1960s
theartsdesk
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Nocturama, Abattoir Blues, The Lyre of Orpheus, DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!!Howard MaleThere’s something just not right about having to reassess a bunch of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds albums in August, just as the sun is finally making a concerted effort to do its job. Cave is generally either icily cold or autumnally melancholic with the only heat being issued from the fiery hell awaiting some of his vividly conjured protagonists.The first three of these rather swiftly re-released albums - Nocturama, Abattoir Blues, and The Lyre of Orpheus (2003, 2004, 2004 Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sound the trumpets triumphantly - Matthew Bourne’s most original masterpiece has come out of hiding into full view, a giddy, sexy, diabolical confection that hovers on the edge of hellish, and deserves to become a global smash. Play Without Words is everything that any sex comedy could aspire to, everything that a film noir could aim for, and much more dangerous than either theatre or film can be, because it’s what bodies do, not what mouths say, that is leading you into your own sinful nature.Bourne made the work in a National Theatre workshop 10 years ago, and that experimental milieu drew Read more ...
theartsdesk
Various Artists: Sound System - The Story of Jamaican MusicThomas H Green This is lovely, a box-set celebration of Jamaican music, marking 50 years of the country’s independence. In a brooks-no-argument fashion, it reminds the forgetful that the Caribbean island punches so, so far above its geographical weight that gobs remain fully smacked over 30 years after the death of the man who gave reggae a global profile in the first place, Bob Marley (who is, incidentally, absent). Aside from the music, though, Sound System’s eight CDs arrive in a chunky 12 x 12in box that contains a coffee table Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Bruce Lacey has had this unbelievable career,” says the Turner prizewinning artist Jeremy Deller. “His is an alternative version of British art history - people didn't seem to know that Bruce has intersected with British history. I felt he deserves to be looked at again." Deller has put his energies into a documentary, exhibition and film season, all celebrating this influential, but largely unsung and unique British artist.In the new documentary The Bruce Lacey Experience, Lacey himself says, “I’m a satirist or, to put it a crude way, a piss-taker. If I see something, I like to take the Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Searchers: Hearts in Their EyesKieron TylerAlthough second to The Beatles as Liverpool’s most consistent Sixties chart presence, The Searchers have never previously been given the box set treatment. Like the Fabs, they were innovative and influential. They presaged folk rock, and without them there would have been no Byrds and maybe even no Tom Petty. The subtitle, celebrating 50 years of harmony & jangle, says it well. The four CDS and 121 tracks take the story from 1963, before they signed with Pye Records, to the present day via their Seventies new wave-inclined recordings for Sire Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It was the right venue. Frankie Valli is New Jersey royalty. He might not have been crowned, but appearing in The Sopranos is as good as any coronation. As he leaned into the audience, shaking hands, he spread his magic. Even Jimmy Page had come along for this rare London show by one of pop’s greatest, most distinctive voices.The real shock was that live, Valli sounds exactly like Frankie Valli. Exactly. To hear for real the sharp falsetto was a thrill. Opening with a forceful “Grease” couldn't disguise the fact that, despite the billing, it was instantly obvious this was not Frankie Valli Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Make it Your Sound, Make it Your Scene – Vanguard Records & the 1960s Musical RevolutionKieron TylerSeymour and Maynard Solomon’s Vanguard Records hasn’t been given the same amount of recognition as Jac Holzman’s Elektra, despite both labels being equally important and having trodden – at least up to the late Sixties – very similar paths. This neat four-CD box set should ensure that Vanguard gets more recognition.Like Elektra, Vanguard cast its net into New York. Also like Elektra, its earliest releases didn’t suggest a coherent strategy. Viennese waltzs, Elizabethan Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Claude François doesn’t have the hipster cachet of Serge Gainsbourg, but he did lead an extraordinary life and died young. He also wrote “Comme d’habitude” which was Anglicised to become “My Way”. His live shows were spectacular, the women he married, dated and flirted with were striking, he had tax debts, a father who rejected him and his chosen career, and a mother addicted to gambling. It’s more than enough to fuel this two-and-a-half hour biopic.But Cloclo isn’t going to lead to an Anglophone embracing of François – universally known by the nickname Cloclo. However strong the image, his Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Eurozone is in crisis and the American economy stagnating; Syria is self-destructing, the Arab Spring has stalled and climate change threatens the whole planet, yet Yoko Ono believes that “the world, now, is really turning towards the light”.In 1969 when she and John Lennon staged their famous “Bed-In” for peace in a Montreal hotel, optimism was in the air we breathed and their plea to “Give Peace a Chance” felt like a genuine call to world leaders to choose accommodation over confrontation. In our youthful euphoria, we even believed it was possible.Forty three years and many wars later, Read more ...
theartsdesk
Can: The Lost TapesKieron TylerDespite being compiled from previously unreleased material, the extraordinary The Lost Tapes is as wonderful as last year's 40th Anniversary edition of Tago Mago. This archive trawl outpaces previous exhumations like Limited Edition, Unlimited Edition, Delay ‘68 and Prehistoric Future by a very long distance. Not because it’s a three-CD set, but due to the sheer quality of what’s heard. Can still had material on the shelf equalling what they issued. Little is from the post-Damo Suzuki configuration of the band (it’s roughly half-and-half between the Suzuki and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The wish to go back into your past, and change things with the knowledge you have in the present, must be a universal one. It’s the subject of Israeli-US director Dana Lustig’s A Thousand Kisses Deep, which manages to make fantasy come alive for its heroine Mia (Jodie Whittaker, outstanding in the role). With the help of time travel.Coming home from a nursing shift to her London mansion block home one morning, Mia witnesses an old lady leaping to her death from the same building, holding in her hands torn photographs, one of which Mia recognises as that of her former lover, jazz musician Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“A dirty fairy tale” was one of the encomiums lobbed at The Apartment in June 1960, nine months before it won Billy Wilder and I A L Diamond the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Wilder the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Although The Saturday Review’s influential Hollis Alpert was critically off the mark when he disparaged Wilder’s serious adult comedy, he was right to describe it as a fairy tale. A prince does rescue a princess after an ogre’s cruel treatment of her has caused her to fall into a fatal sleep.The “dirty” part is more complex. The premise is undeniably Read more ...