1980s
Kieron Tyler
For a teenager, a parent’s birthday party is never comfortable. As We Are the Best! opens, it’s worse than that for Bobo as she holds a torch for punk rock and her mother is determined to have a good time. It’s Stockholm in 1982 and no matter how liberal-minded the adults, Bobo cannot fit in with the forced jollity. Punk rock is supposed to be dead but for Bobo and her friend Klara, it’s the light at the end of a tunnel of stultifying conformity and frustration.We Are the Best! is the story of Bobo, Klara and their unlikely soul mate Hedvig. It’s about their assertion of individuality and how Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's rare that you can trace a genre to one man. But house music is well documented: “house” originally simply meant the music played at the Warehouse club, by one Frankie Knuckles, who died yesterday in Chicago from diabetes-related complications. Knuckles was a disciple of New York disco, who'd served his DJ apprenticeship in the city's spectacularly decadent gay bathhouses in the mid-Seventies as an understudy of Larry Levan (who would set up the Paradise Garage, which itself gave its name to another genre – garage).Seeking a club where he could have complete creative freedom, he moved to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Seeds: Raw & Alive / The Dream Syndicate: The Day Before Wine and RosesTwo live albums. Both by bands rooted in psychedelia and based in Los Angeles. Each recorded in a studio rather than on stage. One, by The Seeds, from 1968. The other, by The Dream Syndicate, from 1982. The links between these two releases – coincidentally issued a week apart – are about more than the circumstances of their creation, geography and musical style. Both bands had brushes with the mainstream and in the form captured here both proved too raw, too unstable and too wilful to last the course.As 1968 Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Last night Lloyd Cole arrived on stage with a similar suede-and-corduroy air to that of his Eighties college-rock hits. Yet something was different. Over the last few years he has developed a real gravitas. It showed in the lines on his face and gunmetal hair; and it's this depth that critics have perceived on his recent album, Standards. Yet despite the critical acclaim the old troubadour is still not happy with how he’s “ disappearing into a niche”. In fact, he says, if this tour is a flop, he might give up music altogether.Whatever concerns Cole might have about his career, he didn’t bring Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In one of the extras on the DVD release of Computer Chess, director Andrew Bujalski explains that the film came about after he realised how to marry two ideas which he had been conjuring with for a while: a then undeveloped interest in the period when computers were programmed to play chess, and a yen to make a film with vintage black-and-white video technology.An exercise then, Computer Chess is hardly about the film itself. Making it was a means to enact these ideas. It’s a knowingly meta film. It looks amazing and comes over as an authentic-seeming archive resurrection, with all who appear Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Beachwood Sparks: Desert SkiesBeachwood Sparks didn’t become Fleet Foxes, but their DNA is integral to the harmonious Seattleites. Both bands have been issued by the Sub Pop label, but after two albums Beachwood Sparks drifted apart in 2002. Fleet Foxes picked up the torch in 2008. The connection is more than a shared label and general musical preferences. It’s through the torch held for Gram Parsons's “cosmic American music” and the debt both owe to David Crosby’s 1971 solo album If I Could Only Remember my Name. Beachwood Sparks had started something – a parallel path to, but not, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hailed in some quarters as a wily and satirical retro-classic, Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess depends for its survival on threading its way through the eye of a tiny nostalgic needle. Bujalski's intention was to create a kind of hommage to the single-minded, possibly autistic computing pioneers of the early Eighties, often unsightly weirdos with hilarious hair and no clothes sense who nonetheless "saw this mountain and insisted on climbing it," as Bujalski puts it.After barely managing to sit through the first 10 minutes, in which creators of rival computer chess programs at a weekend Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Dev Hynes's path of artistic development is one of the most pleasing in 21st century music. The flamboyant black indie-kid risking life and limb to ride the local buses growing up in Hackney, who channeled his frustration at the lack of a place for him in the world through the awkward, aggro, occasionally inspiring but awfully named early 2000s electro-punk trio Test Icicles, has since then through sheer force of will carved out a space within the music world where he can be himself.Hynes clearly adores the whole aestheticHis sophisticated indie singer-songwriter guise Lightspeed Champion had Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
William Onyeabor: World Psychedelic Classics 5 – Who is William Onyeabor?A primitive drum machine rattles out a Latin rhythm. Keyboards begin. The gaps between the repetitive spirals of notes are plugged by blobs of fat synth. A disembodied yet warm voice sings “Good name is better than silver and gold. And no money, no money, no money, no money can buy good name.” The melody nods towards Kraftwerk’s “Computer World”. The music is as intense as early Marshall Jefferson and the whole suggests Tom Tom Club.William Onyeabor's “Good Name” is compelling and electrifying: minimal and Read more ...
James Williams
Walking into London’s cavernous O2 Arena for Peter Gabriel’s So 25 show last night felt like stumbling onto the set of some David Lean epic: Peter of Surrey, if you will. With a number of imposing lighting and camera rigs framing the already roomy stage, the show’s chroniclers sat perched perilously in suspended chairs with their equipment focused on the band setting up before us.If it was not already clear, last night’s concert was filmed for posterity, or more likely a DVD. To explain the situation the film’s director appeared onstage to guide the audience through the night’s proceedings. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Thirty seven years since first breaking into the public consciousness and following a period being regarded as punk’s pantomime dame, John Lydon is now finally reaping wider musical recognition and kudos. Recent times have seen a revitalisation of Public Image Ltd (albeit in the guise of a cottage industry and completely on their own terms) with extensive touring and the muscular return-to-form album, This is PiL.However, I have to admit I attended last night's show with a degree of trepidation. PiL have never been the most consistent band and I wondered if the man who used to insult hippies Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Madness: Take it or Leave itIn 1981, Madness followed The Beatles, Slade and The Sex Pistols by playing versions of themselves in a film. Take it or Leave it is no masterpiece, but it is hugely entertaining. At the time, surprisingly, a soundtrack album wasn’t issued and its belated appearance on CD plugs a gap in the story of Madness.This smart, two-disc set teams a DVD of the film with the shelved album, for which a master tape was assembled. The CD is not a live set though, collecting the rough-and-ready performances seen in the film, but assembles familiar studio recordings and Fats Read more ...