1980s
Kieron Tyler
Open-mouthed incredulity is a reasonable reaction to this 2012 documentary on one of the UK’s prime punk-spawned bands, available on catch-up via streaming service Now TV’s tie-in with Sky Arts. There’s not much “rise” but there’s an awful lot of “fall” in The Rise and Fall of The Clash.After coalescing between April and June 1976 in the slipstream of the Sex Pistols, The Clash fell apart in November 1985. The end came at the same time as the release of what became their final album, Cut The Crap. Reviewing it for the music weekly Melody Maker, Adam Sweeting said “Guess what? It’s CRAP! And Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“An exercise in bizarre mixtures, combining the bleak acid hangover of half-hearted Velvet Underground impersonators with muted razzmatazz: a long and rather stylish joke.”The April 1980 New Musical Express review of The Monochrome Set’s debut album wasn’t entirely favourable but it captured the difficulty of getting to grips with the band. A combination of raised-eyebrow archness and dolefulness confirmed the band was setting-out its own path. Further confirmation of their slipperiness came in October 1980 when a second album was released.Strange Boutique, the debut, and its follow-up Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
ZZ Top always seemed like a Texan version of Status Quo. It turns out, from watching this entertaining but hardly revelatory documentary, that is kind of what they are. Directed by Canadian Sam Dunn, best known for his 2005 documentary, Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, the film follows Dusty Hill, Billy Gibbons and Frank Beard as they go from Hicksville also-rans to global megastars, while hardly changing their bar room blues boogie a jot.The hour-and-a-half documentary is good on their convoluted beginnings, clearly laying out their stints in various wannabe-Beatles/Stones 1960s outfits, with Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The talk is of an “economy in ruin [with] unemployment through the roof”: a précis of Britain in lockdown? In fact, this is one of the many eerily apposite remarks to be found in Wonderland, the Beth Steel drama set in the early 1980s that marks the second in the Hampstead Theatre’s sequence of three productions streamed across as many weeks: Howard Brenton’s Drawing the Line comes next, and last.And what a pleasure it is to be reacquainted with the muscular drama – the author’s second-ever play – that brought Steel a 2014 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright. The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For the duration of this C19 Lockdown, rather than the usual sprawling monthly epic, theartsdesk on Vinyl will be presented regularly in bite-sized editions, roving across the pile of releases we have already, since those incoming have been whittled down a trickle. Welcome, then, to a cross edition of plastic ranging from the beautiful to the bizarre. Dive in!Napalm Death Logic Ravaged by Brute Force/White Kross (Century Media)Great title. You don’t get titles like that with Dua Lipa! Five years after their last album, Apex Predator – Easy Meat, the Midlands’ perennial politico noise-riff Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A raga-rock circularity. Finger cymbals. A distant, etiolated female vocal. A fuggy atmosphere. A kinship with Jefferson Airplane’s “Come Up The Years”, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” and The Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. Hangman’s Beautiful Daughters' “Love is Blue” is a beautiful, haunting recording.The band’s “Outta My Head” is as great, but is taken at a faster tempo and along the lines of US Sixties psych-garage rockers The Neighb'rhood Childr'n or “Don't Cry Your Tears”, the 1981 single by Edinburgh band The Delmontes.“Outta My Head” and “Love is Blue” are Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Let’s talk about “Blinding Lights”. What a sleek single, like an escapee from the acclaimed soundtrack to the film Drive, a polished riff on mid-Eighties synth-pop, ripe for 21st century dancefloors, one of the songs of the year so far, all topped off with the crystal falsetto of Abel Tesfaye, AKA The Weeknd. Is his new album, then, full of other treats that similarly step sideways from his trademark electro-warped hip Los Angeleno R&B, or is it business as (un)usual? The answer is that it’s a bit of both.The Canadian star has worked with everyone from Kanye West to Ed Sheeran to Kendrick Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The new Boomtown Rats album – their first for 36 years! – is both preposterous and rather wonderful. This is as it should be. The Irish band surfed the so-called “New Wave” after punk rock to brief chart-topping stardom. They had some cracking songs (“Rat Trap” is a gem), but were reviled by the era’s Year Zero arbiters of taste. This was because they were clearly a Stones-ish R&B unit who’d jumped the bandwagon, the outrageous mugging of frontman Bob Geldof sealing the deal. That, however, is all ancient history and they return with a set that’s as goofy as it is contagious, clearly Read more ...
Owen Richards
Think of the phrase “music memoir”, and you might conjure images of wild nights and heavy mornings. You’re unlikely to think of suburban West Bromwich and tributes to Mike Batt’s Wombles back catalogue. But then, Pete Paphides’s story is comprised of unlikelihoods. What were the chances of one of the country’s leading music critics being the mute son of Greek Cypriot chip shop owners? Broken Greek tracks Paphides’s childhood from four to thirteen. In his early days, he was selectively mute to everyone outside of his family for reasons not quite clear to anyone, including himself. It was Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Roland Orzabal, co-founder and lead guitarist of Tears for Fears, laughs to himself often during this documentary — the latest in the BBC’s often-excellent, always-forensic Classic Albums series. “I agree, I agree, it sounds great,” says Orzabal. He’s listening to “Shout,” the band’s 1984 Billboard No. 1 hit. “There’s something about it,” he chuckles, “I believed it.” The documentary focuses on Orzabal and Curt Smith, Tears for Fears’ founders and frontmen, and the development of their album-topping record Songs From The Big Chair (1985). It tells the somewhat unlikely tale of how a cathartic Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Huey Lewis and the News were an unlikely mid-Eighties phenomenon. Their Sports album was a mega-success for a band already approaching early middle age. Their Fifties feel, given a contemporary polish and boosted by association with cinematic juggernaut Back to the Future, sat comfortably (yet incongruously) alongside the likes of Madonna and Duran Duran. They were, however, always shorthand for middle-of-the-road, their appeal satirized by Brett Easton Ellis who made them a favourite of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. It should, then, come as no surprise that their latest album is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
10 years ago, a wave of exciting femme-pop was cresting, women taking the reins with singular visions; the results were shiny, personally honest, inventive and ebullient, from Gaga to Adele and beyond. A leading light was La Roux, a duo fronted by the androgynous Elly Jackson. She looked different, a bit Bowie, and the music was a fantastically catchy reimagining of Eighties synth-pop. They had monster hits with “In for the Kill’ and “Bulletproof” but Jackson’s career since has swerved about somewhat. Her return is much-anticipated. Unfortunately her third album, while bubbling with bounce, Read more ...