anti-theatricality and politics (punke rocke flashback)

Punkyditty from 1980 that swipes at Ronald Reagan and harps on his being a movie actor

 

The Bollock Brothers - a name constantly on the edge of one's vision as a music press reader, but I'm honestly not sure I ever heard anything by them until this moment.

J. Lydon involved - not Johnny but his brother Jimmy. 

The main feller called himself Jock McDonald (a stage name haha)

The obligatory dubversion 

The Bollock Brothers was a bit like Pistols-karaoke - that's the sense I got from my peripheral-vision as a music paper peruser, at any rate. 

And some kind of bolstering to that notion comes with this record, which might be their sole claim to fame, in so far as it could well be the very first example of the whole-album-covered album

Before Bollocks brothers, there had been the offensively monikered 4 " Be 2", for which they got some flak, but probably not enough. "One of the Lads", the debut, was rumored to be produced by Jimmy's brother, and it's a fairly blatant PiL impersonation. 

 The obligatory dubversion 

There's an Irish element in among the dubdisco - is that a ukelele? 

Now Johnny Rotten, he knows a thing or two about performing, m'boy 

"It's my entrance, my own creation

"My grand finale, my goodbye" 

Mentally I file the Bollock Bros / 4 " Be 2 " etc alongside this record 

The back sleeve says "they wanted to destroy show biz... wring the neck of entertainment" . They presumably being Sex Pistols / McLaren / Glitterbest

It's a spin-off / side-project to an abortive punk rock movie titled Millions Like Us  being made by Fred Vermorel and Judy Vermorel. Full story is here (although no explanation of the lyric that I hear as "London town where the Jews all pray"). Snippets of Sid's voice talking about not wanting to be an entertainer and the spirit of the eternal teenager (once you stop being a kid, it's all over - better to die young etc), taken from Vermorels's interviews that went into their Sex Pistols book.

Disappointingly there is no YouTube trace of the other Vermorel record - "Stereo/Porno"

Hello, again / "for all starchildren"

 

Paul Oldfield, Melody Maker, October 10, 1987

And here Paul reviews some more BIFF! product, Melody Maker March 19 1988

The BIFF! label seems to have petered out almost immediately after this press coverage!

There was a slight stab at a glam resurgence in '87, in the form of Scarlet Fantastic (which is where the "starchildren" reference here comes from) and various other things (Sigue Sigue Splatdud, Boys Wonder, Transvision Vom, Act, Westworld, Das Psych-oh Rangers, the Bolshoi... )

(Better than any of these squibs was Last Few Days, an industrial band who underwent a total reinvention. Via Product Inc, an advance tape would arrive at some point in '88, containing tantalising but tragically ultimately never released revisions of glam 'n' glitter). 

But Scarlet Fantastic were the most explicitly glam-aligned and they had something of a head of music paper support brewing up behind them. 

Here's Paul O's review of Scarlet Fantastic's "No Memory' from three weeks earlier. 

Here's Paul's chagrined review of Scarlet Fantastic from the following year, when it's clear the groop are not going to happen, the starchildren did not pick up their signal ...

 

One thing I've become increasingly fascinated by - and find endearing, in an odd way - is the lack of integrity of musicians, their flexibility. The way that artists and bands will keep going through a series of make-overs, at times involving a total transformation of sound and look. Either to keep up with fashions and musical style shifts, or in attempts (more often than not unsuccessful, misdirected, a fumbled gamble) to anticipate what the Next Thing will be. 

Which is the case with Scarlet Fantastic - they are taking a punt on what the punters could be into soon, as a reaction against the deep-and-well-meaningfulness of adult-oriented mid-80s pop with its caring concern. Like, time for some shallow post-Warhol glittery trash!

But only a few years earlier, Scarlet Fantastic, or some of the group, were doing something completely different, under the name Swans Way. Torn from the gut soul, timeless elegance etc etc

It points to the extent to which artists are not internally driven but buffeted along by the Discourse, the episteme of any given micro-era. Or, whatever they have to say from internally, they express through the Sound and Look of the moment.

Still going, amazingly - 

 

The Next Day

(an appropriate post as I enter the second day of my seventh - yikes emoji - decade - ) 

DAVID BOWIE's THE NEXT DAY

director's cut, The New York Times, March 6 2013 

by Simon Reynolds 

On “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)”, the new single from David Bowie’s comeback album The Next Day, one line jumps out:  “We will never be rid of these stars.”  

