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      Alan White, Who Drummed With Yes and Ex-Beatles, Dies at 72

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      The invitation to perform with John Lennon, which he thought was a joke, led to almost 50 years with one of progressive rock’s foremost bands.Alan White, a seasoned rock drummer who had worked with two former Beatles by the time he turned 21, but who was best known for his long tenure with the pioneering British progressive-rock band Yes, died on Thursday at his home in the Seattle area. He was 72.His death was announced by his family. The announcement did not specify a cause, saying only that he died “after a brief illness.”News of Mr. White’s death came just days after Yes announced that he would not be taking part in the band’s upcoming tour of Britain, which begins on June 13. He had been a member of Yes since 1972, but, the band noted in a statement, “a number of health setbacks” had restricted his time onstage since 2016, with Jay Schellen doing most of the drumming and Mr. White joining the band late in each set.Alan White was born in Pelton, County Durham, England, on June 14, 1949, to Raymond and May (Thrower) White. He began playing the drums when he was 12. He first played professionally the next year, and went on to work with a number of British groups throughout the 1960s.In September 1969, John Lennon, who had heard him with one of those groups, called Mr. White and asked him to join the band he was putting together for a concert in Toronto.As Mr. White told interviewers over the years, he assumed the call was a prank and hung up. Lennon called back, Mr. White was convinced he was who he said he was and he was soon on his way to Canada as a member of the Plastic Ono Band, which also included Yoko Ono, Eric Clapton and Klaus Voormann.The Toronto concert, one of only two that the band would play (the second was a charity concert in London that December), was a memorable one, marking Lennon’s return to the stage after a long absence and yielding the hit album “Live Peace in Toronto.” Mr. White subsequently recorded with Lennon on the single “Instant Karma” and on several tracks of the album “Imagine,” including the title cut, which, like “Instant Karma,” was a Top 10 hit.Mr. White also recorded with another former Beatle, George Harrison, on sessions for Harrison’s first solo album, “All Things Must Pass.”Following those recordings, as well as work backing Joe Cocker and others and a brief stint as one of several percussionists with his fellow drummer Ginger Baker’s band, he was invited in 1972 to join Yes after the band’s original drummer, Bill Bruford, left to join another leading progressive-rock band, King Crimson.Mr. White worked with two former Beatles, John Lennon and George Harrison, before he was 21.Dean Rutz/The Seattle Times, via Associated PressYes’s music, like that of other bands in the so-called prog-rock movement, was more complex and challenging than standard rock ’n’ roll. But Mr. White had only three days to learn the band’s repertoire before a concert in Dallas — and, he later recalled, when he met with the band’s singer, Jon Anderson, and its bassist, Chris Squire, they told him that if he didn’t agree to join the band “they were going to throw me out the third-story window.” He agreed, he learned the music and his long association with Yes began.Yes underwent numerous changes in both personnel and style over the years, notably adopting a more straightforward pop sound for the album “90125” and the single “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” which became a No. 1 hit in 1983. Mr. White and Mr. Squire were the band’s only constant presences until Mr. Squire’s death in 2015.Mr. White performing with Yes at Madison Square Garden in 1978. He was on every one of the band’s albums from 1973 until last year.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesMr. White, who also helped write a number of the band’s songs, was first heard with Yes on a few tracks of the live album “Yessongs” (1973) and, a year later, on the studio album “Tales From Topographic Oceans.” He was on every subsequent album through “The Quest,” released last year.Yes was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.Mr. White is survived by his wife of 40 years, Rogena (Walberg) White; a son, Jesse; a daughter, Cassi; and two grandchildren. More

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      Abba Returns to the Stage in London. Sort Of.

