1960s
Music Reissues Weekly: The Telstar Story, The Heinz Sessions Vol. 1Sunday, 14 August 2022
“Telstar” was released 60 years ago this week. On 17 August 1962, British record buyers could purchase the second single by The Tornados, a band whose claim to fame until then was being Billy Fury’s back band – their March 1962 debut 45 was... Read more... |
Where the Crawdads Sing review - picturesque film glosses over its darker themesMonday, 25 July 2022
Derived from Delia Owens’s massively successful novel, Where the Crawdads Sing is the story of Kya Clark, a girl from an abusive, broken home in the North Carolina marshlands who raises herself almost single-handedly. The few people she encounters... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: The Beatles - Get BackSunday, 24 July 2022
“At all times, the film-makers have attempted to present an accurate portrait of the events depicted and the people involved.” The on-screen statement beginning each of Get Back's three parts acknowledges that definitions of accuracy can depend... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Larks on a StringTuesday, 19 July 2022
Jiří Menzel's Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti) was in production while Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague in August 1968. Predictably, the film was banned by the new Czechoslovak regime and it remained unreleased until 1990, though illicit video... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Happy In Hollywood - The Productions Of Gary UsherSunday, 17 July 2022
As either a producer or songwriter Gary Usher worked with The Beach Boys and The Byrds, the two most consequential California bands of the Sixties.When he co-wrote “409” with Brian Wilson for the Beach Boys’s first Capitol Records single in mid 1962... Read more... |
Mick Jagger: My Life as a Rolling Stone review, BBC Two - the rock'n'roll enigma gives little away as the band reaches 60Monday, 04 July 2022
At the beginning of this film, Mick Jagger says: “What most documentaries do is repeat the same thing over and over… all the mythology is repeated until it becomes true.” He’s right, as he so often is. This latest attempt to prise open the enigma of... Read more... |
Glastonbury Festival 2022: an unexpurgated odyssey around the best party on the planetThursday, 30 June 2022
Last days of June 2022, I sit in my writing hut. My liver is radioactive jelly, my nose reinforced concrete, my leg muscles marathon-cramped, and poisoned perspiration rolls down my forehead, stinging my eyeballs.You’ll already have seen a trillion... Read more... |
The Rolling Stones, BST Hyde Park review - let it rock!Monday, 27 June 2022
A few spots of rain greeted the arrival of the Rolling Stones on BST Hyde Park’s stage on Saturday night, and after “Street Fighting Man”, as Mick Jagger dedicated the show to the much-loved and lamented drummer Charlie Watts, a rainbow appeared... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Whatever You Want - Bob Crewe's 60s Soul SoundsSunday, 26 June 2022
In 1965, Bob Crewe was living alongside Central Park in New York’s Dakota building. At various times, the block’s other residents included Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. For work, Crewe’s 6th-floor offices on West 60th Street... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Ban the Bomb - Music of the Aldermaston Anti-Nuclear MarchesSunday, 19 June 2022
“The case is quite simple. We think that the policy which is being pursued by the western powers is one which is almost bound to end in the extermination of the human race. Some of us think that might be rather a pity.”This extract from a 1958... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Soft SkinSunday, 19 June 2022
The 400 Blows (1959) and Jules et Jim (1962) established François Truffaut as an outstanding and original director. His next film, The Soft Skin (La peau douce) from 1964, was not in the same league.Although it displays many of his story-telling... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Barney Wilen - ZodiacSunday, 12 June 2022
In 1966, the combo fronted by French sax player Barney Wilen issued an album of musical interpretations of each sign of the zodiac. In the US in 1969, Mort Garson released 12 albums, each dedicated to a single sign. Two years earlier Garson was... Read more... |
