1970s
Kieron Tyler
The descending refrain opening the song isn’t unusual but attention is instantly attracted as it’s played on a harpsichord. Equally instantly, an elegiac atmosphere is set. The voice, coming in just-short of the 10-second mark, is similarly yearning in tone. The song’s opening lyrics convey dislocation: “You and I travel to the beat of a different drum.”“Different Drum,” the September 1967 single by an outfit dubbed Stone Poneys Featuring Linda Ronstadt, was immediate, had a country edge and was written by Mike Nesmith – then best known as a member of The Monkees. The band had already issued Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A reissue can be an aide-mémoire, a reminder that a record which has been off the radar for a while needs revisiting, that it deserves fresh attention.In that spirit, this column has looked at straight vinyl reissues of albums of varying styles, from various periods; from the well-known to those which attracted barely any consideration when they first surfaced. In the latter category, there is the reissue of Horizoning by the Canadian folk-inclined singer-songwriter Stefan Gnyś whose sole album had, until 2024, never advanced beyond the 12 two-sided acetate discs which were specially cut in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
One of last year’s major joys was the box set version of Hawkwind's Space Ritual, an 11-disc extravaganza which made the great live album, originally issued in May 1973, even more great. Now the two studio albums which preceded it – X In Search Of Space and Doremi Fasol Latido – have become similarly packaged, though less colossal, box sets.X In Search Of Space – also known as (X) In Search Of Space – was released in October 1971. Hawkwind’s second album, it came out when the band were still an underground attraction, a band lacking traction with the mainstream music scene. They were popular Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The return to shops of a consecutive sequence of five of John Cale's Seventies albums through different labels is undoubtedly coincidental. All have been previously reissued multiple times and none are scarce in any form. Anyone wanting any of these albums presumably already has a copy. Nonetheless, it’s good that these makeovers sustain the profile of Cale’s idiosyncratic take on art-rock.The Academy in Peril was originally issued in July 1972. Cale’s third solo album after his 1968 departure from The Velvet Underground, it followed-up March 1970’s Vintage Violence and April 1971’s Terry Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Let's walk down memory lane the Magazine way. Let's regurgitate fifth-rate Low [the David Bowie album] period pieces. Let's plonk plonk plonk with ponderous sub-Pink Floydery. Let's do the wallpaper waltz. This is not pushing back the barriers. It's frighteningly bland conservatism.”So said Garry Bushell in his March 1979 Sounds review of Magazine’s second album Secondhand Daylight. He went on. “'Silly Thing' [the single by the rump Sex Pistols] is one hundred times more exciting. 'Unconventional People' [the then-recent Royal Rasses single] is one hundred times more relaxing. [Sham 69’s] ' Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tucker Zimmerman is singing a number called “Don’t Go Crazy (Go in Peace)”. At 83, he performs sitting down. Surrounded by support band Iji, who act as his pick-up, he approaches the song in a whispery, affable voice. At the start of his set he was assisted to his seat but, knees aside, he’s not frail. He’s just laid back, a Sixties original, strumming gently. “Don’t go crazy,” he sings, “Go with the flow, go in peace.” Although he’s advised us to not think about politics, it’s hard not to. Yet his hour-long show soothes, offers a window into some of what’s best about America.Tucker is one of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After the chart success of his second album, June 1969’s Hot Buttered Soul, it was inevitable that any single had to represent Isaac Hayes in a different way to the LP. The album’s 12-minute version of “Walk on by” would not work as a seven-incher. There was also “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which clocked in at over 18 minutes. They did, though, become the A- and B-sides of a tie-in single. But only after significant editing.The decision to truncate album tracks for the singles market set a pattern. Follow-up album The Isaac Hayes Movement opened with a just-short of 12-minute cover of “I Read more ...
How To Survive Your Mother, King's Head Theatre review - mummy issues drive autobiographical dramedy
Gary Naylor
It is unsurprising to learn in the post-show Q&A that each audience receives Jonathan Maitland’s new play based on his 2006 memoir differently. My house laughed a lot (me especially) but some see the tragic overwhelming the comic, and the laughs dry up. When it comes to humour, as is the case with mothers, it’s each to their own.It’s an unusual production right from the off when the playwright, who is also a main character, is also acting himself too – but not entirely, as there’s a pre-teen and post-teen version of him too, played by different actors. Got all that? When you add his Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“Don’t take a piss in the house of a woman you have made a widow.” The mixture of earthy comedy and tragic pain in this piece of parental advice is typical of the tone of Richard Bean’s Reykjavik, his new work play which explores the lives of the Hull trawlermen of the mid-1970s.As its title suggests, the story revisits the long-lost world of fishing in Arctic waters, and an industry which Bean also explored in his 2003 play, Under the Whaleback, which premiered at the Royal Court. Now a regular at the Hampstead Theatre, his new work has the distinct feeling of a throwback not only to his own Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Grandiloquent indie-synth-pop outfit Bastille have been around for over a decade. Three of their four albums have been chart-toppers (the other one still made Top 5 and went Gold). They are no flash in the pan.Head honcho Dan Smith now presents a fifth album, &, that, he says, “feels like someone talking to you, rather than turning up the volume”. Returning to his pre-success solo incarnation, he’s trying a style of music mainly associated with thoughtful 1970s American singer-songwriters. Thing is, he just can’t help laying on the over-production.In the manner of, say, Al Stewart, Smith Read more ...
James Saynor
It’s common to say that Shakespeare would have liked such-and-such a modern story, but I think he actually might have gone for this one. The Bard’s eye was drawn to cruelty at every turn, and bad-to-the-bone cruelty seeps from each scene of The Apprentice, a drama about Donald Trump’s rise to fame and gain.There will be many more Trump biopics over the coming century, but this early contender (leaving aside the Funny or Die spoof of 2016, which no one is laughing at now) is a venomously good start. Republicans have attacked its release date, three weeks from the 2024 election, as dirty pool, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A boy’s dead friend scratching at his first-floor window, Nosferatu-like vampire Barlow rearing up with heart attack shock…The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV take on Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot scared a teen generation out of their skins.This new film exists first as a failed franchise equation, adding Conjuring Universe producer James Wan to IT screenwriter Gary Dauberman as writer-director (he also wrote The Conjuring’s Annabelle series), but suffering heavy cuts prior to this much delayed release.King’s Salem’s Lot was a textured depiction of a Yankee small- Read more ...