Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The 60s is when it all came alive, when the teenagers saw that Bill Haley had faded out and that the first great hero of Rock and Roll was never coming back, it was the era of old men born in the 19th Century finally not running the White House, of hope in the passion of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, of the race to go beyond the perceived limits of the Earth, of a new love culminating in the Woodstock festival and in which for ever afterwards, through the wasted opportunities, through political scandal and assassinations, and the rise of Generation X and the coming of cynical dogma, that if you can remember it, then you weren’t paying attention to the message.
To be Made In The Sixties is now the crush of realising of just how that time was, the sense of beauty, of searing optimism, and whilst the downsides of the era were ones that were the stuff of nightmares, the shadow of the nuclear bomb and the disgusting face of racism on one side of the Atlantic and the imperialist power grabs in the Far-East, there was still a sense of hope, carried by music, that would not be diminished.
How to carry a carry all that went on in a decade is perhaps an impossible task to contemplate, in any form of art it would be thought of as grandeur, of pertaining every scene imaginable to a point where the picture itself would have to be considered abstract, overflowing with information, the only logical course of action to take would be take a year at a time, a salient point, what made people sit up and take notice; if you remember the sixties from now on then it is down surely to Mike Sponza and his celebrated style of music as his ninth album brings a deliberate musing, a dug deep response 50 years on from the time of our lives.
The effect is excellent, and with contributions from the likes of Eddi Reader, Nathan James, Chris Stoor, Hayley Sanderson, Aaron Liddard and Michele Bonivento, the decade is restored as one of hope and the crashing down of inevitable destruction. In tracks such as A Young Londoner’s Point of View on Cuban Crisis, Day of the Assassin, Even Dylan Was Turning Electric, Just The Beginning and the regaling Blues For The Sixties, the album is perfectly laced with that sense of new found confidence and the regret of letting a golden moment pass into history.
Thanks to Time’s inevitable unbeatable hand, we were all Made In The Sixties, we have all been shaped by that brilliant, beautifully damned decade regardless of whether we realise it or not.
Ian D. Hall