’Let the Canary Sing’

Singer-songwriter, icon, tireless advocate – Cyndi Lauper’s position in history is firmly cemented. But it wasn’t always this way.

Just one step away from the coveted EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony – only the Oscar remains to be won), Lauper hit the big time with the 1983 single Girls Just Want to Have Fun and album She’s So Unusual. By then, she had been in the industry struggling for more than a decade. And the documentary Let the Canary Sing provides a context to the struggles she faced both at home and within the male-dominated music business. Four successive top five songs from a debut album (the first female recording artist in history) still didn’t make it easy for her.

Tireless in the advocacy of her beliefs (feminism, gay rights and homelessness in particular) along with diverse musical tastes and influences, Let the Canary Sing overall accentuates the positive. A number of negatives in her early life are excluded (rape, hospitalisation for malnutrition, dropped by her record label) as Lauper looks not to (all) True Colours but in turning back time, looks to the many albums, Tony and Olivier Best New Musical Awards for Kinky Boots and personal journeys instead.

Nostalgic, insightful, Alison Ellwood’s documentary may not provide a great deal of new material, but it will undoubtedly please her legion of millions of fans.

Rating: 72%

Director: Alison Ellwood (Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, TV’s How to Change Your Mind)

’Blitzed!’

Amusing, irreverent, mainly anecdotal two part documentary revisiting Blitz, the London club that was the birthplace of the New Romantics.

As punk quickly came and went, early 1980s Britain was dour and rife with social problems. A small London club, founded by Steve Strange and Rusty Egan, with its strict dress code became the hangout for creative working class kids and art students pushing fashion and gender boundaries. Shortlived it may have been, but Blitz is now synonymous with the look, the sound, the style and the attitude of the ’80s and beyond. Spandau Ballet, Boy George, Marilyn, Sade, Midge Ure went on to high profile superstardom but the club also helped launch the likes of Emmy-award winner costume designer Michele Clapton (Game of Thrones, The Crown) and milliner-to-the-queen Stephen Jones.

Archival footage along with interviews with Boy George, Rusty Egan, journalist Robert Elms, Michele Clapton, Midge Ure and others central to the heyday of Blitz provide a wholly engaging, funny, occasionally bitchy two-part insight into the intensely competitive and judgemental club that famously turned away Mick Jagger.

Rating: 67%

Director: Bruce Ashley, Michael Donald