In the video, Bowie and actress Tilda Swinton play an elderly couple persecuted by a pair of vampiric stars, who stalk them, invade their house and manipulate them like marionettes.  But the song itself is less literal.  “The Stars” portrays celebrities as an overlord class who “burn you with their radiant smiles.”  Bowie's original idea for the video was "stars like Greek gods, cruel and controlling";  a trace of that concept survives in the bit at the start where he enters a grocery store and catches sight of a celebrity gossip magazine called Pantheon. The famous are superhuman but also than human -  faintly pitiable creatures, “jealous” of the quiet lives and grounded existence of nonentities.  “I hope they live forever”, Bowie sings, a nod to the notion of fame as immortality, the compensation for its otherwise distorting effects.  Death and fame are closely braided themes shadowing The Next Day, a dark, melancholy and surprisingly harsh-sounding album that’s receiving acclaim as Bowie’s strongest effort in decades.

A superstar critiquing celebrity culture could be taken as somewhat hypocritical, of course. Especially given Bowie’s full-spectrum assault on the public’s attention this year.  For most of the 21^st Century, Bowie had disappeared from view, even as the glam theatricality and gender-bending he pioneered in the 1970s was dominating pop through figures like Lady Gaga. Most assumed that he’d effectively retired, physically exhausted after a life-threatening heart attack and surgery in 2003 and creatively spent after four decades of self-reinvention. But in a brilliantly organized stealth attack, Bowie returned without warning in January with “Where Are We Now”, the herald for The Next Day.  That album, his first in a decade, asserts Bowie’s continued relevance as a musician. Meanwhile, his stature in pop history as the performer who has most convincingly bridged the gap between the worlds of art and rock is being shored up by a retrospective at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, a celebration of his mastery of all the non-audio aspects of pop, from clothes and stage sets to record artwork and video.

Bowie has always had an ambivalent attitude to fame. His biggest American hit of the Seventies, “Fame” was a harrowing dispatch from inside the paranoid bubble of superstardom. He’s returned to the subject frequently, from his 1999 album Hours, an exploration of “fame as injury” according to  Bowieologist Nick Stevenson,  to his new album’s “(You Will) Set the Earth on Fire,” the sales pitch of a svengali to a potential protégé.  Bowie’s career has been governed by a bi-polar rhythm, alternating between relentless pursuit of the limelight and shattered retreat from it. Now, after his longest period of seclusion ever, the 66 year old Englishman and New York resident is back for what could well be his last blast, the supernova of his stardom.

Yet while Bowie himself has been virtually absent for a decade, the Bowie-esque has been omnipresent.  After the Nineties, a period dominated by the authenticity and “real-ness” of grunge and gangsta rap, the 2000s saw the return of glitz and artifice. All the things that Bowie, alongside fellow glam rockers like Roxy Music and Alice Cooper, explored to the hilt during the early 1970s— over-the-top theatricality and spectacular staging, extremist fashion and sexual androgyny—became the defining principles of 21st Century pop.

Lady Gaga is the most visible inheritor of Bowieism, from her freaky costumes to her gender games (the male alter-ego Jo Calderone, the artfully concocted rumor that she’s a hermaphrodite).  But there have also been figures like Adam Lambert, the American  Idol star, who called his first major tour Glam Nation, and, on a more alternative level,  cult performer Amanda Palmer and her punk cabaret outfit The Dresden Dolls.  You can see Bowie-like currents in recent black pop too, from rappers like Drake who make their own fame the primary subject of their music, to the sharply styled theatricality of Janelle Monae, to Beyonce’s Ziggy Stardust-like gambit of creating the alter ego Sasha Fierce as a vehicle for her walk-on-the-wild-side impulses. Above all, there’s Nicki Minaj, who has her own alter-ego, the gay male character Roman Zolanski.  While it’s unlikely that Minaj is directly influenced by Bowie, the parallels between his serial personae and her constant image changes are clear. As one presenter on a video pop channel put it, “there isn’t a single ‘Nicki Minaj’...  she says she’s just being herself, but who she is changes every day.”  

