1960s
Hanna Weibye
The original idea for the subtitle of this show, first made in 2000 and last seen at Sadler's Wells in 2007, was apparently "An Auto-Erotic Thriller". Yes, groan. But "erotic thriller" is a much straighter description of The Car Man than its actual, rather coy, subtitle, "Bizet's Carmen Reimagined". This is a nail-biting ride, and certainly not suitable for kids.The plot is based loosely on The Postman Always Rings Twice - wife and lover murder husband somewhat inefficiently, there is a wrongful conviction but eventually (twisted) poetic justice. Bourne adds a tragic misfit and a bisexual Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
This must be one of the year’s most remarkable archive exhumations: it may well become the re-release of 2015. A French take on the western released in 1969, Cemetery Without Crosses was explicitly made in the style of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Leone even directed one scene – a set piece in which the cast gather around a table for dinner. Its director and lead actor Robert Hossein says it was France’s first western.Hossein was meant to be in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, but his contract with French company Gaumont prevented him taking the job so he set to creating his own Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Love Affair/Steve Ellis: Time Hasn’t Changed us - The Complete CBS Recordings 1967-1971The connection between Sex Pistols, the stars of last week’s Reissue CDs Weekly, and late-Sixties London soul-pop hit-makers The Love Affair is unlikely, but genuine. Shortly after they formed, when their repertoire of originals was thin, the instigators of UK punk rehearsed a version of The Love Affair’s 1968 Top Ten single “A Day Without Love”. Despite the supposed year-zero ethos of Brit-punk, Sex Pistols covered a fair amount of pre-hippy nuggets, including – as well as that Love Affair song Read more ...
ellin.stein
The pop-genius-as-self-destructive-lost-soul biopic is this year’s genre du jour. We’ve already had documentaries on Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain, while coming down the pike are dramatised bios of NWA, Hank Williams, Elton John, and, again, Cobain. Now Love & Mercy, a fictionalised life of Brian (Wilson), presents the Beach Boys’ resident composer of gorgeous pop classics like "God Only Knows" as a sort of Californian Amadeus, an otherworldly savant through whom sublime music pours while he tries to escape from the domination of a stern father. As with all such biopics of artists, it Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The latest transatlantic transfer is curiously esoteric, concerning as it does an obscure period in the lives of two great men: Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles. The centenary of the latter’s birth makes this an apt moment for the European premiere of Austin Pendleton’s Chicago-originating 2000 play, but its appeal may not extend beyond dedicated students of theatre history.It’s 1960, and critic Kenneth Tynan (Edward Bennett) is determined to unite his beleaguered heroes, persuading the declining Welles (John Hodgkinson) to direct out-of-step Olivier (Adrian Lukis, pictured below) in Read more ...
Barney Harsent
One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock… For those who orchestrated the swing from blues to rock ‘n’ roll, it’s getting late. Like the Chelsea pensioners, their numbers are beginning to dwindle and, as time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future, their testimony must be recorded for posterity, lest it be lost for ever in the music mists (currently somewhere off the coast of Kintyre). Except – and it’s a fairly big "except" – this stuff’s already fairly well documented, no? And no matter how many grey-haired rockers try to explain how revolutionary this stuff was at the time Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Dust on the Nettles – A Journey Through the British Underground Folk Scene 1967–72It’s one of the most significant musical rediscoveries of recent years and, on its own, makes Dust on the Nettles indispensible. “The Seagulls Scream” by Christine Quayle is track 10 on the first disc of this box set of psychedelically inclined British folk or folk-inspired music. Quayle intones desolately of “a human in bed [who] is singing his prayers in his head, his mind is dead.” Eleswhere in the disconsolate lyric, a child asks his mother for love but “beneath his skin, his body is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Peter Zinovieff: Electronic Calendar – The EMS TapesRoxy Music’s June 1972 debut appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test found them miming to “Ladytron” from their debut album, released that week. A prime focus for the camera was Eno, in a fake leopard-skin jacket and shiny gold gloves. Twiddling knobs and waggling a joystick, he stood at what was obviously an instrument but not a conventional one. There was no keyboard and the noises generated bubbled and swooped. This was an EMS synthesiser.The EMS synthesiser was British and a favourite of Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lesley Gore: California NightsThe reissue of 1967’s California Nights is a timely tribute to both Lesley Gore, who died in February this year, and Bob Crewe, the producer of most of the album’s tracks, who died in September last year. Gore first charted in 1963 with “It’s my Party”, which was followed by a string of hits including the feminist-slanted “You Don’t Own me”. Crewe was prodigious: he was a songwriter, manager, producer and singer. With Bob Gaudio, he steered The Four Seasons to success and wrote or co-wrote classics like "Big Girls Don't Cry" and "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine ( Read more ...
Matthew Wright
You might think that the carefree, gleeful melodies of sunny Californian surf-rock giants The Beach Boys would render them immune to the kind of egotistical wedge-driving that sunders most rock groups eventually. You would, of course, be wrong. Shortly after the band’s 50th-anniversary world tour in 2012, Mike Love, who owns the band’s name, took it away for his own version of the Beach Boys, leaving founder (and widely acknowledged musical genius) Brian Wilson and Al Jardine behind. Rumours, which will receive a thorough airing in the next year when first Wilson, then Love, publish their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Marvin Gaye: Marvin Gaye 1961–1965On single, Marvin Gaye’s earliest years were defined by a head-long rush beginning with his fourth 45, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow". After that, future classic followed future classic: "Hitch Hike", "Pride and Joy", "Can I Get a Witness", “How Sweet it is (to be Loved by You)", "Ain't That Peculiar" and more. The years 1962 to 1965 were a musical goldmine for this multi-faceted singer and songwriter.On album, Marvin Gaye’s earliest years were somewhat more complex. Where his label Tamla (odd issues came via related imprint Motown) went for the direct and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I fell in love with both of them immediately,” says Pete Townshend of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the managers who took his band The Who to world-wide success. An hour into Lambert & Stamp, a documentary on the duo, the depth of that bond is belatedly seen in a touching clip of Townshend demonstrating one of his new songs. Singing with acoustic guitar, Townshend tries a tentative run-through of “Glittering Girl”. Stamp’s face lights up as he hears the melody line take shape, Lambert is attentive. The relationship is not quite that of son to father, but it is familial.Lambert & Stamp Read more ...