1960s
Kieron Tyler
Two of the 84 tracks on A Slight Disturbance In My Mind: The British Proto-Psychedelic Sounds of 1966 are covers of songs from Revolver. One is a rendering of “Tax Man” (sic) by a band named Loose Ends which was enterprisingly issued as a single on the same August 1966 day The Beatles’ album was released. Despite the addition to the arrangement of bongos, spiralling soul-type organ and an odd spindly guitar line it’s pretty faithful to the original and not too exciting.The other is Hertfordshire band The Mirage’s re-rendering of “Tomorrow Never Knows”, which hit record shops in December 1966 Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s almost unbearably poignant, on this black Friday evening in March 2020, to watch a documentary about Ready Steady Go! , “the most innovative rock ‘n’ roll show ever”, believes Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the second of its four directors who went on to work with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he!” – but he’s right. Nothing has surpassed it, certainly not Top of the Pops, BBC TV’s response to the programme which, based around the singles chart, eventually helped kill it.“The weekend starts here” was its (unofficial) slogan, though it wasn’t quoted in The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two years before he took on The Beatles, George Martin was working with another artiste who would go on to have success in America. Martin first encountered Matt Monro in 1960 when he signed him to the label he ran, Parlophone. The “Portrait of my Love” single charted later in the year. In summer 1961, “My Kind of Girl” hit America’s single’s charts. His 1965 version of ”Yesterday” had a Martin arrangement. The same year, Monro – born Terry Parsons – moved to America after he had been picked up by Capitol Records, which also had The Beatles on its books. Also relevant to Monro, Capitol had Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Beatles lyric that gives Mike Bartlett’s terrific play its title dates to 1967, which also happens to be the year in which the first of Bartlett’s three acts is set. What follows are two further scenes in the evolving relationship between Kenneth (Nicholas Burns) and Sandra (Rachael Stirling), set in 1990 and then 2011. By that point, their marriage has ended, only for the onetime Oxford University sweethearts to exist under siege from their two children, not least a 37-year-old daughter (Isabella Laughland) who courses with disappointment on every front (romantic, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Through previous archive releases or bootlegs, deep-digging Cream fans will already be familiar with much of what’s on Goodbye Tour – Live 1968. The legitimate 1969 album Goodbye Cream included three tracks from the 19 October 1968 Los Angeles Forum show, heard here in full. Another trio of tracks on this set, from a 4 October 1968 Oakland show, appeared on the 1972 Live Cream Volume II album. The 26 November 1968 Royal Albert Hall set has done the rounds in various forms. As for bootlegs, all the shows collected on Goodbye Tour have circulated in their complete form.What's new is Goodbye Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The titles conveyed the enthusiasm. “A Girl Named Sandoz”, “Gratefully Dead”, “Monterey”, “San Franciscan Nights” and “Yes, I am Experienced”. LSD, The Grateful Dead, Monterey Pop Festival, San Francisco and Jimi Hendrix. There they were, explicit tags confirming that The Animals’ Eric Burdon had been psychedelicised. Three years on from 1964's “House of the Rising Sun”, he was a changed man.It wasn’t unusual for British pop. Whole bands and members of outfits who had traded in edgy R&B and blues had tuned in. The Pretty Things did so. Zoot Money turned his Big Roll band into Dantalian’s Read more ...
mark.kidel
8 ½ is one of the classic films about the art of cinema. There is something about the make-believe of movies, and our buying into the dreams they foster, which suggests reflection and self-referencing, as if films offered a mirror to our inner lives and the stories we tell on the big screen. Truffaut’s La nuit américaine (Day for Night) and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard both play with this rich material in their own very distinct ways. Fellini’s film is altogether different, as it is about himself and the story describes his inner turmoil and creative stasis with great brio and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
August and September 1964 were golden months for Pye Records. The Kinks hit number one on the British charts in September with “You Really Got Me”, their third single for the label and the group’s first success following two flop 45s.Before The Kinks, the top spot was occupied by The Honeycombs’s debut single “Have I the Right?”, where catchiness and a big beat combined to make a radio- and sales-friendly smash. It was issued by Pye in June, and took a while to become a best-seller. But no matter, the label behind both singles now had more than The Searchers on its beat-era books to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When it was issued in May 1968, “Fading Yellow” attracted no attention. It couldn’t have as it was the B-side of “Mr. Poem”, Mike Batt’s poor-selling debut single. The top side was good, very 1968 and along the lines of whimsical 45s like Donovan’s “Jenifer Juniper” or Marty Wilde’s “Abergavenny” but wasn’t a hit. Relegated to the flip, “Fading Yellow” was obviously considered the least commercial of the two songs.However – as deep-digging collectors later discovered – “Fading Yellow” was the true treasure. Over three minutes 40 seconds Batt, who then worked as an A&R man at his label Read more ...
David Nice
A work of genius isn't sacred, copyrighted territory. A great film may become a play, a novel a film; the adaptation shouldn't be about fidelity, as Elena Ferrante has written about the latter case, but down to to the director "to find...the language with which to get to the truth of his film from that of the book, to put them together without one ruining the other and dissipating its force". Stage genius Ivo van Hove managed it by pairing Ingmar Bergman's most talked-about film masterpiece, Persona, with a side-work, After the Rehearsal. Paul Schoolman kills it by being both too faithful and Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dennis Hopper’s first starring role, in Night Tide from 1961, as a naïve but curious young sailor bewitched by a siren, offers a strange mirror to his role as the evil Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). If anything, he offers a preview of the bemused Jeffrey Beaumont played by Kyle McLachlan in Lynch's masterpiece. Curtis Harrington made dark and wonderful work as an independent film maker, not least in Night Tide, now released in a 4K version, along with a very well-curated collection of eight of his short films, many of them as interesting in their own way as the more Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In July 1961, the first issue of the Liverpool music paper Mersey Beat put three items on its front page. One was a surreal article by John Lennon titled Being a Short Diversion on the Dubious Origins of The Beatles. Another was a photo of Gene Vincent “at the Rialto Ballroom earlier this year, [signing] autographs for two young Liverpool beauties, Mary Larkin and Terry Shorrock.” The third was a piece on “Swinging Cilla,” “a Liverpool girl who is starting on the road to fame.” She has, readers were told, sung with The Big Three and the Hurricanes.Exactly two years after she became front page Read more ...