The "official photographer of the 1980s"

Any long-serving reader of my "regular blog" Give 'em the old Razzle Dazzle will know that one of "our gang"'s occasional divertissements is to attempt to photographically recreate those magnificently-stylised 80s album covers we know and love - see here, here and here for examples.

Today comes sad news that the man who was behind most of those images we were emulating, photographer Brian Griffin has departed to take up residence in the Posing Room at Fabulon.

Here are just a few of the many, many works that encapsulated, if not influenced, the aesthetic that particular [favourite] era five decades ago...

Mr Griffin's work was lauded throughout his career - his photograph for the Depeche Mode LP A Broken Frame [at the top of this post] was chosen for the cover of Life magazine's "The World's Best Photographs: 1980 - 1990", and he was voted The Guardian’s photographer of the decade in 1989. Permanent collections of his photography are held in galleries across the globe, including the National Portrait Gallery, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and the V&A.

His impact on popular consciousness, however, is forever cemented in his classic album covers, for the likes of Iggy Pop, Joe Jackson, Psychedelic Furs, Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Devo, among many, many others. The following is merely a soupçon:

[All works copyright Brian Griffin Estate - click any pic to enlarge]

RIP, Brian Griffin (13th April 1948 – 29th January 2024)

Let me do a good show!

We are distraught here at Dolores Delargo Towers! Our Patron-Saint-with-Attitude Señorita Chita Rivera has departed in a storm of glitter, jewels and twirling chiffon, to take centre stage (of course - who would dare argue) in Fabulon.

From The Guardian:

A consummate “triple-threat” entertainer, she was celebrated for her singing, acting and dancing in classic musicals including West Side Story and Chicago. She won Tony awards for best actress in a musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman and The Rink and was given a lifetime Tony award in 2018....

Rivera emerged as a New York theatre sensation in the 1950s and was still centre-stage six decades later, in the 2015 Broadway production The Visit, which reunited her with composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb. She performed their songs over decades, not just in musicals but also in her own cabaret revues....

She looked back at her career in a 2005 revue, Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life, and in the 2023 book Chita: A Memoir, written with Patrick Pacheco, which notably featured her hell-raising alter ego Dolores (also Rivera’s birth name). She continued to perform small shows, sometimes with her daughter and with her own piano, bass and drums trio.

[Of her backstage routines on Broadway, she said]: “The only time my door would close would be just before I went on and I said my prayers. I would say the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Act of Contrition. Then I’d go off to be crazy!... My prayer was always, ‘Let me say the right words, let me please the audience, let me do a good show.’”

She never did a bad one!

Chita Rivera, Rita Moreno and Bette Midler - America

Chita Rivera, Paula Kelly & Shirley MacLaine - There's Gotta Be Something Better Than This

Chita Rivera - All I Care About is Love

Chita Rivera - Kiss of the Spiderwoman

RIP, Chita Rivera (born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero Anderson, 23rd January 1933 – 30th January 2024)

It's a look

"Openly left-handed?"

A joyful read, courtesy of Ryan Gilbey, writing in The Guardian:

Andrew Scott is capable of many things but giving a dull interview seems not to be among them... in one of those cosy Hollywood Reporter roundtable discussions which proliferate during awards season, he has challenged a piece of outdated rhetoric from an era when queerness was synonymous with shame.

The moment arose when the moderator Scott Feinberg singled out Scott, who stars in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers as a screenwriter magically reunited with the parents who died when he was 12, and Colman Domingo, who plays Martin Luther King’s advisor Bayard Rustin in the Netflix biopic Rustin, as “openly gay actors playing openly gay characters who are at the centre of important films”. The remark was intended as a way in to a discussion about representation, though at no point did he refer to the other performers present (Robert Downey Jr, Paul Giamatti, Mark Ruffalo and Jeffrey Wright) as “openly heterosexual”.

“I’m going to make a pitch for getting rid of the phrase ‘openly gay,’” said Scott, steering the conversation in a more illuminating direction. “It’s an expression that you only ever hear in the media. You’re never at a party and you say, ‘This is my openly gay friend...’” Why, he wondered, is “openly” always attached to that adjective? “We don’t say you’re ‘openly Irish.’ We don’t say you’re ‘openly left-handed’...There’s something in it that’s a little near ‘shamelessly.’ ‘You’re open about it?’ You know what I’m saying?” He proposed that “it’s time to just sort of park it.”

It's about bloody time someone said it!

Now, Mr Gilbey, can we "sort of park" the epithets "queer" and "queerness" as well, please..?

All Hale

Oh heavens. Another personal icon has gone!.

I really couldn't say it any better than this from a super-fan:

"Can’t even begin to express how much I loved Georgina Hale. She was a cross between Mae West, Fenella Fielding and a careworn Sindy Doll."

She was all that, and more - a RADA-trained alumnus of the Royal Shakespeare Company, she played Adam Faith's "wife" in Budgie, the second witch in T-Bag, and character roles in (among many, many others) Emmerdale, Minder, The Sweeney, One Foot in the Grave, Hollyoaks and The Bill; she was a favourite "muse" of the legendary Ken Russell - who cast her in Mahler, The Devils, Lisztomania and The Boy Friend - and was also a lauded theatre actor in such roles as "Josie" in Steaming, "Crystal Allen" in an adaptation of The Women, and leading roles in plays by Beckett, Chekhov and Ayckbourn. Whew.

Miss Hale had such allure that it made me smile every time I saw her name in the credits - the purse-lipped, purring way she delivered her lines was unique, and always endearing. We'll miss her.

RIP, Georgina Hale (4th August 1943 – 4th January 2024)

On the Jukebox this Weekend at Dolores Delargo Towers

To be real

One of the very last surviving major stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood and classical years of British cinema has departed up the glitering staircase to Fabulon...

[as Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins] "We're clearly soldiers in petticoats, and dauntless crusaders for women to vote! Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid."

[as Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night Music] "Send in the clowns."

“As far as I’m concerned, I’m not interested in playing the role on only one level. The whole point of first-class acting is to make a reality of it. To be real. And I have to make sense of it in my own mind in order to be real."

"I think we've got to remember to grab onto our perks, whatever is the good thing about each age. Each stage of life should be a progression."

RIP, Miss Glynis Johns (5th October 1923 – 4th January 2024)

Read my tribute to the great lady on her centenary last year.

Starting the New Year with a bang

Happy 2024 from London!!

London Fireworks 2024

No tracklist this year, but the soundtrack marked the Coronation of our new monarch, 75 years of the NHS, 75 years since the arrival of Empire Windrush and 10 years since same-sex marriage became legalised. It features a recorded message from His Majesty King Charles III, as well as readings by Sadiq Khan, Dame Helen Mirren, Bella Ramsey, Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, George the Poet and Baroness Floella Benjamin - and an eclectic selection of music including bhangra, k-pop and reggaeton, alongside global and British pop classics including the Spice Girls, Calvin Harris featuring Tom Grennan, Rema & Selena Gomez, Lulu, Beyoncé, Louis Armstrong, Fifty Fifty, Jasmine Sandlas, Dua Lipa, The Kinks and Gala.