Nick Hasted

1 month ago | theartsdesk.com | Nick Hasted

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was uniquely disturbing, with its monster Leatherface’s first primal eruption to hang a victim on a meat-hook rivalling Psycho’s murders for shock and fright. It was only as the bludgeoning effect faded on subsequent viewings that the film’s pitch-black comedy became clear.

1 month ago | theartsdesk.com | Nick Hasted

Forty years ago, Chuck Prophet was the Keith Richards-like guitar hotshot in Green On Red, peers of R.E.M. and among the raw country-punk architects of what became Americana. Now he’s 61 and playing in a sold-out pub back-room in Hassocks, a downland commuter village near Brighton, still giving his all during two hours of humour and humane passion as if this is the biggest stage, and this crowd a community clearly worth serving.

1 month ago | theartsdesk.com | Nick Hasted

Thirty years ago, Chuck Prophet was the Keith Richards-like guitar hotshot in Green On Red, peers of R.E.M. and among the raw country-punk architects of what became Americana. Now he’s 61 and playing in a sold-out pub back-room in Hassocks, a downland commuter village near Brighton, still giving his all during two hours of humour and humane passion as if this is the biggest stage, and this crowd a community clearly worth serving.

2 months ago | theartsdesk.com | Nick Hasted

Longlegs’ trapdoor ending snapped tight on its clammy Lynchian atmosphere and themes, reconfiguring its Silence of the Lambs serial-killer riff into a more slyly awful tale. Osgood Perkins’ hit fifth horror film seemed sure to elevate his career, but follow-up The Monkey is a resolutely minor, down and dirty B-movie, relishing cartoon gore and comic excess.

2 months ago | loudersound.com | Nick Hasted

The Kinks were yesterday’s men as the 70s dawned, written off as 60s relics. Their only significant hit since 1967, Days, hardly arrested a calamitous, lift-shaft fall which hit bottom with a humiliating 1968 tour of working men’s clubs, bizarrely undertaken as they finished their wistful LP classic The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, which bombed. Convinced their archaic label Pye only wanted Kinks singles in the age of Sgt. Pepper, Ray Davies decided he’d had it with 45s.