 2008. The connection is more than a shared label and general musical preferences. It’s through the torch held for Gram Parsons's “cosmic American music” and the debt both owe to David Crosby’s 1971 solo album If I Could Only Remember my Name. Beachwood Sparks had started something – a parallel path to, but not, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Unlikely subjects can make for great musicals. (Assassins, anyone?). Just as great subjects can make for terrible ones (the Broadway Breakfast at Tiffany’s comes to mind). Sadly Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest project can’t redeem itself on either count. An awkward story allied with a treatment that veers from unexciting to embarrassingly bad, the only marvel here is how it ever made it past the workshop stage. I would have hated Stephen Ward if I hadn’t been so numbed by boredom that I couldn’t muster emotion even approaching that intensity.The internet has been rife with chatter over the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We've already been casting a revisionary eye over Lord Lucan, the Cold War, the Kennedy assassination and the Profumo affair. Last year Sheridan Smith portrayed Mrs Ronnie Biggs for ITV, but what took them so long to get around to the Great Train Robbery itself? Just hours too long for the real Ronnie Biggs, as it happened.Scripted by Chris Chibnall, a man basking in bankability following his bustin' hit series Broadchurch for ITV, this two-part voyage round the GTR is stylish, well cast and easy to watch, but adds nothing much to the existing information-mountain about the crime. You'd get Read more ...
Andy Plaice
There’s a wonderful moment in Bruce Reynolds’s autobiography when he describes what became of his mate, a fellow train robber who had fled to Canada but was hunted down by the enigmatic Tommy Butler. Four and a half years after the Great Train Robbery in which crooks made off with £2.6million, Detective Chief Superintendent Butler had come to arrest Charlie Wilson and was knocking on his door."You look well, Charlie," said Butler. To which the fugitive replied: "And you, Guv. Cup of tea?" The detective was determined to find his man and, 50 years later, it’s a feeling shared by writer Chris Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: German Measles Vol 1 – Flames of Love / German Measles Vol 2 – Sun Came Out at SevenFor the years between The Beatles inventing themselves in the clubs of Hamburg and the evolution of what was dubbed Krautrock, Germany’s popular music scene hasn’t gained much of an international profile subsequently. It’s understandable, but a pity. Just as the Fabs inspired countless wannabe beatsters in Liverpool and beyond in Britain, they did the same in the country which had as great a hand in their training as the UK. The two German Measles albums don’t dwell on local stars like Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The film too often comes over as a prettily decorated edition of a sick spinster’s diary” was how the Monthly Film Bulletin concluded their review of The Innocents in January 1962. After seeing Jack Clayton’s intense adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw more than 50 years on, the impression left now isn’t so much of an attractively presented chronicle of a breakdown, but a film which paints little of its substance in so clear-cut a fashion. As it is with the literary source, the audience is left to draw their own conclusions as to what is real, what is unreal, and what is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Neil Young: Live at the Cellar DoorCrosby, Stills, Nash & Young had fallen apart in summer 1970 and Neil Young was left to promote After the Gold Rush, his third solo album from August that year. He hit the road on his own after "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" had nudged the singles’s chart. As 1971 unfolded, the tour would be billed Journey Through the Past – he was playing recent songs alongside material from his earlier albums, including those made with The Buffalo Springfield.Live at the Cellar Door catches Young in Washington D.C during a series of dates over 30 November to 2 Read more ...
paul.mcgee
There's been a quiet but nevertheless palpable sense of anticipation surrounding psych-folk enigma Linda Perhacs' first-ever European tour. Comparatively low-key advance publicity certainly proved no impediment to a sold-out house for the recent opening date at Berlin's Kantine am Berghain, a somewhat drab and unprepossessing bunker in the shadow of the city's notorious techno temple.The late bloomer/Indian summer narrative has become ever more familiar to music fans in recent years. Vashti Bunyan and Terry Callier were both rescued from obscurity via a combination of serendipity and a devout Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Velvet Underground: White Light/White HeatThe shadow cast over the reissue of The Velvet Underground’s second album White Light/White Heat by Lou Reed’s recent death is a poignant reminder that an awful lot of time has passed since this still-vital inspiration for much of today’s indie rock was first released. As a 45th anniversry edition, this does mark an unusual milestone but as seemingly the last word on the album it’s hard to imagine what could constitute a 50th anniverary edition. The Velvet Underground have been endlessly examined and re-examined. The vaults must now be bare. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
BBC Radiophonic Workshop: BBC Radiophonic Music / The Radiophonic WorkshopThe inescapable 50th anniversary of the television debut of Doctor Who has had the side effect of drawing attention to the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the backroom outfit who created the otherworldly theme, sound effects and atmospheric colour for the series. Of course, Doctor Who was just one BBC production they worked on. The corporation allowed the Workshop to close 15 years ago, in 1998 – a not-so happy anniversary. It had been established in 1958.When the Radiophonic Workshop’s paymasters were Read more ...
David Nice
Now here’s a funny thing, possums. Back in 1990 when one great Australian Dame, Joan Sutherland, gave her farewell performance, another, a certain housewife superstar from the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds, seemed closer to retirement age.Now La Stupenda is no more, Dame Edna is a gigastar and it’s her turn to shrill a gladdie-waving goodbye to her adoring public. She doesn’t look a day older, nary a hair out of place in that immaculate lilac coiffure. Daring to upstage her in a final speech is manager Barry Humphries, still with his hand in the till while Edna gives all for her art Read more ...
theartsdesk
On 22 November 1963 President John F Kennedy was shot, yoking his name to an ex-marine and sometime defector to the USSR called Lee Harvey Oswald. Everyone old enough to remember is said to know where they were when they heard. As America dealt with its trauma, the conspiracy theories started,and spawned well over 1,000 books. The assassination also became the focus for artists in all art forms - in literature, theatre, film and even music. The latest is the movie Parkland, out this week, which reconstructs events in Dallas while steering clear of the main event. Meanwhile the Finborough Read more ...