1980s
Reissue CDs Weekly: Killing Joke, Motown, Bob Marley, The WinkiesSunday, 28 April 2013
Killing Joke: The Singles Collection 1979-2012Killing Joke were one of the most singular British bands to emerge in wake of punk. Their metal-edged, tribal stomp didn’t fit in with anything else going on at the time. Collecting 33 tracks from their... Read more... |
DVD: Dead HeadFriday, 19 April 2013
British film noir followed two courses in the 1980s. Whereas the American neo-noir revival of the 1970s prompted such contemporary crime thrillers as The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa, and Stormy Monday, three superior BBC drama serials, though... Read more... |
CD: Ian McCulloch – Holy GhostsWednesday, 17 April 2013
When I suggested reviewing Ian McCulloch's new album, our glorious editor was under the impression that it was just a live collection of ancient tracks. It is actually a double album – mainly old Bunnymen beauties on the self-explanatory Orchestral... Read more... |
Evil DeadTuesday, 16 April 2013
Down in the cellar where the monsters were in Sam Raimi’s 1982 debut The Evil Dead, you glimpsed a poster for Wes Craven’s 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes, ripped symbolically in half. The bar for gruelling low-budget horror, Raimi was saying, had... Read more... |
PunksNotDead/DuoTaskingFriday, 12 April 2013
The bassline starts, "1979" flashes up on screen and, over a scratchy recording, the voice intones "Walking down the street, I get punched; you're walking down the street, you get punched".PunksNotDead's not going to hold your attention for more... Read more... |
CD: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs - MosquitoWednesday, 10 April 2013
On hearing the opening track of this album, a friend said “I didn't expect to be listening to new albums of the YYYs 10 years on!” And this is kind of understandable: of all the new rock bands of the early 2000s – The Strokes, The Vines, The Hives,... Read more... |
Thatcher: The Sound and the FuryTuesday, 09 April 2013
The political legacy of Margaret Thatcher is being sifted and analysed all over the world. But what of the music she left behind? The first and only female Prime Minister had barely a cultural bone in her body, but on her watch a young generation of... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Simple Minds, Klaus Dinger, The Primitives, Transvision VampSunday, 31 March 2013
Simple Minds: Celebrate – The Greatest Hits +Of all the bands which surfaced in 1977 in response to punk, Simple Minds occupy a singular status. Despite line-up changes, they have never split up. After their 1982 success with “Promised You a Miracle... Read more... |
Nile Rodgers: The Hitmaker, BBC FourSaturday, 30 March 2013
It was one of those entirely unverifiable "facts" that music documentaries increasingly prefer over genuine insight: early on in this serviceable but routine overview of a truly stellar talent, we were told that Nile Rodgers’s guitar has “played on... Read more... |
Mari Wilson, The Komedia, BrightonMonday, 25 March 2013
Long before Amy Winehouse, there was a north London retro soul'n'jazz girl with a beehive hairdo making inroads into the Top 40. However, after a short run of hits in the early Eighties Mari Wilson never achieved the epic popularity of her dark-... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Nick RhodesSaturday, 23 March 2013
Nick Rhodes (b 1962) is a founding member of the group Duran Duran. Their synthesizer player and driving force, he is the sole member to have been in every incarnation of the band. Duran Duran started in Birmingham in 1978 when Rhodes was only 16, a... Read more... |
The Challenger, BBC TwoTuesday, 19 March 2013
When the NASA space shuttle Challenger fell out of the Florida sky on the morning of 28 January 1986 after 73 seconds, killing all seven astronauts, the Nobel-winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was the only independent scientist appointed... Read more... |
