"I know a thing or two about performing, m'boy"

 fragment, from an essay about something else, on my favorite film 

“I am a bullet”—Chas Devlin

The essence of mod is the connection between Englishness, style, and violence. 

Rock ‘n’ roll had triggered violence before (with the cinema seat slashing done by Teddy Boys driven into a frenzy of excitement by the first rock’n’roll movies) but it had never represented it musically or enacted it onstage.   The mod sound was expressive not of sexual desire but of an unrest at once social and existential.  It's latent violence was dramatized by The Who in their climactic orgies of instrument-smashing: the orgasmic release that mod music and mod neurology required.

From violence aestheticized, to a kind of aesthete of violence:  Chas Devlin, the smooth criminal protagonist of Performance, a Donald Cammett and Nic Roeg directed film made in 1968 but released a couple of years later. Played by James Fox,  Chas  is an enforcer for a “firm” (criminal syndicate) in East London, a virtuoso “performer” who collects protection money and puts the squeeze on “flash little twerps”.  Chas is also a bit of a mod, what with his short hair, thin ties and sharp suits. He’s a narcissist who may have a homosexual past but currently goes in for S&M games with his girlfriend involving whips and mirrors. In one scene, we see Chas in his  bachelor pad in a posh apartment complex, dressing with great care. In a shot that seems to look ahead to Richard Gere in American Gigolo, Chas selects gold cuff links from a drawer that contains about a dozen sets, and then obsessively fussing over the placement of some magazines on his coffee table, making millimeter adjustments so that they are square with the edges of the table.  Then he’s off to threaten the owner of a betting shop who is being coerced into merging with the firm: the camera cuts from Devlin’s almost prissy sartorial rituals to a dustbin being hurled through the betting shop window by one of his thugs.  

Later, on the run after killing the betting shop owner, with whom he has some extremely personal history, Chas winds up hiding from the law in the Ladbroke Grove house of Turner, a burned-out and decadent rock star modeled on the Rolling Stones’s Brian Jones but actually played by Mick Jagger. Phoning an accomplice, Chas says he’s “on the left” (i.e. West London) and complains about the “long hair, beatniks, druggers, free love” atmosphere of his hideout. Chas is uptight and as Performance unfolds Turner and his lover Ferber (played by Brian Jones’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg) loosen up their sociopath guest with hallucinogens, in order to break down his character armor and poke around inside his inner workings.

Whether deliberately intended as an in-joke or just an instinctive choice, the confrontation between the Rolling Stone and the mod-like Chas is inspired. Mods loathed the Stones, regarding them as scruffy art-school bohemians with dirty long hair. The very things that made Jagger, Jones and Richards anti-heroic role models for bourgeois students the world over was what convinced the mods they were posh middle class kids slumming it.  The antipathy endured:  echoing Pete Meaden’s definition of mod as “clean living under difficult circumstances”, Paul Weller once declared his belief in “clean culture, real culture. Not all this bullshit… rock fuckin’ image and…. elegantly wasted wankers, like Keith Richards.”   

One of the key figures behind Performance was David Litvinoff. He’s credited as Dialogue Consultant and Technical Advisor, but his most important role was serving as the conduit between the demimonde of upper class Chelsea and the East London underworld inhabited by the Kray Twins (the sharp dressed mobsters who provided the model for Chas’s firm).  

In his BFI  Film Classics monograph on Performance,  Colin McCabe describes Litvinoff as “ suppressed, violent, buttoned up...”  But then again “buttoned up”, or it’s more common equivalent “bottled up”, could almost be the definition of  Englishness....

director's cut bit on Performance from S+A

The Man Who Fell to Earth  deserves its reputation as one of the most successful – artistically, not so much commercially – rock star as movie actor turns to date. Probably it’s only real rival is the earlier Roeg movie Performance, which he co-directed with writer Donald Cammell.  Performance and The Man Who Fell To Earth go together, and not just because Bowie’s frenemy Mick Jagger starred in the former . The two movies form a conceptual pair, bookending the glam era. 

Filmed in 1968, Performance is absolutely Sixties, but it rehearses the themes of the pop era that followed swiftly upon the film’s delayed release in 1970. Decadence, sexual indeterminacy, the theatricality of performance are all in there, along with a persistent motif to do with mirrors (used to causing doubling and gender-blurring effects). There’s magic too: upper class bohemian Cammell was fascinated by Crowley and friends with Kenneth Anger, whose movies are clear influence on Performance. Cammell had a role in Lucifer Rising, playing Osiris the God of Death.

