Posts Tagged ‘Soho’
Sunday, December 18th, 2011
Although these days it is possible to see almost any film in the comfort of your own home, the experience is very different to watching a movie on the big screen. A lot of my favourite flicks – movies starring the likes of Bruce Lee and Jimmy Wang Yu – were shot with the assumption that viewers would be metaphorically knocked dead by the wide-screen scale of the action. That doesn’t happen on a computer or TV screen – and not even in the small auditoriums of multiplex cinemas. Home viewing also lacks the social aspects of movie theatres – for example, cheering and laughing along with fight scenes. Although in the seventies and eighties I went to cinemas all over London, I ended up spending more time at The Scala in Kings X than anywhere else.
I actually started going to The Scala when it was in Tottenham Street but my memories of it’s first two years of existence (1979-81) in Fitzrovia are a little dim. I do recall being really knocked out when I saw Ministry of Fear there one afternoon – I think on a double-bill with The Third Man. I recently watched Ministry Of Fear again and was rather disappointed by it, since this Fritz Lang feature didn’t live up to my 30 plus year old memories of it. That said, I’ve had worse reactions to watching films at home that I’d enjoyed when I last saw them at the cinema decades earlier. Ministry Of Fear wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t nearly as good as my recollections of it.
The Scala on Tottenham Street was perfectly placed for those of us on the punk rock trail between Soho and Camden. Walking distance away to the south there was the 100 Club, Marquee, Notre Dame Hall and Rock On Record Stall; and in the other direction were venues like The Music Machine and Electric Ballroom – as well as Compendium Books. But at that time there were still a lot of cinemas around central London, so The Scala didn’t seem too special.
As we went into the eighties a lot of both repertory and first run cinemas disappeared from the face of London. As a result, The Scala – which had relocated to Kings X in 1981 – came to seem a lot more like a lone London beacon for lovers of midnight movies. Aside from having better flicks than anywhere else, The Scala must have been the dirtiest and most run down fleapit in The Smoke – and therefore it had way more character than places like The Everyman. The Scala also had ultra-cheap daytime multi-bill screenings with concessions (for the unemployed and pensioners) – and I was merely one of a crew of dole scum who seemed to spend more weekly daylight hours in this particular fleapit than out on the street or looking for work.
One of the things that particularly sticks in my mind from the earlier part of the eighties are the all night screenings – particularly stuff such as all night beat generation movies, which was where I first encountered flicks like Beat Girl and Bucket Of Blood. Around this time there were also free preview screenings for The Worst of Hollywood TV series (a Friday late-night slot on UK Channel 4 shown towards the end of 1983). As anyone who went to those free screenings can tell you, they’d do filmed introductions for several flicks before showing them. The audience were there to applaud and laugh at Michael Medved running down various grade Z movies – and we got commands from the film crew about how to react to him. Despite doing free screenings for all the films in the series (3 per day as far as I recall), the TV people used the same piece of stock footage of me in the audience on each of their weekly broadcasts. The films themselves – Plan 9 From Outer Space, Wild Women of Wongo, Robot Monster etc. – found a new life and a new audience, and went on to be recycled on more recent TV reruns such as Mystery Theatre 3000.
After a while The Scala became a home from home for many, and the regulars had their favourite seats. I always took the one immediately in front of Kim Newman (who I didn’t actually ever get to know until years after The Scala closed). Other things I suppose I should mention include the famous Scala cat – who’d walk over the seats and across the front of the screen – and the rumble of trains going under Kings X. Ditto the fact that there were lots of broken seats.
in the early and mid-eighties The Scala seemed good at building new films. They’d put movies without a ready-made audience on a multi-bill with established cult favourites. To give an example, I don’t remember what Liquid Sky was showing with the first time I saw it at The Scala, but I was mesmerised and didn’t know if it was really great or totally shit – so I went back to see it again and decided it was great.I must have seen Liquid Sky at least half a dozen times at The Scala during the eighties. The Scala was also a good place to see multi-bills of John Waters or Russ Meyer flicks; although it wasn’t where I first encountered films by either of these directors, it was one of the few places I could see their movies regularly. Thundercrack was another of my Scala favourites, alongside the more obvious art house choices like the I Am Curious movies and WR Mysteries of the Organism (which I still love). The Scala also had some less tasteful multi-bill choices – such as the regular Nazi exploitation triple of The Night Porter (a massively over-rated piece of shit), Salon Kitty and Red Nights of the Gestapo.