Among Bowie’s most famous pronouncements in his early career were “I feel like an actor when I’m on stage, rather than a rock artist” and “if anything, maybe I’ve helped establish that rock’n’roll is a pose.” Before Bowie came along, rock defined itself against show biz and Hollywood. There was meant to be a more or less direct correspondence between the performer and their real-life personality.  But Bowie talked about playing characters, such as the fictional rock god Ziggy Stardust, or the cold, remote Thin White Duke.  Like a movie star taking on different roles that refract a fundamental unchanging charisma, Bowie was paradoxically the same and yet different each time he came before the public with a new album and tour.

Bowie embraced metamorphosis from the start. In his pre-fame 1960s, he hopped through five bands and a variety of musical styles and looks before connecting with the public circa 1970.  Once his career took off, the shape-shifting took on a new urgency.  Pop taste is fickle. Some stars manage to become hardy perennials, but most are lucky to eke out a living playing their hits to an audience of nostalgic diehards. Bowie circumvented pop’s cruel turnover by turning himself into the New Thing, again and again. As he said in 1977, “my role as an artist in rock is rather different to most, I encapsulate things very quickly...  my policy has been that as soon as a process works, it’s out of date. I move to another area.”  Perhaps the fashion world has so lionized Bowie (Gucci co-sponsored the Victoria & Albert exhibition) not just for his cutting-edge style, but because he’s so thoroughly assimilated fashion’s own logic of remorseless supercession.

But there’s more to Bowie’s compulsive self-reinvention than a career strategy.  It’s an artistic impulse (the desire to challenge oneself) and it relates also to existential anxiety (a fantasy of perpetual rejuvenation).  What Bowie was really developing during his Seventies heyday was a new postmodern psychology based around flux and mutability.  His great precursor and influence here was Andy Warhol, about whom he wrote the song "Andy Warhol", and a role he would actually play in the 1996 movie Basquiat.  Analysing Warhol, the critic Donald Kuspit wrote of “the protean artist-self with no core”—a description that fits Bowie perfectly.  Likewise David Bowie Is, the intransitive title of the V & A exhibition, signifies “how wondrous ‘tis to live in a world that contains this polymath genius!” but also “fill in the blank space”. His career has seen that emptiness filled up, then erased, then filled up again, repeatedly.

But living like a cross between a chameleon and a magpie (Bowie is a voracious assimilator of influences and borrower of ideas) has its downsides.  Read the biographies or the vintage interviews, and it’s striking how often intimations of hollowness occur, the sense of a man who is outwardly super-confident but who battles feelings of self-loathing and doubt.  “I honestly feel that there is something incredibly lacking in my life”... “I’m not an innovator. I’m really just a Photostat machine. I pour out what has already been fed in.” ... “When I heard someone say something intelligent, I used it later as if it were my own. When I saw a quality in someone that I liked, I used it later as if it were my own”.   As much as artistic hunger or artful career management, a continuing, returning feeling of inadequacy over what I've done” has propelled the restless remaking of self, the endless switches of sound and style.  

Perusing the lavish book that accompanies David Bowie Is, with its dazzling procession of poses and images and its weighty critical essays tracking the dense cross-references to pop culture and high art, you get a sense of how much hard work it must be to be Bowie.  Director Julien Temple, who made some videos for Bowie and cast him as an advertising executive in his 1986 movie Absolute Beginners, has spoken of the “grueling nature of reinvention... the huge creative surge required to do that again and again. It takes its toll, psychically.”

During the Nineties, Bowie did seem to be running almost on empty. (Indeed it’s noticeable that David Bowie Is features little material from after the mid-Eighties). For a while he subsumed himself in the collective identity of a hard rock band, Tin Machine. Then he tried reverting to earlier successful stages of his career. For Black Tie White Noise, Bowie reunited with Chic’s Nile Rodgers, the producer of his 1983 blockbuster Let’s Dance.  For the adventurous but confused Outside, he re-enlisted Brian Eno, his foil during the experimental mid-Seventies Berlin trilogy of Low, ‘Heroes’, and Lodger.  Switching strategy, Bowie attempted to refuel using cutting-edge electronic dance ideas on Earthling, a charming if semi-successful dabble in drum and bass. Finally he regrouped with Tony Visconti, the producer on all his classic Seventies albums, for the solid but subdued Heathen and Reality, records on which he seemed to reach a kind of settlement with himself.

