1960s
Judy Chicago: Revelations, Serpentine Gallery review - art designed to change the worldFriday, 31 May 2024Being a successful artist is not Judy Chicago’s primary goal. She abandoned that ambition six decades ago when the Los Angeles art world greeted her with hostility. Now she’s having the last laugh, though. At 84 she is being heaped with accolades,... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Jon Savage's The Secret Public - How The LGBTQ+ Aesthetic Shaped Pop CultureSunday, 26 May 2024Jon Savage's The Secret Public How The LGBTQ+ Aesthetic Shaped Pop Culture 1955-1979 accompanies the titular author/historian/journalist’s book of almost the same name. The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979) and... Read more... |
'I think of her as a proto-punk': documentarist Svetlana Zill on Anita PallenbergWednesday, 22 May 2024Anita Pallenberg was a vital presence in the Stones’ most vital years. Her bright eyes and hungry mouth betrayed a ferocious appetite for pleasure and adventure, taking her from a nun-schooled Rome childhood to New York’s downtown art crowd, then... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Andwella - To DreamSunday, 19 May 2024Original pressings of Love And Poetry sell for up to £2,800. Copies of the August 1969 debut album by Andwellas Dream can sometimes also be found for £700, a relative bargain in the context of the upper limit of the prices the collector’s market has... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: West Coast Consortium - All The Love In The WorldSunday, 05 May 2024West Coast Consortium’s first single was July 1967’s “Some Other Someday,” a delightful slice of Mellotron-infused harmony pop which wasn’t too far from The Ivy League’s “Funny How Love Can be” and The Rockin’ Berries’ “He’s in Town” – each of which... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The DreamersTuesday, 30 April 2024Isabelle (Eva Green) leans over, her long hair catches fire from a candle, and Matthew (Michael Pitt) devotedly snuffs it out. She doesn’t miss a beat at this real-life accident, consumed already by The Dreamers’ closed world of a Left Bank... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Congo Funk! - Sound Madness from the Shores of the Mighty Congo RiverSunday, 14 April 2024Brazzaville 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... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Happy End (Šťastný konec)Tuesday, 09 April 2024Happy End’s big draw is its central conceit, that of a convicted murderer narrating his life story backwards from the guillotine to the cradle. Made in 1967 by Oldfřich Lipský (1924-1986), renowned as a director of off-beat comedies, you wonder how... Read more... |
Ripley, Netflix review - Highsmith's horribly fascinating sociopath adrift in a sea of noirSaturday, 06 April 2024There would have to be a good reason for making another screen version of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley, already successfully adapted by Anthony Minghella in his 1999 film. One this new adaptation presumably had in mind... Read more... |
Mothers' Instinct review - 'Mad Women'Sunday, 31 March 2024This is a Nineties psycho thriller in Mad Men clothes, undermining its Sixties suburban gloss and Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain’s desperate housewives with genre clichés, yet sustained by the courage of debuting director Benoît Delhomme’s un-... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Status Quo - The Early YearsSunday, 31 March 2024“So Ends Another Life” is strange. Very strange. The song’s dolefulness is immediately set up with a strummed guitar along the lines of the intro to The Bee Gees’ “New York Mining Disaster.” “In a world of agitation, there’s no time for compassion”... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Niney The Observer Presents Lightning and Thunder!Sunday, 24 March 2024Winston 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”... Read more... |