1960s
Kieron Tyler
The death today at age 82 of trumpeter Kenny Ball makes him the first of the big three chart regulars of Britain’s trad jazz boom to pass away. Both Acker Bilk and Chris Barber are still with us. It’s easily forgotten, but trad actually was bigger than The Beatles. In January 1963, just as the Liverpool quartet were issuing their second single, “Please Please Me”, Ball was on a sell-out bill at north London’s massive Alexandra Palace. Ball beat them to the US charts, hitting number two there in early 1962 with “Midnight in Moscow”.Trad isn’t cool, and probably wasn’t then. But it was massive Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Blue Öyster Cult: The Columbia Albums CollectionBlue Öyster Cult were about more than the music. They seemingly arrived fully formed with a ready-made mythos and mystery. Their first two albums had no pictures of the band and weird, Escher-esque art. Their symbol, an inverted hybrid question mark and cross, suggested they were in thrall to a shadowy cult. Song titles like “Cities on Flame With Rock ‘n’ Roll”, “7 Screaming Diz-Busters” and “Career of Evil” fostered the impression they were zeal-filled revolutionaries. Their third album, issued in 1974, included a track called “ME 262” and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Cut Copy me”, the opening track of Petula Clark’s first British studio album in six years, is beautiful. It could have been created by Saint Etienne at their most melancholy. Her voice almost a whisper, it’s the sound of shadows and uncertainty even with what sounds like a light touch of autotune. The title track follows. Similarly assured, it’s sparse and centred around a rippling piano. Then a by-rote, in-the-shadow-of-Adele version of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" breaks the spell.Accompanying “Crazy” are versions of “Imagine”, “Love me Tender”, Gershwin’s “He Loves and She Loves” and a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Family: Once Upon a TimeFamily were always difficult to place. This lavish box set doesn’t make getting a handle on them any easier. They were as idiosyncratic as Jethro Tull and, in Roger Chapman, had a vocalist as offbeat as Joe Cocker. Not that they sounded like either, more that their DNA was as sharp-edged as both. The Leicester-born band had roots in soul-pop outfit The Farinas and the psychedelic underground embraced them – they were integral to the 1969 novel Groupie, a lid-lifting, supposedly fictional, exposé of rock’s seamier side. Despite these leg-ups and their popularity, they Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not a bad idea for a series, even if it is a tiny bit Boardwalk Empire Goes to Nevada. In short: whoosh back to the early Sixties and poke about in the wild and lawless underbelly of Las Vegas, a city awash with debauchery and corruption and under the thumb of the Mob. Better still, the show was created by Nicholas Pilleggi, screenwriter for Martin Scorsese's gangster flicks Goodfellas and Casino.Vegas is based on the true story of Sheriff Ralph Lamb, who aimed to tame the hookers, hustlers, hitmen and hucksters who helped make Sin City such a fun destination. Lamb is given some movie star Read more ...
David Nice
I laughed quite a bit going round the exhibition to which the Barbican’s latest theatre events are tied, The Bride and the Bachelors. Pioneer Marcel Duchamp’s 1921 “Readymade” Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy? is funny in itself: a metal birdcage containing marble sugarcubes with a cuttle bone and a thermometer stuck through the bars. It’s even funnier when you learn that admirer Robert Rauschenberg, about to pinch a couple of cubes on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the late 1950s, was told by the guard, “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to touch that crap?” I laughed a lot, too, Read more ...
David Nice
It's odd that Jerry Herman merits only a passing mention in Stephen Sondheim's two-volume autobiographical take on Broadway words and music, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat. In a couple of subjects Herman chose no less daringly than the master. Yet while La Cage aux Folles is now so entrenched that we forget its original boldness in asserting a loving gay relationship, Dear World's eccentric mix of eco-plea and nostalgia has yet to be established as a bittersweet chamber piece.Where it only took Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along 11 years to progress from flop to classic, Dear Read more ...
judith.flanders
Genius does not mean having no influences. Monotones, one of the very greatest of Frederick Ashton's ballets, is heavily influenced by other works: by George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations and Apollo, by Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère. And it in turn has influenced other great works: Kenneth MacMillan’s searing Gloria would not exist without this unearthly, moon-calm vision.Monotones II, the second or “white” half, was created first, a gala piece which defies the usual fate of gala pieces. The starkness, the heroic simplicity and grace of this trio was immediately apparent, and Ashton Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Sally Potter has forged an admirable career as an independent British filmmaker. She has avoided formulas, made daring visual experiments, and been committed to a highly personal art cinema. Among her movies, there have been two dazzling achievements, The Gold Diggers and Orlando, and an audacious vanity project, The Tango Lesson.It’s arguable, however, whether Potter has developed as a muscular storyteller. Set in 1962 against the background of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Cuba missile crisis, her depiction of the collapsing friendship of 17-year-olds Ginger (Elle Fanning) Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Who’s That Man – A Tribute to Conny PlankThe list of acts Konrad Plank worked with is a Hollywood Walk of Fame of Krautrock. As an engineer or producer he was behind seminal albums by Neu!, Cluster, Harmonia, La Düsseldorf and Kraftwerk. From outside Germany, Ultravox and Eurythmics came to him. Later-blooming locals like DAF sought him ought. Naturally, Brian Eno was around, both collaborating with Plank and bringing Devo to his studio to complete their first album. As the liner notes of this four-CD box set note, Plank turned U2 down, something Eno did not.Plank died Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A pedestrian talent hitches a ride on genius in Hitchcock, director Sacha Gervasi's often cringemakingly banal look at the filmmaker in the run-up to the mother of all horror movies, Psycho. One can only imagine what the Great Man himself would think of a film that applies rudimentary psychology to a celluloid classic that gets under the skin to an extent Gervasi can only dream of. Thank heavens, at least, for the committed performances of a cast headed by Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren as Mr and Mrs H, two classy talents in a film that otherwise feels as if it was made for some Read more ...
ronald.bergan
Both on screen and off, Montgomery Clift was sensitive, hesitant, introspective, self-destructive and often tortured. A personality that expressed itself on film as if afraid of what the camera would reveal. There were at least three faces of Clift. The early public one of the dark, romantic, handsome star of the fan magazines; the face of extraordinary beauty marred after a car accident in 1956, and the private face of drink, drugs and a series of unloving homosexual encounters. Although the accident itself had not really disfigured him too seriously, it seems to have scarred his character Read more ...