The Next Day sees Visconti at the helm again, but this time Bowie seems galvanized by a desperate energy that over-rides the frailty palpable in his haggard vocals.  Imagery of decay, debility and dejection pervade the record: “here I am/not quite dead/my body left to rot in a hollow tree”, “just walking the dead”, “I gaze in defeat at the stars in the night/the light in my life burned away/there will be no tomorrow.” Some of the morbidity-- references to “a room full of bloody history” in “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die”—may be influenced by books on Medieval tyrants that Bowie has reportedly been reading obsessively. But elsewhere the imagery seems obviously inspired by his own brush with mortality.

The Grim Reaper is no stranger to the Bowie songbook. He covered Jacques Brel’s “My Death, while his big UK hit “Ashes to Ashes” derived its title from the Anglican burial service.  “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” on Outside, addressed “the fact that life is finite,” Bowie has explained. “That realization, when it comes, usually later in life, can either be a really daunting prospect or it makes things a lot clearer.”

But judging by The Next Day, Bowie’s close encounter of the near-fatal kind has only muddied things. There is little evidence of serenity or enlightenment.  The climactic song, “Heat,” is a homage to the existentialist balladry of Scott Walker, who covered “My Death” before Bowie did and whose own recent work includes songs about the human body’s abject vulnerability and doomed dictators like Mussolini and Ceaucescu. “My father ran the prison,” Bowie intones enigmatically, moving through ominous lines about missions grown dark and worlds ending, before confessing “ I don’t know who I am” and “I am a seer/But I am a liar”. 

Warhol believed “superstitiously” that fame could “keep at bay” Death, claims Donald Kuspit. When Bowie declares “I hope they live forever” in “The Stars”, it this a gesture of bitter solidarity with “the dead ones and the living”, all those stars who believed and who still believe in fame as salvation? You can reinvent yourself over and over, but Death, the Great Uninventor, will catch up with you. The naked torment of such apprehensions has shaped David Bowie’s twilight masterpiece.  

excruciated consciousness

excruciated consciousness # 1 (via a New Yorker profile of the 1975 frontfellow)

"In January, the thirty-four-year-old British rock star Matty Healy woke up on a couch in his house, except it was not his house, it was a stage set at the O2 Arena, in London, and twenty thousand people were there with him, screaming. His band, the 1975, stood in position among wood-panelled walls and framed family photos, and Healy—skinny, in a close-cut suit and a tie, black curls slicked back behind his ears—rose and dramatically blinked at the lights, took a swig from a flask, and sat down at a piano. Then he lit a cigarette and began to play the jittery riff that opens the band’s latest album, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” “You’re making an aesthetic out of not doing well / And mining all the bits of you you think you can sell,” he sang, taking long pulls from a bottle of red wine as the audience roared.....  If you do a show that’s about the duality of your life, is it still Method acting?” he asked between songs at the O2. The house lights came on, and white-coated technicians touched up the band members’ clothes and faces. A tech slammed a clapboard, and they resumed their positions, concluding the meta intrusion."

excruciated consciousness #2 (via a different New Yorker piece, about Taylor Swift and her current Eras tour)

"In 2011, Swift told The New Yorker that she has long been “fascinated by career trajectories”—the idea, as she put it, that “ ‘this artist peaked on their second album. This artist peaked on their third album. This artist peaked with every album.’ ” She went on, “I sometimes stress myself out wondering what my trajectory is.” Swift has traded in this self-consciousness for a self-awareness, one that has likely been facilitated by the therapeutic process of rerecording, and reclaiming, her older works. She has built a tour solely devoted to the idea of a trajectory—that of a career, of a musical identity, of a life—that can be traced cleanly from one “era” to the next. It’s a funny way to reach an understanding of oneself... 

"One of the most surprising elements of the concert was how some of the Swift songs that I’ve always found irredeemably cringe—for example, “You Need to Calm Down” and “Look What You Made Me Do”—were the most exciting to watch live. During the latter, Swift performed with several digital versions of herself and with background dancers dressed in the garb of her various eras; at every show, she picks a different era to hold up a “loser” hand sign to—either a completely random choice, or a genuine reflection of whichever part of herself she hates that day."

