1980s
Harry Freedman
On hearing that I had recently written a book about Leonard Cohen, someone asked me why I thought Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature rather than Cohen. Not being a Nobel prize adjudicator I couldn’t answer the question but I did agree that although Leonard Cohen is best known as a singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen was first and foremost a poet extraordinaire. One of the things that makes listening to him so compelling is that his songs are poems set to music.A hallmark of Leonard Cohen’s musical poetry is its deep spirituality. But unlike most spiritual poetry drawn it Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Madness frontman Suggs is asking the capacity crowd at the Brighton Centre if any of them are in school-age education. Quite a few are. There are actual young people here! Some are with parents (even, possibly, grandparents), but gaggles of teenagers are also in evidence on their own. They shout out. We all know what’s coming… a Madness song about school days… “Naughty boys in nasty schools, headmaster’s breaking all the rules…” And, we’re off again, jogging on the spot to perennial Eighties classic “Baggy Trousers”, a sea of shaven heads, red fez’s and porkpie hats bubbling with happy Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Back in 2013, Gina Gershon chewed up the scenery in the daytime movie House of Versace. Focusing on the murder of Gianni Versace, it was a tacky, cheap drama that knew what it was, and was all the more entertaining for it. The same can’t be said of Ridley Scott’s new drama which focuses on an equally prestigious Italian fashion house and a murder. The film masquerades as a crime drama with an impressive gloss, but it can’t mask its daytime TV mechanics. Scott’s second film in as many months, House of Gucci follows box office failure The Last Duel. Sitting somewhere between bad opera and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A persistent moan of this writer in recent years, about gigs attended by those his own age (54) and up, is that, however good the band is, the audience are stationary, staring, semi-catatonic. They don’t twitch or move, facing stage-wards earnestly, silent, as if watching Chekov at the theatre. Their joy, if it exists, is internalised, unreleased. Dancing something forgotten long ago. Such gigs are flat, disappointing, like the airless, staid classical concerts I was taken to as a boy, contemplative and half-asleep. It is, then, a blissful surprise to find Eighties synth-pop outfit OMD’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
One of the most interesting tracks on Essiebons Special 1973–1984 Ghana Music Power House is Joe Meah’s mysterious "Dee Mmaa Pe". It’s not mentioned in the compilation’s accompanying booklet, and Joe Meah doesn’t figure in any of the standard discographies littering the world-wide web.Despite this inscrutability, Essiebons Special’s second cut has a surprisingly familiar touchstone. Mainly instrumental with stabbing brass, a sax solo and odd vocal interjections it has a shuffling soul vibe. But the keyboard part dominates. What’s played nods so overtly to The Doors’s “Light my Fire” that it’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Amid the spume of insults at the close of the song “The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle” by Malcolm McLaren’s Rotten-less, end-game version of the Sex Pistols, Rod Stewart is a prime target. Sandwiched between abuse for David Bowie and Elton John, Rod is accused of having “a luggage label tied to his tonsils”. It’s hardly a cutting verbal blow but the point is he’s amongst those the Pistols were supposedly rendering irrelevant. Over four decades later, though, his musical output remains relatively prolific and his albums massive hits. This new one will be. A terrifying thought as it contains many Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Sun Shines Here - The Roots Of Indie-Pop 1980-1984 is three-CD set in a clamshell box with 74 tracks. The opener is “Better Scream”, January 1980’s debut single from Wah Heat! The closing track was issued in November 1984: The Jesus And Mary Chain’s first single “Upside Down”. In between: Mo-Dettes, The Monochrome Set, Microdisney and Marine Girls. Lori & The Chameleons, Ludus, The Loft and The Lines too. There’re also the pre-fame Pulp, Prefab Sprout, Hurrah! and lesser-knowns like Junes Brides offshoot The Ringing and The Page Boys, who spawned 1000 Violins.The Sun Shines Here is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Along with Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis is a key figure in the development of - to be loosely colloquial about it – trance and chill-out electronica. His 1970s work was proggy trip music, laced with classical aspirations that later came into their own. Artists from Sven Väth to Air to Enigma owe him a debt, as do those involved in the current boom in soothing electro-classical sounds. His output over the decades has teetered between overblown orchestration and ear-pleasing, pulsing synth symphonies. Happily, on Juno to Jupiter, the balance is mostly likeable.Of Vangelis’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When The Specials returned with their chart-topping 2019 album Encore, it was a wonderful surprise. As well as being their first in nearly four decades (excluding material by alternately named intermediary incarnations), it proved they were more than an endlessly touring heritage night out for ageing rude boys. Critics of their reappearance on the tour circuit claimed they were washed up without the band’s original driving force, Jerry Dammers. Encore, full of musical pep and socially conscious vim, proved this was not the case. Protest Songs 1924 – 2012 is an apt sequel.With the band now Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s a lot of going back to the future in theatres just now - shows (like this one) postponed by 18 months or so and delayed still further by co-star Roger Bart being indisposed on press night are bringing the bright lights back to the West End. Once you read all the Covid advice sent in advance (is there an way of making it a bit less intimidating, as it’s never quite the expected blizzard of certificates and glowing QR codes on the door), we’re back to, if not quite 26 October 1985, then 26 October 2019 - and doesn’t that feel good!Doc Brown has pimped up his DeLorean with his time- Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Incredibly it’s now 40 years since the release of Duran Duran’s debut album. To mark this event, the remaining members of the band’s classic line-up decided to return to Birmingham. Not to the NIA or any similar-sized venue, but for a couple of intimate gigs at the city’s O2 Institute. Fortunately, “intimate” didn’t mean getting out the acoustic guitars for rounds of their greatest hits but it was nevertheless quite a shock to see these megastars playing a room that holds 1,500 on a good day and must be little more than 30 metres from the stage to the back wall.In keeping with the premise of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Following the death last year from COVID-19 of keyboard player Dave Greenfield, it appears the The Stranglers’ five decade journey may finally be drawing to a close. They bucked all odds by maintaining a path after singer Hugh Cornwall left in 1990, and the last two decades, especially, have seen them hold steady, both as a live draw and with critically respected albums. Dark Matters, their eighteenth, is a decently wrought, sometimes elegiac conclusion to a career that’s taken them from pre-punk to post-everything.Eight of the 11 songs were recorded before Greenfield’s death but the single “ Read more ...