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      The Swedish superstars — or digital versions of them, at least — performed on Thursday to 3,000 enthusiastic fans with the help of 140 animators, four body doubles and $175 million.LONDON — Ecstatic cheers bounced around a specially built 3,000-capacity hexagonal arena Thursday night as the members of Abba — one of pop music’s behemoths — slowly emerged from beneath the stage, their classic ’70s hairstyles leading the way, to play their first concert in over 40 years.As a synthesizer blared and lights pulsed, the singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad twirled her arms skyward, unveiling a huge cape decorated with gold and fire red feathers, while she sang the slow-burn disco of “The Visitors.” Benny Andersson, poised at his synth, grinned like he couldn’t believe he was onstage again. Bjorn Ulvaeus, the band’s guitarist, focused on his instrument. Agnetha Faltskog swirled her arms as if in a hippie trance, adding her voice to the chorus.Soon, Andersson took the mic. “I’m really Benny,” he said. “I just look very good for my age.”The specially built Abba Arena holds the technology required to bring the Abbatars to life.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesThe audience — some already out of their seats dancing, glasses of rosé prosecco in hand — laughed because the comment went straight to the heart of the event. The members of Abba onstage weren’t real; they were meticulous digital re-creations made to look like the group in its 1979 heyday. The real Abba — whose members are all at least 72 years old — was watching from the stands.Thursday’s concert was the world premiere of Abba Voyage, a 90-minute spectacular that runs in London seven times a week until at least December, with potential to extend until April 2026, when the permission for the Abba Arena expires, with the land being designated for housing.During the show, the digital avatars — known as Abbatars — performed a set of hits with the help of a 10-piece live band and an array of lights, lasers and special effects. For the Spanish-tinged “Chiquitita,” the group sang in front of a solar eclipse. For the stadium disco of “Summer Night City,” it appeared in pyramids made of dazzling light, with the rings of Saturn twirling in the background. The avatars also appeared as 30-foot-tall figures on huge screens at the sides of the stage, as if being filmed at a real concert. At points, they started appearing in dozens of places onstage as if in a manic music video.Baillie Walsh, the show’s director, said the event was meant to be “a sensory overload.”The project, which Walsh said pushed digital concerts beyond the hologram performances that have made headlines in the past, is the result of years of secretive work, protected by hundreds of nondisclosure agreements. That included five weeks filming the real Abba in motion capture suits in Sweden; four body doubles; endless debates over the set list; and 140 animators from Industrial Light & Magic (known as I.L.M.), a visual effects firm founded by George Lucas that normally works on Hollywood blockbusters.Svana Gisla and Andersson’s son Ludvig Andersson, the event’s producers, said in an interview last Friday that they had to deal with a host of problems during the eight years they worked to develop the show, including fund-raising challenges and malfunctioning toilets.“It’s been stressful,” Andersson said, looking exhausted and sucking a mango-flavored vape pen. “But, make no mistake,” he added, “nothing has been more enjoyable than this.”Alex Beers, a member of the band’s fan club, traveled from Amsterdam for the concert.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesCarla Bento flew in from Portugal just to stand outside the show.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesMerchandise for sale inside the arena included shirts, backpacks and a tea tray.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesThe idea started around 2014, Gisla said, when she was brought in to help make music videos for the band involving digital avatars, a process that was “a total nightmare,” she said. Around 2016, Simon Fuller, the producer behind the “Idol” franchise and the Spice Girls, suggested a show starring a 3-D version of the group “singing” while backed by a live band. (Fuller is no longer involved.)The group needed to get creative because Faltskog and Lyngstad had made it clear that they didn’t “want to go on the road,” Andersson told The New York Times in 2021. But the quartet did want to include fresh music in the show, so it reunited in secret to work up a few songs, which became something more: “Voyage,” Abba’s first new album in four decades, released last year.The team quickly realized that holograms were not up to scratch; nor were a host of other technologies. “We kissed a lot of frogs,” Gisla said. It was only when they met representatives of Industrial Light & Magic that she felt they had found a company capable of making “really convincing digital humans,” who could be “running, spinning, performing in floodlights.” The key, Ulvaeus said in a video interview, is “for them to emotionally connect with an audience.”During test shoots in fall 2019, the group’s male members “leapt in with no qualms,” Ben Morris, I.L.M.’s creative director, said. (The musicians’ biggest concern? Shaving off their beards. “I was scared what I would find underneath,” Ulvaeus said.) Lyngstad had just had hip surgery and was using a cane. “But we started playing some songs and she slowly slid off the stool, stood up and said, ‘Take my stick away,’” Morris recalled.The following spring, the band was filmed for five weeks by about 200 cameras in Sweden, as it repeatedly played its hits. The British ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor and four body doubles selected from hundreds of hopefuls looked on, with the intention of learning the band’s every movement, stance and expression so they could mimic its members, then extend their movements to develop the show’s final choreography.Steve Aplin, I.L.M.’s motion director for the event, said they went through “literally hundreds” of iterations of each avatar to get them right, and also modeled clothes designed by the stylist B. Akerlund. The hardest to achieve was Andersson, he added, since “his personality is the twinkle in his eye.”From left: Bjorn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Benny Andersson in their motion-capture suits.Baillie WalshWhile the Abbatars were being developed, the 10-piece band was being formed and Gisla was fund-raising (the final budget was 140 million pounds, or about $175 million, she said), developing an arena capable of handling all the technology and trying to keep the massive project under wraps. A moment of potential jeopardy came in December 2019, when the team submitted a planning application to the London authorities that had the word “Logo” on technical drawings of the building instead of “Abba,” in the hope no one would investigate further.When the coronavirus pandemic hit, a project that “already seemed ludicrous before Covid” became “doubly ludicrous” Gisla said, since she was asking backers to trust the idea that 3,000 people would want to dance next to each other in the near future. Materials for the arena’s sound insulation almost got stuck outside Britain when a ship jammed in the Suez Canal; the wood for the building’s facade was meant to come from Russia, but was sourced from Germany at increased expense after Russia invaded Ukraine.Asked what he had gone through while making the project, Walsh replied, “A nervous breakdown,” then laughed.Abba Voyage is not the only Abba-themed event in London; the long-running “Mamma Mia!” musical in the West End also regularly attracts boozy bachelorette and birthday parties. Gisla said that like a West End show, Abba Voyage would have to sell about 80 percent of its seats to make a profit. Tickets start at £31, or $38, although few of those cheap seats appear available for the initial run. Attendees pay more — starting at $67 — for a spot on a dance floor in front of the stage.Andersson, the producer, said he obviously hoped Abba Voyage would be a commercial success — as do the members of Abba, who are investors — but he insisted he was happy the team had simply “created something beautiful” after so much toil. Ulvaeus said he wouldn’t be surprised if some of the group’s contemporaries consider a similar undertaking: “If they ask me for advice, of course, I would say, ‘It takes a long time and it’s very expensive.’”The Abba Voyage show features a 10-piece live band and an array of lights, lasers and special effects.Johan PerssonBrenton and Brenda Pfeiffer, from Australia, sharing a kiss after the show.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesElla Vaday and Kitty Scott-Claus, competitors on “RuPaul’s Drag Race UK,” attending the opening-night show.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesAt Thursday’s premiere, the audience was split between invited celebrities in the stands (including Sweden’s king and queen) and members of Abba’s fan club on the dance floor, yet in both sections people hugged in joy at the sound of beloved songs, and danced and sang along. The fact that the band onstage wasn’t the flesh-and-blood originals didn’t seem to matter. For “Waterloo,” the Abbatars simply introduced a huge video of their 1974 Eurovision performance and danced their way offstage as the crowd cheered wildly.Jarvis Cocker of the band Pulp said he had been left in “a state of confusion” by the show. “I felt very emotional at certain times during that performance, which I’m calling a performance but it wasn’t — it was a projection,” he said. He added, “But I don’t know what it means for the future of mankind.” He suggested avatar shows featuring the Beatles and Elvis Presley wouldn’t be far behind.The fans outside were too overwhelmed to worry about the show’s implications for the live music industry. Teresa Harle, 55, a postal worker who attended with a friend and ran to the front of the arena to get the best view, said she found the avatars so convincing, she even waved at Faltskog when the show ended.“It was a once in a lifetime experience,” Harle said, “even though we’re coming again tomorrow, and Saturday.” More

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      in Television

      ‘Pistol’ Tells Steve Jones’s Story. With a Touch of Showbiz.

