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... 

anti-theatricality in rock (Coleman's Disgustard)

"The Clash were, I am fairly sure, playing the Apollo — so if it was the Apollo... you were only too aware of the way this small but potent punkish enterprise was scaling itself up rapidly and quite aggressively. The group were evidently no longer an organic continuation of their scrotty urban environment, existing somehow independently of the cogs and flywheels of an egregious industrial machine — and if you are younger than sixty you will have to take it on trust that there once was a time when rock groups really did appear to operate independently of good industrial practice, represented, regulated and approved by that chafing machine.

"You yourself rocked up in all your teased out tousle to the chipped-Deco embrace of the Apollo’s mighty frontage, highly conscious that this was rather more than a halfway house to the big time, and once inside and facing the framing device of a hefty proscenium arch, you were instantly visited by the sense that the Clash, this small aggregation of individuals in military trousers was no longer a socio-political pustule exploding with electric guitars; this was a show. Something that had been put on for an audience by professionals who know how things work. Showbusiness. A put-on, not a turn-on.

"I have no other way of addressing this strange perceptual contortion except to say, in a self-reproaching tone, that I loved the Clash at the time. I did not regard them as fakes or put-ons. They obviously were not fakes or put-ons. And yet I remember finding myself unable to swallow the Kool-Aid that night.

"I fear I may have made too much afterwards of Mick Jones in his white jumpsuit (white!) and the way he appeared to turn a bright eye on himself, as all rock guitarists have done since a shapely Fender was first slung over a young person’s shoulder, observing themselves almost as the Method actor does, from the inside, looking out from within, and then back at his or her outer form with a critical edge on their gaze — as if their inner selves must seal the deal formally with the outer cladding in getting the look, the moves, the face, the grace, la figura, the right stuff right. The ideal projection of self. Mick Jones was getting very good at this kind of eyeless self-scrutiny and projection and I thought it was very bad form. I may have even used the word “narcissistic” when among friends. And I’d have then probably punched you if you’d said to me that I was carrying my responsibilities as a paying member of the audience a smidge too far. No, of course I wouldn’t. But I would have probably fantasised about punching you."

Nick Coleman, at his Substack, which is full of interesting musings about music and the roles it's played in his life. The post is titled "the death of rock: and it was on my watch!"

I think what I would say about the Clash is that if you were to look, today, at footage of them from even their very earliest days, the elements of theatre would scream out to your eyes - there's a rhetoric of bodily movements, from the way Simonon held his bass and pumped his leg, to the quasi-military formation of the players on stage, to how Strummer is projecting towards the mic and the audience. 

Well, looky here, footage of The Clash at the Manchester Apollo, two years before Coleman saw them at the same venue. 

Yet it must have seemed at the time to have a quality of unvarnished urgency that felt like Reality arriving on the stage, instantly outmoding the Old Wave ways of going about rock performance. 

But I mean, quite quite early on they started having backdrops of photos taken on the war torn streets of Belfast, right? So that's already in the realm of theatre, even as it projects towards the Real and tries to bring it onstage with them.  

Jump to 4.46 for a satirical scene from Rock Follies in which Old Waver Stevie Streeter tries to go New Wave with staged urban decay. Tim Curry in top form!