Later The Scala seemed to lose its way and failed to build up new to their audience (but not necessarily recent) films. I guess the cinema’s founder Stephen Woolley was concentrating on making a go of his film production company Palace Pictures. I brought Decoder to the UK for the first time in 1989 and screened it in Glasgow as part of the Festival of Plagiarism I organised there, and also arranged to show it at The Scala a couple of days later. I remember getting dropped off by a friend outside the cinema (he’d brought me back from Scotland in his car) and the queue for the screening stretched back to the main Kings X station. It was an amazingly large audience – some of whom I guess had to be turned away.
Colour was important to Decoder and you didn’t really get it’s full celluloid effect on the videos that had circulated in rather limited circles in the UK until then. I don’t remember the exact deal, but The Scala basically insisted that Tom Vague (who came in on the promotion of London screening of the film with me) and I take all the financial risks; then when they saw the audience and money coming through the door for Decoder, suddenly discovered loads of extra expenses so they could keep nearly all the dosh. I presume they wouldn’t have insisted we four-wall it if they’d realised we had a sell out, so they could have made their cash grab look like less of a rip-off – which in the end included things like alleged bottles of whisky for members of staff.
I got the impression that by the end of the eighties the Scala management had become absolutely shameless about doing anything for money because Palace Pictures was a financial black hole. After seeing the crowd Decoder pulled, The Scala started screening it themselves as part of their programme… but earlier in the eighties I think they’d have realised it was a film worth showing without someone coming in from outside. I don’t know or don’t remember how they started screening all the Hong Kong action movies they showed later on (and which I enjoyed seeing at The Scala a great deal), but I assume it was someone coming in from outside and wanting to do it that kick-started those John Woo/Chow Yun Fat etc. screenings.
I was sorry The Scala closed but by the time disappeared in 1993 it wasn’t the institution it had once been. I think it was Palace Pictures – as much as the court case over an illegal screenings of Clockwork Orange – that killed the place. The Scala had been showing that Kubrick film for years under titles like Mechanical Fruit, but I never liked it much as a movie (or a book) and avoided those screenings. The closest we’ve got now to The Scala is the Prince Charles but that’s more a second run place, and the excellent monthly BFI Flipside screenings (but that’s a much cleaner environment).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 100 Club, 1980s, all nighters, beat generation, Beat Girl, BFI Flipside, Bruce Lee, Bucket of Blood, Camden, Channel 4, Chow Yun Fat, Clockwork Orange, Compendium Books, Decoder, Electric Ballroom, Festival of Plagiarism, Fitzrovia, Fritz Lang, Glasgow, I Am Curious Yellow, Jimmy Wang Yu, John Waters, John Woo, Kim Newman, Kings X, Liquid Sky, Marquee Club, Mechanical Fruit, Michael Medved, midnight movies, Ministry Of Fear, Music Machine, Mystery Theatre 3000, Notre Dame Hall, Palace Pictures, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Prince Charles, punk rock, Red NIghts of the Gestapo, Robot Monster, Rock On Record Stall, Russ Meyer, Salon Kitty, Soho, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Woolley, The Night Porter, The Scala, The Third Man, The Worst of Hollywood, Thundercrack, Tom Vague, Tottenham Street, Wild Women of Wongo, WR Mysteries of the Organism
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography, film | 32 Comments »
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
Watching capitalist corporations fail is a groove sensation, and it takes me right back to everything from the three day week to the ‘winter of discontent’ in the 1970s. All those who love power cuts will recall that the mid-1970s was a real peak for this type of fun in London. As a long-term fan of this great anti-tradition, you can’t keep me out of shops that are closing down. The last 12 months has been a real bonanza for entertainments of this type: first there was the closure of Woolworths, then there was Zavvi, now there is Borders (UK)! Okay, so the flagship Borders store in Oxford Street has already gone, but the sense of chaos and anti-climax in the still just hanging-on-by-a-thread Charing Cross Road branch really gives me the horn. The stock is in disarray, with books and DVDs spilling off half-empty shelves, the toilets (for me what was once the main attraction in the shop) are closed, and there are mugs and other breakable crap – rather than bestsellers – at the front of the shop. The place looks like the set for a disaster movie, which is why for as long as it remains open I’ll continue to goof around in this wrecked ‘retail’ space…
That said, now Borders is closing I only go for the ambiance (rather than ‘Toilet Love’), and to laugh at those buying goods that after being marked up to more than twice their market value are currently being sold at between 20% and 50% ‘discount’. One of the things that caused me to chuckle on the ground floor of Borders while I was enjoying the chaos there on Friday was a display of Redemption DVDs. These were priced at £7.99 minus 30% discount (i.e. £5.60), and there were some Eurosleaze classics among them including a whole bunch of Jean Rollin lesbian vampire movies… But you can buy many of these on Amazon Market Place for around £4 (including postage), or if you can’t wait for them to arrive by mail, all the titles in Borders and many more are sold in Lovejoys a couple of minutes walk down Charing Cross Road at £6.99 each or 2 for £12 (i.e. £6 each when you buy two – not greatly more than the Borders sale price). Likewise I’ve seen these Redemption titles around in secondhand shops at about £3. Which means, of course, that even in the Borders sale, these items (like most of their discounted stock) still pan out as being more expensive than picking them up elsewhere. So don’t bother with the sale, just dig the collapse…. or go in dressed in an over-sized coat….