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      A new limited series is based on a memoir by the Sex Pistol’s guitarist. Just don’t confuse it with a documentary, he says.LONDON — For Steve Jones, direct has always been best. The Sex Pistols guitarist is known for rejecting what he describes as fancy “Beatle chords” in favor of a sound without frills, and for drunken retorts on prime time British television.This approach is at the fore in his 2016 book, “Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol.” In the introduction, he writes, “I’m not gonna come out of this smelling of roses,” before detailing the rampant kleptomania of his late teens and his sex addictions. There are also details of the sexual abuse by his stepfather, his descent into addiction after the band collapsed and the near illiteracy that hampered him until well into his adult life.The book forms the basis for “Pistol,” a six-part series directed by Danny Boyle and arriving on FX/Hulu on Tuesday. The show stars Toby Wallace as Jones and Anson Boon as the Sex Pistols’ lead singer, John Lydon, known as Johnny Rotten.Toby Wallace plays Steve Jones in “Pistol.”Miya Mizuno/FXIn the series, tensions abound between the exceptional and the ordinary, and dramatic license often overcomes fidelity to Jones’s experience. Preparations have been tense, too, with Lydon losing a lawsuit to the rest of the band over the use of Pistols music in the show.In a recent phone interview, Jones discussed what he would do if he ran into Lydon, how his story got changed to fit a TV format and the impact of the band’s manager, Malcolm McLaren. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What motivated you to write the memoir?There was just a lot of stuff I wanted to get out there, even the dodgy stuff. It was weird at first, but I got such a lot of feedback from it — from men, young guys, who experienced a lot of similar trauma stuff as kids. I didn’t realize that kind of thing happens a lot. Most guys don’t tell anybody, they take it to their grave, and it’s very unhealthy to do that. You can’t carry that stuff around with you, you’ve got to move on.In the book, you say you hadn’t minded playing second fiddle to Lydon, but when Sid Vicious joined the Pistols, you were left playing third fiddle. How does it feel to now be the dominant voice in “Pistol?”I mean, it’s OK. I’m a team player, I don’t really like being the center of attention. I’d rather be playing guitar than singing, I’ve always had that approach. I don’t really like all the spotlight at this stage of the game, at 66 years old. But it is what it is.From left, Louis Partridge, Anson Boon, Jacob Slater and Wallace in the show.Miya Mizuno/FXBut surely that was a consideration when Danny Boyle approached you, that you’d be thrust into the spotlight?Well, of course. But Boyle liked the fact that it was coming from my view. He said I was like the engine room of the Sex Pistols, and liked coming from that angle, as opposed to the obvious angle.Through the eyes of Lydon?Exactly. That’s normally the way it goes. I got a shot at telling my story, based on my book. But you’ve got to remember, it’s not a documentary. It’s a six-part series.“Lonely Boy” is a pretty frank tale that asks for little forgiveness. How well do you think that comes across in “Pistol?”Like I said, it’s based on my book. You’ve got to showbiz it up a little bit, you’ve got to make it interesting — even the relationship between me and Chrissie Hynde, the “love interest.” She watched it the other day, and she was surprised: She said, “I didn’t realize I was about this much.”“Pistol” presents that as a recurring relationship. Is that quite how it happened?I knew Chrissie, we did hang out a bit in the early days, she wanted to be a musician, and I kind of brushed her off, so that is all true. But she was shocked when she saw it last week.But I do think it’s a good story. Even if it wasn’t as long as that, my relationship with her, I just think the way it’s been written makes it interesting. If you’re a train spotter, you’re going to hate it, because it’s not in the timeline, but whatever.In “Pistol,” Chrissie Hynde, played by Sydney Chandler, is the love interest to Wallace’s Jones.Miya Mizuno/FXAnother unexpected narrative is the way Malcolm McLaren (played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley) are presented as parent figures. What was your relationship with the pair of them like?They had a flat in Clapham, and I used to go and stay over there. They had Ben and Joe [Westwood’s children], but Ben didn’t stay over much, so I would sleep in one of the bunk beds with Joe. I just used to hang out with them, at Cranks, the vegetarian restaurant in Carnaby Street. I used to drive Malcolm around to the tailors in the East End because he couldn’t drive.[Meeting them] was a real turning point for me, and that’s where my loyalty lay. Malcolm showed me a different side of life — that whole avant-garde, Chelsea “posh toffs” scene. And I loved it. I was not headed anywhere good the way I was going, so I’m always grateful for him and Viv for that. Even though you couldn’t trust him, I still didn’t care.Early in your relationship, McLaren helped you avoid a prison sentence. Repaying that debt seems to justify a lot of your actions in “Pistol.” Did that weigh heavily on your relationship?That was only one part of it. I actually liked hanging out with him. One minute he’d be talking like a toff, and the next like a cop. In all honesty, he really made it all happen, and he doesn’t get enough credit for it. I don’t think it would have happened without him.Did it bother you that Lydon didn’t want to be involved in “Pistol?”We wanted him to be involved. It would have been good if he had been on board. If the shoe was on the other foot, we’d have all been thrilled, if it had been his book and Danny Boyle wanted to do something similar. At this stage of the game, we’re grown men, I don’t know why he’s not interested. But it’s par for his personality for him not to want to be involved. Maybe he’ll secretly watch it and have a chuckle.The show includes the disastrous Sex Pistols tour of the United States, which saw the band implode.Miya Mizuno/FXIs the “Pistol” fallout the final straw in your relationship with Lydon?I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it. It’s not like we hang out anyway. I live in L.A., he lives in L.A., I’ve been here 35 years, and he came just after me, and we’ve never been interested in hanging out. The last time I saw him was in 2008, when we played a load of European gigs. We don’t need to hang out, I’m good with that, we don’t need to be pals. But I do have respect for him, absolutely.What would you do if you ran into him at the shops?I’d probably run and hide behind the baked beans.Danny Boyle has said “Pistol” imagines “breaking into the world of ‘The Crown’ and ‘Downton Abbey’ with your mates and screaming your songs and your fury at all they represent.” When did you realize you had the power to shake things up?The Grundy thing [a notorious interview of the Sex Pistols by Bill Grundy on British TV in 1976] took it into a different sphere. The power came from having a label, then them giving us the boot, getting a label, getting the boot again. We were calling it on our terms, which was unheard-of back then.The Grundy thing was the beginning of the end. As far as making any more music, the creative side was out the window. The way I looked at it, then it became the leather-jacket brigade everywhere. It became mainstream, it lost its originality. Before Grundy, you had the Clash, the Buzzcocks, a bunch of bands that were very creative in their own ways.“You don’t want to fall asleep listening to what I’ve been doing after the Pistols,” Jones said.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe end of “Pistol” ties things up quite neatly. Were you happy with where the series ended?I did like the way it ended. There were a couple of different endings that I wasn’t keen about; [this one] left you with a feel-good-y kind of way as opposed to not being cheesy about it.What were the other endings?There was one where the cast were interviewed about their experiences, and one of those “Where are they now?” kind of endings, which was horrible to be honest with you. I’m so happy Danny ditched that one.It does leave out the third part of your book though, the fallout of the Pistols and your quite tragic personal aftermath. Were you OK with that?It could have gone on, but it would have started getting boring afterward. You don’t want to fall asleep listening to what I’ve been doing after the Pistols. More

