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

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

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

    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

    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

    ‘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. 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    Rina Sawayama Flips Damnation Into a Dance Party, and 15 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Burna Boy, Metric, Sudan Archives and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Rina Sawayama, ‘This Hell’Ever the pop maximalist, Rina Sawayama’s first single from her upcoming album, “Hold the Girl,” has it all: a fiery chorus, cheeky humor, devil puns for days and even a gloriously cheesy hair-metal guitar solo. “This hell is better with you, we’re burning up together/Baby that makes two,” she sings on the towering hook, making eternal damnation sound like an exclusive VIP party. Both the glammy intensity and be-yourself messaging feel like a throwback to “Born This Way”-era Lady Gaga, but it’s all remixed through Rina’s signature, neo-Y2K-pop sensibility. LINDSAY ZOLADZmxmtoon, ‘Frown’If the California singer-songwriter mxmtoon has a mission statement, it’s something like catchy, smiley self-help. “Frown” is from her new album, “Rising,” and it presents itself as an antidote to being “stuck in a loop overthinking all our pain.” She musters four-chord pop optimism, multitracked vocals and a pop-reggae backbeat to insist, “It’s OK to frown/smile upside-down.” JON PARELESDiana Ross and Tame Impala, ‘Turn Up the Sunshine’Nothing screams “Minions” like a collaboration between … Tame Impala and Diana Ross? Yet their styles blend surprisingly well on “Turn Up the Sunshine,” the first single from the Jack Antonoff-produced soundtrack for the animated summer movie “Minions: The Rise of Gru.” (Yes, the man is so ubiquitous, he’s even producing for the Minions now.) A sleek, seamless and lovingly conjured disco throwback, “Turn Up the Sunshine” allows Kevin Parker an opportunity to go fully retro in his arrangement and saves Ross ample space for ecstatic vocals and some groovy spoken-word vamping. ZOLADZCarrie Underwood, ‘She Don’t Know’Infidelity gets a fierce retaliation in “She Don’t Know,” a canny country revenge song from Carrie Underwood and her collaborators, David Garcia and Hillary Lindsay. A foot-tapping beat and country instruments like mandolin and fiddle back her as she sings, with the vindictive glee of someone escaping a very bad situation, “What she don’t know is she can have him.” PARELESKatzù Oso, ‘Conchitas’A good dream-pop song sparkles, like sunlight refracting through water. On the lustrous “Conchitas,” from Katzù Oso’s debut album, “Tmí,” the Los Angeles-based artist Paul Hernandez bathes in ’90s nostalgia, soaking in shimmering synths, buzzing guitar riffs and a breathy falsetto. The result harnesses Cocteau Twins’ most tender, romantic qualities, but Hernandez glazes the track in his own special gloss, too: Much of “Tmí” was written in Boyle Heights, and as sweet as the pan dulce treats of its namesake, “Conchitas” embraces the spirit of that neighborhood, casting it into the soundtrack for a saccharine, lovesick daydream. ISABELIA HERRERASudan Archives, ‘Selfish Soul’It might not seem like the impish charm of a playground rhyme and a jagged violin hook would seamlessly coalesce, but Sudan Archives has always taken risks. On her new single “Selfish Soul,” the artist born Brittney Parks reprises her irreverent boho whimsy, crashing together reverbed vocals, a rapped verse and wild visuals with a razor-sharp message: a promise to love and embrace every kind of Black hair texture. “If I wear it straight will they like me more?/Like those girls on front covers,” Parks sings. The video oozes euphoria, too; Parks climbs a chrome stripper pole, plays the violin upside down and twerks in a mud pit with her girlfriends. What did you ever do? HERRERAMetric, ‘Doomscroller’Over 10 minutes long, Metric’s “Doomscroller” is a minisuite that proceeds from electronic dystopia to a plea for empathy to an offer of reassurance that’s cradled by physical instruments. The dystopia is convincing: a tireless mechanical thump and throbbing, blipping tones — racing like a gathering troll mob — behind Emily Haines’s calmly caustic observations about internet rabbit holes and entrenched inequality. “Salt of the earth underpaid to serve you,” she notes, and, “Scum of the earth overpaid to rob you.” The reassurance, though it builds up to a full-bodied rock-band march, is shakier; as the song ends, electronic blips reappear. PARELESSylvan Esso, ‘Sunburn’Sylvan Esso celebrates self-indulgence and rues its aftermath in “Sunburn”: “Sunburn blistering, the heat under your skin,” Amelia Meath sings. “Oh, but it felt so good.” The electronic backup is bouncy and pointillistic — nearly all staccato single notes, rarely a chord — and punctuated with the cheeriest of samples: a bicycle bell. PARELESBurna Boy, ‘Last Last’Burna Boy juggles heartache, accusations, self-medication and reminders of his success in “Last Last,” a post-breakup song about a roller coaster of feelings: “I put my life into my job and I know I’m in trouble/She manipulate my love,” he sulks. “Why you say I did nothing for