And talking of Redemption, I read a truly bizarre story by Lucy Tobin about this company in The Evening Standard on Thursday 10 December, entitled Film firm that made Koo a star collapses: “The cult movie empire whose back catalogue includes the risqué films of Prince Andrew’s former lover Koo Stark has collapsed into administration. Redemption Films, based in Wigmore Street, Soho, was set up by Nigel Wingrove, Britain’s answer to Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. Administrators were called in today at the distributor of gothic horror movies, whose past titles range from Sinful Nuns Of St Valentine to Ms Stark’s cult 1977 hit The Marquis De Sade’s Justine….”
There is a lot of misinformation to unpack in this story, but let’s start with the headline, since Redemption Films did not make Koo Stark a star. Redemption was set up in the 1990s and Stark became a minor starlet on the back of a couple of mid-seventies movies - Emily (1976) and Cruel Passion AKA De Sade’s Justine (1977) – and then briefly a media celebrity in the 1980s when she dated inbred British royal brat Prince Andrew (“The Duke of York”). All Redemption did was acquire some of Stark’s back catalogue as a film actress and issue it on VHS tape and then DVD long after she’d become a household name in the UK.
Likewise, I find the idea of Redemption being a soft porn ‘empire’ on the same scale as Larry Flynt’s American Hustler operation risible (it is about on a par with suggesting that ‘Boris Johnson is Britain’s answer to Barack Obama’). During the 1990s my friend Nik Houghton worked for Nigel Wingrove and I went into their office on the odd occasion; at that time the business consisted of Wingrove and his part-time assistant Nik in a moderately sized room. Wingrove’s operation may have grown a bit since then, and it has definitely moved to a slightly more upmarket address, but it is still closer to a cult-film one-man band than a porn empire! However, as ever with The Standard, the point of the piece seems to be to pack in as much gossip as possible, rather than to report news. Therefore it should surprise no one that Wingrove’s professional involvement with Georgina Baillie – ‘the granddaughter of Andrew Sachs who was at the centre of the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand telephone scandal’ – gets a passing mention too.
For anyone who has looked into the ways cult films and music are milked for profits, I’d see Redemption going into administration as business as usual within this sector of the culture industry. Cult means niche and there are usually very few buyers for operations in really specialist areas like Oi! music or Eurosleaze films; therefore a businessman (or woman) who knows their way around one of these ‘cult’ areas will often run their limited liability company into bankruptcy while paying themselves a hefty salary. This is a way of writing off debts, because the ‘former’ owner can buy up the assets of the concern they’ve deliberately run down for less than a song: they use another company they’ve set up for this purpose and then proceed to do the same thing again, and again, and again! And what’s more, given that we live in a capitalist society, this is more or less legal! It is precisely the sort of thing so called ‘wealth generators’ do for ‘a living’ and illustrates why businessmen and bankers should not be allowed to reward themselves with anything above an average workers’ wage, let alone ‘bonuses’. I don’t know if this is how Nigel Wingrove operates, but I am familiar with other individuals working in the cult sector of the culture industry who do business this way.
