Beatles
Adam Sweeting
A caption tells us that while filming the Beatles at Twickenham Film Studios in January 1969 for a planned TV broadcast, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and his crew amassed 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio recordings. Some of it was seen in the 1970 film Let It Be, but the bulk of it has remained locked in the vaults ever since. Until now. Sometimes, watching Peter Jackson’s vast three-part documentary series Get Back, it feels like we’re having to sit through every second of all of it.Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) spent four years editing and restoring the footage, and could only Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Leave a 78-year-old ex-Beatle locked down for long enough, and this what he comes up with: a sequel to his two previous wholly solo albums, cooked up in his Sussex home studio. The results find the once derided, “Thumbs Aloft” McCartney’s slow creative redemption nearly complete.Loved up and by his own account stoned for much of the Seventies and Eighties, his easy musical fecundity was only jolted into full power by trauma and challenge: the Fabs’ bitter divorce for McCartney (1970), career back to the wall in Kenya for Band on the Run (1973), Wings’ doldrums for the scatty, sometimes lovely Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
So the Royal Ballet is to make a live comeback, for one night only, on 9 October. Fielding the entire company of 100 dancers, suitably distanced, the enterprise is being hailed as a triumph of logistics. And so it is. But the fact remains that the vast majority of its audience will be watching on a computer screen at home. And the gala programme will be pulled from the company’s back catalogue, health precautions having apparently ruled out the possibility of making anything new since March.Not so in Germany, where earlier this month Hamburg Ballet launched its 2020/21 season with a run of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s almost unbearably poignant, on this black Friday evening in March 2020, to watch a documentary about Ready Steady Go! , “the most innovative rock ‘n’ roll show ever”, believes Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the second of its four directors who went on to work with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he!” – but he’s right. Nothing has surpassed it, certainly not Top of the Pops, BBC TV’s response to the programme which, based around the singles chart, eventually helped kill it.“The weekend starts here” was its (unofficial) slogan, though it wasn’t quoted in The Read more ...
Owen Richards
Think of the phrase “music memoir”, and you might conjure images of wild nights and heavy mornings. You’re unlikely to think of suburban West Bromwich and tributes to Mike Batt’s Wombles back catalogue. But then, Pete Paphides’s story is comprised of unlikelihoods. What were the chances of one of the country’s leading music critics being the mute son of Greek Cypriot chip shop owners? Broken Greek tracks Paphides’s childhood from four to thirteen. In his early days, he was selectively mute to everyone outside of his family for reasons not quite clear to anyone, including himself. It was Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In photographer Jim Marshall’s heyday in the 60s and 70s, before the music business became corporate and restrictive, and before Marshall unravelled – he was partial to cars, cocaine and guns as well as cameras – musicians asked for him, they trusted him, and he never violated their trust because, he said, “these people have let you into their life”. The pictures he took of the Beatles, Janis Joplin (pictured below), John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duane Allman, Joni Mitchell and countless others are startlingly intimate, as if, one of his friends observes, there is no one else in the room.Alfred Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Among the issues integral to the final album The Beatles recorded two, though usually low profile, are worth bearing mind. Abbey Road was their first album to be released in stereo only. There was no mono edition. Also, in late 1968, an EMI TG12345 console had been installed in Studio 2 of their label’s Abbey Road studios. Unlike its predecessor, the REDD.51, it was a solid-state piece of equipment. Transistors had replaced valves.The album was recorded in a new world, one where the old – mono and valves – was being ushered out. And likewise, The Beatles were in the studio as they ushered Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The price of fame and the value of artistic truth are among the topics probed in Danny Boyle’s irresistible comedy, a beguiling magical mystery tour of an upside-down world where The Beatles suddenly never existed. Richard Curtis’s screenplay features some of his characteristic trademarks, not least the protagonist’s slapstick sidekick Rocky the roadie, but it’s illuminated by his fascination with popular music and the emotional resonance it carries.The premise (Jack Barth gets a credit for “story”) is that the entire world has suffered a mysterious power blackout for 12 seconds, and when the Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Mid-career, moving ever further away from composing for concert platform and church towards the stage, Berlioz found himself unsure where his take on Faust belonged. In the end he hedged his bets and titled it a "dramatic legend". Staging it as an opera, as he really wanted, requires the work of a theatrical plastic surgeon. Connective tissue is needed to flesh out the story, to join the four limbs of the work and stitch together its self-contained archetypes of 19th-century music drama: military march, ballet, drinking chorus, archaic ballad and so on.To raise the curtain on Glyndebourne Read more ...
james.woodall
If you were a fan of “Rock Island Line” when it became a pop hit, you’d have to be at least in your mid-70s now. In 1956, Paul McCartney heard Lonnie Donegan perform it live in Liverpool, and Paul’s rising 77. How many below that age know it is moot, though that doesn’t necessarily disqualify it from the hour-long documentary treatment. For blues lovers, it’s a benchmark. “Rock Island Line” dates from the late 1920s and was first recorded in 1934.Billy Bragg dependably and articulately fronted up this BBC Four history of the song, a protest paean to, or (as it might once have been called) a Read more ...
james.woodall
Documentaries about the 20th century’s most fabled quartet keep coming. There’s no special call for The Beatles: Made on Merseyside (BBC Four), which looked at the group’s Liverpool beginnings, though at a stretch it could be argued that in the 50th anniversary year of their horrible break-up we need reminding of pop’s Biggest Bang in 1963. This was almost the film to do it. Yet for such an explosive moment in cultural history it was curiously downbeat.That might be because, as we were reminded throughout, the group’s genesis was scruffy and full of false starts. Liverpool in the 1950s seemed Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
On Drums was inhabited by a parade of fine-looking young and middle aged multi-ethnic anglophone drummers, all introduced by Stewart Copeland, the American drummer of the Police. In vintage film and contemporary interviews his chosen musicians seemed almost invariably fit and trim whatever the substances ingested in the past. Presumably touring schedules and the sheer physical effort (only temporarily supplanted, it turns out, by Roger Linn’s 1980s invention of drum machines) of banging the instruments kept our musicians in good nick.Copeland suggested that percussionists, sitting behind Read more ...