Who Has Had The Most “Returns To Form”?

Actual or proclaimed returns to form? If the latter, then unquestionably REM

Cheating, but Woody Allen. He makes a movie a year almost like clock-work and his fallow periods are full of stuff that’s unwatchable and makes one swear off him forever…. But every six years or so he becomes worth watching again (at least for a year or two). More fastidious established writer-directors would just not make a new film until they had a new genuinely good idea.

It’s not Dylan – I thought the critical consensus was that Dylan had one really long crap period followed by one relatively late period of being pretty good again, but with no serious suggestion that’s it’s as good as the good stuff. Same goes for Prince.

Seemingly every REM album is a proclaimed return to form by someone, even the really bad ones, to the extent it’s become a cliche and no one ever believes it. It’s that combination of hope, vague desperation and prolonged disappointment over several years – I suspect that the Arctic Monkeys are heading for mid-career like that for people who like that sort of thing. Jay-Z’s probably well into this kind of pattern as well.

I suspect Neil Young is the best answer to this question in that he genuinely does have periods of being dull as ditchwater or batshit terrible and will then suddenly release an album that’s as good as his best ones. But then the people proclaiming this probably hate Trans and are therefore NOT TO BE TRUSTED.

@Mark M, 10. You may be right, but I guess I regard Match Point (2005) as a significant uptick compared to the positively angering/unwatchables that came just before it, and I gather (it’s not out down under yet) Midnight in Paris (2011) is a lot more fun than anything else Allen has done recently.

Looking back over Allen’s filmography now, though, I do see that some of my memories are a little distorted: I *detested* Shadows and Fog (1992) at the time and it’s coded in my memory as being part of a huge slump for Allen. But Husbands and Wives (which I loved) was the same year, and Manhattan Murder Mystery (pretty good) was the next year so I’ve evidently misremembered. Similarly I tend to think of the mid/late ’90s for Allen as being a wasteland (‘The Deconstructing Harry Years’) before Sweet and Lowdown, but that leaves out Everyone Says I Love You which I remember thinking was pretty decent and occasionally great (the Goldie Hawn bits). There’s something about Allen’s bad films that makes the experience of seeing them loom inordinately large in memory!

Frankie Valli.

Woody Allen was the obvious film analog in the pub, though more about proclaimed return to form rather than actual. Prolific is important, and even directors who have gone significantly off the boil (say Scorsese, Coppola, Ridley Scott), are given enough kudos for their early work that a bad film is seen as an aberation rather than the norm. I think someone like Stephen Frears has less of a auteur tag, so his good ones could be tagged returns to form, but then an awful lot of his good films seem to end up being credited to anyone but him.

As with the Elvis Costello comparison, often starting off with patchy form is the way to go. I can see someone trying to RETURN TO FORM Tim Burton without really noting there wasn’t much form to start off with.

Robert Altman’s a very good call.

Bowie.

The secondary question is whether when people say ‘return to form’, they mean ‘going back to what we know they can actually do’. That’s certainly the case (regularly) with Elvis Costello – ‘at least if he’s back with the Attractions he’s not making another chamber music album’. Or indeed Lou Reed’s New York (an album title, indeed, that pledged a reversion to home territory in both the geographical and stylistic uses of the term).

Of course, this can be a false promise – there’s many a truly rotten album in the vague approximation of an earlier beloved style, and I’ll argue long and hard that The Aviator is a far, far better movie than The Departed.

Rolling Stones? Beggar’s Banquet, Some Girls, Steel Wheels, A Bigger Bang at least – maybe every album since Steel Wheels.

Elton John maybe, as he’s cranked out enough records, often harking back to the ‘classic’ sound (re 20). A Single Man, Too Low For Zero, Reg Strikes Back, Made In England, Songs From The West Coast, The Captain and the Kid…

@9 Yes Prince has got a charge sheet as long as your arm in this area, to the extent that reviews of his albums (when they have been reviewed at all) over the past two decades almost always felt the need to acknowledge it, by saying something like “this is not the return to form we’ve all been waiting for….”

Prince is an interesting one, though, because the current critical consensus seems to be that he really has returned to form, but only in live performance. There have been a number of reviews along the lines of “I have’t heard anything since Batman, and I wouldn’t listen to the last five albums if you paid me to. But he does put on a fantastic show.”