1970s
Kieron Tyler
“The Method” by The Method Actors was issued as the top side of a single in July 1981. Although recorded in London during September 1980 and only released by a British label, the band – a duo of guitar/vocals and drums/vocals – were from Athens, Georgia.It didn’t get much attention at the time but its wandering guitar figure, blurry, hard to parse vocals, splashy drums and unyielding forward motion bear a striking resemblance to the early R.E.M., whose first single “Radio Free Europe” was also in shops in July 1981. The shops where they came from – which also happened to be Georgia.Chicken Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What’s in the groove isn’t necessarily the end of the story. Sound is fixed into a record when it’s pressed. Get it revolving on a turntable, dump the needle onto it and what’s heard is what’s intended to be heard. It’s fixed. Nonetheless, DJs realised a record can be part of the route to something else, something which becomes their creation.Saturno 2000 - La Rebajada de Los Sonideros 1962-1983 celebrates a previously obscure form of sonic manipulation. In Mexico, DJs were playing records at a lower rpm than the standard 33 1/3 or 45 bringing their tempo down to make them more easy to dance Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fat Man’s Music Festival. The Haystack. Red Line Explosion. Stormy Petrel. Butterwick. Sweet Chariot. Names which don't immediately spring to mind.The factor linking them is also common to 1967’s “Let’s go to San Francisco” hit-makers The Flower Pot Men, The First Class, who charted in 1974 with “Beach Baby,” and The Ivy League, who went Top Ten in early 1965 with “Funny How Love Can be.”Then, there are well-known songs like “Hip Hip Hooray,” “Knock Knock Who’s There,” “My Sentimental Friend” and “Winchester Cathedral” which, respectively, were hits for The Troggs, Mary Hopkin, Herman’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It was going to be great. Birmingham’s Digbeth Rag Market was hosting 1977’s highest-profile punk festival on 17 July. The Clash were headlining. Also billed were The Heartbreakers, Rich Kids, The Saints, Shagnasty, Stinky Toys, Subway Sect and Tanya Hyde & the Tormentors.Two days before it was meant to happen, the city council cancelled it. A gathering of punks was prevented. Even so, The Clash and the less-lauded Shagnasty came to town and after meeting pissed-off ticket holders went to local venue Barbarella’s to put on an impromptu show. They used equipment borrowed from the band Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It’s not hard to see, watching Tom Fool at the Orange Tree Theatre, why Franz Xaver Kroetz is one of Germany’s most staged playwrights.Born in Munich in 1946, he’s known for unflinching portrayals of poverty and what it does to people. Directed sensitively by Diyan Zora, this production is a masterclass in what critic Richard Gilman dubbed “the theatre of the inarticulate” – but it does leave us yearning for a little more depth.The inarticulate in this case are the Meier family, of 1970s Bavaria. Martha (Anna Francolini) looks after the home while her husband Otto (Michael Shaeffer, pictured Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Aldous Harding is one of those artists who has you scrambling for Shazam. You might not know the Kiwi singer, but when you hear her music there’s a sudden urgent need to find a place for it in your life.In her fourth studio album Warm Chris, there are all kinds of songs –strong, delicate, eccentric and plain indecipherable. But there’s an alluring warmth to all of them, and an offbeat sense of fun that keeps you listening. Her songs are strange little worlds you get lost in without quite knowing why. She invites you for a moment, into these intricately constructed places, to poke Read more ...
Sarah Kent
How do you make a film about death, love and loss that avoids being sentimental, maudlin or pretentious? Take your cue from Portuguese artist Catarina Vasconcelos.Her debut feature, The Metamorphosis of Birds unfolds as a series of exquisite vignettes. Each frame is a masterpiece composed with the beauty and exactitude of a Dutch still life. Meanwhile, on voice over, we are treated to a poetic meditation on grief.In close-up, we see her grandfather Henrique (José Manuel Mendes) telling his dead wife Beatriz that he has sold the house and moved to an old people’s home. He needs to set himself Read more ...
Tom Teodorczuk
"Get into the scene late and get out early." So wrote David Mamet in his 1992 book On Directing Film, and Southwark Playhouse, among London's most charmingly eclectic theatres, has delved very early into Mamet's canon, reviving his 1977 play The Woods – a two-hander not seen in London since 1996. While the play revolves around a dynamic that is hardly obscure – man and woman's ultimate incompatibility – a spirited production can't disguise why we will see plenty more of American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross before this Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Don Letts, the film director, musician and DJ responsible for so many of the iconic images of punk and reggae artists, executive produced this documentary portrait. The result is a warm and generous chronicle that occasionally veers on the hagiographic side. But Letts has led such a dynamic life that the lack of any critical voices is forgivable, especially when there’s a wealth of great archive (much of it from Letts’ own collection) and good anecdotes from the likes of Mick Jones, John Lydon and Daddy G.Born in Brixton to parents who had come over from Jamaica in the mid ‘50s to work on the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The death of U-Roy was announced on 17 February 2021. A year on, the reappearance of his oft-reissued 1971 debut album Version Galore brings the opportunity to celebrate the music which brought him his earliest success; the music which propelled him into Jamaica’s top ranks.U-Roy – born Euwart Beckford – had been testing his skills as a DJ since the early Sixties. His initial inspiration was Count Macuki who, from the late Fifties, had performed with Tom Wong’s and Clement Dodds’s sound systems. U-Roy passed through Wong’s, Sir George The Atomic’s and Dodds’s set-ups before he came to King Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Wind the clock back 45 years and the Big Apple was bankrupt, the lights had gone out and many native New Yorkers were packing their bags. Gangs controlled whole neighbourhoods, drugs were the currency of choice and, for a kid with no college, prospects were strictly limited. The movie Saturday Night Fever captured this social decay, illustrating the crisis of confidence that suffused so many big Western cities.In faraway England, the nihilism of punk was leaning into the "no future" narrative, but suddenly, here over the ocean was Tony Manero, this strutting master of the universe, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For America’s oldies radio stations Sammi Smith will forever be about “Help me Make it Through the Night”. In 1970, she was the first singer to pick up on the Kris Kristofferson song. Her version took it into the US Top Ten.Although “Help me Make it Through the Night” was an important calling card for Kristofferson with mainstream America, Smith never again figured strongly on the mainstream charts though she remained and had been a regular on the country listings since 1968. As is made clear by a new collection aimed at more that the country audience, she was a singular artist.Last summer, " Read more ...