1960s
Kieron Tyler
Art Ensemble of Chicago: A Jackson in Your House/Message to Our Folks/Reese and the Smooth OnesA New Orleans brass band plays a death march. What sounds like a saucepan is tapped steadily. The music suddenly dives into swing. A bicycle horn parps. A group of muttering voices are agitated. Reed instruments parp like angry parrots. Someone grunts and hollers. A trumpet signals a fanfare. Bells tinkle. Sonny Rollins appears to wander in and out. So does Ornette Coleman. The whole is arrhythmic, but bedded by percussion. Melodies come and go in the same piece, but are never repeated.The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sandie Shaw: Sandie/Me/Love Me Please Love MeThe former Sandra Goodrich probably would have emerged in the Sixties as an embodiment of the era. She could have been a model, actress or a TV presenter. But it was music that found her, and it suited her a treat. The reissue of her first three albums – each supplemented by the relevant singles and B-sides – is a powerful reminder of her potency. When The Smiths brought her on board for “Hand in Glove”, it further stressed her pivotal role in British culture.Her naturalness obscured the fact that she was a great singer. Ease of delivery did Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Terence Stamp has drolly recalled being over the moon when the Catholic church attacked Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, in which he starred, on its release in 1968. “It was a very obscure movie – it was going to be seen by four drag queens and Einstein. And when the Pope came out against it, everybody wanted to see it.”Theorem, as it’s known in English, was indeed hugely successful. And it has since become one of the Italian’s best-known, most assiduously analysed and arguably most influential films. One can feel its shadow over so many films featuring families driven to distraction by a Read more ...
howard.male
These two 1960s movies have more than just their director, Joseph Losey, and their writer, Harold Pinter, in common. They also both star Dirk Bogarde, escaping his matinee idol mould to startling effect, and feature soundtrack composer John Dankworth, whose jazzy scores cleverly veer between generic sexy swagger and disorientating dissonance, as and when appropriate.Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the most self-consciously avant-garde of the two films that has dated the most. Accident (1967) is at times stilted and painfully slow. And although it might be argued that the pace is a Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It begins with two gunshots. Lee Marvin is a guy who just wants his $93,000. "I want my money" is the mission statement for Point Blank, a film that is as timelessly entertaining as it is influential. But putting it that way doesn’t grab the sensation of watching a film that is so exciting you may forget to breathe for all 92 minutes of it.Beginning as a film editor and then moving up through TV, Boorman, who also made Deliverance, Excalibur and Hope and Glory, wrote in his 2003 memoir Adventures of a Suburban Boy about the “essential mysteriousness of movies” - and Point Blank is an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bernard Herrmann: Vertigo and Music From the Films of Alfred HitchcockGreat film soundtrack music can have a tough time being accepted as thus. There’s the test of time: does the music continue resonating? Is the music a sympathetic foil for the visuals? Can it live away from the screen and still create its atmosphere? The questions are endless, but the music of Bernard Herrmann will always pass any test. With Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo declared the greatest film ever in last year’s Sight and Sound poll, Herrmann’s music for it was, by association, also cast as an all-time great. Previously, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is Steptoe and Son the platonic ideal of the British sitcom? Two men trapped in eternal stasis, imprisoned by class and bound together by family ties as if by hoops of steel, never to escape: it’s what half-hour comedy should be. Posterity would seem to agree, because since the sitcom ended in 1974 the two rag and bone men have never been out of work, appearing in the cinema, on stage and radio. For 30 years they made and reran the show on Swedish television, underpinning the widely held theory that Steptoe is but a step from Strindberg.Half a century after its creation, last summer Steptoe Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Del Shannon: The Complete UK Singles and More (1961-1966)The plaintive, urgent drama of Del Shannon’s debut single, 1961’s “Runaway”, will always identify him. But amazing 45s like 1965’s crunching “Break up” and the ferocious garage-punk of “Move it on Over” show that there was more to the Detroit stylist than his calling card. This well-presented collection of his early singles – all heard in pristine fidelity, unlike the raft of budget comps available – reveals that Shannon was constantly evolving but hampered by what surrounded him.Shannon was a singer-songwriter before such a label was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The death today at age 82 of trumpeter Kenny Ball makes him the first of the big three chart regulars of Britain’s trad jazz boom to pass away. Both Acker Bilk and Chris Barber are still with us. It’s easily forgotten, but trad actually was bigger than The Beatles. In January 1963, just as the Liverpool quartet were issuing their second single, “Please Please Me”, Ball was on a sell-out bill at north London’s massive Alexandra Palace. Ball beat them to the US charts, hitting number two there in early 1962 with “Midnight in Moscow”.Trad isn’t cool, and probably wasn’t then. But it was massive Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Blue Öyster Cult: The Columbia Albums CollectionBlue Öyster Cult were about more than the music. They seemingly arrived fully formed with a ready-made mythos and mystery. Their first two albums had no pictures of the band and weird, Escher-esque art. Their symbol, an inverted hybrid question mark and cross, suggested they were in thrall to a shadowy cult. Song titles like “Cities on Flame With Rock ‘n’ Roll”, “7 Screaming Diz-Busters” and “Career of Evil” fostered the impression they were zeal-filled revolutionaries. Their third album, issued in 1974, included a track called “ME 262” and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Cut Copy me”, the opening track of Petula Clark’s first British studio album in six years, is beautiful. It could have been created by Saint Etienne at their most melancholy. Her voice almost a whisper, it’s the sound of shadows and uncertainty even with what sounds like a light touch of autotune. The title track follows. Similarly assured, it’s sparse and centred around a rippling piano. Then a by-rote, in-the-shadow-of-Adele version of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" breaks the spell.Accompanying “Crazy” are versions of “Imagine”, “Love me Tender”, Gershwin’s “He Loves and She Loves” and a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Family: Once Upon a TimeFamily were always difficult to place. This lavish box set doesn’t make getting a handle on them any easier. They were as idiosyncratic as Jethro Tull and, in Roger Chapman, had a vocalist as offbeat as Joe Cocker. Not that they sounded like either, more that their DNA was as sharp-edged as both. The Leicester-born band had roots in soul-pop outfit The Farinas and the psychedelic underground embraced them – they were integral to the 1969 novel Groupie, a lid-lifting, supposedly fictional, exposé of rock’s seamier side. Despite these leg-ups and their popularity, they Read more ...