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      Review: Wilco’s Understated Magnum Opus ‘Cruel Country’

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      On “Cruel Country,” the Chicago band ponders a genre and a nation.Wilco’s “Cruel Country” makes a modest first impression for a magnum opus. Its tone is naturalistic and understated; the album was recorded largely with Wilco playing live in the studio as a six-man band, quietly savoring the chance to make music together after pandemic isolation.Most of the songs have a quietly strummed acoustic guitar at their core, basic and folky. The sonic experimentation that Wilco has enjoyed since its 2001 masterpiece, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” — which it recently performed at concerts in New York and its longtime hometown, Chicago, and plans to reissue in vastly expanded form in September — has been temporarily, though not entirely, cut back on “Cruel Country,” as if to set artifice aside.“Talk to me/I don’t want to hear poetry,” Jeff Tweedy sings in “The Universe,” continuing, “Say it plain/I want to hear you speak.”But “Cruel Country” is also a double album, a full 21 songs, that sets out to engage the notion of “country” as both a musical style and a nation. Tweedy’s songs ponder history, politics, mortality, ambivalence and the utility — or futility — of art in 21st-century America. They also, at times, blur distinctions between patriotism and romance. Yet in the album’s title song, Tweedy sets ambiguity aside as he sings, “I love my country like a little boy/Red, white and blue,” only to follow it with “I love my country, stupid and cruel.”Wilco was a musical throwback when it got started in 1994. In a decade of grunge and hip-hop, it drew instead on a boomer trinity of the Band, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. And now that the group itself has decades of its catalog behind it, “Cruel Country” also circles back to Wilco’s own past; the band used a similar hand-played, live-in-the-studio approach on its 2007 album, “Sky Blue Sky.” The country music that Wilco embraced on that album, and returns to through most of “Cruel Country,” has a particular vintage: the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Buck Owens and Merle Haggard were pushing country toward rock while bands like the Grateful Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers were connecting three-chord country to psychedelia.Half a century later on “Cruel Country,” the sound is even more nostalgic, though it still leaves room for exploration, especially in a handful of songs that open up into the kind of jams that Wilco extrapolates onstage. Trudging or shuffling along in mid-tempo, the songs can often sound serenely resigned. But there’s an underlying tension in the lyrics and in Tweedy’s scratchy, subdued, openly imperfect voice. He sounds weary but dogged, hanging in there like the music he clings to.The album opens with “I Am My Mother,” a waltz about an immigrant’s hopes and roots: “Dangerous dreams have been detected at the southern border,” Tweedy sings. And in “Hints,” he contemplates a bitterly divided nation, urging, “Keep your hand in mine” but noting, “There is no middle when the other side/Would rather kill than compromise.”The album juggles despair and persistence, gravity and humor. Wilco comes up with twangy, jaunty, chicken-pluck country in “Falling Apart (Right Now),” where Tweedy complains, to a partner or a populace, “Don’t you fall apart while I’m falling apart,” and in “A Lifetime to Find” — a conversation with Death, who arrives suddenly: “Here to collect.” And amid tinkly keyboard tones and teasing slide-guitar lines in “All Across the World,” Tweedy admits to the mixed emotions of being comfortable while others suffer — “I can barely stand knowing what’s true” — as he wonders, “What’s a song going to do?”A song can only do so much, and on “Cruel Country” Wilco offers no grand lesson or master plan, only observations, feelings and enigmas. Many of the album’s best moments are wordless ones. “Bird Without a Tail/Base of My Skull” offers a free-associative string of nonsense couplets that’s like a nursery rhyme until it ends in a fatal stabbing; it turns into an intricately picked two-chord jam, with Glenn Kotche’s drumming providing whispery momentum as Tweedy and Nels Cline toss guitar ideas back and forth, then interlace them. It’s a brief stretch of communion and consolation in doleful times.Wilco“Cruel Country”(dBpm) More

