Now that the 40th anniversaries of 1976 and 1977 as the years which birthed punk rock have themselves become history, surveyors of rock’s rich tapestry will inevitably turn to what came next. The year 1978 and what followed punk are easy targets and, in terms of labels, post-punk is accepted as a next wave out of the traps.
You haven't lived until you've witnessed Viennese maverick H(einz) K(arl) Gruber – 75 today (3 January, publication day) – speech-singing, conducting and kazooing his way through his self-styled "pandemonium" Frankenstein!!. Composed for chansonnier and chamber ensemble or large orchestra, it's a contemporary classic nearly 40 years young.
In 1972, just 2000 copies of Bright Phoebus were pressed. Half were off-centre and unplayable. This year, the first conscientious reissue of the album hit 31 in the British album chart. Although it has been a cult favourite for the last couple of decades, the success was nonetheless surprising.
As we reach December, the year of Stephen King comes to a close with this 4K Blu-ray restoration of his very first film adaptation: Carrie. It was the first major success for Brian De Palma, Sissy Spacek and John Travolta, but how does the original high school horror hold up in the 21st century?
The title Northern Soul's Classiest Rarities Volume 6 suggests this 24-track compilation might be a rag-bag; a collection of random musical floor-sweepings which couldn’t be collected under any other heading. Not a bit of it. Instead, every contribution is a gem. Anyone into soul – Northern, or any of its forms – will get a buzz from this collection.
A nineteen-minute adaptation of “Jack Orion” took up the whole of Side Two of Cruel Sister, Pentangle’s fourth album. It's the highlight of the smart but blandly titled 115-track box set The Albums 1968–1972. Up to this point in 1970, British folk rock had not spawned anything comparable to the epic “Jack Orion”.
Jabberwocky is all the more enjoyable once you get past what it isn’t; Terry Gilliam’s 1977 directorial debut is a medieval romp starring Michael Palin and a short-lived Terry Jones, but audiences shouldn’t expect a Monty Python film.
In 1976, Polydor Records was actively considering signing the Sex Pistols. The label’s Chris Parry checked them out live in Birmingham during August. In September, he had a prime spot behind the mixing desk at the 100 Club’s punk festival from which to consider British punk rock’s figureheads. However, the band’s manager Malcolm McLaren signed them to EMI.
This is a heartbreaking week for women’s tennis. The death from cancer of Jana Novotna at only 49 evokes memories of one of Wimbledon’s more charming fairytales. Novotna was a lissome athlete who flunked what looked like her best shot at greatness, tossing away a third-set lead in the 1993 women’s final and then crumpling on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent. Five years later she eventually became the oldest first-time champion. It would make a lovely Hollywood movie.
Instead this year’s second tennis film is Battle of the Sexes. Like Borg/McEnroe, it spirits us back to the 1970s, that implausible decade of wooden rackets, big hair and (ahem) unequal pay. The story is basically true: female champ Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) led a protest walk-out from a tournament circuit which offered much greater rewards to male players, set up a breakaway women’s tour, only to face a phallocratic broadside from left field when fiftysomething former pro Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) started challenging the top women to a gender-themed play-off.
Riggs had a clown's genius for garish marketing and happily cast himself as male chauvinist pig in order to boost ticket sales. His showdown with King in a Texan jumbo-dome became a famous event which, in retrospect, looks like a sideshow with a slight absence of oomph. So to beef up the script Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty, Slumdog Millionaire) tells the parallel story of King’s discovery of her lesbianism and clandestine affair with Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough), who travels as the tour hairdresser.
Thus King is fighting a public battle but, because she’s married, she’s also involved in a private one. She's not the only one with marital troubles. Riggs is a compulsive hustler who sacrifices his own family life, and a comfortable marriage to his heiress wife Priscilla (Elisabeth Shue, who gets a tender speech in which she gives him the boot). In this telling what matters to Riggs is the buzz of chasing preposterous bets on court, taking on all-comers while tethered to dogs or goats or wearing flippers.
It’s a role which Carell inhabits with relentless gusto (although his racket play is atrocious). As King, the ever-adorable Emma Stone wears the wire-rimmed glasses and apes the loping walk, and convinces as a steely feminist with a vulnerable core. Her swing’s not bad either (though the big match is CGI’d to the hilt). Riseborough is lovely as a free spirit whose gaydar, in an intimately soft-focus salon scene, tells her Billie Jean is there for the taking.
