RIP Tim Curry

A glam icon obviously for his Frank N Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a movie much darker and more interesting than I had first imagined and great fun to write about in S+A. (Interviewed Richard O'Brien who said the character was his own secret self.) 

But I also love Tim Curry's turn as Stevie Streeter in the TV music biz satire Rock Follies (something else I managed to squeeze into S+A). 

In particular these scenes where Streeter talks about his stage concept for the song "Street Signs" - a backdrop of urban decay: "filthy, violent, and honest" - and then rehearses the song with garbage underfoot and a chorus of sex workers. 

It's interesting for the way it shows the theatricality that inevitably lurks within any attempt to bring "reality" onto a stage.

But I wonder who it's actually meant to be a parody of? 

Springsteen? 

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band with their "Vambo Rules" graffiti aerosoled onto a backdrop of a fake brickwork like a tenement wall? 

The Heavy Metal Kids? 

Also rock-adjacent - and punk-adjacent - is Curry's memorable role in Times Square as a late-night  radio deejay who helps turn the teen punk she-rebel duo into folk-heroes 

Here's what I wrote about it in this Pitchfork piece on the Best and Worst Punk Movies.

Producer Robert Stigwood thought he’d do for New Wave what his Saturday Night Fever did for disco—which is why the Times Square soundtrack was a double album, crammed with tunes by the likes of XTC and the Ramones. The John Travolta counterpart here is Robin Johnson as Nicky Marotta, a raspy-voiced runaway who takes sheltered posh girl Pamela Pearl (13-year-old Trini Alvarado) for a walk on the wild side. The backdrop is sleaze-soaked midtown Manhattan, those same streets that Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle imagined a real rain sweeping clean. Pamela’s urban developer dad plans to do exactly that. But street life, incarnated in Nicky, fights back, stealing his child and revealing that Real Life exists “outside of society,” as Patti Smith sang it.

A busker, Nicky is herself a punk poet in the Patti / Jim Carroll mode. The story of the rebel duo, who call themselves the Sleez Sisters, enchants late-night radio DJ Johnny LaGuardia (Tim Curry). When Pamela sends a letter denying that she’s been kidnapped but rather “Nicky-napped, happy-napped,” the DJ reads it out over the air and turns them into Bonnie and Clyde-style outlaws at war with “banality… boredom… television… doing it for all us stay-at-homes.” Now a band with songs like “Damn Dog” and “Your Daughter Is One,” the duo inspire a copy-cat movement of girls wearing bandit-style eye makeup. Then they become urban guerrillas throwing TV sets off the top of buildings. Although increasingly implausible, Times Square works as a beguiling modern-day fairytale. A bomb at the time, it became a touchstone for latterday punks like Kathleen Hanna and Manic Street Preachers.

 Complete with an unconvincing American accent, Curry appeared in the Armchair Theatre play Vérité,  not as a rocker but as an underground film maker called Mik. It was written by Howard Schuman, who wrote Rock Follies, and  aired on 23rd October, 1973.  

BBC Archive report on the making of the Rocky Horror Picture Show

He had a role in the curious little film The Shout - which has scenes of John Hurt doing musique concrete - but I can't remember anything about Curry's contribution.

Hair today, gone tomorrow...