Dont Look Back is the Ur-rockumentary, the template for hundreds of hand-held rock tour films, a source of inspiration as well as a model to aspire to.
“The Shaggs are real, pure, unaffected by outside influences. Their music is different, it is theirs alone.” So began the liner notes to Philosophy of the World, The Shaggs' sole album. Not many people read the words or heard the music when it was pressed in 1969. Only 100 copies were made. It was meant to be 1000, but a murky business deal meant the balance of 900 never showed up.
At the age of 80 Woody Allen has made his first television series. It’s for Amazon, which would suggest he knows how to move with the times. That would be a false impression, because Crisis in Six Scenes is vintage Allen in the sense that it's a museum piece starring Allen himself as yet another of his neurotic hypochondriacs. The only novelty is that it comes in the shape of half a dozen bite-sized squibs, released weekly. Lump them together and they’d amount to one of another movie.
theartsdesk meets Christine McVie on a sunny Friday afternoon in September; the Warner Brothers boardroom (with generous hospitality spread) is suitably palatial. We’re the first media interview of the day, so she’s bright and attentive. McVie was always the member of Fleetwood Mac who you’d want to adopt: the most approachably human member of a band constantly at war with itself.
Chicago’s Chess Records first made waves in the Fifties with a raft of records which included future classics integral to defining the urban slant on blues music. Early in the decade, the label issued singles by John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. They also issued Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”, one of the building blocks of rock ‘n’ roll and brought Bo Diddley to a wide audience. The pioneering label issued different styles of music, but blues defined its early days. It moved with the times though and embraced soul in the Sixties.
In 1969, the Australian band Tamam Shud improvised as a film was projected onto the wall of a recording studio. The results were heard on the Evolution album. Playing original music live to accompany a film screening isn’t commonplace these days but eyebrows are no longer raised when it happens. Pere Ubu have played along with Carnival of Souls and It Came From Outer Space. Mogwai have done the same for the documentary Atomic.
She gave us the most moving King Lear years before the news broke that Glenda Jackson would be playing the role. Only Mark Rylance has recently matched the malicious wit of her Globe Richard III. Now Kathryn Hunter spellbinds in a very Shakespearean downfall drama about the court of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie – but this time the Elect of God doesn’t actually appear in person, not literally at any rate, and the triumph is shared by everybody involved, lighting and soundscape designers included.
It could be a book, film, TV or radio piece, essay or exhibition. If it’s about or based on The Beatles, the question is always the same: how on earth can anything new be said? In the case of Ron Howard’s Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years, surprisingly quite a lot, is the answer.
The Beach Boys signed with Capitol Records on 24 May 1962. Early the next month, their first single for the label became “409”/”Surfin’ Safari”. It was not their debut release. The “Surfin'”/ “Luau” single had been issued in November 1961 by Candix.
Although Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (****) hit cinemas in summer 1970, it is a pivotal Sixties film as it depicts the era in terminal crash-and-burn mode. Cashing in on but not a sequel to Valley of the Dolls, it caught the female pop-group trio the Kelly Affair’s assimilation into and corruption by Hollywood. Renamed the Carrie Nations, they consume drugs, have ill-advised sexual liaisons and sell records by the bucketful. Good-natured singer Kelly MacNamara (Dolly Read) side-lines her boyfriend – their manager – to purse an affair with a money grubbing beefcake.