1970s
Markie Robson-Scott
In director Pat Collins’s lyrical adaptation of John McGahern’s last novel, with cinematography by Richard Kendrick, the landscape is perhaps the most important character – though there’s a fine cast of well known mainly Irish actors.If you’re feeling hemmed in by concrete and city life, it’s a balm to take a deep breath and listen to the birdsong while watching the lake, the trees and the hills change colour through the seasons.Joe and Kate Ruttledge (Barry Ward and Anna Bederke) moved from London two years ago to live in this rural lakeside Irish community (it was filmed in Connemara). It’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHLondon Afrobeat Collective Esengo (Canopy)The weather has not been kind to the UK lately, pelting it daily with endless drizzle and gloom. So wrap your ears around this, a mini-album that will infuse any room with blazing sunshine as soon as the needle hits the plastic. Esengo was supposed to be reviewed last month but one listen and, instead of being held back for review, as it should have been, it bullet-shot straight into the record box for DJing (where it more than proved its worth). The band are a loose-limbed outfit, nine-strong and consisting of members from England, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Brazzaville is on the north side of the Congo River. It is the capital of the Republic of the Congo. Kinshasa is on the south side of the Congo. It is capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly known as Zaïre. The cities face each other, about 1.5km apart, divided by the river and being in different nations.Congo Funk! - Sound Madness from the Shores of the Mighty Congo River (Kinshasa/Brazzaville 1969-1982) unites them by collecting 14 tracks demonstrating their musical fortunes were intertwined. Take the compilation’s Les Bantous De La Capitale, who were formed in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Half-way through this three-CD set, the energy level suddenly shifts upwards. It’s just one track of the 67 collected, but in this context this basic, blunt recording stands on its own. Issued in October 1974, Dr. Feelgood’s debut single “Roxette” was an early sign that British music could change, needed to change.Along with “Roxette,” Patterns on the Window - The British Progressive Pop Sounds of 1974 features a few other tracks associated with the back-to-basics pub rock phenomenon: Ace’s soul-rock hit “How Long,” Brinsley Schwarz’s “The Ugly Things” and Kilburn & The High Roads's “ Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a too brightly tiled Gentlemen’s public convenience (Nitin Parmar’s beautifully realised set is as much a character as any of the men we meet), a lad is shaving his head. He’s halfway to the skinhead look of the early Seventies, but he hasn’t quite nailed it – he's too young to know the detail.Another walks in, older, confident to the point of arrogance, looking not just for another man, but for this particular man-child. Handing over a pair of oxblood DMs with the garish red laces, he doesn’t just complete the boy’s outfit, he inducts him into the two worlds that he will Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Winston Holness started his own record label in 1969. Missing a finger, he became known by many folks as Niney. Born 7 December 1944, he had lost a thumb in an accident at work. By the point his imprint debuted, he had sung on a Clement “Coxsone” Dodd-produced track and was working as a salesman for other producers, including Clancy Eccles, Bunny “Striker” Lee and Lee “Scratch” Perry.Niney would get on a bike and take records to dances where he tried to get DJs to play them. He was also shadowing Bunny Lee in the recording studio, picking up on how records were produced. He began co-producing Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Poor fox,” says Rose Dugdale. She is standing beside her very rich mama and papa in the grounds of their stately home, her face blooded after the killing of her first fox. She knows this vicious upper-class ritual is wrong. It’s 1951 and she is 10. Hardcore challenges to the British establishment lie ahead.Baltimore, directed by Irish husband-and-wife team Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor (Rose Plays Julie; The Future Tense), is based on real events, though it’s certainly not a biopic (The Heiress and the Heist, a fascinating documentary series about Dugdale, was released last year).Dugdale’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A few records changed music. One such was “The Love I Lost (Part 1)” by Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes. Issued as a single by the Philadelphia International label in August 1973, its release introduced what would become a major characteristic of disco music. This was the first time a particular groove was heard; the percussive use of the drum kit’s cymbals with an emphasis on the hi-hat.The inventor of this soon-to-be ubiquitous signifier was Earl Young, a studio-based drummer who since around Autumn 1971 was regularly booked by Philadelphia International producers and songwriters Kenny Read more ...
James Saynor
The French military outpost on Madagascar is a “family cocoon, full of love and benevolence”, according to a character in this fictional portrait of the country in the early 1970s. Of course, as soon as we hear this claim near the start of Red Island, we assume we’re about to witness anything but.What follows, however, is less a broadside against French colonialism, or even against the nuclear family, than a largely personal exercise in nostalgia. Sixty years on from The Battle of Algiers, a film that exposed the horrors of France’s imperial adventures to the world, Robin Campillo’s new movie Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I hate it, so I guess Eater have succeeded.” NME’s March 1977 appraisal of the debut single by UK punk's teen sensations was direct. In his trailblazing British punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue, Mark Perry was equally forthright when contemplating “Outside View.” “Sorry lads but this single is crap,” he wrote. “It’s not even good crap, it’s just a waste of time.”Eater’s first single has become the opening track of Just Want To Be Myself: UK Punk Rock 1977–1979, a 32-track double album which almost – as some of the tracks aren’t really punk – does what its title says. Evidently, one era’s crap Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At last Yoko Ono is being acknowledged in Britain as a major avant garde artist in her own right. It has been a long wait; last year was her 90th birthday! The problem, of course, was her relationship with John Lennon and perceptions of her as the Japanese weirdo who broke up the Beatles and led Lennon astray – down a crooked path to oddball, hippy happenings.Most notorious were the Bed-ins which the couple staged in the late 1960s as a protest against the Vietnam war. At the heart of Tate Modern’s exhibition is the 1969 film BED PEACE in which we see the couple advocating peace from hotel Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was only a matter of time before Bob Marley got his own posthumous biopic, and One Love isn’t the worst you’ll see. For instance, it’s miles ahead of the Elton John flick Rocketman, and at least it’s an hour shorter than Baz Luhrmann’s bloated Elvis misfire.However, turning the life and artistry of a “soul rebel, natural mystic” into a mainstream film biography was always going to involve compromises and over-simplifications. Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (who helmed the King Richard tennis movie) has corralled a batch of screenwriters including Terence The Sopranos Winter. They’ve Read more ...