1960s
Owen Richards
If a Queen biopic called for drama, scandal and outrage, then Bohemian Rhapsody spent its fill in production. Several Freddies had been and gone, rumours swirling about meddling band members, and then director Bryan Singer’s assault accusations caught up with him. In a way, it’s impressive the film came out so coherent. However, coherence does not mean it's good. Is the film as bad as some are making out? Well, yes and no.We meet Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek, completely at one with the great one) working at Heathrow Airport, all buck teeth and flamboyant outfits. But he’s not yet the confident Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
From 7.30pm on Thursday 19 January 1967, George Martin and The Beatles spent the next seven hours at the Abbey Road’s Studio 2 working through takes one to four of “In the Life of…”, a new song which, when completed, would be retitled “A Day in the Life”. In late May, fans would hear it as the final track of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.For many producers, that would have been a good day’s work. However, Martin, engineer Geoff Emerick and second engineer Phil McDonald – both of whom also worked on that evening’s Beatles session – had been in Studio 2 earlier in the day mixing “Never Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Echoes of Phil Kaufman’s 1983 classic The Right Stuff resonate through Damien Chazelle’s new account of how Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. The Right Stuff ended with the conclusion of America’s Mercury space programme in 1963, and First Man neatly picks up the baton by taking us through the ensuing Gemini and Apollo missions, peaking with the “giant leap for mankind” of Apollo 11.First Man plots Armstrong’s progress from test pilot to astronaut with all the training and preparation that entailed, though fans of the earlier film may find themselves missing its comic, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Slovak director Štefan Uher is often acclaimed as the figure who initiated the movement that came to be known as the Czech New Wave with his 1962 work, The Sun in a Net. While that film certainly had a style, both visual and narrative, that was original for its time, Uher would continue to stretch other boundaries over the few years in which the New Wave lasted, not least in his 1966 The Miraculous Virgin (Panna zázra nica).For, as well as pushing the social boundaries of what was acceptable in cinema for which it would become better known, the new political circumstances also ushered in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
There’s a building site outside the Towner Art Gallery and a cement mixer seems to have strayed over the threshold into the foyer. This specimen (pictured below right) no longer produces cement, though. David Batchelor has transformed it into an absurdist neon sign by outlining it with fluorescent tubes. The Everyday and the Extraordinary explores the transformation of banal objects into art. A painting by Philip Core introduces the theme. We see Marcel Duchamp, the inventor of the readymade, playing chess with Andy Warhol, the doyen of pop art; they sit surrounded by the artworks they Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gary Burton fans with an eye for detail will know that “Fly Time Fly (Sigh)” from his second album, 1962’s Who Is Gary Burton?, had a writer credit of “Gibbs”. The American vibes-ace’s next album, 1963’s 3 in Jazz, a collaboration with Sonny Rollins and Clark Terry included another song by Gibbs. Burton’s follow-up solo album, Something's Coming! (1964), featured two Gibbs compositions. In 1967, half the tracks on Burton’s Duster were written by Gibbs.Gibbs was trombonist/composer Michael Gibbs. He did not play on Burton’s recordings and, perhaps belatedly, issued his first solo album in 1970 Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Stoller Hall, the modest-size auditorium inside Chetham’s School of Music, is really proving itself to be the venue Manchester has long needed this season. Two concerts on successive days, each the first of a series and both making something of a statement, proved that.On Thursday Psappha opened its Manchester season there (the remaining performances are at St Michael’s Ancoats) with three guest singers and a second half that was as much music theatre as concert. "Four iconic works from the 20th century" was the subtitle, but the initial focus was on two pianos and two pianists, as Paul Read more ...
David Kettle
“Well, that was really sweet,” one young audience member in front of me remarked on his way out of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre. And yes, there’s no denying that director Wils Wilson’s colourful, psychedelic, summer-of-love-set Twelfth Night, the Lyceum’s season opener in a co-production with the Bristol Old Vic, is warm and generous, lovingly crafted, and – yes, touchingly sweet.More interestingly, perhaps, it’s enjoyably playful – and gently provocative, too – in its approach to gender. Shakespeare’s original sets the gender-fluid tone – with Duke Orsino falling for the aloof, recently Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 2016, a writer from The Washington Post thought they had found Bobbie Gentry. After announcing their presence via the entry phone system of a gated housing development near Greenwood, Mississippi, they were told “there's nobody here by that name.” Though Greenwood was where Gentry had attended school and taught herself to play multiple instruments, it was a predictable response. She has been called “the JD Salinger of rock ’n’ roll.” Jill Sobule recorded the song “Where is Bobbie Gentry?” in 2009, the year BBC radio broadcast the documentary Whatever Happened to Bobbie Gentry?The snippets Read more ...
joe.muggs
Implausible times call for implausible music, and it doesn't come much more unlikely than this. Hawkwind, the die-hard troupers of gnarly cosmic squatter drug-rock, have re-recorded highlights from their catalogue, arranged and produced by Mike Batt. Yes, Mike “Wombles” Batt. Mike “Elkie Brooks” Batt. Mike “Katie Melua” Batt. Mike “Bright Eyes” Batt. And yes, he's removed all of the dirt, grease, diesel fumes, sticky bong residue and guitar distortion from the band's sound – this is a full-on showbiz spectacular, ballroom dance rhythms, big band brass, orchestral swoops and all. And yet Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For viewers challenged by the work of French auteur classic Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Hazanavicius’ Redoubtable catches the moment when Godard himself began to be challenged by Godard. The irony, a considerable one, is that Godard was rejecting precisely those films that most of the rest of us delight in, the ones from the first decade or so of his career. From his debut Breathless in 1960, through the likes of Vivre sa vie, Contempt, Alphaville and Pierrot le fou – what an astonishingly prolific time it was for him – they practically constitute a roll call of the Nouvelle Vague.Hazanavicius Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A day after John Eliot Gardiner and wandering violist Antoine Tamestit had converted the Royal Albert Hall into a sonic map of Hector Berlioz’s Italy, conductor Peter Oundjian and his full-strength divisions transported us to the Western Front. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, premiered in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in May 1962, combines the Latin text of the requiem mass with the First World War poetry of Wilfred Owen to speak, now as then, of fragile human understanding and affection in the face of overwhelming terror and violence. Yet its plea for the still, small voices of truth and Read more ...