Just like The Man Who Fell To Earth, the plotline of Performance is really a frame for the draping of  highly-charged tableaux  and the elaboration of Roeg’s hallucinatory camerawork, with its disorientating edits and slippages of time and perspective.  The basic story involves the flight of an East End enforcer, Chas Devlin, who has incurred the wrath of his Kray Twins-like gang boss.  Posing as a juggler, Devlin takes refuge in the Ladbroke Grove house of Turner, a burned-out, reclusive rock star (modeled largely on Brian Jones, but  played by Jagger). Druggy, polysexual cavortings ensue, as Turner and his lover Pherber  Anita Pallenberg - once Brian Jones’s partner, by that point Keith Richards’s girlfriend) try to dismantle their sociopathic guest’s character armor and poke around inside his psyche.  

Long haired and made-up, the feminized Turner is the opposite of the proudly “all man” Devlin. Except that the East End gangland culture he comes from has a homo-erotic undercurrent: boss of the firm Harry Flowers dallies with toy boys, and it’s implied that Chas also has a homosexual past about which he’s in literally violent denial.  

Another glammy thread in the film relates to ideas of performance and identity.  The script was originally titled The Liars. Both rock star and gangster project a front as part of their trade. Devlin uses intimidation, a psychopathic aura, far more than actual violence.  In the movie’s critical exchange, Turner lectures the “juggler” Devlin (who he earlier described as “a performer of natural magic”) about theatre.  "I know a thing or two about performing, my boy!.... The only performance that makes it, that really makes it,  that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness. Am I right?”.

But Turner also knows that he’s lost his mojo: precisely the ability to believe the illusion he’s projecting. Devlin, whose name is close to devil, still has his “daemon,” as Pherber calls it. “He wants to know why your show is a bigger turn-on than his ever was,” she tells Devlin. She says that the criminal provides a “dark little mirror” that will perhaps help the fading rock star escape the hole in which “he’s stuck. Stuck!”

The second half of Man Who Fell To Earth - Newton under house arrest, passing time in kinky but listless sex, drinking gin by the gallon -  virtually repeats the  atmosphere of aimless decadence and psychic seclusion that pervades Turner’s West London townhouse. Roeg spoke of how Jagger and Bowie both possessed a charisma and physical presence that couldn’t be learned at acting school. “They’re not just a singer with a band. Their whole magnetism comes out in acting.” 

Neither film is strictly speaking about rock – Man Who Fell  To Earth isn’t at all, while Performance barely touches on music-making or the rock biz. But they jostle for first place as rock movies, capturing more of the spirit of their rock era – and more of their respective rock star in a starring role – than any of the films that more obviously deal with rock. 

 "and the only promotional poster that makes it, that truly makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves MADNESS!"

thankfully withdrawn poster for the movie!

vomiting glamour (reflux)

 

How Kenneth Anger Created Camp Cinema with His Short Film, 'Puce Moment'
a piece by Matt McKinzie

"Over a black screen, in garish pink font outlined by vivid turquoise, the words "a film by ANGER" come into view. Not "a film by KENNETH ANGER"… no, he has chosen to omit his first name for a far more ostentatious, and multilayered, mononym....  it is almost as if Anger expects you to know who he is, to blindly and readily accept this sense of self-attributed stardom.... It is this kind of absurdism—this fascination with fame and glamour, the stylistic presentation of an artist's name akin to the presentation of a venerated show-business legend (despite being the farthest thing from one at that point in time), the full and self-reflexive embrace of artifice—that comes to define Puce Moment (1949), Anger's overlooked touchstone of the early avant-garde cinema movement.

... His first major work, Fireworks (1947), landed him in a contentious court case for exhibiting to American movie houses what is essentially a homoerotic wet dream. Puce Moment, which came two years later, emerges as a different kind of dream. As in Fireworks, you won't find handsome sailors or the sparks of Roman candles posing as metaphoric ejaculate. What you will find, however, are more covert allusions to the social and aesthetic realities of Anger's existence and art, the same sort of illuminating material in later Hollywood films like Valley of the Dolls and Rocky Horror Picture Show....   his visual and formative distortions of the film's "plot" make Puce Moment perhaps the earliest cinematic artwork to adopt the camp tradition, and unlike any other (certainly mainstream) motion picture of the 1940s, it is self-aware in its appreciation and understanding of glamour, artifice, exaggeration, and of the power of sexuality and materialism....

