1970s
Helen Hawkins
The French auto-fiction writer Annie Ernaux, now 82, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature last year; now a fascinating new facet of her creative life has been released via her home movies.With her now grown son David Ernaux-Briot (who was three in the first of the films), Ernaux has fashioned a short (63-minute) documentary from the Super 8 footage her then-husband Philippe shot between 1972-81 – short, but rich, Ernaux’s narration lifting the everyday images into the realm of a cultural commentary with profound reach. It’s also a double portrait as these are the years that the Ernaux Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It all started with a June 7, 1976 article in New York magazine about Queens, New York working-class young adults who flocked to a local disco in platform shoes and outlandish clothes to perform organized dances. [Bee Gees manager] Stigwood read Tribal Rites of Saturday Night, and immediately bought the rights from the author, seminal rock critic Nik Cohn.”America’s Library of Congress entry for the copy of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album it holds lays it out – the 1977 film was based on a magazine article which began “Over the past few months, much of my time has been spent in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ latest combines his apparently effortless immediacy at acoustic guitar songwriting with an orchestrated opulence that sometimes pushes the sound towards the realms of musical theatre. Lyrically, he’s in fine form too, but what will likely define many listeners’ response to the album is how they feel about his repeated and passionate belief in God, which permeates everything.This review is not the place to unpack Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ complex 50+ year journey from spiritual Sixties/Seventies troubadour to hardcore Islamic devotee to relaxed-Muslim-who’s-rediscovered-his-inner- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” was the UK’s first explicitly psychedelic record. Although there were delays with it hitting shops, it was recorded in December 1965. A large part of its impact came through the instrumentation and arrangement. Jazz players were on board, playing in a folky way without abandoning their core musical sensibilities. The ground-breaking arranger responsible was John Cameron.In 1976, Heatwave issued the instant dance-floor filler “Boogie Nights” as a single. It was a world-wide chart smash in 1977. Producer Barry Blue brought in arranger John Cameron to work on the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“This is a record company’s idea of new wave. Clichéd heavy metal riffs and someone shouting in a cockney voice. This is a con and I hate it”.Notwithstanding that it would be a record company’s idea of things as just such an organisation was putting the record out, Geoff Travis, of the Rough Trade record shop, was unequivocal in his view of Cock Sparrer’s crunching debut single “Runnin’ Riot” for Record Mirror in July 1977.Considering “Runnin’ Riot”, NME said “Decca finally have a punk, sorry skinhead band. Not surprisingly they play faster than you’ll ever get to talk – like a souped up Read more ...
Mert Dilek
For a masterclass in expansive adaptation, one could do worse than turn to Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain, based on American author Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story of the same title. Proulx’s restrained but searing tale of the queer romance between two ranch hands in 1960s Wyoming generated in Lee's 2005 film a tragedy of deep interiority and complex emotion.Eighteen years on, this source material faces a kindred, if altogether new, challenge in Ashley Robinson’s stage adaptation at West End’s @sohoplace, which comes with serious star wattage through its central cast of Mike Faist Read more ...
joe.muggs
Paul Simon is an ornery bugger. Full of awkwardness and perversity as a person, seemingly hugely detached, but as an artist capable of as much tenderness and directness as just about anyone out there. Capable of making world-changing artistic statements but queering his pitch with bizarrely, unnecessarily reactionary statements or actions. Really, a very weird man.But thankfully, he’s never gone all the way into cantankerousness. He’s not a Morrissey, so high on his own farts that the perversity becomes his entire persona, and every action and word is layered with provocation and second Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Jah Jah Jah blah blah blah. We’ll get to that.I meet Everest at Worthing station at 3.20pm. He’s clad in a light brown corduroy jacket and a cap. He looks dapper. Like a Len Deighton spy. We board the train to Brighton. I hand him a chilled bottle of Henney’s Herefordshire cider (6%) and tuck into my own bottle of St Austell Proper Job Cornish IPA (4.5%). We open a small box of Morrisons All Butter Mature Cheddar Cheese Crumbles, and talk about the harshness that life can deal out to the old.It's a sunny Sunday. In Brighton, we walk down to The Gladstone pub on Lewes Road. It’s bright yellow Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In Mark Jenkin’s haunted Cornwall, time warps and bends. He is a child of Nic Roeg’s Seventies masterworks (Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth), whose kaleidoscopic slivering of time expressed an elliptical, sensual mind. Jenkin too has built his own time and space with self-described “seemingly crazy” antique techniques, limiting him to clockwork, 16mm film and post-synch sound.In this follow-up to his debut, Bait, a ship sunk in 1897's flotsam bobs into 1973, premonitory of a new sinking, remembered on a crackling radio report from now. The otherwise Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Damned could have been bigger contenders. As anyone who’s seen Wes Orshoski’s feature film biog, Don’t You Wish We Were Dead, will know, their career has been blighted by chaos, line-up changes, catastrophic business decisions and just plain bad luck. What they have never been short of is songs. From “Smash It Up” to “New Rose” to “Stranger on the Town”, their golden years were littered with corkers. Their new album, their 12th, assembles a dozen songs that, while not in the league of the aforementioned, showcase rock’n’roll songwriting chops intact, exuding melodic charm and lyrical Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In Sight & Sound’s recent Greatest Films of All Time poll, Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) placed joint 48th with Ordet (1955), just ahead of The 400 Blows (1959) and The Piano (1992). Loden’s existential indie drama about an uneducated working-class Pennsylvanian woman (played by the writer-director herself) haplessly fleeing the role society allotted her might lack the intellectual heft of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which topped the poll, but it’s the more accessible and compelling film.Loden made a diffident, self-deprecating guest when Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
To music-lovers of the era, The Selecter are known as part of the 2-Tone ska explosion which blew up as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. The Selecter were right in the middle of that, their eponymous song on the B-side of The Specials’ debut single “Gangsters”, and their own singles, notably “On My Radio” and “Three Minute Hero”, there right at the start. What will be more surprising to most is that they’ve been almost consistently producing music since. This is their 16th studio album.Frontwoman Pauline Black has become an iconic figure in her own right, a polymath, awarded an OBE last year Read more ...