If Wingrove was planning to write off his debts by buying himself out, The Standard story could be bad news for him, since it might stir up interest from other ‘wealth generators’. That said, Wingrove is also a film-maker himself, so perhaps he just wants out…. Moving on, if you believe what you read in The Standard, you may well have been hoaxed into thinking I wrote the Belle de Jour blog and books, so it isn’t exactly surprising their Nigel Wingrove and Redemption Films story is so inaccurate!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Amazon, Andrew Sachs, Barack Obama, Belle de Jour, Borders, Boris Johnson, Charing Cross Road, Cruel Passion, Duke of York, Emily, Eurosleaze, Evening Standard, Georgina Baillie, Hustler, Jean Rollin, Jonathan Ross, Koo Stark, Larry Flynt, lesbian vampire movies, London, Lovejoys, Lucy Tobin, Marquis De Sade, Nik Houghton, Oi!, Oxford Street, Prince Andrew, Redemption Films, Russell Brand, Sinful Nuns Of St Valentine, Soho, The Marquis De Sade's Justine, three day week, Wigmore Street, winter of discontent, Woolworths, Zavvi
Posted in culture gossip & parties, economics, porn | 37 Comments »
Monday, December 7th, 2009
The oldest of suppressed traditions
In a world dominated by illusion, it comes as no surprise that censorship should be popularly misperceived as a form of social repression. The contradictions which support such an inversion are manifest in every area of daily life; they constitute the apparent “reality” of our “time”. Despite the fact that it has been demonstrated time and again that consciousness is an effect of a closed system of exclusive focus, of censorship, “literate” consensus maintains that censorship and silence are the negation of consciousness. It is clear that Power has a vested interest in maintaining a monopoly on censorship. The “concept of freedom” is an unreachable, collapsing, absolute. All experience becomes equal when exchanged via Capital; with class “privilege” determining how much of this worthless “equality” each person is entitled to.
The negative and its use
Anything can be censored for any reason; start by censoring this text. The censors of the “left”, “right” and “centre”, all do their collective part; despite the fact that they imagine themselves to be motivated by the very beliefs we will ultimately negate.
From originality to ontology: the decline of the text
The possibilities for communal transformation of this world lie in disconnection from imposed notions of progress and democracy. Plagiarism is the “beginning”, the negative point of a culture which finds its justification in the “unique”. Censorship supersedes plagiarism as an “intelligent” negation of “originality” because it suppresses not only (“original”) production, but also reproduction (plagiarism, appropriation &c.) which revalue the “original” and maintain its circulation in “reality”. Censorship is to the present what plagiarism was to history.
The healing power of doubt
Revolutionary propaganda sets itself the task of discrediting all received ideas without offering a single “alternative” thought with which they might be replaced. Kill your desires and live! Erase, destroy and make useless all recorded information. Physically and otherwise attempt to suppress all expression in art, politics, history &c. Resist culture and all other forms of institutional identity. Suppress, by refusing to participate in, interpersonal and mass social relationships. As you see fit, smash the “imagination”, “schizophrenia”, “death”, “sexuality”, “values”, “time” and all other forms of seduction and abstraction. Experimentally break down the frames of reference by which you organise non-valued perceptions into valued entities: i.e. objects, ideas, means of self-perception &c.