"The first indication of Anger's campy distortion is the prologue to his plot. Inexplicably, a series of flapper dresses are danced (by an unseen puppeteer) in front of the screen, before fudging the lens to reveal subsequent dresses on the rack in perpetuity. Anger is vomiting glamour into our face, objectifying objects, sexualizing what cannot, in a vacuum, be sexualized: silk, velvet, cotton, glitter. Our world is tactile and corporeal, and it is overwhelming. But we cannot get enough of it."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

an old Melody Maker review by me of a video reissue of Kenneth Anger's films

KENNETH ANGER'S MAGICK LANTERN CYCLE, VOLUMES 1-4
(Jettisoundz videos)

When they get around to unpicking the tangled threads
that connect The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Psychic TV,
somewhere at the web's centre will lurk the tarantula figure
of Kenneth Anger. Aleister Crowley fan, ex-chum of Jimmy
Page, and chronicler of the psycho-sleaze behind Hollywood's
glittering facade, Kenneth Anger is also the maker of a
series of films whose themes uncannily prefigure the abiding
fixations of leftest-field rock. Pass beyond a certain
limit, and you enter a realm where magic and ritual, S&M,
Crowley, Manson, Nazism, bodypiercing, tattooing,
hallucinogenics, mytho-mania, voodoo dance, all interconnect
as facets of the same quest: for the ultimate transgressive,
transcendent, self-annihilating mystic HIGH.

Both "Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome" (1954) and
"Invocation Of My Demon Brother" (1969) are about this search
for supreme bacchanalian release. ("Inauguration" was
inspired by taking acid, "Invocation" by the counter culture
created by acid). Both are a kaleidoscopic montage of images
grotesque and bizarre, with all the key Anger motifs (cocks,
pagan ritual, bikers, Swastikas, cabbalistic symbols) brought
into play. "Inauguration", with its strident Janacek
soundtrack and vampily made-up actresses, is simultaneously
camp and disturbing; "Invocation", with its maddening moog
soundtrack by Mick Jagger, captures the apocalyptic vibe of
the bitter end of the hippy daze, and must surely have
influenced Nic Roeg's "Performance".

"Lucifer Rising" (1970-80) shares much the same pre-
occupations as the other two films, but expresses them in
less histrionic fashion, through images of serene, stately
beauty, set to a beatific soundtrack by Bobby Beausoleil (an
acolyte of Manson's). "Lucifer Rising" is a rehabilation of
Lucifer, reclaiming him as the Light god, a Rebel Angel whose
"message is that the key to joy is disobedience". Anger's
biker movie, "Scorpio Rising" (1963), on the other hand, is a
"death mirror held up to American culture". The biker
represents American myths of Lone Ranger individualism and
Born To Run freedom, taken to their psychotic limit.
"Scorpio Rising" is a giddy miasma of death's-heads, Iron
Crosses, cocaine and blasphemy, with Anger salivating over
the well-stuffed crotches and leather-clad torsoes of his
subjects - and all set to the incongruous soundtrack of
Sixties pulp pop!

Of the five shorter films also included in this series,
"Fireworks" (1947) is a blue-tinted homerotic nightmare about
being brutalised by sailors (the final image is of a sailor
with a Roman Candle jutting out of his zip), while "Eaux
D'Artifice" (1953) is a beautiful Midsummer Night's
dreamscape, with a full moon suffusing off the cascading,
gushing and spurting waters of the Tivoli fountain gardens.
Sheer brilliance.

secret undeclared thesis

The secret - or secreted - thesis, undeclared but just faintly discernible, in Shock and Awe is that the clothes, the style, the look of glam rock has aged far worse than the music, the records, the sound of glam rock. 

Even Bowie looks shit as often as he looks exquisite

For every one of these ageless amazements

There's several of these

Bowie could get away with it because he was so unusually good-looking, in the sense of looking  beautifully unusual - an unusual kind of beauty

But when his plain-John or decent-looking-but regular-looking-bloke cohorts tried to get with the program, it looked ruddy awful 

As for Roxy Music - in truth, rather often they just looked a bit tatty - a right rocky horror show -  before their retreat into "timeless be-suited elegance" 

In the picture above, they are barely a notch above Deaf School.

And in this next shot, even Bryan looks bad (oddly resembling Ariel P**k)

They only get away with it really because Bryan is generally so incredibly handsome in a classic movie star sort of way.

The rest of Roxy look like a bunch of proggers.

Well to be honest in that shot above they look like the Fabulous Poodles or the Kursaal Flyers.  And Bryan is handsome but clothing wise it's not far off the singer in Mud.

Of course circa the first albums there is Eno, the rival visual attraction in Roxy, the other Brian/Bryan. 

