1970s
Kieron Tyler
Little Bob Story: Off the Rails + Live in ‘78Aki Kaurismäki’s 2011 film Le Havre features a cameo from a hard-rocking band fronted by a grey-haired gentleman who crops up elsewhere in the action. He is Roberto Piazza, and trades under the name Little Bob. Although born in Italy, his family moved to France in 1958 when he was 13. Integral to and at one with France’s perennial love affair with classic rock ‘n’ roll, he formed the band Little Bob Story in Le Havre in 1974.Kaurismäki recognised that the wilful Little Bob is the genuine article: a man forever marinated in the spirit of high- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul, Jan and Louis, three young men living in a gritty part of south London, are bored and broke and, for them, there are two kinds of Britain – one with money and power, and the one they live in, with no money and little to look forward to. No, it's not a play set in 2015, but Barrie Keeffe's Barbarians, set in the mid-1970s when youth unemployment was at an all-time high and the pound was at an all-time low.The parallels to today, with a burgeoning underclass and a widening gulf between the haves and have-nots in the UK, are obvious – which perhaps explains why this co-production Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Faces: You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything… 1970–1975Faces were always about more than just the music. From the moment they were formed by ex-members of The Jeff Beck Group and Small Faces in June 1969, tension was integral. Their front man and singer Rod Stewart ran a parallel solo career throughout the band’s life and the public image as boozy, cheeky lads was useful for papering over any cracks. The story is worth telling, but it is not one told by this collection of their studio albums and singles – more on that in a few paragraphs.Sometimes, the tension surfaced. Talking to Read more ...
Florence Hallett
There’s no sign of Oldenburg, Warhol or Lichtenstein and British pioneers Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake are notably absent from this gritty vision of Pop art. Only in the final room do we come face-to-face with a Campbell’s Tomato Soup tin, the comforting bright colours and clean, supermarket-aisle lines blackened, singed and fragmented as if salvaged from some unimaginable disaster. Made by Russian duo Komar and Melamid in response to the state-sanctioned destruction of their 1974 self-portraits as Stalin and Lenin, this unaccountably shocking image is one of a series of paintings Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Pere Ubu: Elitism for the People 1975–1978Pere Ubu’s early records still sound great. The ethos of the Cleveland, Ohio band had nothing to do with prevailing trends when they formed in 1975, and had nothing to with the punk, new wave or what was later termed post-punk which opened many doors for and ears to them shortly afterwards. The timelessness stems from being singular, an aspect of which resulted in them issuing four singles on their own label between December 1975 and August 1978. Yet Pere Ubu were not isolated: their precursor band Rocket From the Tombs was co-billed with Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Turning autobiography into comedy gold is an alchemy that has often been tried. Among them Caitlin Moran’s Raised by Wolves, Kathy Burke’s superb Walking and Talking, and the mooted but, as yet uncommissioned story of Jeremy Clarkson’s childhood, provisionally titled For Whom the Bellend Trolls.When dealing with real-life reminisces, the balance between believability and comedy is a very difficult thing to get right. Slight situations can provide big laughs in a living, breathing reality, and the temptation is to supersize them for telly to make sure that everyone is in on the joke. The Read more ...
David Nice
Drawing an audience of five and a half thousand in to listen intently is harder than pushing out into the vasts of the Albert Hall. Yet it’s what seems to work best in this unpredictable space, and last night masterful veterans Elisabeth Leonskaja and Charles Dutoit knew exactly what to do. The results were romantic introspection in Mozart - an unfashionable but valid alternative to authentic sprightliness - and a Shostakovich Fifteenth Symphony that was more skull than skin, but a compellingly decorated skull for all that.The quietly commanding tone of the evening, in marked contrast to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Ian Levine’s Stax Soul SensationsTaking 41 years to follow up a successful compilation is perhaps not sound in commercial terms. No matter. Ian Levine’s Stax Soul Sensations is not about marketability, but instead about celebrating the music heard. This new collection of tracks drawn from the Memphis operation and its related imprints comes not-so-hot on the heels of 1974’s Solid Soul Sensations, another Levine-compiled set, which was dedicated to the associated Scepter and Wand labels.Beyond his fascination with Doctor Who, Levine has dedicated his life to soul music. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
America: The Warner Bros. Years 1971–1977Prime amongst the many ironies associated with Seventies soft-rock trio America is that when they reached number one in America in March 1972 with “A Horse With No Name”, the single they knocked off the top spot was Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold". “A Horse With No Name” sounds so like Young, it might as well be him. Young’s thoughts on the ousting are not a matter of record.It went further. America’s fine, eponymous debut album is so much a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young knock-off that frequent double takes are unavoidable. CSNY's distinctive, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Multiple stars are born in The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the conventionally titled film premiered earlier this year at Sundance that turns out to be unconventional in every way that matters. Adapted from Phoebe Gloeckner's novel about a 15-year-old's coming of age in the swinging, drugs-soaked San Francisco of the 1970s, first-time director Marielle Heller has made one of the most probing films yet about that painful journey we all make through what Henry James so succinctly titled "the awkward age".Along the way, Heller has given 23-year-old Bel Powley the breakout role of anyone's dreams, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
When a photographer is as little known as Shirley Baker, it is probably only natural that we scour her work for clues to the personality behind the camera. Certainly, Baker’s photographs of inner city Salford and Manchester, taken over a period of 20 years, seem to offer as full and intriguing a picture of Baker herself as of the disappearing communities she was committed to recording. Her knack of making eye contact with the people she photographs makes her an active, if invisible participant in the narrative; an ice cream man catches her eye at precisely the moment he hands a woman her ice Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sex Pistols: SpunkFor an album that was never meant to be widely available, what’s become known as Spunk has had a surprising afterlife. The bootleg Sex Pistols album first became available in selected shops around three weeks before the release of Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols, the band’s debut album proper, issued on 28 October 1977. Knowledge of Spunk’s existence was pretty instant as the weekly music paper Sounds wrote about it that October, as did the monthly music magazine Zig-Zag the following month.Never Mind the Bollocks was less an album, more a greatest hits Read more ...