Coffee-Table Notes

Norman Lloyd – Actor, director, producer   Born November 8, 1914; died May 11, 2021      Norman Lloyd, who has died in his sleep aged 106, had an eighty-year career on stage, screen and radio that saw him at the forefront of some of theatre and film’s most maverick moments. Possessed with a commanding presence that belied his alight stature, he worked with Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock, and came into contact with other groundbreaking artists, including Bertolt Brecht, and composers Arnold Schoenberg and Hanns Eisler.     In the 1930s, Lloyd worked on the cutting edge of what was then described as social theatre. With the Theatre of Action collective, he was directed by Elia Kazan. It was with the company he also met his wife, actress Peggy Craven. They were together for 75 years. Director Joseph Losey brought Lloyd into the Federal Theatre Project, who devised living newspapers of contemporary events. Other members included Orson Welles and John Houseman, who broke

Anita Lane – Singer, songwriter Born March 18,1960; died April 2021   Anita Lane, who has died aged 61, was a singer and songwriter whose mercurial talent explored emotional extremes with a black humoured candour. She did this over two albums of her own, Dirty Pearl (1993), and Sex O’Clock (2001), and on numerous collaborations with assorted fellow travellers.   Possessed with a voice that sounded sired somewhere between No Wave era New York and the Parisian Left Bank rather than the Australian suburbs she was actually from, Lane’s precious few recordings revealed a fearless and unique creative force.    As a teenager, Lane had fallen in with a post-punk community that crawled out of Melbourne to explore a darker vision than their sunny surroundings offered, and helped carve out a ferocious form of antipodean gothic that marked out her future artistic path. Aged seventeen, Lane formed a creative and romantic alliance with nineteen-year-old Nick Cave after her classmate Roland S. Howard

Monte Hellman – Film director   Born July 12, 1929; died April 20, 2021      Monte Hellman, who has died aged 91, was a film director who became the ultimate outsider. One of a generation of auteurs to have come of artistic age on the back of the post World War Two American counter culture, his work was equally in tune with European philosophical sensibilities. The fusion of the two made for a brooding and ennui-laden canon that chimed with the times. This was seen best in Two-Lane Blacktop, (1971), an existential road movie starring singer-songwriter James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson alongside Laurie Bird and semi regular Hellman collaborator, Warren Oates.   With a trailer voguishly hailing it as ‘The Far-Out World of the High Speed Scene’, it was hoped Two-Lane Blacktop would catch fire with disaffected youth, and become a crossover hit in the mould of Easy Rider. Dennis Hopper’s era defining opus had been released two years earlier, and featured a cast that included Jack Nic

V&A Dundee      Open Up   Now is an interesting time for V&A Dundee to be opening its doors for the first time in months for this superclub size celebration of life after dark, and the designs that have become key signifiers of club culture’s evolution. With venues still unable to open because of social distancing regulations caused by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, plague year lockdowns have achieved what even encroaching inner-city gentrification couldn’t manage.   This gives Night Fever an extra frisson that reflects some of the illegal rave rebellion that has grown throughout the last year prior to this access-all-areas exhibition. Seen in this context, Night Fever’s half-century display of collective memory is itself enough to set assorted synapses twitching with a mix of nostalgic solidarity and yearning.    A version of the show was first seen at the Vitra Design Museum in 2018 in association with ADAM Design Museum Brussels (and, interestingly, Hugo Boss) This makes for

Mike Mitchell – Guitarist   Born; April 16, 1944; died April 16, 2021    Mike Mitchell, who has died aged 77, was a guitarist whose solo on The Kingsmen’s version of Richard Berry’s song, Louie Louie, helped define a sound that helped shift rock and roll out of the school hop and into infinitely rawer territory. The song was recorded by the teenage band in a three-track studio, where, according to Mitchell in a 1999 interview with John Broughton on Casey Radio, Melbourne, Australia, the Kingsmen’s one-take wonder of Louie Louie and two more songs took an hour all in, costing a cool $36 to make.   The result saw Berry’s three-chord construction ingested with new life as a bratty piece of almost incoherent bubblegum trash that became an inspiration for every garage band in town. Despite the messiness of the recording, it was released as a single in 1963, and eventually spent several weeks at number 2 in the U.S. charts.    The Kingsmen’s record gained notoriety after the FBI began a leng

Myra Frances – Actress, animal welfare campaigner   Born April 13, 1942; died March 30, 2021   Myra Frances, who has died of cancer aged 78, was an actress who became a taboo busting pioneer when she shared British television’s first romantic kiss between women. That was in Girl (1974), James Robson’s play for BBC Birmingham’s Second City Firsts series of short stand-alone dramas by relatively new writers. Frances played Christine Harvey, the seemingly stern army corporal who appears opposite Alison Steadman’s discharged pregnant squaddie, Jackie.    As Jackie prepares to leave, the pair’s illicit tryst is revealed in a serious study of the effects their brief relationship has had on both of them amidst the double lives they each lead. As the two women are left alone together, the scene builds towards a bittersweet reckoning played out to the strains of Dusty Springfield’s hit version of Bacharach and David’s song, This Girl’s in Love With You. “Top of the gay girls’ hit parade”, as Fr

As the eleventh edition of Alchemy’s Hawick-based festival of experimental film moves online due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, its programme features 171 works of film and artists’ moving image. These span live screenings, an on demand programme, exhibitions and new commissions, plus talks and events to accompany them. Highlights include -    Charlie Chaplin Lived Here Saturday May 1 st , 3pm-4.15pm, and on demand with audio description for blind and partially sighted audiences. Set in London in 1969,  Louise S. Milne and Seán Martin’s new film focuses on the parallel lives of two great film-makers who never quite meet, as Chaplin visits his old haunts incognito, while Scottish film-maker Bill Douglas and his friend Peter Jewell makes a student film about Chaplin’s childhood and early years in the city. Douglas would go on to direct his famed trilogy of short films –  My Childhood, My Ain Folk , and  My Way Home - based loosely on Jewell’s life, as well as his only feature,  Comrad