1970s
Thomas H. Green
Peter Perrett is one of the most underrated songwriters. If people have heard of him, it’s down to The Only Ones’ classic, “Another Girl, Another Planet”, but The Only Ones made three albums (and an odds’n’ends collection) as the Seventies turned to the Eighties, all peppered with gems. Perrett also surfaced in the mid-Nineties as The One, with another album, Woke Up Sticky. However, since then, despite multiple false starts and an Only Ones reunion (teasing fans with unreleased new song “Black Operations”), there’s been no sign of new material until now.Perrett’s career was famously derailed Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Maurice Hatton’s 1978 Long Shot comes with the subtitle “A film about filmmaking”, a nod at what has practically become a cinematic sub-category in itself. But while other directors have used the genre for philosophical or aesthetic rumination, Hatton’s subject is far more immediate and down-to-earth – the perilous business of just trying to get a movie made.Specifically, an independent movie: Long Shot is a glorious satire on the sheer rigmarole of attempting to stitch a deal together. It’s set against the backdrop of the 1977 Edinburgh Film Festival, which gives rich extra atmosphere, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A well-known internet sales site currently offers seven previous home cinema editions of The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Some are DVD or Blu-ray only, others are on both formats – increasing the amount of packages on offer. Only a brave company would enter such a crowded market with another version of the film to take the total to eight. Yet, here we are with a new dual format DVD/ Blu-ray edition.Despite the spiffy packaging – including a limited-run configuration with a 60-page booklet, a poster and postcards – and fresh extras – including a new interview with director Dario Argento, a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As the accompanying music reminded us, it's the time of the season for looking back in languor at the psychedelic daze that descended on America's West Coast in 1967. It was an era when one was enjoined, if going to San Francisco, to "be sure to wear flowers in your hair". "Feed your head," added the Jefferson Airplane, ensconced in their Haight-Ashbury rabbit-hole.However, the scope of this first of two programmes was much wider, and far more interesting, than a mere survey of the rock groups of the day. It went back to the beginning of the 20th century and travelled both east and west as it Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This Anarchy Arias consists of 13 operatic covers of British punk rock classics from the late Seventies and early Eighties, and it’s almost all skin-crawlingly horrific. Clearly, then, this review is going to be a predictable reaction, from a writer who rates the original versions moaning about how their ultimate mainstream co-option robs them of bite, fury and authenticity. Why, for instance, couldn’t I take a step back and listen from a broader perspective, observing the post-modern nuance, the skill involved and the “sense of fun”?The fact is, smirkers completely numbed by this century’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Four years ago the BBC dramatised the story of the Lucans. Rory Kinnear donned the forthright moustache and Catherine McCormack played his spouse Veronica as a brittle victim of mental cruelty. The script speculated about the murder of the nanny Sandra Rivett using all the known sources. A year later Laura Thompson’s book A Different Class of Murder was published and last year the vanished earl’s death certificate was issued. That might have been thought to be that. But since 1974 Lucan’s widow – whose official name is Veronica, Dowager Countess of Lucan - stayed mainly silent. In this Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
With some re-releases, the fascination is not only discovering the work of a director, but also the environment and context in which he or she worked. This immaculate BFI restoration of two films by the Filipino master Lino Brocka (1939-1991) is a case in point: Isiang and Manila in the Claws of Light are from the mid-Seventies, when his native land was under Ferdinand Marcos-imposed martial law. The key player in both is the city of Manila itself, in particular its slums where life is hard, and human life cheap.With Isiang, Brocka may have been the first director from the Philippines to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Globe’s artistic director Emma Rice has made no secret of her desire to go out with a bang, in this, the final season of her brutally truncated tenure at the company. With this Twelfth Night she stages a departure with bells (and whistles, and disco-balls, electric guitars, congas, Sister Sledge, and yes, a whole rig of lighting) on – a neon-bright, two-fingered salute to the board that forced her out.The trouble is that, for all its zany energy, its charm and its humour (and there is plenty of each), the show also ends up giving two fingers to Shakespeare, which rather makes the board’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We’ve recently seen how Formula One heroes Ayrton Senna, Niki Lauda and James Hunt can become box office gold, in the form of Senna and Rush. Roger Donaldson’s profile of New Zealand race ace Bruce McLaren is more for enthusiasts than a wider public, but for anyone interested in the sport it’s an illuminating portrait of a gifted F1 pioneer who has lapsed somewhat into obscurity since his death in 1970, aged 32.McLaren’s name still adorns the Woking-based team that has produced champions like Senna, Mika Hakkinen and Lewis Hamilton, but today’s technocratic monolith in its Star Trek Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the second week of September 1979, Nick Lowe’s “Cruel to be Kind” entered the Top 40. A month later, it peaked at number 12. The commercial success was belated validation for a song with a history. In May 1978, an earlier version was the B-side of his “Little Hitler” single. Fans with long memories heard another, even earlier, “Cruel to be Kind” when his old band Brinsley Schwarz recorded it for the BBC’s John Peel Show in February 1975. It was co-written by Lowe with fellow bandmember Ian Gomm.Now, the story of “Cruel to be Kind” is pushed back further. The new Brinsley Schwarz release It Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When the Sex Pistols first played live on 6 November 1975 at St. Martin’s School of Art, they were the support act to a Fifties-influenced band called Bazooka Joe whose roadie was John “Eddie” Edwards. Of the first band on that night, he declared “everyone said ‘oh, they’re not much good are they?’ They were a bit untogether.”On 11 March 1976, Edwards made his own live debut as the drummer of another new band, The Vibrators. They opened for the rising Stranglers at Hornsey College of Art. His bandmates were guitarist John Ellis – who, in 1970, co-founded Bazooka Joe – bassist Pat Collier – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Devised and written by John Ridley, the Oscar-winning writer of 12 Years a Slave, Guerrilla (Sky Atlantic) takes us back to London, 1971. The story is set among a group of black activists agitating against racism and police brutality, and the city is portrayed as a shabby, smouldering dystopia about to erupt into apocalyptic violence.Was this really how it was? I suspect not, even though the show brandishes the 1971 Immigration Act as a kind of state-sponsored manifesto of race hatred. What the Milwaukee-born Ridley seems to have done is transplant the Chicago riots of 1968 and an American Read more ...