Andrew Sarris, doyen of auteurist film critics, dubbed A Hard Day’s Night “the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals”. Wild over-praise, or sly, back-handed compliment?
Do we need any more Beatles books? The answer is: that’s the wrong question. What we need is more Beatles books that are worth reading. As the musician and music historian Bob Stanley pointed out, in his 2007 review of Jonathan Gould’s Can’t Buy Me Love, probably the best biography of The Beatles to date, “the subject is pretty much inexhaustible if the writer is good enough.”
On 24th February 2022, when Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation”, life in Ukraine changed abruptly and in a brutal fashion. Soon the impact of the war was felt around the world – and not only in rising food and energy prices. Yet its repercussions in Russia were silenced or at least muffled by state censorship of the media and by the clampdown on dissent.
Leave a 78-year-old ex-Beatle locked down for long enough, and this what he comes up with: a sequel to his two previous wholly solo albums, cooked up in his Sussex home studio. The results find the once derided, “Thumbs Aloft” McCartney’s slow creative redemption nearly complete.
Ambient sounds from an imaginary rail concourse fade to a full choir in the 42 seconds of “Opening Station”, the sonic scene-setting for Macca’s new hour-long set, his first album of new songs since 2013’s New.
News just in that the vinyl soundtrack to Star Wars: The Force Awakens will feature holograms that can seen as the record is played, if a light is shone upon it. It seems that every month there’s a similarly bizarre development in the many ways that vinyl is returning to the public eye. It’s now commonplace for Graham Norton to introduce the musical guests on his TV show by waving about a vinyl copy of their new album, something unthinkable even a year ago.
Youth, AKA Martin Glover (b 1960), is a renowned music producer and bassist in the post-punk band Killing Joke. He achieved his first success with the latter in the late Seventies and has often been at the forefront of innovation and development in British music since. Having played a key role in developing their uniquely dubby, dark sound, Youth parted ways with Killing Joke in 1982 and formed Brilliant, a band that espoused an ahead-of-its-time dance musical ethos and included the involvement of both future members of the KLF.
Oh to have been a fly on the wall at the Palace. “Your Majesty, we’ve had a request from a Mr Boyle. It concerns the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games.” “I’m already opening the blessed thing, aren’t I? What else do they want?” “Ma’am, they just want you to be yourself.”
Paul and Linda McCartney: Ram (Deluxe Edition)
Jasper Rees
Come on, the cheeky title is endearing. So it’s not the Fats Waller lyric that John Lennon would have lifted onto the album cover, but Paul McCartney has often sung of frogs and little lambs, of blackbirds and bluebirds, and even at 69 is still in touch with his inner child. Never more productively than in this homage to the age of the big-band jazz standard he ingested at his father’s feet.