There’s a scarily prescient scene at the start of Henry Cass’s 1950 black comedy Last Holiday, a village surgery’s waiting room crammed with coughers and wheezers.
From Tom Cruise soundtrack hit singer to self-described “pansexual, polyamorous, gender-fluid dyke”, and from LA country-punks Lone Justice to a Blakean songwriter in thrall to London’s phantom spirits, Maria McKee’s 13-year musical absence has ended in personally spectacular fashion.
The new Boomtown Rats album – their first for 36 years! – is both preposterous and rather wonderful. This is as it should be. The Irish band surfed the so-called “New Wave” after punk rock to brief chart-topping stardom. They had some cracking songs (“Rat Trap” is a gem), but were reviled by the era’s Year Zero arbiters of taste.
“I’m not your fucking friend,” intones Baxter Dury as recent single “I’m Not Your Dog” begins. As opening salvos go, it’s right up there with the best of them, full of sneering hostility and fiery intent. As an introduction, it’s a writer’s hook – pushing us away while drawing us in.
Moby is perhaps better known these days for his two ultra-candid biographies, Porcelain and Then It Fell Apart, than he is for his massive album successes of two decades ago. His memoirs are compulsive, unique windows into the screwed up life of an intellectually inquisitive, punk rock-spirited, rave nerd who accidentally, briefly experienced superstardom.
King Hu is the original master of wuxia or martial arts films – visual feasts of balletic conflict and near-slapstick humour – and this 1979 film is one of his best, though perhaps less well-known than Dragon Inn (1967), A Touch of Zen (1971) and Legend of the Mountain (1979).
Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders contains many mysteries, the main one being exactly how such a strange and subversive film could have been released in 1970, so soon after the Prague Spring. That the author on whose 1935 novel the film was based was a loyal member of the Communist Party helped, avant-garde poet Vítězslav Nezval even heading the Czechoslovak government’s Film Unit in the 1950s.
Inevitably expectations were high, given that this Chicago experimental rock band are one of my favourite groups of the 21st century, and this is their first album for seven years. And at first it’s hard to know what to make of Echo Mine. There are only three traditionally structured songs (and one of those comes in two versions), while the surrounded tracks are largely meandering minimalist instrumentals of various shades and angularity.
“Fire and Rain”. Who doesn’t recall James Taylor’s first number one 50 years ago! Born in Carolina and a “graduate” of the 1960s Greenwich Village music scene, Sweet Baby James has given the world some enduring songs and been part of some of music’s greatest scenes.