1980s
India Lewis
Last night’s Travels Over Feeling: The Music of Arthur Russell (a concert in part accompanying the recent publication of a book about his life by Richard King) was a brilliant way to honour the legacy of a fascinating, challenging, and sublime musician who, largely unrecognised in his lifetime, is now loved by many. The tribute was truly moving (reader, I cried twice), but a tonal shift towards the end, whilst enjoyed by many, was a little jarring.Starting the night, Russell’s former partner, Tom Lee, was brought onstage. Lee brought Russell’s music to a wider audience after his death from Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
By midway, things are cooking. “Can U Dig It?”, a post-modern list-song from another age (Ok, 1989), boasts a whopping guitar riff. Keys-player Adam Mole, his ushanka cap’s ear-covers flapping, leaps onto his seat, waves his synth aloft. Frontmen Graham Crabb and Mary Byker fly up’n’down the stage-front, launching airwards for chest-bumps, staccato-firing rapped lyrics about the Furry Freak Brothers, Renegade Soundwave, Bruce Lee, DJ Spinderella and, of course, how writer-magician Alan Moore “knows the score”. At the end Crabb segues briefly into an obscure sliver of Boys Own Bocca Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The name, Caron and Michelle Maso explained to Los Angeles radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, was a literal description. “We’re both like five feet. We’re all grown up, but we’re still little.”Little Girls, the band the Maso sisters formed and fronted was active in Los Angeles over 1980 to 1985. On vinyl, though, the evidence for their existence was limited. In 1981, they contributed a track to the compilation album Rodney On The ROQ Volume 2 – named after Bingenheimer and KROQ, the radio station he worked for. Two years on, there was the six-track, 12-inch EP Thank Heaven! Finally, in 1985, a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Brazzaville is on the north side of the Congo River. It is the capital of the Republic of the Congo. Kinshasa is on the south side of the Congo. It is capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly known as Zaïre. The cities face each other, about 1.5km apart, divided by the river and being in different nations.Congo Funk! - Sound Madness from the Shores of the Mighty Congo River (Kinshasa/Brazzaville 1969-1982) unites them by collecting 14 tracks demonstrating their musical fortunes were intertwined. Take the compilation’s Les Bantous De La Capitale, who were formed in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Industrious screenwriter Steven Knight has brought us (among many other things) Peaky Blinders, SAS: Rogue Heroes and even Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, but This Town may not be remembered as one of his finest hours. Here, we find Knight revisiting his Midlands background for a story that begins in 1981, during Margaret Thatcher’s first term as Prime Minister. There’s rioting on the streets, unemployment is soaring and Bobby Sands is on hunger strike in Belfast. Ska and Two Tone music are all the rage, and the soundtrack is littered with old faves like “The Tide is High”, “Pressure Drop”, “ Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a too brightly tiled Gentlemen’s public convenience (Nitin Parmar’s beautifully realised set is as much a character as any of the men we meet), a lad is shaving his head. He’s halfway to the skinhead look of the early Seventies, but he hasn’t quite nailed it – he's too young to know the detail.Another walks in, older, confident to the point of arrogance, looking not just for another man, but for this particular man-child. Handing over a pair of oxblood DMs with the garish red laces, he doesn’t just complete the boy’s outfit, he inducts him into the two worlds that he will Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dee C Lee was born Diane Sealy in London in 1961. She is best known for her 1985 hit “See the Day”, later covered by Girls Aloud, and for being in two of the Eighties' most notable pop acts, The Style Council and WHAM!. But she was also prolifically involved in multiple other musical projects, and now has a new album appearing, Just Something, her first in over 25 years.Lee’s first break came through talking her way into working with the British soul outfit Central Line, who had a couple of US club hits in 1981. From here, EMI picked her up as a session singer and, alongside Shirlie Holliman Read more ...
James Saynor
As everyone knows, the two most likeable creatures in the fictional world are the dog and the robot. Who doesn’t love a waggly tail or an aluminium cranium? So putting the two together in an animated movie looks like a Bennifer-perfect match.Robot Dreams pairs them, hand in hand, for walks in the park and rides on the subway in a bright, peppy feature that combines American optimism with mounting European angst. The film by Pablo Berger is a Spanish-French production based on a graphic novel by the American illustrator Sara Varon, and is set in a faithfully drawn New York of the 1980s, full Read more ...
graeme.thomson
In February 2001 a brain aneurysm nearly killed Karl Wallinger. It didn’t do World Party many favours either. The aftermath of devastating illness resulted in a five year hiatus for his band, followed by a gradual, tentative return. Since 2006 there have been shows in Australia and America, but no new music and no gigs on this side of the pond. Until now.Wallinger has returned to the fray with a five disc collection called Arkeology. Spanning 1984 to 2011, it contains a couple of new songs but is largely comprised of postcards from the past, written but never sent. There are demos, B-sides, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Diablo Cody’s biggest screenwriting hit was 2007’s Juno, a larky but tender story of teenage pregnancy. She’s gone back to high school for her latest, Lisa Frankenstein, which focuses on another troubled teen. This one has goth looks accessorised with an axe.With director Zelda Williams hammering home the horror, it’s a black comedy but not quite as radical as Cody’s 18-rated Jennifer’s Body (2009), in which another young woman went gorily rogue. This one stars Kathryn Newton as Lisa Swallows, who has witnessed her mother being murdered in a home invasion. Within a year, her father married a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Hilmar Oddsson’s award-winning film Driving Mum is pitch-perfect. Jon has spent the last 30 years looking after his domineering mother. There they sit, side by side, in a remote cottage on Iceland’s western fjords, knitting jumpers to sell to the neighbourhood co-op. And as they work, their skeins of wool become entwined – a gentle reminder of how inextricably enmeshed their lives have become.Now, though, Mamma is planning to die and she makes her son promise that he will take her back to her distant village for burial. But she also wants to be photographed at Gullfoss, a beauty spot famous Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The downstairs of the Whitechapel Gallery has been converted into a ballroom or, rather, a film set of a ballroom. From time to time, a couple glides briefly across the floor, dancing a perfunctory tango. And they are really hamming it up, not for the people watching them – of whom they are apparently oblivious – but for an imaginary camera.We seem either to be witnessing a film in the making or the reenactment of a well known scene from an old movie. There they are again, upstairs. This time the couple appears on screen performing the same sequence (main picture), but for a camera on a dolly Read more ...