1960s
Kieron Tyler
Speaking to America’s Hit Parader magazine in August 1967, Frank Zappa said “If you want to learn how to play guitar, listen to Wes Montgomery.” The article was titled My Favorite Records and the head Mother was being featured shortly after the release of Absolutely Free, the second Mothers Of Invention album. Montgomery was in good company. Zappa also namechecked Bartok, Pierre Boulez, conductor Robert Craft, Stockhausen, Stravinsky, Cecil Taylor and Anton Webern. No pop was mentioned.At this point, Montgomery had just released the A Day In The Life album on A&M. It featured covers of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Released in 1970, David Greene’s I Start Counting is as much an examination of childhood innocence as a psychological thriller. Fans of 1960s architecture will also find plenty to enjoy - never has Bracknell looked so good on film, with starring roles given to the town’s Point Royal flats and St Joseph’s Church. Adapted from Audrey Erskine Lindop’s novel, the plot reads like a Home Counties retread of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Here, 15-year-old Wynne (Jenny Agutter, in an early starring role), has a crush on her older stepbrother George (Bryan Marshall), who she comes to suspect of being Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Viscaynes ought to have been a footnote. A minor footnote. From Vallejo in north California, they were one amongst many early Sixties vocal groups giving it a shot. Some were lucky and had hits. The Earls, The Impalas and Randy & The Rainbows did. Like The Marcels, who charted with “Blue Moon”, they were all rooted in the doo wop sound. Despite their three singles – including the Marcels referencing “Yellow Moon” – The Viscaynes did not break through to national success.Nonetheless, Yellow Moon – The Complete Recordings 1961–1962 is a meticulous 19-track compilation dedicated to what Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On 31 December 1966, the Daily Mail's Virginia Ironside got to grips with a new trend in pop music. Under the heading “The bleeps take over”, Jimmy Hendrix (sic) The Move and The Pink Floyd were gathered together as purveyors of something The Who had started with “feedback, violence, ripping strings from their guitars.” “New groups,” it was said “are taking it farther and farther out. Tra-la-la has been ousted by bleep, squeak pee-oing and whee.” Ironside acknowledged that her article’s hyperbolic description of The Pink Floyd came across as “trendy psychedelic nonsense.” But whatever the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
One of the sadnesses of covid is that films like Judas and the Black Messiah have been held over for release in the hope that cinemas will reopen. Immersive, intense features like this deserve to be seen in a darkened theatre with no distractions. But as the pandemic drags on in the UK, distributors are forced to debut big films on the small screen and it’s a real shame in this instance. Writer-director Shaka King tells the true story of two young men whose fates intertwined in the civil rights movement in Chicago in 1969. Daniel Kaluuya plays Fred Hampton, the charismatic Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Joseph Andras wastes no time. “Not a proud and forthright rain, no. A stingy rain. Mean. Playing dirty.” This is how his debut novel kicks off, and it’s a fitting start for his retelling of the arrest, torture, one-day trial and subsequent execution of Fernand Iveton, the only Algerian-born European (or “pied-noir”) to have been subject to the death penalty during the conflict. It remains one of the most ignominious episodes of the Algerian War of Independence. Ignominious but largely forgotten. Iveton’s case received attention from the likes of Simone Beauvoir, Sartre and Camus, a “pied Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sure, Roald Dahl wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but is that any excuse for a film quite so saccharine? He of all challenging and complex men, with a temperament to match, seems an odd subject for the sort of weightless, paint-by-numbers biopic that would be hard-pressed to muster much attention even as TV filler on a particularly dead night.As it is, made for the screen on what would appear to be astonishingly modest means (let's just say that Hollywood has rarely looked less convincing), this reckoning of Dahl's stormy first marriage to the Oscar-winning American actress Patricia Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Dorian Benediction” begins with a muted organ and spectral chorale. Minimal drums, an electric piano, vibes, melancholy saxophone and a jazzy solo guitar fill out the picture. Over its four-and-a-half minutes, the atmosphere is haunted and haunting. This is music which appears to have seeped from the walls of a baroque church. It’s the final track of The Free Design’s third album, 1969’s Heaven / Earth.“An Elegy” is more direct but still as mysterious. It’s also jazzy and strings colour the arrangement, but there’s an epic quality as the song moves though a series of crescendos. This time, Read more ...
Richard Bratby
A darkened stage; a pool of light; a solitary figure. And then, flooding the whole thing with meaning, music – even it’s just a soft chord on a piano. It’s no secret to any opera goer that even the barest outlines of a staging can magnify the dramatic potential of a piece of music to a point when it can seem like a completely new work. And if – like English Touring Opera’s director James Conway – you’ve spent much of the 21st century creating large-scale drama in small venues with minimal resources; well, it all starts to look deceptively easy. Conway makes a pairing of two song cycles by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The First Generation 1965–1974 is a 35-CD box set dedicated to the blues maven and propagator John Mayall. As well as the discs, there are three books: one a hardback, another reproducing fan club material, and the third a facsimile of the press pack for his first album. Also included are two posters and a signed photograph of Mayall. Five thousand copies have been made. As it sells for £275, the 3.8 kilogram The First Generation will not be a casual purchase.What’s encompassed by The First Generation is not the well-defined narrative of a standard band or musician. Mayall’s Sixties band Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When the concept album first properly took flight, in the late 1960s, before it became slave to the bloated artifice of prog-rock, it was an extension of the LSD-soaked times: “Songs aren’t big enough, man, I need a bigger canvas!” Famed albums by The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Kinks and The Pretty Things sum up this golden period. The second album from singer-songwriter James Wallace’s Skyway Man persona is a psychedelic concept piece, but in line with this wide-eyed period, rather than crap by Yes and the like. Wallace’s psychonaut indie ruminations are, thus, loaded with opaque visionary Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Veteran Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky has gone back to his beginnings for his latest film. The real-life events on which Dear Comrades! is based took place in June 1962, when social unrest over rising prices saw strikes break out in Novocherkassk, an industrial town in Russia’s south, culminating in street protest against the Soviet regime. The very idea of such an uprising was, of course, anathema in the “workers’ paradise” that was the communist system, and it was brutally suppressed by the Kremlin. The extent of the casualties was concealed, the dead secretly buried, and the events Read more ...