Book review: R.E.M. : Album by Album, by Max Pilley

If you were a cool kid in the 1980s, you’ll have listened to R.E.M.

You’ll have impressed people by playing their cheerfully apocalyptic It’s The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) and other songs like Exhuming McCarthy from Document, their fifth and most political studio album. It was not all politics though. Their next album, Green (1988), featured the single, Stand which contains the line:: “Your feet are going to be on the ground, Your head is there to move you around,” which I think we can all agree, is genuinely very helpful information.

As the 1990s began, their next two albums, Out of Time and Automatic For The People (both 1991) helped make them become one of the most successful groups on Earth. This was the era of peak R.E.M. with songs which even old people know like Shiny Happy People, Man on the Moon, Everybody Hurts and Losing My Religion. Michael Stipe went from being all shy and hairy to all bald and cool like Doctor Manhattan from Watchman (although not blue).

The inevitable backlash came with their next album, Monster (1994) which had a scary orange cover with a weird dog on it. It had tracks like What’s The Frequency, Kenneth? and Crush With Eyeliner on. It was certainly different. Some people thought they were trying to sound like Nirvana. 29 years on, it doesn’t sound anything like Nirvana and holds up pretty well.

R.E.M. continued producing interesting music into the 21st century. Their 2001 album, Reveal featuring Imitation of Life and All the Way to Reno (You’re Gonna Be a Star) remains a high point. They split up in 2011.

This book isn’t really an ‘album by album’ guide at all. But it is a comprehensive history of one of the best American bands ever, so well worth reading.

REM: Album by Album, by Max Pilley. Published by: Pen & Sword.

DVD review: Danny Collins (2015)

Review first published on Movie Muser, October 2015  http://www.moviemuser.co.uk/

Starring: Al Pacino, Annette Bening, Jennifer Garner, Bobby Cannavale, Christopher Plummer

Directed By: Dan Fogelman

Al Pacino plays Danny Collins, a fictional music star whose career seems to have peaked at some point in the Seventies. Although not officially a has-been (he still appears to be very wealthy and is widely recognised by young and old everywhere he goes), Collins is unsatisfied. He hasn’t written a song in thirty years and seems less than enthused about his much younger fiancée (Katarina Cas).

While, as his agent (the ever-excellent Christopher Plummer) points out, his problems are extremely minor compared to some people’s, the revelation that Collins was once sent an admiring letter by John Lennon which never got to him, triggers what can only be described as a very late midlife crisis. He begins to reassess his priorities, attempting to rebuild relations with the family of his estranged son (Cannavale and Garner). He also moves into a hotel and soon begins wooing the straitlaced manager (Bening).

The Lennon stuff seems to be largely an excuse to get some of the Beatles’s music on the soundtrack. This turns out to be a godsend as all the music performed by Pacino is absolutely awful. It is hard to see how Collins would ever have made it as a music star, even allowing for the fact that he is supposed to have worsened with age.

The performances are fine though, particularly Garner and Plummer and as Collins notes he and Bening’s character do generate some “good patter” (as in banter).

The mock-up album covers on the extras using pictures from Pacino’s own long career are good fun too. There’s an okay, short advertising featurette too in which Al Pacino at one point unwisely compares his decision to take the role to his decision to play Michael Corleone in ‘The Godfather’. Needless to say , the comparison to his past glories would have been best left unmade.

Special Features: Danny Collins – Album Covers Through The Years Behind The Scenes of Danny Collins Featurette

Overall Verdict: Not likely to make Al Pacino’s own Greatest Hits album. Distinctly average.

Rating: 3 out of 5

Reviewer: Chris Hallam

Book review: Modernity Britain Book Two A Shake of the Dice 1959-62, David Kynaston

Book review: Modernity Britain Book Two A Shake of the Dice 1959-62, David Kynaston. Published by Bloomsbury.

They sometimes say that if you can remember the nineteen sixties, you weren’t there. Well, I genuinely wasn’t there, I know this for a fact. But after reading this, the second part of the third volume of David Kynaston’s masterful collection of books spanning the period from the Attlee victory in 1945 to its bitter denouement in May 1979, I sort of feel like I lived through it.
Or at least the first part of the Sixties. For this book takes us to the half way point in Kynaston’s saga. It is a nation in transition. The colossal changes of the Sixties have not quite began at the end of the book. The Beatles are no longer The Quarrymen. They have been to Hamburg but they have not fully taken off yet. Dudley Moore and Peter Cook’s names are getting mentioned but the satire boom has not yet really got going either. John Profumo is still just another minister in the government. Harold Macmillan is still in office although his hold on power looks less secure by 1962 than it did when the book starts after his General Election triumph of October 1959. Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell meanwhile survives a party crisis, a challenge from Harold Wilson and a brief Liberal Party revival after their sensational 1962 Orpington by-election win. But neither Mac or Hugh will turn out to be leading their parties by the time of the 1964 election.
This is a nation poised between the “Never had it so good” years and the “white heat” of another Harold’s technological revolution. Big important issues such a immigration, slum clearance, tower block building and the issue of British decline are being faced and in some cases botched. But it is Kynaston’s mixture of the lives of the stars, the stars of the future (new Tory MP Margaret Thatcher of Finchley begins to make her presence felt), the perfectly ordinary which makes these books such a delight.
In 1961, for example, rising Carry On star Kenneth Williams (then in his mid-thirties) complains of the heat. On the same day, the future Princess Diana is being born. In 1960, Labour politician Michael Foot asserts boldly (and probably wrongly) that “Like it or not, the most spectacular events of our age is the comparative success of the Communist economic systems…the achievement by any reckoning is stupendous”. Barbara Windsor, the 23 year old star of Joan Littlewood’s “Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be” scoffs at the idea that she might return to the Theatre Royal shreiking: “Are you kidding? I’m finished with all that ten quid a week lark. I’m not in this business for art’s sake, you know – I’m in it for the money. Besides, I’ve got too many expenses to keep up. I’ve just bought a telly.”
Beloved Dixon of Dock Green actor Jack Warden has an easy solution to the “problem” of a group of teenagers he sees loafing on the street. “Bring back the birch,” he says.
This is a marvelous book. Roll on the undoubtedly still more eventful next volume.