1980s
Kieron Tyler
Lewis: L'AmourImagine a very subdued Antony Hegarty whispering over the spookiest moments of Angelo Badalamenti’s music for Twin Peaks. Or conjure up a marriage of Arthur Russell’s shimmering World of Echo and John Martyn at his most intimate, but shorn of all but the most necessary instrumentation. To say that L’Amour, the only album by Lewis, is arresting underplays it. This is one of the most direct and affecting series of songs ever captured in a studio. Yet until a few years ago it was unknown and, even then, only available as a dodgy download with added colour from the scratches Read more ...
Heather Neill
When Daytona was premiered at the Park Theatre last year some of the critics went into contortions to avoid giving away the two "reveals" in Oliver Cotton's plot. The challenge remains, but can there be many potential theatregoers who haven't heard about the shock revelation in the first half and the life-long secret disclosed in the second? If there are, the following may contain spoilers.The premise is pretty conventional: an outsider enters and disrupts the humdrum life of the other characters. In this case, the newcomer is Billy, not a stranger but the estranged brother of Joe, with whom Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: NME C86, The Motown 7s Box – Rare and Unreleased Vinyl Volume 2With music – or anything really – few things develop or evolve neatly, and British grassroots music from the mid-1980s is a case in point. When, in 1986, the NME issued a cassette tape of 22 current and (hopefully) up-and-coming bands the stylistic jumps it presented were jarring. Beefheart-style herk-jerk sat side-by-side with Sixties-derived jangle pop. Dance-music polemicists battled it out with bands saturated in far too much of The Fall.The C86 cassette caught the rag-bag nature of what infested pub Read more ...
joe.muggs
Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti are a living lesson in the rejuvenating power of remaining experimental in art. Their music holds its own alongside the young guns of electronica, who indeed frequently idolise them, and in person they frequently seem as excited about possibilities and open to new ideas as artists just starting out.The set they played at Sónar festival in Barcelona last weekend was based on the Chris & Cosey songs they wrote throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but deliberately done in the more abstracted electronic style they took on as Carter Tutti from 2000 onwards – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dead Moon: In the Graveyard, Unknown Passage, DefianceAfter a few notes of barbed-wire, bent-string guitar, a descending riff kicks in. It’s a relative of the uptempo version of “Hey Joe”. The voice starts. It’s high-pitched, as if Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant had only Love’s Arthur Lee and The 13th Floor Elevator’s Roky Erickson as an influence. The lyrics are hard to make out but touch on mean days and a girl who turns the singer cold. He might as well be dead and in a graveyard. The momentum is tempered by a break borrowed from The Elevators' “You’re Gonna Miss me”. The production is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Philadelphia International Records – The CollectionThe O’Jays’ “Love Train”, The Jacksons’ “Show You the Way to Go” and McFadden & Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” share an undeniable power. All make the body move and have a potency which could be devotional. Each is also about going forward and could slot into a church service. Despite being products of a musical production line, these were more than simple pop records.All three were issued by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s Philadelphia International Records and are heard on Philadelphia International Records Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Josef K: The Only Fun in TownJosef K seem like one that got away. Their fellow Postcard Records’ bands Aztec Camera and Orange Juice had high-profile afterlives with, respectively, the careers of their songwriters and front men Roddy Frame and Edwin Collins. After his band split, Josef K’s Paul Haig went on to have a string of fantastic, accessible releases – including collaborations with New Order – but none clicked with the mainstream. His old outfit’s legacy is though heard less directly through Franz Ferdinand, whose agitated forward-thrust derives directly from Josek K. It’s also Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You'll recall the scene where the title comes true in Gregory’s Girl. Gregory, a gawky, puzzled teenager played by John Gordon Sinclair, has finally hooked up with a girl. They spend a long evening dreamily kissing and listing their favourite numbers. “A million and nine," suggests Susan, played by Clare Grogan, after a long last smooch on his doorstep. "How come you know all the good numbers?" says Gregory, and you can hear the witty and the quizzical mingling in his voice, as inextricable as jam stirred into rice pudding.The exchange captures all the sweetness and mystery of teenage Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Grace Jones: NightclubbingThe scary, steely Grace Jones persona distracts from what has always been her best aspect – the music. Of course, the image is inextricably linked but, taken on their own, her albums have the power to delight. Nightclubbing is hands-down her best album. Originally issued in 1981, it was a coherent statement sequenced like a nightclub act which had danceable peaks, toughness, the influence of Weimar-era Berlin cabaret and a reflective, sensitive conclusion which left a lingering impression. Its reissue brings an opportunity for a fresh assessment. Especially as two Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For a teenager, a parent’s birthday party is never comfortable. As We Are the Best! opens, it’s worse than that for Bobo as she holds a torch for punk rock and her mother is determined to have a good time. It’s Stockholm in 1982 and no matter how liberal-minded the adults, Bobo cannot fit in with the forced jollity. Punk rock is supposed to be dead but for Bobo and her friend Klara, it’s the light at the end of a tunnel of stultifying conformity and frustration.We Are the Best! is the story of Bobo, Klara and their unlikely soul mate Hedvig. It’s about their assertion of individuality and how Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's rare that you can trace a genre to one man. But house music is well documented: “house” originally simply meant the music played at the Warehouse club, by one Frankie Knuckles, who died yesterday in Chicago from diabetes-related complications. Knuckles was a disciple of New York disco, who'd served his DJ apprenticeship in the city's spectacularly decadent gay bathhouses in the mid-Seventies as an understudy of Larry Levan (who would set up the Paradise Garage, which itself gave its name to another genre – garage).Seeking a club where he could have complete creative freedom, he moved to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Seeds: Raw & Alive / The Dream Syndicate: The Day Before Wine and RosesTwo live albums. Both by bands rooted in psychedelia and based in Los Angeles. Each recorded in a studio rather than on stage. One, by The Seeds, from 1968. The other, by The Dream Syndicate, from 1982. The links between these two releases – coincidentally issued a week apart – are about more than the circumstances of their creation, geography and musical style. Both bands had brushes with the mainstream and in the form captured here both proved too raw, too unstable and too wilful to last the course.As 1968 Read more ...