The Taylor piece is interesting (as is the Healy profile). It analyses - from a fanatically committed and obsessively consuming Swift-fan's perspective -  the ways in which the Eras Tour is utterly integrated with onlineness and telemediation. Every aspect Instagrammed and TikToked in real time, but also before it happens (you preconsume the tour before you even attend) and immediately after it  happens (reconsumption). A densely spiraling virality of clips and comments and reactions and fan behaviours caught unawares by fans-turned-snoops-turned-amateur-documentarians, then recirculated. 

It ends ambivalently"

"In the days after the concert, I noticed some Swifties posting on Reddit about a new phenomenon: some are struggling with a post-Eras Tour depression, in large part because they went to the show but are unable to remember it. It’s not that they were drunk, or that they weren’t paying attention; they just don’t remember. “It’s strange,” one person wrote, saying that, despite having attended two Eras Tour performances, she could recall only a few details, like Swift’s outfits, “but nothing about me being in that moment experiencing it.” Others mentioned having similar out-of-body experiences and blurred memories. A user named bellahadidpizza, who had also blacked out during the concert, consoled the group by noting that “high sensory experiences” have been known to cause amnesia. (One commenter said the same thing had happened to her during her wedding.) No one had a good solution. But many had returned to consuming footage of the show, hoping it might spark something. As one person wrote, “I’ve done nothing but cling to the videos I took to take me back.”

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

postscript: flashback to 2017's "Look What You Made Me Do' video with its gallery of Taylor Swift "personae" - Zombie Taylor, Dead Taylor, Crazy Rich Taylor, Viper Taylor, Celebrity Taylor, Thug Taylor, Squad Leader Taylor, Vixen Taylor, The New Taylor, Nerdy Taylor.

Bowieism goes K-Mart

"Swift has said that part of the premise of the video is rooted in the idea that, "If everything you write about me was true, this is how ridiculous it would look. It is a satirical send-up of media theories about her true intentions that have little validity. The video begins with an overhead shot of a cemetery before the camera zooms in on a grave with a headstone that reads "Here Lies Taylor Swift's reputation." After that, a zombie Swift, wearing the dress from her "Out of the Woods" music video, crawls out of the grave before proceeding to dig another grave for her Met Gala 2014 self. The next scene shows Swift in a bathtub filled with diamonds, with a necklace spelling out No next to a ring, supposedly sending up tabloid press rumors of past romantic relationships. She is then seen seated on a throne while snakes surround her and serve tea. Swift later crashes her golden Bugatti Veyron on a post and sings the song's chorus holding a Grammy as the paparazzi take photos. She is also seen swinging inside a golden cage, robbing a streaming company in a cat mask, and leading a motorcycle gang. Afterwards, she gathers a group of women at "Squad U" and dances with a group of men in another room. Then, she is seen standing on top of the wing of a plane in an airport hangar, sawing off the wing in half and spray-painting "reputation" in pink on the side of the plane. At the video's climax, Swift is seen standing on a T-shaped throne while clones of herself (from her past music videos, stage performances and red carpet appearances) struggle and fight against each other trying to reach her. The video concludes with a scene of a line up of surviving Swift clones bowing in the hangar while Swift stands and watches on the wing of the plane. The clones bicker with one another, describing each other as "so fake" and "playing the victim". The 2009 VMA Swift clone then says "I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative", resulting in the other Swifts yelling at her to "shut up!" in unison."

Postscript #2 - even more New Yorker coverage of the Eras tour - Amanda Petrusich on "the intense parasocial bond that Swift’s fans feel with her", and specifically the on the "startling intimacy" as well   "mind-boggling inescapability of  Taylor Swift’s latest endeavor—a sixty-date stadium romp" that could end making Swift "a billionaire".

"The scope of the show reinforces the hysterical demands on twenty-first-century pop stars: be something new every time you show up, or don’t show up at all"

^^

"The pavement outside the stadium was dappled with thousands of fallen sequins. Strangers were mouthing the word “slay” to each other. Forearms were wrapped in bracelets featuring Swift-isms spelled out in lettered beads. I was seated in front of two people dressed as fully decorated Christmas trees."