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      in Movies

      ‘Fanny: The Right to Rock’ Review: Still Kicking

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      Started by two Filipino American sisters in California, the influential band is claiming its rightful rank in rock ’n’ roll history.Jean and June Millington, Filipino American sisters and lifelong bandmates best known for their 1970s rock band Fanny, have over 50 years of history in the music industry to reflect on in the documentary “Fanny: The Right To Rock.”When Fanny was signed to a recording contract in 1970, there was no one in rock music quite like them. Though the group’s lineup has had several iterations, all its members have been women, and two — June Millington and the drummer Alice de Buhr — are lesbians. Their musical chops earned them gigs at venues like Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, where they won the respect of musicians like David Bowie, Bonnie Raitt, Alice Bag and Cherie Currie of the Runaways.The group disbanded in 1975, but three original members — the sisters June and Jean (Millington) Adamian, and Brie Darling — reunited for an album, “Fanny Walked the Earth,” released in 2018. The thought of the group’s struggles brings a smile to Jean’s face in the movie. “We dealt with the prejudice against girls and feminism, and June says, now we’re bucking ageism!”The director Bobbi Jo Hart decided to show the group’s story through a combination of archival footage and present-day interviews with band members and their famous fans. The film’s most novel sequences come when Hart joins the band for recording sessions for their 2018 album, and finds that even if the voices warble a bit more than they did in the screaming days of youth, Fanny’s sound remains heavy. But the conventional vérité footage doesn’t add new depth to the guitar licks and improvisations, the signals of musicianship that make Fanny feel artistically vital as white-haired rockers. What the movie showcases best from its subjects, then, is the humor and ease of women who have survived a lifetime of setbacks and strife. Fanny has already proven itself — what’s left is for us to enjoy its growing catalog.Fanny: The Right to RockNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      The All-Female Band Fanny Made History. A New Doc Illuminates It.

