Sixties

Rita Tushingham on life after A Taste of Honey: ‘It was a shock when the 60s ended’

~ Michael Stevenson ~ 1 Comment

She caused outrage as a wide-eyed teen in her very first film. As the actor returns in a spooky Agatha Christie, she relives life as a 60s icon – and the taunts she endured in the street

One day nearly 60 years ago, Rita Tushingham was walking through Soho with her friend, the late British actor Paul Danquah, when a passerby yelled: “Blacks and whites don’t mix!” Tushingham looks troubled by the memory. “It happened to Paul a lot,” she says. “I remember he shouted back, ‘Don’t worry! She’s only been on holiday and got a tan.’”

That was Britain in 1961, before London swung, before sex between men was decriminalised, before a black man and a white woman walking in Soho might pass unremarked. There’s a photo in the National Portrait Gallery of the pair that very year, her leaning in care-free, him eyeing the street as if on alert for the next racist.

At the time, Tushingham and Danquah were filming the now-celebrated A Taste of Honey, adapted from the play by Shelagh Delaney. “It had everything – race, class, gender, sexuality, poverty,” says Tushingham of her first film role. She played something cinema had never seen before: a bored teenager from the rough end of Salford. Jo was alienated from school, revolted by her boozy single mam and eternally suckered by worthless suitors. After falling in love with a sailor, played by Danquah, Jo gets pregnant. He returns to sea, so she moves in with Geoffrey, a gay textiles student who becomes her surrogate co-parent.

Fist interracial kiss onscreen

 

“We shocked audiences without intending to,” says Tushingham. “I only learned later that Paul and I did the first interracial kiss on screen.” It’s a big claim: certainly, it was seven years before Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura kissed in Star Trek, and a year before the earliest known interracial kiss on British TV, in the ITV drama You in Your Small Corner. For this and other supposed outrages, A Taste of Honey was banned in several countries including New Zealand. “A lot of the reaction was, ‘People like that don’t exist’ – by which they meant homosexuals, single mothers and people in mixed-race relationships. But they did.” Continue reading →

Orphy Robinson: why Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is a secret jazz masterpiece

~ Michael Stevenson ~ Leave a comment

The musician celebrates the 50th anniversary of Morrison’s Astral Weeks with a reimagining that draws out its latent jazz energy

I remember as a kid regularly going into the West End and spending all of my money on records – so much so that I wouldn’t have my bus fare home. I had a nice hi-fi system so all the local kids would come round to hear the latest albums. It was a ritual: we would sit on the sofa and play the whole thing. We’d want to know what the album was saying and we’d take it all in, from the liner notes to the artwork.

Astral Weeks was one of those albums that had been floating around my mind in bits and pieces for years. I’d heard odd tracks, like Madame George or Cyprus Avenue, but I’d never sat down and heard it in its entirety. That was until two years ago when a friend, Colm Carty, approached me with the idea to do a whole concert of Astral Weeks. I went away and immersed myself in the record for about a month. I’m a late-night person, so I would come home after a gig at around 3am when the adrenaline was still firing, I’d stick it on and I really started getting into it.

There was a freshness. It felt like Van Morrison could’ve recorded it yesterday, even though this year marks its 50th anniversary. When something is good, it works at any time. I was fascinated by the background of the musicians – jazz artists like the drummer Connie Kay, who came from the improvisational Modern Jazz Quartet – and I liked this idea of music coming from people you wouldn’t normally associate with that genre [ . . . ]

Source: Orphy Robinson: why Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is a secret jazz masterpiece

Michael Caine on how the 1960s broke class barriers: ‘I’ve met lots of equals. No betters’

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As a schoolboy, Michael Caine, the son of a charlady and a fish-market porter, was repeatedly taught to respect “his betters”. It took the social revolution of the 1960s, he says, to make it clear that such a hierarchy did not exist. “I’ve met lots of my equals since. But no betters,” Caine told the Observer this weekend on the eve of the British premiere of his documentary about the outpouring of working-class creativity in the 1960s.

“True, there was a lot of new music and great actors, as well as books and film directors and some dancing in discos, but it was a lot more than that: it was a change in the social lives of young people,” he said.Michael Caine: ‘I voted Brexit. It was about freedom, not immigrants’ | Read more: Michael Caine on how the 1960s broke class barriers: ‘I’ve met lots of equals. No betters’ | Film | The Guardian

Ray Davies on understanding hipsters, not talking to Pete Townshend – and why he fled Tony Blair’s Britain

~ Michael Stevenson ~ Leave a comment

Davies lives a mile and a half from the house in Muswell Hill where he was born, in Highgate village, a north London peak that lies above the modern-day smog. He says he stayed here because of the light. He sometimes does interviews on the park bench where he broke up with his first girlfriend, but today it is raining, so we meet at Café Rouge, in a back room, where his whispering voice can be caught on a tape recorder. As he [ . . . ]

Source: Ray Davies on understanding hipsters, not talking to Pete Townshend – and why he fled Tony Blair’s Britain