you/When I for do anything you want me to do.” The video shows him surrounded by friends, possessions and awards, smoking and drinking. The title of the sample that provides the track’s nervous strummed rhythm and vocal hook suggests a very different scenario: It’s from Toni Braxton’s 2009 single “He Wasn’t Man Enough.” PARELESMeridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento, ‘Metamorfosis’Meridian Brothers, a high-concept Colombian band formed in 1998 by Eblis Álvarez, delights in twisting and time-warping the roots of salsa and other Latin American styles. “Metamorfosis” — from an album due Aug. 5 — borrows Kafka’s title for a song about a man waking up transformed into a robot, facing a futuristic world of drones and screens; he summons Yoruba deities to battle transhumanism. Blending brisk guaracha and montuno rhythms with eruptions of psychedelic reverb and jazzy piano, it’s a percussive romp. PARELESCalypso Rose featuring Carlos Santana and the Garifuna Collective, ‘Watina’The Garifuna people, an Afro-Caribbean culture that has maintained its own language and traditions primarily in Belize and Honduras, are descendants of Indigenous Arawaks and of West Africans who survived a 17th-century shipwreck to escape slavery. The Garifuna Collective, founded by Andy Palacio, revived and updated old Garifuna songs and “Watina” (“I Called Out”) was the title song of its 2007 album. This remake adds a horn section — pushing the arrangement a bit closer to ska — and has lead vocals from the Trinidadian icon Calypso Rose, 82, who has been an honorary citizen of Belize since 1982, along with stinging guitar from Carlos Santana and some lyrics translated into English: “Lord please help me, even if I’m alone.” PARELESOneida, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand’The long-running Brooklyn band Oneida loves repetition, layering and noise, and its catalog includes plenty of arty, elaborate structures. But “I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand,” previewing an album due in August, recalls foundational punk-rock songs like “Roadrunner” by the Modern Lovers. It uses just two chords nearly all the way through (with one more for a bridge), a hurtling beat and terse lyrics: “So sure of ourselves/Who needs a plan?” But those two chords support a welter of guitar parts and drum salvos that just keeps getting more euphoric. PARELESFKJ featuring Toro y Moi, ‘A Moment of Mystery’Vincent Fenton, the French producer who bills himself as FKJ (for French Kiwi Juice), collaborated with Chaz Bundick, who records as Toro y Moi, and Toro’s keyboardist, Anthony Ferraro, on a track from FKJ’s album due in June, “Vincent.” It’s three minutes of lush, wistful uncertainty: serenely blurred vocals, hovering keyboard tones, ambiguous chords that stay unresolved. “I love the drama because I never know what the ending’s like,” Bundick sings, matching the music. PARELESEsperanza Spalding, ‘Formwela 12’“Our bodies are Music/You cannot play/Music/Without the body/Dancing.” The 91-year-old dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, a former Alvin Ailey star, opens Esperanza Spalding’s latest with those lines of poetry; in the ensuing 13 minutes, she brings them to life. She glides and tilts across the floor of an open studio, surrounded by four dancers and four musicians — including Spalding, who uses her upright bass and a quiet, cooing voice to coax and support de Lavallade. Early in the performance, de Lavallade sits down beside her, laying an ear and a hand on the bass while Spalding plays. As the piece carries on, the band’s lush flourishes and pointillism are clearly coming in response to the dancers, as much as their steps are responding to the music. Mostly, everyone is focused on the guidance and the unhurried elegance of de Lavallade. The audio of this piece is a bonus track on the newly released vinyl version of Spalding’s “Songwrights Apothecary Lab.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOShabaka, ‘Explore Inner Space’Shabaka Hutchings begins this track improvising on a lone wood flute, against a backdrop of silence. Soon analog synthesizers and loops are pooling around him, and an electric guitar adds dewy, flickering plucks. The music never fully crescendos, but its mysterious serenity might invite to take up the charge of the track’s title. The tune comes from “Afrikan Culture,” the first solo EP released by this famed U.K.-based saxophonist, who has begun performing simply under the name Shabaka. RUSSONELLOMary Lattimore and Paul Sukeena, ‘Hundred Dollar Hoagie’The harpist Mary Lattimore and the guitarist Paul Sukeena, two experimental musicians and Philly-area expats who occasionally collaborate, have teamed up to release the stirring ambient album “West Kensington,” out Friday on the indie label Three Lobed recordings. The opener “Hundred Dollar Hoagie” announces itself humbly, with its playful title nodding to the all-time greatest regional slang word for a submarine sandwich, which does not quite prepare you for the seven-and-a-half minutes of otherworldly sublimity that it contains. Lattimore’s synthesizer chords and Sukeena’s warping, weeping guitar lines layer to create an almost lunar soundscape, pleasantly reminiscent of Brian Eno’s awe-struck 1983 masterwork “Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks.” ZOLADZ More

