This week's music DVDs reviewed
THE YARDBIRDS
The Story of The Yardbirds
Voiceprint★★★★
1960s UK band The Yardbirds were punk in an age when pop groups (The Beatles, Herman's Hermits, The Dave Clarke Five) ruled the charts. Dirtier in sound, and enhanced by a sequence of guitarists (Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page) that in their own way would define the nature of rock in the 1970s, The Yardbirds brought the blues out of retirement and bolstered it with showmanship, suss and some great songs –
For Your Love, I'm a Man, Still I'm Sad. Dating from 1992, and updated with interviews with Clapton, Beck, Page and original members Chris Dreja and Jim McCarty, this documentary scores bonus points by including some terrific rare live footage from various European TV shows, as well as snippets from the Windsor Jazz Blues Festival (which later morphed into the Reading Festival). Led Zeppelin fans will be pleased to discover a prototype version of
Dazed and Confused.
BRIAN BOYD
PAUL MCCARTNEY
In Performance
Edgehill★★
This could have been a good critical appraisal of an interesting artist, but instead it’s a bit of a mess as it struggles to afford any real interpretation of McCartney’s substantial work. It’s billed as a “film portrait”; what you get is some interesting and some dull footage of McCartney in action with The Beatles, Wings and solo. The problem is that the talking heads assembled (“the friends and colleagues”) don’t have enough clout. You get some of McCartney’s old studio engineers and various longtime fans with connections of sorts to the subject, but really not much more. There are some interesting observations along the way, but, given the glut of McCartney material already out there, it’s difficult to see who this is aimed at. TONY CLAYTON-LEA
