1970s
Bonnie Raitt, Brighton Dome review - a top night with a characterful, very American blues rock queen
Thomas H. Green
If you walked into a bar in the US, say in one of the southern states, and Bonnie Raitt and her band were playing, you’d have the best night of your life. They are the kind of purely American rhythm’n’blues experience, tempered with FM radio balladry, that somehow works best, and perhaps only, on those endless highways and dusty plains.Tonight she imports that spirit – the best of America at a time when the world is seeing the worst of it – to a 200-year-old hall full of septuagenarians on the British south coast.Raitt plays for an hour-and-a-half and has real presence, a gregarious chatty Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The tag “the most Tony-nominated play of all time” may mean less to London theatregoers than it does to New Yorkers, but Stereophonic, newly arrived at the Duke of York’s, deserves the accolade wherever it plays.It has nothing to do with the Welsh band Stereophonics, though everything to do with typical rock band behaviour. Playwright David Adjmi hasn’t named the one we are watching, a band recording an album in 1976 that will make them megastars, as Rumours did for Fleetwood Mac, a band notoriously riven with breakdowns and divorces. But the internecine spats Adjmi’s group members engage in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Britain is currently offering two exhibitions for the price of one. Other than being on the same bill, Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun having nothing in common other than being born a year apart and being oddballs – in very different ways. And since both reward focused attention, this makes for a rather exhausting outing – I’m reviewing them separately – so gird your loins.I’ve always been intrigued by Scylla (méditerranée) 1938 (pictured below right) a painting by Ithell Colquhoun that Tate Modern has shown with Surrealists such as Salvador Dali. It’s a double image that, like a “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
"It was really strange. Really quite conflicting, the sort of thing most bands didn't have to deal with. At the front, we'd have the kids who'd come along to scream and at the back were the people who'd come along to hear the music. We didn't know whether to talk to the kids at the front or to speak over their heads to the other people.”While speaking to Melody Maker in September 1976 after the release his band’s third album Morin Heights, Pilot’s guitarist Ian Bairnson recognised a difficulty: that their hit singles had attracted one audience, and that another audience was also interested in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Forest and the Shore” by Keith Christmas is remarkable. In his essay for Gather In The Mushrooms, compiler, author and Saint Etienne member Bob Stanley says it is “as evocative as its title. The song has a deeply wooded sound, like a cross between Serge Gainsbourg’s “Ballade de Melody Nelson” and Ralph Vaughan Williams.” To this can be added the brooding, dramatic melancholy of Scott Walker’s “The Seventh Seal.”Despite the grandeur of “Forest and the Shore” – and the astounding Richard Thompson-esque, Tom Verlaine-predicting guitar solo taking it to its close – Gather In The Mushrooms: The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Johnnie Taylor’s big break came with the ever-fabulous September 1968 single “Who's Making Love.” His ninth 45 for the Stax label, it went Top Ten on the Billboard Hot 100. Up to this point, the Arkansas-born singer had been on the R&B charts only. Hitting the mainstream countdown had taken a while: Taylor’s first solo single had been issued in April 1961.Before this, he had been in gospel outfits The Five Echoes – who he joined in 1951 or 1952 at age 17 – and, from 1957, The Highway QC’s, who Sam Cooke had passed through. In August 1960, he took on the Cooke role in the Soul Stirrers – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Soul Scene,” by Echoes Limited, is built from elements of the James Brown sound. But it’s put together in such a way that the result is unfamiliar. The angular drum groove edges towards a 5/8 shuffle. The circularity of the guitar suggests Congolese rumba. Funk, but outside recognised templates.Then there’s “Anoshereketa” by Oliver & The Black Spirits. The swirling township structure is recognisable but the drums and the nature of the guitar playing – clipped and spindly, respectively – give an edge. This music is hard to place aesthetically and geographically.Add in the loping, reggae- Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Gary Oldman has always lived life to the fullest, on screen and off. Maybe that's why he is often at his best in his pitch-perfect portraits of real-life personae such as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour and Herman J Mankiewicz in Mank. He now stars as the bibulous middle-aged American author John Cheever in Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino's latest lush homage to Italy's recent past. Oldman's Cheever is little more than a cameo, but his performance is genuinely touching – poignant and witty, appreciative of the beautiful young protagonist (Celeste Dalla Porta) but detached from her. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sixes and Sevens is a surprise. A big one. Since leaving Siouxsie and the Banshees in September 1979, John McKay has largely been a mystery. On record, the only suggestion this influential guitarist had continued with music was the EP his post-Banshees band Zor Gabor issued in 1987. Otherwise – nothing.Sixes and Sevens collects 11 tracks excavated by McKay from his personal archive. It is not an unreleased album. Three tracks are from 1980, three are from 1983, and there is one apiece from 1985, 1986 and 1987, and two from 1989. One of the 1983 tracks is titled “Zor Gabor” and, as well as Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Purporting to be a documentary about John Lennon in the 1970s, Borrowed Time is no such thing. Instead, we have a lot of fan boys stating the bleeding obvious and covering a much longer period of time. On the other hand, there are some really interesting and illuminating details here, so the film is an absolute must for fans.Touring plans for 1981 were afoot when Mark Chapman changed the world. And it was going to be extraordinary technically (Lennon’s brief was "to give Mick and Elton ulcers"), a glimpse of which is recreated here. Tariq Ali, Bob Harris, Earl Slick and many, many others ( Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s this mod milieu, harking back to the Eighties. Weller at the forefront; Dr Robert and his Blow Monkeys; all righteously hate Thatcher; then the electronically groovy 1990s arrive; Acid Jazz Records; boss mod Eddie Piller; his collection of snappily dressed muso's who magazines wrote about and who nearly had hits. These sorts are still about, endlessly churning out music. It’s impressive. Sometimes the music is too. As with this album.Matt Deighton was in Acid Jazz outfit Mother Earth. He’s one of the aforementioned who keep on bangin’ out music. Much of it well-liked. Those mods Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In October 1967, John Lee Hooker released a single titled “The Motor City is Burning.” The song commented on the civil unrest which had taken place in his Michigan home city of Detroit that July. “Oh, the motor city's burnin',” sang Hooker. “My home town burnin' down to the ground, Worser than Vietnam, Well, it started on 12th and Clairmont, this mornin'.”A couple of years on, Detroit’s MC5 released their version of “Motor City is Burning” (no “The”) on their debut album, the live set Kick Out The Jams. Now, the title is borrowed for the three-CD clamshell box Motor City Is Burning - A Read more ...