An end to social relations
“Self-destruction” is a semantic swindle. The moralism against suicide is reactionary resistance to change. Only total opposition, both theoretical and practical (i.e. silence), is irrecuperable. Anything else must necessarily appear absolutist and contradictory.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 557087 Seattle, 60s, Alex Trocchi, Alexander Trocchi, APG, Art and Culture, Artists Placement Group, Arts Journal, Barry Flanagan, beat generation, Better Books, black beauties, black bombers, Bluecoat Gallery, Bow Street Magistrates Court, cannabis, central London, charge, Clement Greenberg, conceptual art, Destruction In Art Symposium, Destruction in Art: Destroy to Create, Diamond & Co., drug smuggling, Durophet, Finch College, Finch College Museum of Art, Fluxus, forgery, Francis Morland, heroin, Jeff Sawtell, Jeffrey Sawtell, John Latham, John Lennon, John Perreault, junkies, Liverpool, London, LSD, Lucy Lippard, MOMA, Morning Star, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York City, New York Museum of Modern Art, Norwich, Norwich School of Art, Number 7, NYC, Paula Cooper Gallery, pot, purple hearts, Seattle, Seattle Art Museum, Sheila Malcham, Simon Ford, sixties, Soho, St. Martin's School of Art, Still and Chew, The Art Forum, UK, USA, weed, Yoko Ono
Posted in art criticism, counterculture, True crime | 26 Comments »
Sunday, November 1st, 2009
Shortly after I’d settled into my seat at BFI Screen 1 for the Flipside Halloween shindig, a ‘real-life witch’ came and sat next to me. I figured this woman was a Wiccan because she looked completely out of place among hordes of trash film fans. A few minutes later Geraldine Beskin from the Atlantis Bookshop joined her. Among many other things, I overheard the pagan immediately to my left make the following observation to her occult book dealing friend:
“A lot of people said they would have come any other night of the year but not tonight because they need to be alone to communicate with the spirits. It’s a shame. I’ll get my brazier out when I get home and I’ll still have plenty of time to see who’s running about…”
Eventually, Flipside’s mainstays Vic Pratt and Will Fowler did their comedy act. After this short introduction, it was straight into the films, starting with a ten minutes segment about witches from a BBC programme called Twenty-Four Hours. In this, Bernard Falk introduced Alex and Maxine Sanders in sky-clad action (i.e. ritual nudity) with their coven. Sanders was treated as a comedy item in this 1970 production and deadpan observations along the lines of him being ‘a former chemical worker from Chorlton in Manchester’ got plenty of laughs. At the time this was made, Sanders had perfected a piercing stare but otherwise appears somewhat lacking in the necessary charisma to be a really successful cult leader.
Next was a 25 minute TV programme from 1957 directed by Geoffrey Hughes entitled Out of Step: Witchcraft. This was presented by Daniel Farson, a Soho drinking legend in his own ‘rite’ (oops, I mean ‘right’)… as well as a TV personality of yesteryear, and an almost iconic gay figure to boot. First up, he interviewed an elderly Margaret Murray, whose unreliable and extremely far-fetched book The Witch Cult In Western Europe (1921) is the source of much modern paganism. She was followed by the hugely entertaining Gerald Gardner, whose bulging eyes and maniacal laugh when asked in a slightly veiled manner about nudity at his Wiccan ceremonies, were particularly pleasing. It was, of course, Gardner and his circle who synthesised Murray’s highly speculative claims with rituals cribbed from Aleister Crowley and freemasonry (and a few other things, including Gardner’s business and leisure interests in nudism) to create witchcraft as we know it today. Thus there is no reason to give any credence to the spurious assertions of modern witches – including Gardner and Alex Sanders – that their practices are the continuation of a pre-Christian tradition. The last of Farson’s interviewees was the writer Louis Wilkinson (AKA Louis Marlow), who was presented as a relatively sensible secular friend of Aleister Crowley with little sympathy for occult ritual or belief, but a deep personal knowledge of its most famous practitioner.
However, the highlight of the night was undoubtedly the screening of Derek Ford’s mockumentary Secret Rites (1971). The print from the BFI archives runs to 47 minutes, and while there are rumours of a longer cut, I have no idea whether a feature length version of the film actually exists. Ford is probably best known as the director of ultra-low budget British sexploitation flicks such as Groupie Girl (1970) and The Wife Swappers (1970): and while I love scenes in both these movies, they would definitely have benefited from being trimmed in terms of running time. In Secret Rites, Ford appears to have teamed Sanders up with some professional actresses, put them on a movie set (in Film House Studios) and run them through cinematic variations on some spurious Wiccan rites. As long as you are happy to accept everything is utterly fake, and Alex Sanders is the biggest flake of them all, then Secret Rites is a groove sensation (including the assertion at the end of the film that what you have just seen is completely ‘authentic’). As the rites get going and the robes come off, we are treated to some particularly trippy mirror distortions and a glorious soundtrack of psychedelic funk from the Spindle (as well as possibly the worst faked orgasm ever committed to celluloid). If you liked Luigi Batzella’s Nude For Satan, and I know I did, then you’ll love Secret Rites!