The facts of the Billie Jean story have been fairly outrageously origamied out of shape, events dragged around, people placed where they weren’t. King’s Australian rival Margaret Court (Jessica McNamee) comes off very badly as a hatchet-faced queer-basher. This being a feelgood fist-pumping version of a complicated narrative, the ugly aftermath of King's love affair doesn’t make it into the what-happened-next blurbs. Instead Marilyn hastens to Billie Jean’s changing room before the big game to fix her hair, the way these things happen only in the movies.
If you accept that you’re being sold a simplified snapshot, Battle of the Sexes is a lot of fun. It has two directors – Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (who made Little Miss Sunshine) – perhaps to prove that, somewhere on this project, the sexes really can collaborate as equals. Of course it's a necessarily rigged story from which no man emerges with much credit. It's hard to give two hoots for Riggs's private anguish. Billie Jean's walk-on husband Larry King (Austin Stowell) is a lantern-jawed dope. Tennis impresario Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) may as well horns and a curly tail. Even foppish tennis couturier Ted Tinling (Alan Cumming, not quite the full ticket as an English toff) spouts feeble bullet-pointed bromides - “some day we will be free to be who we are” etc.
There’s an awful image of fellow pro Rosie Casals (Natalie Morales, terrific) talking to camera with a tall patronising commentator clamping his hand round the back of her neck as if she’s his chattel. And spot the briefest cameo for that famous Athena poster of the tennis girl hitching up her skirt to reveal nothing underneath. The bare-faced cheek of male chauvinism needed a damn good slap. This fantasy history administers it lightly, with wit and grace.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Battle of the Sexes
These days Peter Perrett doesn’t rely on the songs of his late Seventies/early Eighties band, The Only Ones, to hold his audience’s attention. At 65, looking and sounding healthier than he has done in years, he’s on a vital late-career creative roll. At the start of his first encore he even plays a new, unreleased song, “War Plan Red”, giving vent to fiery infuriation with global politicking, his band shadowed in ominous scarlet lighting. He may be renowned, primarily, for songs of romance and dissolution, but with lyrics such as “The so-called free world stands for evil incarnate” he clearly feels that in 2017 there’s also much else to sing about.
Perrett fronts a five-piece band consisting of his sons Jamie (guitar) and Peter Jr (bass), alongside their girlfriends Jenny Maxwell and Lauren Munisamy on backing vocals, violin and keys, with drummer Jake Woodward holding steady at the back. This is a family affair and they’re musically tight to a fault, Jamie Perrett’s lively fret-wrangling showpieces the perfect foil to his father’s stationary stage persona. Peter Perrett himself is black clad in a white shirt and Ray-ban-style shades, his hair in a classic Seventies rocker cut. His words are perfectly enunciated, that distinctive nasal voice cutting through everything. He was ever about the words.
Its starkness emphasises what an undersung master-songwriter he really is
Most of the set is drawn from Perrett’s recent album, How The West Was Won, a comeback of sorts for a man who spent chaotic decades since The Only Ones mostly mired in a dark underworld of crack and heroin. It’s a fine album and even better live. The title track is introduced with a rare and dry aside, “This song is a eulogy to a country that’s become great again.” Full of lyrical pith, the band really work its “Sweet Jane”-ish riff, and also cut loose spectacularly on “Living in My Head” with a squawling, invigorating violin vs guitar jam. The set is peppered with Perrett’s raw, self-scathing odes to his wife of many decades, Xena, and an emotive highlight is the new album’s superb “Home”. Its existential longing is simply heart-rending.
Perrett also dips into his solo back catalogue, from the better known such as “Woke Up Sticky”, which fires thought-provoking allegories off in all directions, to the more obscure “Baby, Don’t Talk” from 1994, with its cutting couplet “You ain’t learned nothing, from the cradle to the grave”. And, yes, The Only Ones are in there too, with fine versions of “The Big Sleep” and “Flaming Torch”. Surprisingly, given the song is something of a mixed blessing as it’s the only Perrett song most people know, tonight’s encore take on “Another Girl Another Planet” is a scorcher, Jamie Perrett nailing the famously tricky guitar solo with showy aplomb.
And at the evening’s very end, Perrett pushes towards the curfew on his second encore. He closes proceedings with a band-free take on The Only Ones’ “It’s The Truth”. Its very starkness emphasises what an undersung master-songwriter he really is. Given tonight’s performance it seems his return is only gathering pace.
Overleaf: Seven minute feature about Peter Perrett on Newsnight