1960s
Kieron Tyler
Peter Zinovieff: Electronic Calendar – The EMS TapesRoxy Music’s June 1972 debut appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test found them miming to “Ladytron” from their debut album, released that week. A prime focus for the camera was Eno, in a fake leopard-skin jacket and shiny gold gloves. Twiddling knobs and waggling a joystick, he stood at what was obviously an instrument but not a conventional one. There was no keyboard and the noises generated bubbled and swooped. This was an EMS synthesiser.The EMS synthesiser was British and a favourite of Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lesley Gore: California NightsThe reissue of 1967’s California Nights is a timely tribute to both Lesley Gore, who died in February this year, and Bob Crewe, the producer of most of the album’s tracks, who died in September last year. Gore first charted in 1963 with “It’s my Party”, which was followed by a string of hits including the feminist-slanted “You Don’t Own me”. Crewe was prodigious: he was a songwriter, manager, producer and singer. With Bob Gaudio, he steered The Four Seasons to success and wrote or co-wrote classics like "Big Girls Don't Cry" and "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine ( Read more ...
Matthew Wright
You might think that the carefree, gleeful melodies of sunny Californian surf-rock giants The Beach Boys would render them immune to the kind of egotistical wedge-driving that sunders most rock groups eventually. You would, of course, be wrong. Shortly after the band’s 50th-anniversary world tour in 2012, Mike Love, who owns the band’s name, took it away for his own version of the Beach Boys, leaving founder (and widely acknowledged musical genius) Brian Wilson and Al Jardine behind. Rumours, which will receive a thorough airing in the next year when first Wilson, then Love, publish their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Marvin Gaye: Marvin Gaye 1961–1965On single, Marvin Gaye’s earliest years were defined by a head-long rush beginning with his fourth 45, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow". After that, future classic followed future classic: "Hitch Hike", "Pride and Joy", "Can I Get a Witness", “How Sweet it is (to be Loved by You)", "Ain't That Peculiar" and more. The years 1962 to 1965 were a musical goldmine for this multi-faceted singer and songwriter.On album, Marvin Gaye’s earliest years were somewhat more complex. Where his label Tamla (odd issues came via related imprint Motown) went for the direct and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I fell in love with both of them immediately,” says Pete Townshend of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the managers who took his band The Who to world-wide success. An hour into Lambert & Stamp, a documentary on the duo, the depth of that bond is belatedly seen in a touching clip of Townshend demonstrating one of his new songs. Singing with acoustic guitar, Townshend tries a tentative run-through of “Glittering Girl”. Stamp’s face lights up as he hears the melody line take shape, Lambert is attentive. The relationship is not quite that of son to father, but it is familial.Lambert & Stamp Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Spooky Tooth: The Island Years (An Anthology) 1967–1974After Spooky Tooth called it a day in 1974, various long-time members struck out in directions as unpredictable as their former band’s identity was hard to get a handle on. Drummer Mike Kellie joined the Lou Reed-influenced, punk-era band The Only Ones. Their main songwriter, co-vocalist and keyboard player Gary Wright scored a massive US hit in early 1976 with the fantastically atmospheric proto-yacht rock single “Dream Weaver”. Guitarist Mick Jones formed the immediately successful (in America) formulaic rock band Foreigner. Read more ...
Barney Harsent
This latest Friday night vehicle for archive footage and pop performances was the tour bus, as BBC4 invited us to hop into the back of the van for a quick spin through the "golden age" of touring rock bands (which the producers clearly felt ended with the Eighties).The designated driver was high priest of prog pomposity Rick Wakeman – but long gone are the flowing locks and gowns that were once his trademark, replaced by a look that falls somewhere between youngish Bill Maynard and overstuffed straw pillow. Given the subject matter – the often harsh reality of life for a touring band – this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The pupils at a girl’s school are afflicted by fainting. It’s spreading. A teacher is affected too. The epidemic began after Lydia and Abbie's friendship has irrevocably ended. Lydia became the first to faint. The school’s headmistress, Miss Alvaro, is determined to ignore what’s going on and ascribe it to baseless hysteria. The stern teacher Miss Mantel is equally unyielding. When medical examinations are finally undertaken, no causes are determined. Lydia is isolated and then expelled as a Typhoid Mary figure.The Falling is, after Edge, director Carol Morley’s second fiction feature. She is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Falling, released in cinemas this week, charts the events surrounding an epidemic of fainting among pupils of a girls' school in the late 1960s. The trigger appears to be the end of the friendship between the intense Lydia and the outgoing Abbie. Much in the dream-like film is unexplained. Abbie’s difficult home life is perhaps a contributing factor, as may be the institution’s disconnection from the liberal world evolving beyond the school’s gates.The first major fiction film by director Carol Morley – best known for her affecting, evocative documentary Dreams of a Life – features Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bert Jansch: Bert JanschNorth Villas is a short street parallel to Camden Road, the main artery linking Camden Town to Holloway in north London. It’s off Camden Square, where Amy Winehouse lived and died. In August 1964, Bill Leader began recording what would become Bert Jansch’s debut album in his home at 5 North Villas. The first-floor flat had two living rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. Leader would set up his tape recorder in the same room as who he was recording and monitor what was being caught on tape through headphones.At the same time as Leader was using his home as a recording Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Julie Christie ushered in the swinging sixties as Liz, the girl whom Billy (Tom Courtenay) loves but isn’t man enough to accompany to London in Billy Liar (1963); director John Schlesinger introduced her swinging her bag as she bounces along a Bradford street. Christie does exactly the same in London when Schlesinger introduces her as the grown-up Diana Scott in Darling (1965), now restored and re-released on DVD and Blu-ray for its 50th anniversary. (The original trailer is the disc’s sole extra.)Schlesinger, screenwriter Frederic Raphael and producer Joseph Janni must have asked, “What Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
After the second piece of last night's triple bill, Hofesh Shechter's Untouchable in its world premiere, my friend asked me why it had been put on the programme with the first piece, George Balanchines 1946 Four Temperaments. He wondered if there was some structural or thematic connection that he had missed between the two wildly different pieces. The Balanchine speaks obviously to the bill's last item, Kenneth MacMillan's 1966 Song of the Earth; both pair a cool neoclassical choreographic idiom with deeply felt but vaguely expressed melancholy. But the best I reason I can imagine for the new Read more ...