1960s
Heather Neill
Mustapha Matura's 1974 play is a celebration of liberation, both social and political, and a sly warning about the possible pitfalls of sudden freedom. Mas (or Masquerade) is the Trinidadian version of Carnival, an exotic mixture of Christian and African tradition played out just before Lent. It provides an opportunity to adopt a different persona, to drink to excess and to behave in ways unacceptable at any other time. But Matura's play is set on either side of colonial Trinidad's liberation from Britain in 1962; the acting out of roles and dressing up as policemen and generals takes on a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A frivolous piece of hysteria. I liked it in a confused sort of way but when it was all over I must confess I couldn’t really see the point.” So ran the Daily Express review of The Manchurian Candidate on 5 November 1962. Other fascinating newspaper appraisals quoted in the booklet of this new Blu-ray/DVD edition of John Frankenheimer’s Cold War-era drama detect the shadow of Hitchcock looming over the film. Despite also mentioning Hitchcock, the Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker was less equivocal, saying it was “a fiendishly clever spy thriller that might have been devised specifically Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bridget St. John: Dandelion Albums & BBC CollectionPigeonholing Bridget St. John is gratifyingly difficult. Although generally categorised as folk, her early albums actually posited her as a singer-songwriter following her own path. Like her similarly restrained contemporary Nick Drake, she did not have a background in folk clubs. And also like him, her voice was huskily intimate. Her intonation was very English, yet there was a hint of Nico’s Teutonic drama.There was no traditional material in St. John’s repertoire, but she did cover Donovan. Buddy Holly too. She also interpreted Read more ...
Mick Houghton
Sandy Denny was well known within the folk world by 1968 (writes Kieron Tyler). Although the recordings were as-yet unreleased, in July 1967 she had recorded with The Strawbs. She featured on two albums which were in the shops in August 1967: Alex Campbell and His Friends, and Sandy and Johnny, made with Johnny Silvo. Early the next year, she was contemplating her next move.The story is picked up in Mick Houghton’s I’ve Always Kept A Unicorn: The Biography of Sandy Denny as Fairport Convention audition for a new singer in the wake of Judy Dyble being asked to leave the band. The group already Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Zakary Thaks: It’s the End – The Definitive CollectionGalloping with the urgency of a sweat-flecked horse running a steeplechase, the choppy guitar riff takes early Kinks raunch and filters it through a testosterone-driven sensibility that won’t let up. The drums are unremitting. Then, a solo guitar peels off a berserk fistful of notes which Dave Davies would have been proud of. A key change raises the intensity level even higher. And then, at just over two minutes, the relentless performance grinds to a halt. Sixties garage rock at its finest, “Bad Girl” is 126 seconds of Read more ...
David Nice
For those who never saw Samuel Beckett’s favoured performer Billie Whitelaw on stage as indomitable, buried-alive Winnie, peculiarly happy days are here again with another once-in-a-generation actress facing what Dame Peggie Ashcroft called “a ‘summit’ part”, the female equivalent of Hamlet. Juliet Stevenson makes you think not so much “what a great performance” as “what a towering masterpiece of a play” – and how often do star interpretations even of the big Shakespeare roles prompt that kind of reaction?This is, in short, the works: 90 plus minutes of perfectly modulated near-monologue in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The 1960s media's wild excitement about the space race is now almost forgotten. The era when every boy wanted to be an astronaut is ancient history. The period is, however, a goldmine for gloriously kitsch cosmic samples, a fact electronic groups such as The Orb have taken advantage of. Conversely, the new album from Public Service Broadcasting mines the area for neither irony nor comedy. The London duo’s second album is, instead, determined to celebrate humanity’s wide-eyed initial glee at blasting beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.Musically Public Service Broadcasting are somewhat Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Wild River blurs documentary and fiction, tackles racism and segregation in America’s south, addresses the predicaments of little people coming face to face with the will of a behemoth of a government, considers the nature of progress and – maybe a minor concern in the light of these – is also an against-the-odds romance. If all that weren’t enough, it was seen in cinemas in über-panoramic CinemaScope. Wild River was ambitious.Released in 1960, Wild River was the last film Elia Kazan made while under contract to Twentieth Century Fox and followed 1957’s sly satire A Face In the Crowd. The Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
If you bought a Beatles album in the Sixties, chances are you also bought The Mersey Sound, that best-selling collection of poems by the Liverpool poets Brian Patten, Roger McGough and Adrian Henri. It was launched at the Cavern Club in 1967 to musical accompaniment. Their poems felt new, accessible and exciting. "Love is feeling cold in the back of vans," wrote Henri, "Love is a fanclub with only two fans / Love is walking holding paintstained hands / Love is /."But though he was best known as a poet, Henri was primarily a painter, as well as a collage-maker and performance artist. He taught Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tyrannosaurus Rex: My People Were Fair and had Sky in Their Hair, Prophets, Seers & Sages: Angels of the Ages, Unicorn“I was just reflecting and talking about things most people thought or wanted to hear about at the time.” Marc Bolan’s comment about why Tyrannosaurus Rex became popular so quickly is heard in a brief BBC interview included as one of the extras on this new edition of My People Were Fair and had Sky in Their Hair, the summer 1968 debut album.Bolan himself, as the liner notes to the related reissue of Prophets, Seers & Sages: Angels of the Ages state, was astutely Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Part of a series of programmes marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, The Eichmann Show was a 90-minute account of how the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the SS's most enthusiastic engineers of the Holocaust, became "the world's first ever global documentary series". The key men in making this happen were TV producer Milton Fruchtman and renowned documentary director Leo Hurwitz, the latter a victim of McCarthy-era blacklisting in the USA.It was a potentially interesting idea, but the notion of presenting the trial of one of the most heinous Nazi war criminals – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Powder: Ka-Pow! An Explosive Collection 1967–68It’s an instantly familiar sound. Crescendo follows crescendo, and power chord follows power chord. For The Who, “I Can see for Miles” was the apex of this style. But this is not The Who. Instead, it is a band from California called Powder whose shelved album from 1968 was crammed with thrilling, British-influenced gems. Like Todd Rundgren's contemporaneous band The Nazz, Powder filtered a British sensibility through an American outlook.Ka-Pow! collects the surviving recordings by Powder and the band they seamlessly evolved from, The Art Read more ...