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    A Neil Diamond Musical Is Coming to Broadway, After a Stop in Boston

    “A Beautiful Noise” will start at Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston next month and transfer to Broadway’s Broadhurst Theater in November.A new musical about the life and career of Neil Diamond is coming to Broadway late this year.“A Beautiful Noise, The Neil Diamond Musical” will start previews on Nov. 2 and open on Dec. 4 at the Broadhurst Theater, the show’s producers said Wednesday. The Broadway production will be preceded by a six-week run starting June 21 at the Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston.Diamond, an 81-year-old Brooklyn native who was one of the most successful songwriters of the rock era, retired from touring in 2018, citing a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, and this year he sold his catalog to Universal Music Group. He wrote and performed “Sweet Caroline,” which has become a sports stadium favorite, especially at Fenway Park; won a Grammy for best original film score (“Jonathan Livingston Seagull”); and in 2011 was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.The stage musical will feature a score made up of Diamond’s songs, with a book by Anthony McCarten, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter behind “The Two Popes” and “The Theory of Everything.” The show is being directed by Michael Mayer, the Tony-winning director of “Spring Awakening” and a veteran of several adventurous jukebox musicals, including “Swept Away” (featuring songs from the Avett Brothers), “Head Over Heels” (the Go-Go’s) and “American Idiot” (Green Day). Steven Hoggett (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”) will choreograph.The lead producers are Ken Davenport, a Broadway veteran (his credits include the Tony-winning revival of “Once on This Island”) and Bob Gaudio, a musician who was the producer of several of Diamond’s albums. The musical is being capitalized for up to $20 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; a spokesman said the producers are hoping to keep the budget to $19 million.The actor Will Swenson will star as Diamond in the Boston run of the show. Casting for Broadway has not yet been announced. More

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    Britney Spears Revealed on Instagram That She Had a Miscarriage

    The pop singer, recently released from a conservatorship that had prevented her from becoming pregnant, revealed on Instagram that she has had a miscarriage.A month after announcing on Instagram that she was pregnant, the pop star Britney Spears has posted an update saying that she suffered a miscarriage, writing: “We have lost our miracle baby.”“Perhaps we should have waited to announce until we were further along,” said the message, which was posted to Ms. Spears’s Instagram account on Saturday afternoon and attributed to her and her partner, Sam Asghari. “However we were overly excited to share the good news.”When Ms. Spears, 40, let it be known that she was pregnant, her announcement was seen by many not only as glad tidings, but also as a declaration of agency after being freed from a conservatorship that had governed her life since she was in her 20s.That arrangement began in 2008, amid concerns over her mental health and potential substance abuse, when a judge in California granted oversight of her personal life and finances to her father, James P. Spears.During court proceedings last summer that stemmed from her request that the conservatorship be dissolved, Ms. Spears testified during a 23-minute speech that the arrangement had been “abusive,” adding that she had not been allowed to remove an IUD.“I want to be able to get married and have a baby,” Ms. Spears said then. “I was told right now in the conservatorship I am not able to get married or have a baby.”The statement about not being allowed to become pregnant was particularly stunning, even in a speech in which Ms. Spears also told the court that she had been placed on Lithium and forced to work against her will.Some reproductive rights advocates said that forced birth control was legally questionable, a violation of Ms. Spears’s autonomy and of her basic human rights.Late last year, a judge in Los Angeles ended the conservatorship, saying it was “no longer required.” By that time Ms. Spears had announced her engagement to her longtime boyfriend, Mr. Asghari, an actor and fitness trainer who told Men’s Health in 2018 that he had met Ms. Spears two years earlier while working on a music video for her song “Slumber Party.”Ms. Spears announced that she was pregnant on April 11, posting a photograph of pink flowers on Instagram and writing: “So I got a pregnancy test … and uhhhhh well … I am having a baby.”She described having experienced depression during a previous pregnancy, and said that this time she would be staying in more and doing yoga each day. She ended her message by writing: “Spreading lots of joy and love,” followed by heart emojis and exclamation points.The message posted on Ms. Spears’s Instagram on Saturday expressed gratitude for fans’ support. “Our love for each other is our strength,” it added. “We will continue trying to expand our beautiful family.” More