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      The group put out five albums in the ’70s and counted David Bowie and Bonnie Raitt as fans. The filmmaker Bobbi Jo Hart, dismayed its story hadn’t been told, took action.In spring 2015, the documentary filmmaker Bobbi Jo Hart was clicking around the Taylor Guitars website, looking for a new instrument for her 10-year-old daughter, when she came across a short profile of June Millington, the singer and lead guitarist for the pioneering 1970s all-female rock group Fanny.Hart, now 56 and living in Montreal, grew up in a hippie household in California “with piles of LPs all over the place”: David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, and on and on. But she had never even heard of Fanny, despite the fact that it was the first all-female rock band to release an album on a major label.Fanny put out a total of five albums between 1970 and 1974, one of which was produced by Todd Rundgren. The band scored two Top 40 hits — the swinging, soulful “Charity Ball” and the doo-wop-flavored “Butter Boy” — and played in the United States and abroad with Slade, Jethro Tull, Humble Pie, the Kinks and Chicago. The group backed Barbra Streisand in the studio and performed on “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” and “American Bandstand.”In 1999, Bowie hailed Fanny as one of the finest rock bands of its time in Rolling Stone. He also lamented that “nobody’s ever mentioned them.”Kathy Valentine, the bassist of the Go-Go’s, a later all-female band, wished more people had spread the word about Fanny. “If their visibility had been higher,” she said in an interview, “we would have seen a lot more women in the rock landscape.” Valentine didn’t hear about Fanny until 1982, she said, by which time the Go-Go’s were making their second album.When Hart, the filmmaker, first learned about Fanny online, she had a visceral reaction. “It really pissed me off,” she said. “It was just another example of amazing women that we don’t know about.” Hart reached out to former band members about the possibility of a documentary, but determined that at the time, the Fanny story didn’t have the “forward-momentum narrative” she was looking for.Then, in January 2017, Hart attended the Women’s March in Washington. She was watching Madonna speak on the Jumbotron when she spotted a woman with “flaming gray hair” onstage, filming the proceedings on her iPhone. It was June Millington. The sighting spurred Hart to call Millington, who had some news: Three members of Fanny — Millington, her younger sister, the bassist and singer Jean (Millington) Adamian, and the drummer and singer Brie Darling, a fellow Filipina-American — were about to make a new album on an indie label. The moment for a film had arrived.The resulting documentary, “Fanny: The Right to Rock,” opens in New York on Friday before hitting other major markets and, on Aug. 2, video on demand. (It will come to PBS in 2023.) The movie documents the making of that album, recorded under the name Fanny Walked the Earth and released in 2018, and features interviews with five members from the original group’s frequently shifting lineup. (The reclusive keyboardist Nickey Barclay, who has said she hated her time in the band, notably did not participate. She also declined to speak for this article.) Valentine, Bonnie Raitt and the Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott are among the talking heads.From left: Jean Millington, Nickey Barclay, Brie Darling, Alice de Buhr and June Millington practice in the basement of their band’s famed home, Fanny Hill.Linda WolfThe documentary lovingly recounts the history of Fanny, beginning with the sisters June and Jean Millington, who were born in the Philippines to a white American naval officer father and a Filipina socialite mother. In 1961, the Millington family moved overseas to Sacramento, Calif., where the sisters, as early adolescents, had a difficult time fitting in. Racism was a constant part of life. (In the film, Jean recalls the father of a boyfriend of hers telling his son, “I’ll buy you a Mustang if you stop seeing that half-breed girl.” The boyfriend opted for the car.)The sisters found solace in music, forming an all-girl band in high school called the Svelts, which played the radio hits of the day. The Svelts morphed into Wild Honey, a Motown cover group that decamped to Los Angeles in 1969 to make it big. Wild Honey signed with Warner Bros. Records’s Reprise label later that year. Not long after, the band, looking for a new name with a female identity, chose Fanny, which in the United States is slang for bottom.“We thought it was a double entendre that would work,” said June Millington, 74. It wasn’t until the band members toured overseas that they discovered that in Britain, fanny is slang for female genitals.Early on, the band lived in Fanny Hill, a house in West Hollywood that Millington, in the film, calls “a sorority with electrical guitars.” Joe Cocker and the lead singer of the Band, Rick Danko, hung out there, and the group Little Feat would come over and jam; Raitt was a houseguest for a time. A libertine, clothing-optional spirit prevailed. “It was a wonderful, creative environment,” said Darling, who is 72 and lives in Los Angeles. “It wasn’t people just getting high” and having sex.The film highlights the fact that two of Fanny’s members — June Millington and the drummer Alice de Buhr — are lesbians, something that the band never dared speak about publicly in those days. “People would ask us, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’” recalled de Buhr, now 72 and residing in Tucson, Ariz. “And I’d say, ‘I’m taken.’ I hated not being able to say, ‘Well, I’m in love with a woman.’”Predictably, Fanny was subjected to a great deal of sexism, often being treated as a novelty act. “Most of society didn’t see girls with a guitar between their legs,” said Patti Quatro, 74, who replaced Millington as lead guitarist in 1974. (Quatro, of Austin, Texas, is an older sister of Suzi Quatro.)Millington said that the “condescension and sneering” that would greet Fanny at concert appearances was “so palpable it was almost physical.”Both Millington and her sister recalled, however, that Fanny would ultimately win over the crowd. “I felt like it took at least 10 minutes for everyone to realize there was not a boy band playing behind us,” said Jean (Millington) Adamian, 73, who lives in Davis, Calif. “They were waiting for us to fall down. And once we proved it was really us playing and singing, it was generally a big, uplifting experience.”Rock critics weren’t always swayed though. “We were battered by the reviews,” Millington said. “Every once in a while, they’d say, ‘Oh, they’re good.’” She cited a generally positive 1971 concert review in this newspaper headlined “Fanny, a Four-Girl Rock Group, Poses a Challenge to Male Ego.” “‘What will it do to the male ego?’ Well, who cares?” she said. “Why don’t you guys just deal with it and dig us?”“The fact is that Fanny is a flame that ignites people,” June Millington said.Linda WolfJUNE MILLINGTON EXITED Fanny in late 1973 in part because of a near “nervous breakdown,” she said in a video interview. “I’m glad I left, because I knew that my life was on the line on some major level.” She was sitting in front of a crackling fire at her home on the campus of the Institute for the Musical Arts, a nonprofit recording and retreat facility she co-founded with her longtime partner, Ann Hackler, in Goshen, Mass. On the mantel were various Buddhist objects — Millington is a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism — and a framed photo of Jimi Hendrix.“The straw that broke the camel’s back,” Millington said, was the record company’s insistence that Fanny, whose members favored ’70s California chic, dress up in glammy, more revealing outfits onstage. (“My top was $45 worth of American coins, looped together, that just pinched my nipples,” de Buhr said.) Millington saw it as a sign that Reprise had lost faith in the band. “I took it as an insult,” she said.A new version of Fanny — featuring Adamian, Barclay, Darling and Quatro — signed with Casablanca Records and released a final album, “Rock and Roll Survivors,” in 1974. That record featured the single “Butter Boy,” which Adamian said was inspired by — but not about, as has been widely reported — her then-boyfriend, Bowie, and his gender-bending ways.“‘He was hard as a rock, but I was ready to roll, what a shock to find out I was in control of the situation,’” Adamian said, reciting the song’s opening lines. “I mean, those kinds of lyrics were very tongue-in-cheek and intended to be provocative.” “Butter Boy” became Fanny’s biggest hit, reaching No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1975. But by that time, the band had split up for reasons both artistic and personal.Fanny has technically never reunited. But in 2016, Millington, Adamian and Darling played together at a concert in Northampton, Mass., a collaboration that led to the self-titled album “Fanny Walked the Earth.” That LP includes appearances by de Buhr and Quatro, plus Valentine of the Go-Go’s and members of fellow all-female groups the Runaways and the Bangles.A tentative plan to tour behind the Fanny Walked the Earth album was scuttled when, two months before the record’s March 2018 release, Adamian suffered a stroke that affected the right side of her body. Today, she uses a wheelchair to get around. “I cannot play bass,” she said. “I keep looking at my two fingers, going, ‘If just one of you would move, that would be good.’ It’s absolutely frustrating.”Fanny Walked the Earth’s Jean Adamian, Darling and June Millington.Marita MadeloniMillington has experienced health issues of her own. Her snow-white hair was noticeably shorter than it had been during the Fanny Walked the Earth era, the result of chemotherapy she received last year to treat breast cancer that is now in remission.“I knew I was going to live because my work is not done,” she said. “So anything can happen.” She didn’t discount the idea of some version of Fanny recording or touring again. As for the latter scenario, she said it would take a lot of money to do so properly, given the medical situations she and her sister faced. (Adamian has sung live with Fanny Walked the Earth since her stroke; her son, Lee Madeloni, filled in on bass.)In the meantime, Millington said, she was looking forward to the release of “Fanny: The Right to Rock.” Hart, the director, expressed the wish that the documentary would lead to far wider appreciation for the band. “A not-so-secret dream that I have is if they would get that recognition to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” Hart said.Millington isn’t waiting for a call from the Rock Hall. “Is it ever going to happen? I don’t know,” she said. “And at this point, I don’t care.” She said she was comfortable resting on her laurels. “I’m fine with it, because I never imagined anyone would mention Fanny ever again,” she said. “For 30, 40 years, we couldn’t get arrested.”The internet, she said, is exposing new audiences to the band. “Fanny is a flame that ignites people,” Millington continued. “It is igniting people all over the world of different ages and different sexes. It’s like the Olympic torch, and that is really something to be proud of.” More

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      Vangelis, Composer Best Known for ‘Chariots of Fire,’ Dies at 79

