1960s
Kieron Tyler
Music is no exception to the rule that history is littered with winners and losers. In commercial terms, however they are looked at, San Francisco’s Charlatans were losers. They issued just one single in 1966 and a belated album in 1969. While the world hummed along with Scott McKenzie’s "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" in 1967, these pioneers of the city’s scene were without a label and left adrift in the rush to sign Bay Area bands. Big Brother & the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape and Quicksilver Messenger Service saw their stock Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The expectation that late means great is one embedded deeply in our culture: that the consummation of creative endeavour finds its peak towards life’s conclusion, with experience assimilated into a rich finale. These two films from the very start of the career of the eminent Czech director Věra Chytilová (1929-2014), and the beginning of the remarkable movement that became the Czech New Wave, are a salutary reminder of the opposite, showing just what happens when youth bursts out with supreme energy.The Czech New Wave was a young movement, emerging directly out of the Prague Film School. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When the Sixties-inspired The Prisoners released their second album Thewisermiserdemelza in 1983, the decade they looked to for their musical and sartorial style was closer to the album itself than it is to today. Now, the half-century remove from what the Medway band drew from then ought to be as distant as, say, the minutiae of 1916 are from those of 1966. Yet this is not the case. The 1960s have never been consigned to the dusty drawer of distant memory, a point rammed home by the Victoria & Albert Museum's annoucement last week that they are to hold a major exhibition dedicated to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Paris Sisters were a look and a sound. Slightly different but still peas in a pod, Albeth, Priscilla and Sherrell Paris united to make often moodily minor-key music always suggestive of angels stamping their feet. Otherwordly. Yet hard-edged. The defining vocalist was Priscilla, whose slightly husky, ever-intimate mid-tone evoked the wind whispering its secrets. No one had sounded like her before and, at her best, only Saint Etienne’s Sarah Cracknell has come close to Priscilla’s vivid union of the languorous and yearning.Albeth (1935-2014), Priscilla (1945-2004) and Sherrell had been Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The individual colleges of the University of Cambridge can call, when needed, on an astonishing international network of alumni for expert advice, consultation and financial support. Such is the backing for an exquisite new public gallery on the site of Edwardian stables in the grounds of Downing College there.Now open to the public, the Heong Gallery is, as far as this reviewer can tell, unique in the university’s rich provision of arts and sciences museums. There are nine major such public institutions at Cambridge, among them the Botanic Gardens, museums of zoology, classical archaeology, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
One of the great joys of being a critic is discovering someone remarkable you’ve never heard of before. By the time he died in 2013 aged 90, the American photographer Saul Leiter had gained a degree of recognition, but it had been slow in coming and only now is his work gaining an international reputation. His contemporary, Robert Frank, became internationally famous – mainly as the result of his seminal book The Americans, 1958; but while he was given a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York in 1962, Leiter had to make do with inclusion in group shows. Both Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While Harpers Bizarre’s US Top 20 version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)” will always be their single turned to by American oldies radio, its follow-up “Come to the Sunshine” defines their sound and musical attitude. Written and previously recorded by Van Dyke Parks, it captures an irresistibly effervescent Californian harmony pop which painted a sonic picture of the West Coast in 1967 as balmy, beautiful and seductive. In the same way as The Beach Boys’ early surfing songs, it was as much invitation as postcard, one which said: bring yourself into an Read more ...
joe.muggs
Questions of what is authentic and what is retro get more complicated the more the information economy matures. Music from decades past that only tens or hundreds of people heard at the time it was made becomes readily available, gets sampled by new musicians, and passes into the current vernacular. Modern musicians play archaic styles day in day out until it becomes so worn into their musculature that it reflects their natural way of being. Tiny snippets of time that were once meaningless become memes that are shared and snared into the post-post-modern digital tangle.And in the thick of all Read more ...
Mary Finnigan
This extract from Mary Finnigan’s book Psychedelic Suburbia describes events leading up to the creation of the Beckenham Arts Lab, during the early period after David moved into her flat in Foxgrove Road, Beckenham in April 1969. The book was published by Jorvik Press on 8 January 2016 – three days before David died in New York. In early May, Hutch comes to stay for a few days and adds the dimension of his refined guitar skill to David’s compositions. David can strum to useful effect, but he has not learned to finger pick.I never get to know Hutch well, but on first impression he seems to be Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Though Soft Machine were the first band to suggest Canterbury could be musically noteworthy, the appearance of Caravan’s debut album in late 1968, Kevin Ayers' post-Soft Machine solo outing two years later, and the subsequent arrivals of Gong, Matching Mole, Hatfield & the North and the solo Robert Wyatt confirmed the city had a fertile scene. It was a fluid environment where musicians from one band played with others. The mutability was captured in one of the most entangled of Pete Frame’s celebrated Rock Family Trees.And at its top: The Wilde Flowers. The band formed in 1963 and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
January 1966 is a half a century back but some of the music released 50 years ago this month remains fresh, vital and timeless. With its biting invective and energy, Bob Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl out of Your Window” will never lose its visceral edge. Dusty Springfield’s joyful, kinetic “Little by Little” is eternally alive. Author Jon Savage goes further and pinpoints the whole of 1966 as “the year that shaped the rest of the century”. His proposition uses the year’s pop music as evidence for 1966 as a year like no other: one which was pivotal and irrevocably changed the world.Savage Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Distributor Second Run’s second collection of the Czech New Wave (strictly speaking, Czechoslovak, although the three films included here are from the Czech side of the movement) reminds us what an astonishing five years or so preceded the Prague Spring of 1968. What a varied range of film-makers and filmic styles it encompassed, making any attempt to impose any external category – whether political or artistic – redundant.The fate of the directors involved was as varied as the works they produced during that short-lived period of political thaw and formal experimentation. Many of those who Read more ...