1960s
graham.rickson
Released in 1965, Pearls of the Deep (Perličky na dně) is that rare beast, a successful portmanteau movie. Five young Czech film makers each directed a segment, with two more contributions excised for reasons of length and later released separately.The individual chapters are based on short stories by Bohumil Hrabal (whose Closely Observed Trains was adapted by Jiří Menzel a year later), mostly taken from his 1963 collection Pearls of the Deep. Peter Hames’ booklet essay points out that Hrabal’s pithy tales “are about situations rather than narrative”, tending to focus on the oddballs and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
High Tide were one of many late Sixties and early Seventies British bands unearthed in the early Eighties by record collectors digging into what came after psychedelia. The bands didn’t have similar musical styles but were united by their obscurity and having sold barely any copies of their albums. All were largely forgotten until their rediscovery. Ben, Gracious!, Pussy, Red Dirt, T2, more. Who were these bands? Who were High Tide?As is the way, collector interest and the sharply rising prices of original pressings resulted in digging for information and reissues. High Tide had released two Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a tribute to a forgotten hero, gay black Quaker Bayard Rustin (Colman Domingo), driving force behind the 1963 March on Washington, the vast peaceful protest that sanctified Martin Luther King as his oratory seemed to lift black America towards a Promised Land.King (Aml Ameen) is a cautious rising star here, a flawed figure who betrays Rustin early on, as his sexuality proves his Achilles Heel to Civil Rights movement enemies including the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins (grizzled Chris Rock) and black Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (Jeffrey Wright, pictured below). Produced by the Obamas’ Higher Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“How psychedelic is your pop? This is the demanding question posed to many groups today, struggling for acceptance. It's no longer any good to say: ‘Well, mate, we can play Wilson Pickett, James Brown and all that gear,’ to anybody contemplating booking a band. One has to explain whether one is likely to set fire to the auditorium, or batter the audience’s senses with flame, light and fiendish noises.”When music weekly Melody Maker got to grips with psychedelia in its 14 January 1967 issue, it was noted that Pink Floyd were “originally an R&B blues-type group.” Drummer Nick Mason told the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For Finnish composer Osmo Lindeman, the decision to pursue electronic music was made in 1968 during a visit to Poland. He had recently started using graphical notation for the scores of his compositions and was having problems getting conductors and orchestras to follow what he wanted.In Poland, he met composer Andrzej Dobrowolski and visited the Warsaw School of Music’s electronic music studio. He found that Dobrowolski also used graphical notation. With electronic music, Lindeman saw that there no barriers to using any type of score. He had the way forward. He would embrace electronic music Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Basel Chamber Orchestra’s 21 string players on tour are an extraordinary set of musicians. Not only did they begin their programme in Manchester with Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, requiring at times one-to-a-part playing to accomplish its multi-voice textures, but eight of them put down their instruments and transformed into a choir for the piece that followed.That was for Heinz Holliger’s Eisblumen, written for seven strings plus four vocal parts: Bach’s chorale “Komm, O Tod” is heard beneath the very un-Bachian string writing. It was realised with delicacy and Read more ...
mark.kidel
Targets (1968), Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature is generally regarded as a great film. And yet, it came out of a mixture of false starts and opportunism. Could it be that its unique quality, the elements which make it stand out in the history of cinema, owed as much as anything else to the randomness that accompanied the movie’s creation?Bodganovich, a cinephile and writer for the magazine Esquire, had come to the attention of Roger Corman, the genius of low-budget horror and sleaze. After assisting him on a feature, Corman asked the eager young man to make a film with Boris Karloff, who Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Biba dresses are way too colourful, the shop’s interior about 10 times too bright… and did anybody really say ”happening threads” in 1965?Taking Ben Elton to task for his portrayal of the Sixties, which feature in the first half of Close-Up, his new self-directed piece about the style icon and national treasure known as Twiggy, shouldn’t be the point. He’s written another jukebox musical, with all the colour-popping jollity that involves, the energetic chorines giving it their all and building an affectionate rapport with the audience. Except, what he’s written is more a hybrid: a musical Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In September 1955, the grandly named London Skiffle Centre set up for business each Thursday in a room above the Round House pub in Soho’s Wardour Street. A prime mover in the venture was blues acolyte Cyril Davies. Two months after the opening, Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” was issued as a single. It was previously out as a track on a 1953 Chris Barber album. Despite the wonky timeline, the skiffle boom was on.Davies – now in partnership with fellow blues enthusiast Alexis Korner – grew increasingly dissatisfied with skiffle and in March 1957 the duo renamed The London Skiffle Centre Read more ...
AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan and T Rex review - musical doc falls between two stools
Adam Sweeting
Seeking to be both a documentary and a musical tribute to Marc Bolan, AngelHeaded Hipster doesn’t quite pull it off on either count. It’s based around the making of an album (whence the film gets its title) of versions of Bolan’s songs by an interminable list of artists including U2, Joan Jett, Devendra Banhart, Macy Gray, Beth Orton and many more, produced by Hal Willner and released in 2020. Willner, who died shortly before the album's release, made his name by creating multi-artist tributes to such fabled names as Charles Mingus, Kurt Weill and Harold Arlen, but one might hesitate to put Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“March of the Flower Children” was a June 1967 B-side by Los Angeles psych-punks The Seeds. The track was extracted from their third album Future, a peculiar dive into psychedelia which was as tense as it was turned on. While the song’s lyrics referenced a “field of flowers,” a “painted castle” and a sky “painted golden yellow” the mood was jittery, unstable.The title has been borrowed by a three-CD clamshell set dedicated to, as its subtitle puts it, “The American Sounds of 1967.” Over around four hours, this March of the Flower Children collects 85 tracks. The Velvet Underground’s “White Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Between the late 1950s and around 1971, Robert “Mack” McCormick (1930–2015) travelled through his base-state Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, west Louisiana and parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma looking for musicians to record. It wasn’t a random process: he covered 700 counties using a grid system, so nothing would be missed. As well as tapes, he made lists, filled notebooks and took photos. He kept everything.After archivists at the National Museum of American History went through what was donated by McCormick’s daughter to the Smithsonian Institution in 2019, they found his collection encompassed Read more ...