music industry
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Pulling together a music documentary strikes me as a simple enough concept. Gather your talking heads in front of a nice enough backdrop, splice with archive footage in some semblance of a narrative order and there you go. There’s no need to, say, hire a minibus and attempt to recreate a near-mythological gig from 20 years ago. Especially if that gig happened in France.While taking his protagonists on the physical journey from Scotland to Mauron in the north west of France, director Niall McCann takes them on an emotional journey, too: from the close-knit friendships and fertile new music Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dont Look Back is the Ur-rockumentary, the template for hundreds of hand-held rock tour films, a source of inspiration as well as a model to aspire to.When director DA Pennebaker went on the road with Bob Dylan as he played a number of English gigs in 1965, he was intending to make a concert film. The backstage, limo and hotel room material was imagined as filler. But something unexpected happened: Dylan and his entourage, not least his constant companion road manager Bob Neuwirth, realised very soon that the performance didn’t end as the protest singer stepped out of the spotlight, high on Read more ...
Barney Harsent
You can almost hear the words ringing out in the dramatic pauses. “We should call it Vinyl. Like, y’know... when you could hold music in your hand... touch it... FEEL it. When it was really WORTH something. The Seventies – that was when music had real value, when you had an album and it was like a book – something to treasure...” I’m not sure whether it would have been Martin Scorsese or Mick Jagger who said it, but at some point during the supposed 20-year genesis of this New York-based music biz drama, one of them did. Definitely.Vinyl, however, as the show’s near two-hour pilot ably Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Australia has long been a country shaped by its arrivals and, as this BBC4 documentary set out to show, so it was with rock music. Using the twin journeys of the Albert family from Switzerland and the Youngs from Scotland, it went on to map out the particular path that would eventually lead AC/DC on to global domination. The Youngs, you see, included guitarists Angus, Malcolm and George.The pairing of these opposites – the refined Alberts from Switzerland, who set up a music company that had been established for more than a generation by the time rough and ready Youngs arrived from Glasgow – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was 20 years ago that Mick Jagger suggested to Martin Scorsese that they should make a film "that spanned four decades of the world of music in New York City". The idea has finally come to fruition as Vinyl, HBO's new 10-part series that kicks off on Sky Atlantic on Monday 15 February.The two-hour pilot show is directed by Scorsese and co-written by Terence Winter, who has previously worked with the director on Boardwalk Empire and The Wolf of Wall Street. It's a riotous ride through 1973 New York, a city then awash in debt, crime and sleaze, but also a seething musical melting-pot of punk Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The nature of Europe, its administration, institutions and its porousness are hot topics. Sectors of Britain’s media and political class hyperventilate over trumped-up concerns while real issues which are just about impossible to address remain unresolved. In this climate, the European Border Breakers Awards are ripe for misinterpretation. Instead of being for those devising the shrewdest ways to slip in and out of countries, they are an annual European Union-sponsored award presented to pop musicians achieving success beyond their own borders.There are rules in this contest, one which no one Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
So the feasibility study for the new concert hall – The Centre for Music – has finally surfaced, a little later than planned. It’s being greeted, generally speaking, as if it’s to be the next London Olympics. “A global beacon,” declares the Evening Standard... Nicholas Hytner (he who said that building the Southbank Centre extension would spoil the view from his National Theatre) compares it to Tate Modern, which he says enlarged audiences for other visual arts rather than taking them away. This should, he says, be “a Tate Modern for music”.Having written more times than I can count that it’s Read more ...
mark.kidel
Few rock managers deserve a full-length documentary as much as Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, who breathed life and inspiration into a lively young Mod group the High Numbers, and transformed them into The Who.They were an unlikely duo – a partnership which reflected the class-busting mood of London in the 1960s. Lambert was brilliant, cosmopolitan and gay: he had been to public school and Oxford, and his father was the composer Constant Lambert. Stamp was the son of a Thames tugboat captain, a cockney chancer with a sharp intelligence and a great deal of ambition.In a fast-cut, restless Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Always desperately seeking the next profit-boosting lifeline, the record industry is getting all worked up about the "vinyl revival". While sales of CDs and downloads have been falling, those shiny black circles, once believed defunct, have been enjoying an upward surge. Tesco has even taken the bizarre decision to stock a triple LP by Iron Maiden.Don't get too excited, though. Vinyl apparently now makes up about three per cent of UK record sales, and while this is clearly an improvement on the 0.1 per cent share vinyl dwindled to in 2007, we're not looking at the imminent death of Spotify Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Most three-act movies include a scene in which the protagonist and his or her intimates are at their happiest – a state of affairs that can’t last. Oren Moverman and Michael A Lerner, the writers of the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, lit upon an organic – in fact, magical – way of encapsulating the effect of Wilson’s genius on the other Beach Boys.It comes when the 24-year-old Wilson (Paul Dano) steers his bandmates into finding the exact blend of harmonies needed for “Good Vibrations” one day in 1966. Even the song’s lyricist Mike Love (Jake Abel), a surf pop conservative who’d Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
For women making music, it’s probably a tough call to decide on what is more tedious: being asked what it’s like being a girl in a band, or being grouped with other female musicians, regardless of genre, for magazine features and documentaries on Women in Rock. Girl in a Band – which, like Kim Gordon’s recent memoir, wears its title as a wink to the first – is a little too much of the second, although still has plenty of interesting things to say.Kate Mossman, the New Statesman’s arts editor, put together an impressive selection of interview subjects from Carol Kaye, a former jazz Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
If you liked the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, with its Dave Van Ronk-esque hero in Greenwich Village in 1961, you'll enjoy the new exhibition Folk City: New York and the Folk Music Revival, a celebration of NYC as the centre of folk music from its beginnings in the Thirties and Forties to its heyday in the Fifties and Sixties. It's at the Museum of the City of New York, far uptown at 103rd Street in east Harlem, a block or two from Duffy's Hill, the steepest in New York and the scene of many cable-car accidents in the 19th century. The kind of thing Peter, Paul and Mary might have Read more ...