1980s
Jasper Rees
They say there are no second acts, but in the world of contemporary dad rock there’s little else. This year Squeeze became the latest band to re-form, not in quite the original line-up, but in an incarnation which patched up previous cracks between its two front men. The result was a cheerful tour and an enlightening album. I caught the live show at the Royal Albert Hall, where the old songs inevitably fared better than the less familiar new ones. In their studio incarnation, the robust new songs have the potential to sink into the marrow.Cradle to the Grave is the latest addition to a small Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The news that Lush have reformed didn’t come as surprise. Their comparable contemporaries Ride and Slowdive had also done so over the past couple of years, and My Bloody Valentine – an influence looming over all three – returned in 2007 after over a decade’s abscence. Unlike the others, Lush, who were on 4AD rather than Creation, have reissued their complete catalogue as a box set during the run-up to re-hitting stages next May. Chorus has the potential to eclipse the reappearance as it doesn’t edit history like a one-or-so hour live concert.With Lush, editing is probably necessary to make a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
As many colleagues have remarked over the past week, Christmas is that time of the year when, musically speaking, all bets are off. Whilst some prefer the season's more artsy offerings, personally, I still enjoy the soothing and traditional. Which is why, as the wine is mulling and fire crackling, I may well be tempted to dip into the Wilde Winter Songbook: this new deluxe edition is a big soft hug of festive classics and Wilde originals.Proceedings start with a rousing duet of “Winter Wonderland”, featuring Rick Astley having a decent stab at some old time Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Martin Fry is unsure whether Worthing is enjoying itself enough for his liking. Clad in a sharply tailored grey three-piece suit, ABC’s frontman keeps asking us if we’re having a good time. The shouts of approval that greet the question suggest we are. In any case, he certainly seems to be.Age suits him. He always aspired to a classic crooner look and at 57, he’s achieved it. Having established all is well, he plunges on into a greatest hits set, attacking the catchy, mid-paced “King Without a Crown” from 1987 (actually not a Top 40 hit, but sounds as if it should have been). The song allows Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's something reassuringly resistant to modernity about Jeff Lynne. In much the same way that his cast iron Brummie accent and demeanour have remained unchanged despite decades in Los Angeles, so his music remains in a late 20th century interzone – its real concerns being the songwriting of the Sixties and the huge, glossy production values of the Seventies and Eighties.And so it is here. The songs and vocal delivery are full of shameless nods to his sometime fellow Travelling Wilburys Bob Dylan (“Ain't it a Drag”) and Roy Orbison (“I'm Leaving You”), as well as to Paul McCartney (almost Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It trashed Olivia Newton-John’s film career, halted the movie-musical revival, and was so critically reviled it led to the creation of the Razzies. How, then, could the stage version of hubristic 1980 flop Xanadu become a 2007 Broadway hit? The answer, as illustrated by Paul Warwick Griffin’s sublimely silly Southwark Playhouse production, is to laugh at itself first.Adaptor Douglas Carter Beane retains the best of the original – John Farrar and ELO leader Jeff Lynne’s infectious pop/rock score – and lovingly spoofs the rest. The book’s absurd Ancient Greece/contemporary California mash-up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
However it is looked at, Sleepwalker is one of British cinema’s strangest films. What initially seems to be a Mike Leigh-style, Abigail’s Party-ish hyper-real take on middle class mores quickly becomes an intense journey into dystopian horror which nods to both Italian gialli and films which deconstruct the nuts and bolts of British social attitudes. If late-period Mario Bava and Lindsay Anderson had collaborated to direct an episode of The Good Life, this might have been the result.Sleepwalker begins simply enough. Angela and Richard Paradise (Joanna David and Nicholas Grace) are urban, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Laraaji: Ambient 3 – Day of Radiance“If you are OK with this as being an ‘ambient’ record, then I am OK with it too,” says Laraaji in the booklet accompanying this new reissue of his first album, 1980's Day of Radiance. He goes on to explain that back then he described his music as “‘beautiful’ or ‘ethereal’ or ‘celestial’.” As for being defined as New Age, he declares: “I have always accepted it. It was a term that was very alive at the time I began exploring this direction.” Minimalism is another genre which Day of Radiance could slot into quite comfortably. Pinning down exactly what Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a screen quotation late in this remarkable documentary that reads, “An outstanding athlete cannot belong totally to himself.” The words are those of Soviet ice hockey trainer Anatoly Tarasov, who's one of the presences behind this story of the sport seen through the eyes and experience of the legendary defender Vyacheslav (Slava) Fetisov. But director Gabe Polsky has made a broader film, one which touches on the uncertain journey Russia has undergone over the last three decades.Red Army makes clear how, in a world in which sport was an extension of the superpower struggle, Fetisov and Read more ...
Simon Munk
A unicorn, on fire; the wet slap of flesh on hospital linoleum; homoerotic manhugs from wounded soldiers. The latest and greatest in the legendary Metal Gear Solid series starts odd. But brilliantly odd.Waking in a hospital bed, covered in bandages is Big Boss. Or Ahab, as what appears to be a face-covered Kiefer Sutherland in a hospital gown insists on calling you. Before you know it Kiefer's helping you make a madcap escape from some distinctly superhuman entities that feel torn straight from the pages of a Manga comic, in a hospital covered in blood, on fire.Then Kiefer's gone and a bloke Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Julian Cope: World Shut Your Mouth, FriedIt’s a fair assumption Julian Cope’s record label Phonogram was committed to the idea that he could be a solo commercial and critical success. Teardrop Explodes, the band he had fronted, had charted and his face regularly featured in the new crop of glossy pop magazines. The announcement of the band’s split had come in November 1982, but it took another year for “Sunshine Playroom”, the first solo single, to emerge.The record label’s faith was demonstrated by approving a £20,000 spend for the single’s promo video – it was the first that photographer Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mission of Burma: signals, calls, and marches/Vs.The opening moments of Mission of Burma’s “That’s When I Reach for my Revolver” still exhilarate. Recorded in early 1981, it was the first track on the Boston-based band’s 12-inch EP signals, calls, and marches. The tension, power and forward motion of this sparse encapsulation of rock at its most textured lay the bed for a brooding melody drawing its lyrical jumping-off point from – depending on how the story is told or who is telling it – either a Hermann Göring comment about his antipathy to culture or a line from 1930s German play by Read more ...