1970s
Kieron Tyler
Just over two weeks before Christmas 1967, The Rolling Stones issued Their Satanic Majesties Request. The album’s title appeared to serve time on the peace-and-love, flowers-for-everyone good vibes of the psychedelic era. A year later, the Stones’ next LP, Beggars Banquet, went further. It opened with "Sympathy for the Devil." “Just call me Lucifer…or I'll lay your soul to waste,” sang Mick Jagger.The Stones were already troubled. There was the Redlands drug raid in February 1967 and the subsequent upholding of the appeal against the prison sentences handed down to Jagger and Keith Richards. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Michael Craig-Martin was the most playful and provocative of the conceptual artists. His early sculptures are like visual puns, a play on the laws of nature. On the Table, 1970 (pictured below right), for instance, appears to defy gravity. Four buckets filled with water stand on a table; so far so ordinary. But the table has no legs and is suspended from the ceiling by ropes and pulleys.Normal relationships are reversed; by acting as a counter balance, the buckets hold up the table rather than the other way round. On the Shelf, 1970, consists of 15 milk bottles lined up on a shelf tilted at a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When the first solo album by Tangerines Dream’s Peter Baumann was released in the US in 1977, its promotion was striking. Press advertising (pictured below left) said “he possesses the infinite vision that has made his group one of the most important contributors to mystagogic lore.”Baumann had joined Tangerine Dream — "his group" — in 1971, and left in late 1977. The album in question, Romance ’76, was recorded in Berlin and Munich in July and August 1976 and first issued in the UK by Virgin Records in February 1977.Discussing the album with NME’s Miles before its release, there Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A Chorus Line reigned supreme on Broadway from 1975 to 1990, a bold, bare-bones piece that for once put musical theatre’s hoofers in the spotlight. “As welcome as a rainbow after a thunderstorm” was Clive Barnes’s summation in the New York Times.It was there when Aids began to decimate theatre-land, taking its creator, Michael Bennett, in 1987 too. It was a show that acknowledged the flesh and blood performers who went on making the magic happen and lent them added poignancy. And it presumably did so again in 2021, when the Curve Leicester created this production as a one-finger salute to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After Sex Pistols have played “New York,” the fourth song in their set, someone from the audience shouts “Anarchy in the U.K.” "We've already played it, you fucking idiot" responds Sid Vicious. They have. It was the first song they did at Kristinehamn’s Club Zebra.The request begs the question of whether the person calling out knew what “Anarchy in the U.K.” sounded like. They may have known of “Anarchy in the U.K.” but not actually heard it. Considering where the particular show was, the information gap is possible.Kristinehamn is a small town about 250km north-west of Sweden’s capital Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
X, although beloved of music journalists, are one of American punk’s most under-acknowledged. They took a tilt at fame in the mid-Eighties with the radio-friendly Ain’t Love Grand album and its lead single “Burning House of Love”, but it wasn’t to be. They remained a connoisseurs’ choice (inarguable evidence of their abilities is the stunning 1983 tune “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts”). Now they reach the end of the line, persuasively so, with a wistful but sonically punkin’ final album.Led by the vocal spar-harmonising duo of John Doe and Excene Cervenka, the Los Angeles four-piece were never Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Swedish-American four-piece Blues Pills are new to this writer but have been around since 2011. Their fourth album makes me wonder why.Of its 11 songs, judged purely on sheer pop-rock chops, nine have real legs. If a friend had put Birthday on and told me it had topped the charts in the US for three weeks, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. Mind you, I might also have asked if it had been a hit some time between 1977 and 1982.That’s not quite fair. Birthday has a production sheen and feel that flirts with the modern. “Top of the Sky” sounds akin to Lady Gaga doing one of her lighters-in-the-air Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery includes many of the artists’s most iconic political photomontages. Beginning in the 1970s, Kennard created images that by speaking truth to power, gave protest movements like CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), the Anti-Apartheid Movement and Stop the War Coalition the visual equivalent of marching songs.Influenced by John Heartfield who, in 1930s Germany, used his scissors to create lacerating images denouncing Nazism, Kennard has similarly gone on the attack to reveal the hypocrisy of politicians, his revulsion at war Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“I don’t care what they’re talking about,” says the best bugger in the business, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman). “I just want a nice fat tape.”In the minor-key masterpiece Francis Ford Coppola made in the brief interlude between The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part 2 (1974), Harry is a freelance genius of surveilled sound, whose mask of isolated control is incrementally dismantled by a recording of a clandestine lovers’ rendezvous in San Francisco. “It’s not an ordinary meeting,” he realises. “It makes me feel something.”The Conversation is a shadowy tone poem Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The conundrum central to library music is that it was not meant to be listened to in any normal way. Yet, in time, this is what happened. What ended up on the albums pressed by companies like Bruton, Chappell, De Wolfe and others was heard by subscribers – the records did not end up for sale in shops or on the record players sitting in the nation’s homes.Those receiving this music were from the advertising, film and television industries. They were looking for material which could feature in their productions without the need to book a recording studio and employ an arranger, composer, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In April 1985, The Damned’s Dave Vanian was speaking with Janice Long on her BBC Radio 1 show. He said “Barry Ryan and Paul Ryan have been sadly forgotten. Everyone waxes lyrical about Scott Walker which is marvellous but this is absolutely superb. There’s a tension in there, it starts off pretty but it grabs you after a while.”He was introducing Barry Ryan’s 1968 hit “Eloise,” so explosive an orchestral pop record it threatened to obliterate any record player on which it was played. The Damned duly recorded their own version and, after its January 1986 release as a single, it hit number Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ever since their 2013 album Now What?! hard rock veterans Deep Purple have been on a roll, both creatively and commercially. They’ve seemed a revitalised force. An album of covers aside, their output since has also sold/streamed multitudes. Not bad for a unit that’s been going for 56 years, with a stable line-up for well over 30. Their latest album is more enjoyable and feistier than cynics might imagine. It’s business as usual, of course, but Deep Purple wear their heritage with aplomb.Deep Purple, at their best, have always combined widdly guitars and hefty riffs with a pop sensibility, Read more ...