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      A master of the synthesizer, he won an Oscar for that film’s score, and his memorable theme song became a No. 1 pop hit.Vangelis, the Greek film composer and synthesizer virtuoso whose soaring music for “Chariots of Fire,” the 1981 movie about two British runners in the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, won the Academy Award for best original score, died on Tuesday in Paris. He was 79.The cause was heart failure, said Lefteris Zermas, a frequent collaborator.A self-taught musician, Vangelis (pronounced vang-GHELL-iss), who was born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, recorded solo albums and wrote music for television and for films including “Blade Runner” (1982), “Missing” (1982) and “1492: Conquest of Paradise” (1992). But he remains best known for scoring “Chariots of Fire.”The most familiar part of that score — modern electronic music composed for a period film — was heard during the opening credits: a blend of acoustic piano and synthesizer that provided lush, pulsating accompaniment to the sight of about two dozen young men running in slow motion on a nearly empty beach, mud splattering their white shirts and shorts, pain and exhilaration creasing their faces.Vangelis’s music became as popular as the film itself, directed by Hugh Hudson, which won four Oscars, including best picture.The opening song, also called “Chariots of Fire,” was released as a single and spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including a week at No. 1. The soundtrack album remained on the Billboard 200 chart for 30 weeks and spent four weeks in the top spot.Vangelis said the score immediately came to him as he watched the film in partly edited form.“I try to put myself in the situation and feel it,” he told The Washington Post in 1981. “I’m a runner at the time, or in the stadium, or alone in the dressing room … and then I compose … and the moment is fruitful and honest, I think.”Vangelis recorded a track with 25 children from the Orleans Infant School in Twickenham, England, for a 1979 single, “The Long March.”Fred Mott/Getty ImagesHe was working at the time in his London studio with a Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer.“It’s the most important synthesizer in my career and the best analog synthesizer design there has ever been,” he told Prog, an alternative music website, in 2016, adding, “It’s the only synthesizer I could describe as being a real instrument.”For “Blade Runner,” a science-fiction film noir set in a futuristic Los Angeles, Vangelis created a score to match the director Ridley Scott’s dystopian vision. He augmented the CS-80 synthesizer, which produced the sounds of horns and bass, with an electric piano and a second synthesizer that emulated strings.“What interested me the most for this film was the atmosphere and the general feeling, rather than the distinct themes,” he said on a fan site, Nemo Studios, named for the studio in London that he built and for many years worked out of. “The visual atmosphere of the film is unique, and it is that I tried to enhance as much as I could.”The “Blade Runner” soundtrack album was not released until 1994, but it was well received. Zac Johnson of Allmusic wrote that “the listener can almost hear the indifferent winds blowing through the neon and metal landscapes of Los Angeles in 2019.”Vangelis at the French Culture Ministry in Paris in 1992.Georges Bendrihem/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesVangelis was born on March 29, 1943, in Agria, Greece, and grew up in Athens. He started playing piano at 4 and gave his first public performance two years later. He did not have much training and never learned to read music.“Music goes through me,” he told The Associated Press in 1982. “It’s not by me.”In the 1960s, he played organ with the Forminx, a Greek rock band. He left Greece for Paris in 1967 after the military coup there.Vangelis was a founder of Aphrodite’s Child, a progressive rock band that had hit singles in Europe and enjoyed some success on FM radio in the United States. The band released a few albums, including “666,” which was inspired by the Book of Revelations. When Aphrodite’s Child broke up, he moved to London in 1974.In the 1970s he began composing music for television shows like the French documentary series “L’Apocalypse des Animaux” (1973), as well as working on solo albums and film projects. Music from his album “China” was used by Mr. Scott in the memorable 1979 “Share the Fantasy” commercial for Chanel No. 5.He also became friendly with Jon Anderson, the lead vocalist of the British prog-rock band Yes. Vangelis was invited to replace the keyboardist Rick Wakeman when he left the band, but he turned down the offer. He and Mr. Anderson subsequently collaborated, as Jon and Vangelis, on four albums, including “The Friends of Mr. Cairo,” between 1980 and 1991.Vangelis’s music was also heard on the scientist Carl Sagan’s 1980 TV series, “Cosmos.”Information on survivors was not immediately available.Among the films Vangelis scored after “Chariots of Fire” were “Antarctica” (1983), a Japanese movie about scientists on an expedition; “The Bounty” (1984), with Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson; Oliver Stone’s “Alexander” (2004), about the Macedonian king; and “El Greco” (2007), a Greek film about the artist.He also composed music for spectacles like the 2000 and 2004 Olympics and the 2002 World Cup. And in 2001 he recorded a choral symphony, “Mythodea,” which he had adapted from earlier work, at the Temple of Zeus in Athens to commemorate NASA’s Odyssey mission to Mars.“I made up the name Mythodea from the words myth and ode,” Vangelis said in an interview for NASA’s website in 2001. “And I felt in it a kind of shared or common path with NASA’s current exploration of the planet. Whatever we use as a key — music, mythology, science, mathematics, astronomy — we are all working to decode the mystery of creation, searching for our deepest roots.”Vangelis performed in concert with a choir in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1991.Rob Verhorst/Redferns) More

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      ‘Pistol’ Mini-Series Captures the Anarchy in the Sex Pistols

