1970s
Kieron Tyler
Erasmo Carlos got his break in August 1965 when the TV show Jovem Guarda (The Young Guard) began its run. Filmed before a live audience in São Paulo and broadcast nationally, it was pop as never seen before in Brazil. On screen, Roberto Carlos and his unrelated songwriting sidekick Erasmo Carlos – born Erasmo Esteves – presided over a frothy, energetic mix of singers, song, fashion and lifestyle tips which confirmed to Brazil that its pop music was as vital – within the county, anyway – as the internationally lauded Bossa Nova. The roots of MPB – Música Popular Brasileira – reach back to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If Christine may occasionally be an uncomfortable film to watch, it’s impossible not to be gripped by Rebecca Hall’s sheer, virtuoso turn in the title role of Antonio Campos’ third feature: it sears itself on the memory with a pitiless rigour that won’t be easily forgetten.Hall plays Christine Chubbuck, the Florida television presenter who shot herself in 1974 while live on air on the station for which she worked. If that’s a real-life act that’s (inevitably) impossible to follow, Craig Shilowich’s script and Campos’ direction open her story out to us with a fully convincing wider perspective Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At September 2010’s MTV Video Music Awards, Lady Gaga took the stage in a dress made of stitched-together cuts of meat. The outfit, she said, was a political statement worn to draw attention to the aspect of the US military's don't ask, don't tell policy preventing anyone who "demonstrate[s] a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts" from joining the forces. The first female singer to wear a meat dress on stage, though, had less of a profile.Lady Gaga’s prototype was Liverpool-born art-rock provocateur Linder Sterling who, on 5 November 1982, was playing Manchester’s Haçienda with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
New releases by Mike Oldfield don’t exactly grow on trees, but nor can they be deemed rarities. For the first three decades he brought out roughly half a dozen a decade. But Return to Ommadawn is only his second since 2008. As the title announces, it tours the landscape of his third album Ommadawn, which he recorded in his own studio at Hergest Ridge in 1975 and played pretty much everything that didn’t require breath (wind instruments and vocals).It’s roughly the same story here except that Oldfield blows on his own penny whistles, which feature prominently in the mock-Celtic musical Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Khaled Hosseini's 2003 bestseller ticks all the boxes as an A-level text. A personal story with epic sweep, it interweaves the bloody recent history of Afghanistan with a gripping family saga. Its treatment of racism and radicalism is timely. Other themes too might have been hand-picked for classroom discussion: bullying, betrayal, bad parenting, family secrets. Its first-person narrative makes it feel real.The trouble with this stage adaptation newly arrived in the West End is that only a small portion of the audience is using it for exam revision. Those merely hoping for a theatre Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An action film with an intensity that sets it apart, Assault on Precinct 13 still shocks. Although expected, its first killing is a “they wouldn’t do that, would they?” moment. No wonder the 2005 remake failed to overshadow the original. John Carpenter’s hard-boiled second feature, a follow-up to Dark Star, was filmed on a budget of $100,000 in less than three weeks in late 1975 and released the following year. He wrote, shot and edited it as well as composing and playing its brilliant soundtrack music (the early Human League took a lot from it). With a cast of unknowns, the noir-toned Los Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sixty-eight tracks into the intriguing Action Time Vision, orthodoxy suddenly gives way to individualism. The two-and-bit discs so far have mostly showcased what passes for notions of punk rock: block-chord guitars, guttersnipe vocals, Ramones-speed rhythms and Clash-style terrace-chant choruses. Suddenly, The Fall’s lurching “Psycho Mafia” suggests the early punk era was not about trying to be same as every other band. Individualism was possible.Recorded in 1977, but issued in 1978, “Psycho Mafia” was from The Fall’s first record, an EP on the Step Forward label. Other bands on the imprint Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
New Year’s Eve has its rituals and, in the Russian-speaking world, watching the 1976 film The Irony of Fate is core to ringing out the old and ringing in the new. A television staple, it has the seasonal status of It’s a Wonderful Life, The Little Shop on the Corner and White Christmas. First seen in Russian homes as a three-hour, two-part small-screen production on the first day of 1976, it was subsequently edited and shown in cinemas.The Irony of Fate (the full title is The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!: Ирония судьбы, или С лёгким паром!) is a farcical and straightforward-seeming Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
French Pictures in London was a bolt from the blue. Issued in June, four decades after being recorded, it was a previously unknown, unreleased album better than most mid-Seventies rock offerings. It was also better than about 99 percent of albums retrospectively hailed as classics. However, it had escaped attention and its maker was barely heard of.It wasn’t meant to be this way. In 1975, A&M Records paid for the sessions and the album’s master tape was passed to pop star and Bensick’s fellow Ohio native Eric Carmen, who was meant to get it to music industry bigwig Clive Davis, the then Read more ...
graham.rickson
Not quite three wishes; this film’s Czech title is Tři oříšky pro Popelku, which translates as three nuts. We’ll get to that later. Three Wishes for Cinderella, a Czechoslovak-East German co-production from 1973, is a treat, and still an annual Christmas fixture on Eastern European TV screens.Director Václav Vorlíček’s source material wasn’t the familiar Cinderella retelling by Charles Perrault, but a darker version written by the 19th century Czech folklorist Božena Němcová. There’s no father, only one nasty step-sister and a refreshing lack of flashy magic. In place of a fairy Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Pictured above is Sweden’s Ralph Lundsten. He might look like a guru or mystic but is actually a multi-disciplinary artist most well-known on his home turf for his pioneering electronic music. His first album, 1966’s Elektronmusikstudion Dokumentation 1 (made with Leo Nilson), was issued by national Swedish radio’s own label and recorded at the station’s electronic music studio. Lundsten (born 1936) began making music for soundtracks in the 1950s and has issued at least 38 albums.Lundsten’s “Bön 5 – “Förlåt oss våra skulder” (Prayer 5 – Forgive us our Debts) from the 1972 album Fadervår (Our Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This House arrives in the West End with magic timing - a comedy about the farcical horrors of being a government with a wafer-thin majority, frantically wheeling out dying, suicidal and breastfeeding MPs to vote, horsetrading with "odds and sods" to keep their nails on power. James Graham’s play about the 1970s Labour travails, produced by the National Theatre/Chichester Festival, opened in 2012 to a mixed reception, but its reappearance on Charing Cross Road acquired some serendipitous overnight oomph as Tory fellow-traveller Zac Goldsmith lost his seat to the Lib Dems yesterday, Read more ...