1960s
Kieron Tyler
The title Northern Soul's Classiest Rarities Volume 6 suggests this 24-track compilation might be a rag-bag; a collection of random musical floor-sweepings which couldn’t be collected under any other heading. Not a bit of it. Instead, every contribution is a gem. Anyone into soul – Northern, or any of its forms – will get a buzz from this collection.“High-quality dance records from across the Northern Soul spectrum – floor-fillers, chin-strokers, the esoteric and the sometimes obvious” are the words summing up the contents on the back of the package. This nails it though it’s hard to see how Read more ...
David Nice
Director Richard Jones watched all 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone as research for this Almeida production. I've never seen a single one, to the amazement of the American fan on the tube home who saw me reading the programme and, having grown up with the TV series in the early 1960s, told me a lot more about the skill of creator/scriptwriter Rod Serling and which instalments I should seek out. I shall now.The question why may trouble all but diehard enthusiasts as the opening actions unfold and intertwine, but by the end of this giddying evening Twilight Zone virgins may feel they've been Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A nineteen-minute adaptation of “Jack Orion” took up the whole of Side Two of Cruel Sister, Pentangle’s fourth album. It's the highlight of the smart but blandly titled 115-track box set The Albums 1968–1972. Up to this point in 1970, British folk rock had not spawned anything comparable to the epic “Jack Orion”. Extending a traditional song to this length in such spellbinding fashion was ambitious and while some of John Renbourne’s electric guitar suggested the fluidity of Quicksilver Messenger Service’s John Cipollina, the overall effect was of a band magnificently pushing what they did to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Beneath the creamy overlay of gowns, crystal chandeliers, palaces, uniformed flunkies and a sumptuous (albeit CGI-enhanced) Royal Yacht, a steely pulse of realpolitik fuels The Crown, returning to Netflix for its much-anticipated second series. Vaulting straight back on the horse, creator Peter Morgan pitches us into a royal marriage heading for the rocks, a weak and wobbly Prime Minister getting sucked into a disastrous escapade in the Middle East, and the story of the Queen’s troubled younger sister trying to a find a place in the world away from the flotsam of European royalty offered up Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Cinematographer Douglas Slocombe is a true prince of darkness here, picking out Leslie Caron’s beautiful eyes and gleaming mouth despite the gloom of a seedy Notting Hill boarding house. Taking a break from her usual roles as a happy hoofer, Caron plays Jane, a serious young French woman adrift in London with an unplanned pregnancy who finds herself renting an attic bedsit.Adapted from Lynne Reid Banks’s best-selling novel, The L-Shaped Room was very daring in 1962 and the film faced several battles with the censors. Not only does Jane visit a Harley Street abortionist (a creepy Emlyn Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Until now, the easiest non-bootleg way to hear the early Rolling Stones live was via the various home cinema editions of October 1964’s T.A.M.I. show. Otherwise, although they employed backing tracks for broadcast, the American DVDs of their Ed Sullivan Show appearances caught the band in thrilling full flight. The new BBC sessions collection On Air fills out the picture by collecting 32 tracks they recorded between October 1963 and September 1965.Decent Decca-era archive collections of the Stones barely exist due to their poor relations with ABKCO, the organisation which owns their rights Read more ...
Owen Richards
Laid Bare – it has a lurid implication which is all too suitable for Joe Orton’s work. During a time where the straight-laced British struggled to ease into sexual liberation, Orton stretched acceptability to its very limits. Salacious acts had been going on behind closed doors long before the Sixties, but everyone hid behind a modest front. In his brief career, Orton’s plays challenged this hypocrisy with razor wit and poetic eloquence.Despite the title, Joe Orton Laid Bare was not as scandalous nor revolutionary as his writing; indeed, it was a rather traditional piece of programming. Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Go west, opera-lover: Mid Wales Opera is back in business. In fact, it’s been back since spring this year, when it toured venues in Wales and England with a warmly reviewed Handel Semele and a striking (and impressively cast) Magic Flute inspired by 1970s British sci-fi. That was the first production under the company’s new artistic leadership of Jonathan Lyness and Richard Studer – a conductor/director team with considerable form and substantial ambitions. This spirited chamber staging of Walton’s 1967 “extravaganza in one act” The Bear – MWO’s third new production this year – is modest in Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
STIMMUNG is always an event. Stockhausen’s score calls for a ritual as much as a performance, with six singers sitting around a spherical light on a low table, the audience voyeurs at some intimate but unexplained rite. Singcircle has been performing the work for over 40 years, and its director, Gregory Rose, clearly has an innate sense of its pace, structure and aura. This performance commemorated the 10th anniversary of Stockhausen’s death, but also marked the last ever appearance by Singcircle, a fitting end for a group associated above all else with this work.As with most of Stockhausen’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In early 1965, Birmingham’s The Moody Blues topped the British charts with a forceful reinterpretation of Bessie Banks’ R&B ballad “Go Now”. In early 1968, after some line-up changes and a radical musical rethink, they hit 19 with “Nights in White Satin”. Although as moody as “Go Now”, this was a different Moody Blues.“Nights in White Satin” is a staple of oldies radio and, as such, has been robbed of much of its power to astonish. Nonetheless, it was bold. As was its parent album Days of Future Passed. At one stroke, The Moody Blues invented orchestral pop and pointed the way to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In terms of cinema history, 1969’s Les Chemins de Katmandou is a footnote. Directed by André Cayatte, whose most interesting films were 1963’s interrelated marital dramas Jean-Marc ou la Vie Conjugale and Françoise ou la Vie Conjugale, it was a period-sensitive immersion into the world of a group of Nepal-based hippies. Though ostensibly a crime drama, a focus on drugs and free love brought an exploitation allure.For French cinema goers, the titillation was supplemented by Jane Birkin featuring alongside Serge Gainsbourg at the time they were establishing themselves as the nation’s couple to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dave Porter has a question. He wants to know where clouds go. “After they pass by, are they just like people, that go on and then die?” The figurative bit between his teeth, he wonders if small clouds “are lonely, like you and I? Do they just go to rain, or is that a tear from their eye? Sometimes I feel like a small cloud passing by, never knowing where I’m going and never knowing why.”Porter delivers his existential, melancholy contemplation in a voice brimming with defeat. He sounds as if he is about to lay down and surrender to the void; to an eternal abyss from whence he will never Read more ...