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      ‘Pistol,’ a new mini-series directed by Danny Boyle, is based on a memoir by the punk band’s bassist and founder, Steve Jones.LONDON — “Are we doing any spitting?” asked a man in the crowd at the 100 Club, a small, red-walled underground space, redolent of spilled beer, cigarette smoke and a thousand lost nights, just off London’s Oxford Street.Yes, there would be spitting. The club was the setting for an early Sex Pistols gig, which last June was being recreated for “Pistol,” a six-part series about the British band, directed by Danny Boyle and streaming on Hulu in the United States and Disney+ in other territories, starting May 31.The Sex Pistols were the “philosophers and the dress code” of the punk revolution, said Boyle, who seemed to be everywhere on set, talking to the extras about crowd behavior, checking cameras and peering intently at monitors as the actors performed the song “Bodies” and the audience went wild.“I tried to make the series in a way that was chaotic and true to the Pistols’ manifesto,” Boyle said in a recent interview. That meant taking an experimental approach to filming: “We would just run whole scenes, whole performances, without knowing if we had captured the ‘right’ shot or not. It’s everything you’ve been taught not to do.”Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who plays Malcolm McLaren, the band’s manager, with virtuosic panache, said Boyle’s approach was unlike anything he had previously experienced on a set. “You felt, this could go wrong, but you could trust in Danny and dive in and experiment — very Sex Pistols!”Before filming began, the actors playing the members of the Sex Pistols spent two months in “band camp,” with a daily routine of music lessons, vocal coaching and movement practice. Miya Mizuno/FXThe result is a charged, visceral, Cubist portrait of the flamboyant rise and explosive fall of the Sex Pistols, whose brief existence from 1975 to 1978 made punk rock a worldwide phenomenon and whose anarchic songs (“God Save the Queen,” “Pretty Vacant”) became anthems for the disaffected.The series, written by Craig Pearce, is based on the memoir “Tales of a Lonely Boy” by Steve Jones, the band’s guitarist. But Boyle said that although Jones’s story was “a wonderful way in,” he and Pearce had tried to paint a composite picture of the entire group, and the ’70s world from which it emerged. (The band originally comprised Jones, the singer John Lydon, known as Johnny Rotten, the drummer Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock on bass, replaced in 1977 by Sid Vicious.)The first episode opens with a montage of archival footage: The Queen waving politely to the crowd; a scene from the slapstick “Carry On” movies; David Bowie performing; striking workers and garbage piled in the streets. When we meet Steve (Toby Wallace), he is busy stealing sound equipment from a Bowie gig. (The singer’s lipstick is still on the microphone.)Steve and his bandmates are angry, bored, and “trying to scrape enough together for another pint,” he tells them as they discuss what their group should wear. “So, no suits?” asks the hapless Wally, who soon gets booted from the band.“It’s hard to overestimate how class-ridden and moribund British society was for these guys,” said Pearce, who met Jones, Cook and other figures close to the band before writing most of the script in his native Australia during the first months of the pandemic.“The promise of the Swinging Sixties didn’t deliver; rock ’n’ roll freedom didn’t happen for most kids,” Pearce said. “There was a feeling that if you were born into a certain class, you couldn’t escape. You had to accept what had been handed to you.”Then, he said, came “this group of kids who said, you are sleepwalking through life.”“I tried to make the series in a way that was chaotic and true to the Pistols’ manifesto,” said Danny Boyle, who directed “Pistol.”Miya Mizuno/FXBoyle, he added, was always his “dream director” for the series. “We couldn’t believe it when he immediately said he wanted to do it.”It turned out that Boyle couldn’t quite believe it either. “I am very music-driven, but I never imagined doing the Pistols,” he said. “I had followed John Lydon’s career closely, and the hostility he felt for the others wasn’t a secret.” But after reading Pearce’s script, Boyle immediately said yes.“Which was ridiculous,” he said with a laugh, “since I didn’t even know if we would have the music, the most important thing.”Lydon opposed both the use of the Sex Pistols’s music and the series itself, but eventually lost his court case when a judge ruled that the terms of a band agreement gave Cook and Jones a majority vote. Boyle said he had attempted to contact Lydon during the dispute. He added that he hoped the series would “reveal the genius and the humility” in the frontman.Boyle said that while he did extensive reading and research, talking to everyone he could find who had been involved with the band, he ultimately trusted his intuition in formulating an approach to the series.“I grew up in a similar working-class environment to Steve and these guys,” he said. “We are exactly the same age and I am a music obsessive. I had to explain to the actors what the 1970s were like; they just don’t recognize how little stimulation there was, how you waited all week for the lifeline of the New Musical Express to appear on a Thursday!”Before filming began, the actors playing the band members spent two months in “band camp,” with a daily routine of music lessons, vocal coaching and movement practice. Sometimes Boyle would talk to them about the ’70s and show them footage. Then, led by Karl Hyde and Rick Smith from the British electronic music group Underworld, they would spend hours playing together.Boyle said he had mostly avoided casting trained musicians. “I didn’t want anyone locked into an expertise,” he said, adding that Jacob Slater, who plays Cook, was an excellent guitarist, but had to learn drumming.Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler), left, and Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley) are two of the memorable female characters in the series. Miya Mizuno/FXHe also decided not to do any postproduction work on the music. “Like the Pistols, we just had to get up and, however imperfect we were, go for it,” said Sydney Chandler, who plays the American singer Chrissie Hynde. Chandler’s character is one of several memorable women in the series, alongside the designer Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley), Nancy Spungen (Emma Appleton) and the punk icon Jordan (Maisie Williams).When it came to the band members, “we didn’t want to be tributes or caricatures,” said Anson Boon, who plays Lydon and, like his character, had never sung before. “The Pistols produced a raw, angry wall of sound and we wanted to capture that essence without trying to do an impression.”Playing a character who is also a real person was intimidating but fascinating, said Wallace, who spent time with Jones before filming began. “We talked a lot about his family, then he gave me the first guitar lesson I really had.”The series shows Steve’s unhappy childhood, which Wallace saw as central to Jones’s “anger and frustration,” he said, and led him to create “a band that represents the unrepresented.Working on the series, Boyle said, had made him aware of the Pistols’ importance beyond music. “They were a bunch of working class guys who broke the order of things, more than the Beatles,” he said. “It was especially resonant in the U.K., where the way you were expected to behave was so entrenched.”The Pistols, he added, gave their fans permission to do whatever they wanted, to waste their time however they wanted, to shape their own lives in a singular way.“They gave a sense of purpose to purposelessness,” he said. More