Yet Eno in his balding-yet-long-locked, heavily made-up glam phase looks much less sexy (to my hetero male eyes at any rate) than the Another Green World era look (short haired; sensible 'visual artist at work' casual wear)

Much the same applies to the album artwork, actually

The first five Roxy covers (with the exception of For Your Pleasure  which still thrills and thralls) are embarrassing, don't you think? Softcore Pirelli Calendar, suitable for the locker room of a car repair shop. Especially Stranded and Country Life (and ain't that an ugly pun?)

Yet the music - the music - "For Your Pleasure", "2 H.B.", "Mother of Pearl", "Amazona" -  is an ageless amazement.

Of course sometimes the glam pose  / fashion-as-art-statement stuff doesn't look good from the off, it's sort of pre-dated. 

Dexys promo shot for their new single "The Feminine Divine"

Or going back to the original era, take a look these late-prog / late-glam turning into New Wave

 grotesques 

S+ A is written from an odd position - a glam rock fan who isn't that interested in clothes. Who is  reflexively suspicious of the fashion world. Who tends to see it as inherently counterrevolutionary - simply through its relation to money and the class system. (In that sense, very much like the art world. As in dealers and auction houses, not so much curators and museum administrators, who at least believe in something). 

In terms of glam's relation to visuality: I suppose my agenda in S+A was double. On the one hand, 

to argue the case for what no one talks about much when talking about glam, which is the music. To claim that there was a distinctive, if loose, rock aesthetic  there.  A set of sonic advances, or at least steps in a direction. Tons of stuff to be excited by musically, even if  you're constitutionally not that swayed by the glad rags and the poses.

But equally - conversely, even - the aim was to argue that in the context of rock in its entirety, image appearance gesture performance spectacle is always there. Even in apparently un-glam or anti-glam styles like underground metal, Deadheads / jam bands, grunge etc - always there is a rhetoric of the visual that aligns with the rhetoric of the sonic.

So the thesis is that "everything is glam rock"

Even the performance of non-performance is a kind of performance

Which parallels that thing which fascinates me about the various naturalistic turns in  acting for stage and screen alike (method acting, kitchen sink realism of the '60s, Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, mumblecore etc - the casting of non-professionals and the untrained, improvised scripts etc). There is  always a new code of stylization that emerges within this attempt to be unstylized, without style. . 

Each new push towards realism creates a form of artifice whose stagey-ness becomes apparent in subsequent decades. The initial Shock of the Real - the new levels of naturalism in terms of bad diction,  inanity, profanity, indignity, ordinariness, vernacular speech, stumbling inarticulacy, plainness and humdrum-ness - fades away. And suddenly you see the contours of its contrivance. You see that the "unwritten"-ness is actually written and there are new mannerisms, new codes, that have emerged.

Same with realism in rock - pub rock, New Wave, indie, grunge, lo-fi. Each new phase of anti-glam involves its own kind of theatrics.

photophilia (Grace / Amanda)

 

I am a glossy photograph

I am in color and softly lit

Overexposed and well blown up

Carefully printed and neatly cut

You can look at me for hours

I won't mind, I'll let you dream

From the page of a magazine

I am a glossy photograph

Of course I am a bit retouched

And my color has been processed

But cameras always erase

Fear lurking behind a face

I am a lie and I am gold

But I shall never grow old

My lips are parted

But they're not for kissing

My eyes are open

But I'm not listening

My breasts are round

But my heart is missing

I'm a photograph, I'm a photograph

I'm better than the real thing

I am a glossy photograph

I am appearing by the magic

Of a Nikon Automatic

Maybe I'm just a piece of paper

But some think that I am better

Cause photographs do not complain

Or cry, or love, or suffer

Or cry, or love, or suffer

Or cry, or love, or suffer

"I am a Photograph" is the title of a song by Amanda Lear (1977), which Sabranski is performing with 35 % accelerated speed playback and synchron. He is sitting in a close up in front of a wood structured wall paper and is wearing different eye masks, made of different photographs. In the beginning the masks change in time with the music and are accompanied by studio lightning. When the voice comes in till the end of the video Sabranski is wearing the same mask. The lyrics of the songs are telling from the perspective of the photograph, the different working steps in the developing process of a photograph and their different aspects.

Cf

It's glam oop North (Roxette)

Roxette (1977) / Producer: John McManus

"Extract from a student documentary profiling young Roxy Music fans. In the full film fans talk about the band and the music, are seen out and about in Manchester and getting ready for a concert at the Opera House. Includes footage of a tribute band, who due to a lack of musical instruments use household appliances to make music."

whole film viewable here 

An article about the film I found somewhere or other. By Robin Clark.

 

You can read the article easier at Robin Clark's site. Where there is also a dissertation about Rock Follies (another Roxy connection via Andy Mackay's songs)

Roxette the short film not to be confused with 

Or indeed with