Daily Mail, 11.5.15 Some boys collect train numbers, others have stamp albums. But for Keith Sivyer, as with many boys of his generation – including, I confess, this one – the great hobby was records. As a schoolboy I couldn’t afford to buy many, but those that I did get became treasured objects, their sleeves… Continue reading…
2011 “John…” says Sir George Martin measuring his words, “hated his voice. When we were recording he was always asking me to distort and disguise it by putting different sorts of echo on it. In that way when he heard it through his headphones in the studio he could forget that he was listening to… Continue reading…
Back in the Seventies film producer David Puttnam asked me to go and see a young, hitherto unknown actor playing Jesus in the show Godspell, which was a surprise hit in London’s West End at the time. The actor’s name was David Essex, and he was, Puttnam was convinced, perfect for the film we were… Continue reading…
The Radio Times, December 1982 When the Everly Brothers had their first hits in the late 50s they were both barely more than boys, and the sound of those two late adolescents harmonising about sorrow, pain and the hurts of teenage love, was imprinted on the memories of a generation. So when I finally met… Continue reading…
The Sunday Times, January 1980 David Attenborough has done an awful lot to make copulation respectable during the past quarter of a century. For years now he has been showing us film of all manner of creatures great and small caught in that most intimate of acts, and never a whisper of complaint has there… Continue reading…
The Sunday Times, January 1980 It seems to me that you never meet your heroes on equal terms – not even at tea-time in the Texas Pancake House in Charing Cross Road where Tom Stoppard and I deliberated together over the nutritious merits of a Shiloh as opposed to a Louisiana Lemon and eventually settled… Continue reading…
Sam Phillips Plus Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison (Radio Times, September 1973) “Until rock and roll music came along the grossest of all racial discrimination in America was in music. You had pop music – which was for a certain type of people; you had country and western music, which was supposedly for… Continue reading…
Evening Standard, February 1973 The singularly most interesting aspect of the development of pop in the last couple of years has had less to do with the music being played than with the presentation of that music. And when it comes to stage acts Bowie is both the best and the most original. Where Mick… Continue reading…
London Evening Standard, July 1972 An interesting new film which has unfortunately been much critically overlooked is now approaching the end of its run at the Brixton Classic. It is The Harder They Come. The choice of such a venue for the first British showing of the movie was no accident, because this is the first… Continue reading…
Evening Standard, February 1972 Marc Bolan of the group T. Rex is the one super pop hero to have emerged in the vacuum left by the dissolution of the Beatles and the emigration of the Rolling Stones. While Jagger, Lennon, McCartney and friends drift quietly down the path towards middle age, Bolan, at twenty-four, with… Continue reading…
