1970s
James Saynor
The French military outpost on Madagascar is a “family cocoon, full of love and benevolence”, according to a character in this fictional portrait of the country in the early 1970s. Of course, as soon as we hear this claim near the start of Red Island, we assume we’re about to witness anything but.What follows, however, is less a broadside against French colonialism, or even against the nuclear family, than a largely personal exercise in nostalgia. Sixty years on from The Battle of Algiers, a film that exposed the horrors of France’s imperial adventures to the world, Robin Campillo’s new movie Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I hate it, so I guess Eater have succeeded.” NME’s March 1977 appraisal of the debut single by UK punk's teen sensations was direct. In his trailblazing British punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue, Mark Perry was equally forthright when contemplating “Outside View.” “Sorry lads but this single is crap,” he wrote. “It’s not even good crap, it’s just a waste of time.”Eater’s first single has become the opening track of Just Want To Be Myself: UK Punk Rock 1977–1979, a 32-track double album which almost – as some of the tracks aren’t really punk – does what its title says. Evidently, one era’s crap Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At last Yoko Ono is being acknowledged in Britain as a major avant garde artist in her own right. It has been a long wait; last year was her 90th birthday! The problem, of course, was her relationship with John Lennon and perceptions of her as the Japanese weirdo who broke up the Beatles and led Lennon astray – down a crooked path to oddball, hippy happenings.Most notorious were the Bed-ins which the couple staged in the late 1960s as a protest against the Vietnam war. At the heart of Tate Modern’s exhibition is the 1969 film BED PEACE in which we see the couple advocating peace from hotel Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was only a matter of time before Bob Marley got his own posthumous biopic, and One Love isn’t the worst you’ll see. For instance, it’s miles ahead of the Elton John flick Rocketman, and at least it’s an hour shorter than Baz Luhrmann’s bloated Elvis misfire.However, turning the life and artistry of a “soul rebel, natural mystic” into a mainstream film biography was always going to involve compromises and over-simplifications. Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (who helmed the King Richard tennis movie) has corralled a batch of screenwriters including Terence The Sopranos Winter. They’ve Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When Colombian drug potentate Pablo Escobar made his comment that “the only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco,” he ensured that Ms Blanco would achieve immortality in the annals of crime. Netflix’s new series about Blanco, starring and produced by Sofía Vergara, claims to depict Blanco’s life “as faithfully as possible”, though that famous line “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend” feels a bit nearer the mark.Blanco’s tangled biography has been considerably simplified for this Netflix version, but what emerges is a lurid, high-octane ride packed with sex, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In October 1977 Glasgow punk band Johnny & the Self Abusers decided to change their name. This was a problem for Chiswick Records, who were about to release their debut single. The records were pressed, the sleeves printed and the press release issued. There was no time to recall any of it and alter the band’s name. The single was credited to Johnny & the Self Abusers.The new name the band went for was taken from the “so simple-minded” lyrics of David Bowie’s “The Jean Genie.” After reconfiguring their line-up, Simple Minds began regularly playing under the new Bowie-derived name from Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Twenty years ago Alexander Payne put Paul Giamatti on the map in Sideways; here he is again, as another punctilious expert, this time not in the field of viniculture but plain old culture, of the old-fashioned classical kind. And his adversary is not a roguish friend but a spiky pupil at the boys’ school in New England where he teaches classics. It’s a masterclass in meshing screenwriting, acting, cinematography and music direction in a seamless blend. The script, by David Hemingson, takes an old trope – the curmudgeonly teacher versus the bright but wayward student – and gives Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Bull And The Lion was originally released in 1976 by Jo'burg, a South African label which opened-up for business in 1973 with a couple of singles and the first album by black singer Margaret Singana. Her debut LP was titled Lady Africa. The same year, the imprint issued the second single by Rabbitt, a white pop-rock band whose guitarist Trevor Rabin became internationally known when he played with Manfred Mann and then joined Yes.Jo'burg, it seems, was not bound by genre limitations and the strictures of working within Apartheid-era South Africa. After 1973, Singana and Rabbitt remained Read more ...
Heather Neill
Reports of supernatural events are always met with either willing belief or dismissive scepticism. The "camps" generally don't have much to say to each other: belief in immovable logic, discounting the weird as merely the so-far unexplained, can be as entrenched as its opposite. In the case of the ghostly goings-on in Enfield, sincerity and mischief are also stirred into the mix.Writer Paul Unwin seems genuinely fascinated by the experiences described by young Janet and Margaret Hodgson in late 1970s suburbia and unable to come down on either side, for or against the truth of their stories. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If a week is a long time in politics, what price 44 years? And 3500 miles? Turns out, not much, as Michael Healey’s sparkling play, 1979, proves that events all that time ago and all that way across the Atlantic maintain a remarkable relevance today.We open on a besieged prime minister, Joe Clark, being harangued by his finance minister, John Crosbie, who has Malcolm Tucker’s lexicon on his lips and a budget to force through a hung Parliament. Lose the vote and Clark’s fragile minority government will fall; postpone the vote and his credibility (not least in his own mind) will plummet; win Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the Light of Time - UK Post-Rock and Leftfield Pop 1992-1998 was unexpected. Collecting 17 tracks, it brought a fresh perspective on a particular aspect of the UK’s independent-minded music. This ground-breaking, agenda-setting release was effectively the soundtrack to what has been written about post-rock.The groundswell dug into by In the Light of Time ran in parallel with shoegazing but what was heard – while as much about texture as shoegazing – came from a different perspective as it embraced elements of Krautrock and techno. This was music which impacted on Radiohead and sigur rós. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As Britain headed towards the end of 1972, pop fans had fair cause to scratch their heads about a single which first charted in July. In mid-August, Hawkwind’s “Silver Machine” peaked at number three behind Terry Dactyl and the Dinosaurs skiffle-esque “Seaside Shuffle” and, in the top spot, Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out.” Donny Osmond’s oleaginous “Puppy Love” was number four. At 11, David Bowie’s “Starman.”Glam had kicked in the previous year and, until “Starman,” T.Rex were its torchbearers. Hawkwind did not fit in. They were not easy on the ear or eye. They were not heavy metal or Read more ...