1960s
Kieron Tyler
Through previous archive releases or bootlegs, deep-digging Cream fans will already be familiar with much of what’s on Goodbye Tour – Live 1968. The legitimate 1969 album Goodbye Cream included three tracks from the 19 October 1968 Los Angeles Forum show, heard here in full. Another trio of tracks on this set, from a 4 October 1968 Oakland show, appeared on the 1972 Live Cream Volume II album. The 26 November 1968 Royal Albert Hall set has done the rounds in various forms. As for bootlegs, all the shows collected on Goodbye Tour have circulated in their complete form.What's new is Goodbye Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The titles conveyed the enthusiasm. “A Girl Named Sandoz”, “Gratefully Dead”, “Monterey”, “San Franciscan Nights” and “Yes, I am Experienced”. LSD, The Grateful Dead, Monterey Pop Festival, San Francisco and Jimi Hendrix. There they were, explicit tags confirming that The Animals’ Eric Burdon had been psychedelicised. Three years on from 1964's “House of the Rising Sun”, he was a changed man.It wasn’t unusual for British pop. Whole bands and members of outfits who had traded in edgy R&B and blues had tuned in. The Pretty Things did so. Zoot Money turned his Big Roll band into Dantalian’s Read more ...
mark.kidel
8 ½ is one of the classic films about the art of cinema. There is something about the make-believe of movies, and our buying into the dreams they foster, which suggests reflection and self-referencing, as if films offered a mirror to our inner lives and the stories we tell on the big screen. Truffaut’s La nuit américaine (Day for Night) and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard both play with this rich material in their own very distinct ways. Fellini’s film is altogether different, as it is about himself and the story describes his inner turmoil and creative stasis with great brio and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
August and September 1964 were golden months for Pye Records. The Kinks hit number one on the British charts in September with “You Really Got Me”, their third single for the label and the group’s first success following two flop 45s.Before The Kinks, the top spot was occupied by The Honeycombs’s debut single “Have I the Right?”, where catchiness and a big beat combined to make a radio- and sales-friendly smash. It was issued by Pye in June, and took a while to become a best-seller. But no matter, the label behind both singles now had more than The Searchers on its beat-era books to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When it was issued in May 1968, “Fading Yellow” attracted no attention. It couldn’t have as it was the B-side of “Mr. Poem”, Mike Batt’s poor-selling debut single. The top side was good, very 1968 and along the lines of whimsical 45s like Donovan’s “Jenifer Juniper” or Marty Wilde’s “Abergavenny” but wasn’t a hit. Relegated to the flip, “Fading Yellow” was obviously considered the least commercial of the two songs.However – as deep-digging collectors later discovered – “Fading Yellow” was the true treasure. Over three minutes 40 seconds Batt, who then worked as an A&R man at his label Read more ...
David Nice
A work of genius isn't sacred, copyrighted territory. A great film may become a play, a novel a film; the adaptation shouldn't be about fidelity, as Elena Ferrante has written about the latter case, but down to to the director "to find...the language with which to get to the truth of his film from that of the book, to put them together without one ruining the other and dissipating its force". Stage genius Ivo van Hove managed it by pairing Ingmar Bergman's most talked-about film masterpiece, Persona, with a side-work, After the Rehearsal. Paul Schoolman kills it by being both too faithful and Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dennis Hopper’s first starring role, in Night Tide from 1961, as a naïve but curious young sailor bewitched by a siren, offers a strange mirror to his role as the evil Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). If anything, he offers a preview of the bemused Jeffrey Beaumont played by Kyle McLachlan in Lynch's masterpiece. Curtis Harrington made dark and wonderful work as an independent film maker, not least in Night Tide, now released in a 4K version, along with a very well-curated collection of eight of his short films, many of them as interesting in their own way as the more Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In July 1961, the first issue of the Liverpool music paper Mersey Beat put three items on its front page. One was a surreal article by John Lennon titled Being a Short Diversion on the Dubious Origins of The Beatles. Another was a photo of Gene Vincent “at the Rialto Ballroom earlier this year, [signing] autographs for two young Liverpool beauties, Mary Larkin and Terry Shorrock.” The third was a piece on “Swinging Cilla,” “a Liverpool girl who is starting on the road to fame.” She has, readers were told, sung with The Big Three and the Hurricanes.Exactly two years after she became front page Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As one decade gives way to the next, the beginning or end of the ten-year cycle rarely yields anything cut and dried. With pop music, a host of decade-related platitudes have no respect for the decade-to-decade switch. Depending on points of view, the Sixties didn’t begin until 1962, 1963 or 1964. With the Seventies, the kick-off could have been 1971 or 1972. Or maybe 1976 or 1977.Even so, it’s clear when some groundswells originated. Most of the early Seventies’ successful glam rockers were active in the preceding decade. Bolan, Bowie, Slade, Sweet and Alvin Stardust had all done their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Earlier this year, the Peter Laughner box set was more than an archive release. Its diligence and scale forced a wholesale reinterpretation of the evolution of America’s punk-era underground scene. What it collected – aurally and in its book – demonstrated Laughner was more of a pivotal figure than he had so far seemed, and that his actions and vision resonate more than four decades on from his death.Moving through a different musical landscape, the CD compilation The Daisy Age cohesively soundtracked for the first time how hip-hop opened itself up to seemingly unrelated music (and non-music Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hugh Hefner established Playboy Records in 1972 as an arm of his male-targeted business empire. Amongst the singles issued in its first year were seven-inchers by jazzer Bobby Scott, proto-yacht rockers The Hudson Brothers, singer-songwriter Tim Rose, Björn & Benny (with Svenska Flicka), who were ABBA before they had a name, and Michael Jarrett, who’d written “I'm Leavin'” for Elvis Presley. In 1974, Playboy Playmate Barbi Benton came on board.Other notables included country staple Mickey Gilley, soul star Major Lance, soft rockers Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds and, late in the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Inua Ellams’ Three Sisters plays Chekhov in the shadow of war, specifically the Nigerian-Biafran secessionist conflict of the late 1960s which so bitterly divided that newly independent nation. It’s a bold move that adds decided new relevance to the action, grounding proceedings that are more often generalised in their listless disappointment to a very particular time and place. We certainly view the travails of the Chekhov’s eponymous protagonists – instead of Olga, Masha and Irina, here they are Lolo, Nne Chukwu and Udo – in a different light when starving refugees and the battle Read more ...