Sophie was a Scottish singer-songwriter and record producer.
She is known for such songs as “It’s Okay to Cry” (2017).
RIP Hilton Valentine (1943 – 2021)
Hilton Valentine was an English guitarist, member of the The Animals.
Valentine played the electric guitar arpeggio introduction to the Animals’ 1964 signature song “The House of the Rising Sun”.
RIP Cloris Leachman (1926 – 2021)
Cloris Leachman was an American actress with a long an fruitful career.
I give you a fragment from The Last Picture Show (1971) in which she is a wife angry at her husband.
And one set of fragments from the Young Frankenstein (1974), where she famously is Frau Blücher, and everytime her name is pronounced the horses start to whinny, neigh and rear.
RIP Arik Brauer (1929 – 2021)
Arik Brauer was an Austrian artist, co-founder of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism.
The work of Brauer strikes me as uninteresting.
Maybe I’m too harsh on this whole school of Vienna, but the only artist of that school who really impresses me is Johfra Bosschart.
RIP Alberto Grimaldi (1925 – 2021)
Alberto Grimaldi was an Italian film producer known for producing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Last Tango in Paris, but more importantly for us, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom by Pasolini.
That Sodom film you don’t need to see to form an opinion about. It’s better just to read about it and let it lead you to the manuscript by Sade on which it was based.
That book has the lines:
“How many times, damn it, have I not desired that one could attack the sun, deprive the universe of it, or use it to set fire to the world”.
But I digress.
RIP Guem (1947 – 2021)
Guem was an Algerian musician, composer and dancer.
Guem is best known for his cult dancefloor recording “Le Serpent” (1978).
“Le Serpent” is a sibling to “Jingo” (1959) by Candido Camero, “New Bell” (1972) by Manu Dibango and “Road Close” (1984) by Tony Allen, who all died last year.
RIP James Purify (1944 – 2021)
James Purify was an American singer.
He is best known for singing “I’m Your Puppet” (1966) with his brother. This song mixes well with “After Laughter (Comes Tears)” (1964).
RIP Larry King (1933-2021)
Larry King was an American talk show host iconic in the 1990s. He was called the father of talk show democracy and was instrumental in the development of infotainment.
His whole era is captured by the superb documentary Spin.
In that documentary, he can be seen talking to G. W. Bush on the merits of the drug Halcion at 5:40.
RIP Phil Spector (1939 – 2021)
Phil Spector was an American musician and record producer known for his Wall of Sound sound production.
The Wall of Sound was a very dense sound with little room for details of individual instruments, exemplified in recordings such as “Da Doo Ron Ron” “Be My Baby” or “Baby, I Love You”, all released in 1963.
There is, Phil Spector: He’s a Rebel, a documentary from 1982 on Phil Spector, without his cooperation , in which Albert Goldman is recorded as saying:
“Rock ‘n’ roll is basically institutionalized adolescence. And the bottom line of rock ‘n’ roll is that it’s a baby food industry and Phil found a new formula for baby food.”
I thought that was quite funny.
RIP Michael Apted (1941 – 2021)
Michael Apted is a British director famous for a body of diverse films.
I give you Up (1964 – today).
The Up Series is a series of documentary films that have followed the lives of fourteen British children since 1964, when they were seven years old.
So far the documentary has had eight episodes spanning 49 years (one episode every seven years).
The children were selected to represent the range of socio-economic backgrounds in Britain at that time, with the explicit assumption that each child’s social class predetermines their future.