1980s
Kieron Tyler
"Both of us have always enjoyed listening to dance music, and we wanted to interpret disco in our own way. We wanted to make good quality soulful electronic dance music, more biting than the usual bland disco stuff. We wanted to make records that would stand out in a disco and that you could listen to in your own bedroom."Speaking to NME’s Paul Morley in May 1981, Soft Cell’s Marc Almond clearly expressed where he and Dave Ball intended to go with their music. At this point, the duo had not issued much. October 1980’s barely available Mutant Moments EP was followed by one track on the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Paul Sng’s documentary Tish is one of the best British films of 2023 – both a heartfelt tribute to the life and work of the late photographer Tish (born Patricia) Murtha and a timely reminder of the war waged on the nation’s industrial working-class by the Thatcher government and its successors. Murtha’s death in 2013 was not unrelated to that war.Her black and white documentary photos, as touching as they were trenchant, represented the politically and socially disenfranchised families of north-eastern England during the Seventies and Eighties as photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Madness are an English institution due to deathless, jolly hits such as “House of Fun”, “Baggy Trousers” and “One Step Beyond”, but there’s always been another side to them.The London band are often at their best when bittersweet. Lesser-known songs such as “Grey Day”, “Madness (is All in the Mind)” and “One Better Day” showcased a downbeat poignance. Their new album, their 13th, is a case in point. It’s a response to the disturbing times we live in, and to “a disparate couple of years which saw the band at their most polarised and fragmented”. I can’t stop playing it.Ignore the iffy Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The KLF are endlessly fascinating. There’s never been a “pop group” like them. From the late Eighties into the early Nineties, they treated music, especially electronic dance music, as a laboratory for lunatic experiment. Unlike most avant-garde thinkers in pop, though, they made a glorious and highly unlikely commercial success of it, via a series of globally successful singles (and, to some degree, the album, The White Room).From their beginnings to demise, filmmaker Bill Butt was an accomplice, creating films and videos as asked. The BFI's 23 Seconds to Eternity gathers these together Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The three previous albums that Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark have released since reforming in 2010 have all, to varying degrees, adhered to their early sound. The band were part of the post-punk, post-Kraftwerk, 1979-82 synth-pop boom, alongside the likes of The Human League, Depeche Mode and Gary Numan.Those three albums, History of Modern, English Electric and The Punishment of Luxury, were all deep dipped in the sonics of that era. This time round, though, OMD’s sound often moves towards their mid-Eighties output; a less universally loved era.They sound also like they’re having fun. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Mustapha Matura’s 1981 play, Meetings, is still a knockout. Supply the characters with mobile phones and it could be set in the present day. What makes it topical is the central issue it chews on: is the modern world all it’s cracked up to be, or is progress a toxic brand? Jean, an advertising executive who loves all things contemporary, including fast food, is married to a businessman, Hugh, who is increasingly hankering for the tastes of his youth – swordfish in yellow gravy, okra and rice, manicou, that kind of thing. The culinary quest that begins in their snazzy Trinidad Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Exactly 40 years since Madonna’s first UK hit, “Holiday”, was skittering about the Top Five, she launches her global Celebration Tour at the O2.It is spectacle on the very grandest scale. In the latter half, following a video montage of tabloid controversies that pursued her career, and, to some extent, made it, a banner headline flashes “Age is a sin”. Madonna responds, “The most controversial thing I’ve ever done is to stick around.” The most successful female artist of all time is here to refute the sniping.The show is biographical concept album as dance theatre. It begins, as Madonna did Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Initially, it doesn’t sound so unusual. The collection’s first song is titled “Never Understand.” Sung in English, it’s poppy reggae with a light feel, twinkling keyboard lines and a lengthy, rock-oriented guitar solo. The singer appears to be a fan of Bob Marley. Originally, it was the last track on Side One of Hesnawi and Peace, the 1980, Italy-recorded debut album by Ibrahim Hesnawi.Next up, “Tendme.” While cut from the same cloth musically, the voice is different – keening, less smooth. This time, the language is unfamiliar. The lyrics are in Libyan Arabic. Ibrahim Hesnawi (Ibrahim al- Read more ...
Gary Naylor
I know, I was there. Well, not in Edinburgh in 1985, but in Liverpool in 1981, and the pull of London and the push from home, was just as strong for me back then as it is for Eck in John McKay’s comedy Dead Dad Dog. Back in London for the first time in 35 years, it plays now not as contemporary satirical commentary on Thatcher's Britain, but as warm nostalgia-fest, inevitably its teeth blunted, its references, Morrissey excepted, cuddlier. That softening comes, at least in part, from a quick survey of the house people of a certain age. To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim from Read more ...
CP Hunter
Celia Dale published 13 novels between 1944 and her death in 2011. A majority of her these are often categorised – albeit loosely – as crime fiction, or else labeled as a kind of suburban horror.Her astonishing skill, however, lay in the balance between genres: she wrote persistently along that tightrope of mundane normalcy and unsettling surreality, and deftly wove stories that leave the reader feeling uncomfortably disturbed – and yet unable to articulate precisely why. In her novels, people are rarely who they present themselves to be; intentions are obscured or hard-to-read; the narrative Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Becoming reacquainted with what was originally titled Westlake in 1987 is a pleasure. Yes, at his own measured pace, David Westlake has issued great albums since then and his Eighties and Nineties band The Servants have been the subject of various archive releases. It is not as though he has vanished. But any reminder of his flair as a songwriter is welcome.Originally a mini-LP, Westlake is now retitled D87, resequenced, appended by four tracks recorded for a contemporaneous BBC session and a couple of previously unheard demos. The augmented reissue doesn’t use the original sleeve image but Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Let’s face it, well over 50 years into Alice Cooper’s career, you probably already know whether his umpteen-billionth album is for you. Over the last decade, he’s revitalised things by taking a meta look at himself, but, whether harking back to his proto-punk Detroit roots or creating sequels to classic albums, his genial schlock-rock has settled to a calculable pattern.Nothing wrong with that. Worked for Motörhead and The Ramones. As with the later career of those bands, if the listener is inclined, Road has its moments. It's a concept album about being on tour. This is an environment where Read more ...