1960s
Claudia Pritchard
How irksome in some ways for the National Theatre that both the glamour and the accessibility of cinema have bookended its first 50 years, when the company and, latterly, its Southbank home, are essentially driven by and dedicated to live performance. But it was Laurence Olivier’s film career, making him a household name, which helped secure for him the job as first director of the National Theatre in 1963. And it is cinema relays that have taken NT productions to places and people who might never step into Denys Lasdun’s building, despite the company’s national ambitions.The Olivier years Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Though never really part of the country’s groundbreaking New Wave, František Vláčil was a Czech master who's best known for his films like Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees, both complex historical works. His first feature The White Dove, which appeared at the very beginning of the momentous Sixties, is the exact opposite of those two large-scale movies: it's a small film of poetry and mystery, which has a fabular quality remote from any political dimension (very likely the reason why its production in 1960, a time of continuing censorship, was possible).The symbolic nature of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Kinks: Muswell HillbilliesRock’s rich tapestry currently has it that 1968’s The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society is their best album. This deluxe edition, 2CD reissue of 1971’s Muswell Hillbillies isn’t going to alter that, but it does force the emphasis away from the notion that their most lasting legacy will be a fascination with and celebration of Britishness.The album found Ray Davies and co looking to American archetypes, musical and cultural, and bringing them into songs drawing figurative links between the former colony and those still wedded to the old country. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There was much to be said for attending the third and final show of Crosby Stills & Nash's Albert Hall stint, because this was the night when they played their debut album in its entirety. Clearly much – almost everything, in fact – has changed since 1969, but though the musicians are four decades older, their original collective spirit survives remarkably intact.The addition of Neil Young turned CSN into a supergroup, but the original trio had a natural cohesiveness the four-piece version could never replicate, despite the fact that they were completely dissimilar characters with very Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Following the completion of the White Album, and the conclusion of recording sessions in Los Angeles with new Apple signing Jackie Lomax, in late November 1968 George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd departed for Woodstock in upstate New York. They were heading for Bob Dylan country.Harrison had first fallen for Dylan early in 1964. The Beatles had played his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, over and over again in their rooms in the George V hotel in Paris, and were quickly seduced. On their second trip to America in August of that year they had met him for the first time, smoking Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Period dramas are all the rage, and you can imagine Breathless being plucked with forceps from a steaming cauldron in which bubbled Call the Midwife, The Hour, Mad Men, Heartbeat and inevitably a sprig of Downton, which couldn't hurt. It's 1961, the National Health Service is still regarded as one of the wonders of the known universe, and women are foolish little things who wear stylish frocks, are obsessed with hair and nails and keep getting themselves up the duff. As one posh lady put it, inadvertently finding herself in an "interesting" condition, "I've been such a silly muffin."Luckily Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although it’s impossible to make a case for The Breaking of Bumbo as a great film, it is a bizarre, compelling, hyper-real slice of Swinging Sixties nonsense as essential to the era as Privilege, What’s Good For the Goose and The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. It gave Joanna Lumley her first proper role and pretends to be radical, but is in fact about as envelope-pushing as a Whitehall farce. The makers were so out of touch with the mood of times that it was primed for release in September 1970, by which time the Sixties bloom had all-but withered and died.After 15 minutes of dull scene- Read more ...
David Nice
Interviewed live just before his Proms performance of Britten’s Serenade, Ben Johnson was asked the usual question as to whether the composer wrote especially well for the tenor voice. “He writes amazingly for every instrument,” came the reply. If we needed a single-programme testament to that special genius, this all-Britten celebration from Vladimir Jurowski and his London Philharmonic Orchestra was it. In addition to the two billed soloists, there were at least a dozen from within the orchestra who proved the point. And what sounds, what textures, whether Britten was writing light or dark Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dino Valente: Dino ValenteDino Valenti’s reaction to his sole solo album being credited to Dino Valente isn’t recorded, but any confusion probably wouldn’t have mattered as he had such high-profile cheerleaders. Before its release in October 1968, Ralph J Gleason, then America’s most important commentator on rock and pop, called Valenti – who died in 1994 – “an underground Bob Dylan”. After its release, Lillian Roxon, New York’s most trenchant observer of musical trends, said he was “a macrobiotics-solar-energy legend”. In Rolling Stone in January 1969, Ben Fong-Torres repeated the " Read more ...
Serena Kutchinsky
We all know the backstory of the Mighty Mac, the breakups, the betrayals, the addictions and now, finally, the reunion. These days they're more like the Mellow Mac with the emotional hatchets buried, lingering hugs on stage, and tender tales of their time as struggling Seventies hippies. Few other bands, not even Abba, have mined their private lives for inspiration to the same extent. Unlike today's manufactured pop-ettes who invent relationship strife to grab column inches and make themselves more interesting (Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, I'm looking at you), heartache has always been at Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We know, not least through her own account, of Marianne Faithfull's colourful progress as winsome Sixties pop star, lover of Mick Jagger, junkie on the streets of Soho and her artistic rebirth as gravel-throated chanteuse. Here, her frequently gruelling trawl through archives from the 1930s and '40s helped to explain how she became the artist she is, while throwing up some morbidly fascinating details about the inner workings of the Third Reich.At the core of the film was her mother Eva, whom the young Marianne first came to know while growing up inside her cramped little house in post-war Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Classroom ProjectsIt starts with a plummy voice: “The poems, the words and the music on this record all come from children at primary schools, boys and girls of eight, nine, 10 and 11 years old.” Although the introduction to Classroom Projects sounds like a BBC continuity announcement from a lost era, what follows is more than entertainment. This collection of tracks from albums made by and for British schools is enlightening. Compiled here are music concrête, folk, chamber experiments and songs written about road safety. All of it is amazing.An important release, Read more ...