1970s
Rachel Halliburton
There is a line of argument that – unfairly – blames playwright James Graham for Dominic Cummings. Would Cummings, some might ask, have achieved the influence he has now if it hadn’t been for his depiction in Graham’s brilliant TV drama Brexit: The Uncivil War in which he was played as an obsessive genius by Benedict Cumberbatch? The question’s unfair not least because Graham himself is horrified by the phenomenon of Cummings-driven politics and all it represents. A more interesting question is how a then 36-year-old had the insight to identify the impact and ascendancy of a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Collector of the Light” is based around what sounds like a treated bass guitar. As the neck is moved up and down, multiple notes are plucked at once. The instrument’s sound is subaquatic, wobbly. Over this, a distant, echoey voice sings of being the “collector of light”, restoring dreams and “silver points of wonder”. Atmospherically and structurally, a parallel is the 1968 13th Floor Elevators’ single “May the Circle Remain Unbroken”. “Sunbury Electronics Sequence”, with its obviously after-the-fact title, is a disconcerting nine-minute mélange of speeded-up snatches of voice – “mar-mi Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As the music industry slips into the rhythm of lockdown, so the spigot slowly becomes untapped and events, livestreams and similar start to flow more steadily. This week a host of big names are up to a bunch of different stuff, all worth checking. Dive in!A Theatre for Dreamers/Von Trapped Family Livestream + Dave Gilmour Live at PompeiiA couple of treats for Pink Floyd fans, from both ends of the band’s career. Most current is the latest home-stream by guitarist David Gilmour’s family. These take place each Friday and partly celebrate Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson’s bestselling novel A Theatre Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Like mellotrons before them, synthesisers could project a strange and deep emotion – something in the wiring had an inherent melancholy. Previous generations had often disparaged synths as dehumanising machines but, at the turn of the 80s, a new generation of musicians appeared who could coax them into creating modern and decidedly moving music. It was almost as if these groups had intentionally set out to prove the doubters wrong.”The strapline from the back of the Saint Etienne-compiled The Tears of Technology lays out the 20-track collection’s mission statement: to rescue synth-infused Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Midway through another week of lockdown, here's a cross section of small good things to keep the eyes and ears entertained. There's some lively stuff here for the old grey matter to chew on. Take a look. Dive in!Neil Young Fireside SessionsNeil Young’s website, neilyoungarchives.com, is densely populated, counter-intuitively designed and fiddly, but, for fans and others willing to persist, the great American singers-songwriter and proto-grunge rocker offers up a plethora of material in his two online “Hearse Theater” screening spaces (set up to look like cinemas). Screen 2 offers a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Even though nothing on Tape Archive Essence 1973–1978 was released at the time it was recorded, every track evokes material which was issued. Any fan of the German legends Cluster and Harmonia needs this album gathering extracts from tapes key member Hans-Joachim Roedelius recorded on his own during the period when both outfits were active.Cluster was initially Kluster, a trio which released a couple of experimental, free-form albums. After performing live at Göttingen University in May 1971, Conrad Schnitzler left and the remaining members Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius changed Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
When I saw that the Berlin Philharmonic had thrown open the doors to its virtual concert hall the thing that most interested me was to see some Karajan. When I was a child in the mid-1980s I lived for a while in Berlin and my father took me to the Philharmonie several times. I remember seeing Karajan, then in the final years of his long Berlin reign. His conducting was minimal – helped onto the stage, seated on the podium and conducting with sometimes barely perceptible gestures – but there was an aura that was palpable.Although by the mid-1980s Karajan was physically diminished, in the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
ZZ Top always seemed like a Texan version of Status Quo. It turns out, from watching this entertaining but hardly revelatory documentary, that is kind of what they are. Directed by Canadian Sam Dunn, best known for his 2005 documentary, Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, the film follows Dusty Hill, Billy Gibbons and Frank Beard as they go from Hicksville also-rans to global megastars, while hardly changing their bar room blues boogie a jot.The hour-and-a-half documentary is good on their convoluted beginnings, clearly laying out their stints in various wannabe-Beatles/Stones 1960s outfits, with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Netflix’s ReMastered series is one of the streaming channel’s undersung gems. Launching in 2018, when Tricky Dick and the Man in Black first aired, it has proved to be a solidly well-made set of music documentaries. Some of its subjects have been raked over many times before, but the saga of President Richard Nixon inviting country superstar Johnny Cash to play the White House’s East Room (capacity 250) on April 17th 1970, while hardly obscure, is a lesser known event that proves fascinating.The hour-long film quickly sets the scene, pinballing between Cash’s youth and his status in Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“Whipped cream with knives” is how Harold Prince, who directed the Broadway premiere of A Little Night Music in 1973, famously described this particular Sondheim show. And nowhere is that borne out with more exquisite agony than in this duet between two unhappily married women. With a book by Hugh Wheeler, the musical, based on Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night, is about the pain, ecstasy and killing disappointments of life, love and desire.Set in Sweden around 1900 and composed largely in waltz time, it’s ravishing and cruel, hearts breaking beneath starched shirt fronts, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Coming in at around four hours, in two parts, this 2015 documentary is ostensibly about Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, but really, via the prism of his existence, it’s as much about America’s journey through the first two thirds of the 20th century. What other life intersects so neatly with such a scattershot selection of key names – Franklin D Roosevelt, Elvis Presley, Lucky Luciano, Mia Farrow, Louis B Mayer, Edgar J Hoover, Louis Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King, Eli Wallach, and on and on. It’s a compulsive biography that, like the man it covers, never slows, and never grows Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Here's an irony worthy of the work of Stephen Sondheim, an artist who clearly knows a thing or two about the multiple manifestations of that word. On the same day that he turns 90, namely today, Broadway is unable to host the keenly awaited American premiere, scheduled for this evening, of the gender-flipped Company that stunned London last year. The city's theatres there (as everywhere else) shuttered by the coronavirus, New York will have to bide its time until audiences can see the director Marianne Elliott's fresh take on the story of a Manhattan singleton, once male and now female, Read more ...