^^

"Swift has for years been a savant of what I might call “you guys” energy, a chatty, ersatz intimacy that feels consonant with the way we exist on social media—offering a glimpse of our private lives, but in a deliberate and mediated way. When Swift addressed the seventy-four thousand people who had gathered to see her, I felt as though she was not only speaking directly to me but confessing something urgent." 

^^

"She has perhaps been unfairly dismissed as too capable and too practiced, an overachieving, class-president type. I’ll admit that I’ve struggled, at times, with the precision of her work. If you’re someone who seeks danger in music, Swift’s albums can feel safe; it’s hard to find a moment of genuine musical discord or spontaneity. Over time, though, I’ve come to understand this criticism of Swift as tangled up with some very old and poisonous ideas about genius, most of which come from men slyly rebranding the terrible behavior of other men." 

^^^

"Swift was recently rumored to be dating Matty Healy, of the British rock band the 1975. Healy is, depending on whom you ask, either an irascible provocateur or a disgusting bigot. Some of Swift’s fans deemed him a racist torture-porn enthusiast, owing to comments he made on a podcast, and groused about him after he and Swift were photographed together....  This is the obvious flip side of Swift’s purposeful cultivation of intimacy. From afar, her fans’ possessiveness appears both mighty and frightening."

All the Old Dudes

The news that Ian Hunter just turned 84 reminded me of one of my fave facty surprises when doing S+A, which is learning that when the Mottman became a pop star he was already in his early thirties, with a wife and two kids. 

Ian Hunter, in fact, was born so long ago that he's older than my mother.

More relevantly, he's older than both Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger, the two primary sources for Hunter and the Hoople's style.  (That seems a bit undignified somehow - like a prefect copying a fourth former). 

"All the Young Dudes", the song that he and they are most remembered for, was received at the time as the Third Generation Anthem.  The "third generation" was a concept coined by Alice Cooper, or at least most prominently promoted by him in interviews. The idea was that the First Generation was the kids whose lives were shaken by rock 'n' roll when it first erupted in the late 1950s; the Second Generation was the Beatles and the Stones cohort; but now here we were, in 1971-72, with a whole fresh wave of youngsters who wanted their own bands to follow, their own idols, their own sound.  Hence the lyric, written by David Bowie of course, with its jeering reference to older siblings still stuck on stale Sixties sounds and ideals: "And my brother's back at home with his Beatles and his Stones / We never got it off on that revolution stuff".

The irony of Ian Hunter, born in June 1939, before the Second World War, singing these lines should be fairly obvious. He would have been just the right age, at 17, 18, to have been one of the First Generation Brit rock'n'roll singers alongside Cliff Richard and Billy Fury (both slightly his juniors). When the beat group boom kicked off in England around 1964, Hunter would have been on the older side already but could have joined in the Second Generation action. To be the mouthpiece of Third Generation consciousness at the ripe age of 33 is pushing it.

Mind you, one of the peculiar things about glam 'n' glitter is that while it was the teenage sensation  of the nation, rather a lot of its prime movers were old lags who'd been trying to have a hit for ages. Gary Glitter had been a touted potential teenybop idol before The Beatles; Alvin Stardust, likewise, had been the roadie of Brit rock'n'rollers Shane Fenton and the Fentones and then was drafted as replacement for the suddenly-dead singer, even taking on the name Shane Fenton. Alice Cooper was no spring chicken (23 when he sang "I'm Eighteen", but still he was a good nine years younger than Ian Hunter). Even the relatively youthful Bowie and Bolan had been trying for ages to make it, donning and doffing styles and personae since the early-mid Sixties. 

But out of that whole era of theatrical rockers, I think only Alex Harvey (born 1935) was more ancient than Ian H. 

Incidentally, the First / Second / Third Generation concept that Cooper was pushing is out-of-whack with the commonly regarded "natural span" of a generation (20 to 30 years). If we give the idea credence, that would mean rock would be running through three whole "generations" in less than 20 years (1955 to 1972). These would seem to be more accurately termed micro-generations, not tied to the interval between childhood and having children yourself but more like the sensibility-gulf between wide-gap siblings.  So the lyric about the brother still listening to the Beatles and Stones fits. 

(Look out soon - possibly this very week - for my essay that explores the concept of "the generation", along with related notions like the decade etc.)

Alice Cooper's own Third Generation anthem, if we don't count "I'm Eighteen", was "Generation Landslide"

"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.