For the record, the credited ‘coven’ consists of Jane Spearing, Penny Beeching, Shirley Harmer, Tony Barton and Wendy Tomlinson. The narration is handled by Lee Peters – whose other credits include appearances in Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968) and the English TV series Dixon of Dock Green. I suspect that Penny Beeching is the early-seventies starlet of that name who can be seen in various episodes of Up Pompeii and The Morecambe and Wise Show. If anyone can pin this down for me, I’d appreciate it if they can add their information to the comments section below. The intonation of some of the ‘coven’, not to mention their suntanned breasts, certainly suggest to me that they are more likely to be actresses or models than ‘real-life witches’.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Aleister Crowley, Alex Sanders, Atlantis Bookshop, Bernard Falk, BFI, Chorlton, Daniel Farson, Derek Ford, Dixon of Dock Green, Film House Studios, Flipside, freemasonry, Geoffrey Hughes, Gerald Gardner, Geraldine Beskin, Groupie Girl, Halloween, Jane Spearing, Lee Peters, London, Louis Marlow, Louis Wilkinson, Luigi Batzella, Manchester, Margaret Murray, Maxine Sanders, Nude For Satan, Out Of Step: Witchcraft, Penny Beeching, Secret Rites, Shirley Harmer, Soho, Spindle, The Morecambe and Wise Show, The Wife Swappers, The Witch Cult In Western Europe, Tony Barton, Twenty-Four Hours, Up Pompeii, Vic Pratt, Wendy Tomlinson, Wicca, Will Fowler, witchcraft, witches, Witchfinder General
Posted in film | 17 Comments »
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
Despite the recently fashionable status of the Bethnal Green area in east London, this has to date failed to lead to a revival of interest in the 1970s band who named themselves after the hood. Bethnal were formed in Bethnal Green in 1972, and sounded like a cut-price Who minus the vocal skill of Roger Daltrey and the songwriting talent of Pete Townshend. I saw Bethnal at The Marquee in Wardour Street on Thursday 24 August 1978 and had a good night out. Bethnal had plenty of energy but beyond their deployment of a violin, there was nothing very memorable about them. They simply weren’t as good as the other bands I saw at The Marquee that month: The Vibrators on Monday 14 August 1978 and Ultravox! (when John Foxx was still the vocalist) on Tuesday 22 August 1978. I caught plenty of other bands that August too, at venues all around London… Bethnal were simply another night out on the town.
At some point after that Marquee gig, I pulled Bethnal’s first album Dangerous Times out of a bargain bin. It’s bog standard seventies Brit rock. The opener Out In The Street (not the tune of the same name from the first Who album) sounds like a second-rate Pete Townshend song covered by a boogie band, but it’s still enjoyable. The best tracks are covers of We’ve Gotta Get Out Of This Place and Barba O’Reilly, but while acceptable they’re not as good as the originals… And other tracks like Who We Gonna Blame are seriously let down by the vocals. Bethnal’s second and final album Crash Landing was not at all to my taste, since it veers much more in the direction of stadium rock and prog, so even when I came across bargain bin copies of this swansong recording, I left them lying where I found them.
One reason for mentioning Bethnal is because I’ve been enjoying John Eden’s series of blogs at Uncarved about uncool gigs he attended as a teenager. The ninth and most recent in the series is about him going to see The Mission in 1987. Eden appears to have ticket stubs and other memorabilia to jog his memory, whereas I’m relying on internet research to date the gigs I went to 30 and more years ago. I’m a bit older than Eden and I seem to have been more hardcore about my gig going from an earlier age. I liked a lot of seventies new wave and punk acts and among my early live experiences can list The Stranglers, The Damned and The Clash. I hate to admit it but the first band I ever saw was The Jam, and that was sometime before they had a record contract. For me, more interesting than these ‘name’ acts are those who never made it. One of the best bands in this latter category is Burlesque, a jazz rock combo with new wave trimmings, who like Bethnal managed to release a brace of albums that have yet to be reissued on CD.
According to the Billy Jenkins Webzine Burlesque were: “Selected as the ‘Band Most Likely To Succeed’ in both the tabloid Sun and Melody Maker at the end of ’76, it took a flying visit from America by music business legend Clive Davis to sign the band to Arista Records.” I don’t like the construction of that sentence, but I presume an article hosted on a former Burlesque band member’s website will be factually accurate. All I can say is he and his band-mates in Burlesque cracked me up with songs like Steel Appeal (about being sexually turned on by people in wheelchairs). Better yet, Burlesque saxophonist Ian Trimmer wore a tatty army jacket with ‘Bird Lives’ sprayed punk-style across the back; even at the age of 15 I knew that ‘Bird’ was jazz legend Charlie Parker. Making things even more surreal, the one time I saw Burlesque Paul Weller of The Jam was in the sparse audience. That said, Weller was obviously present to check out support act The Pleasers, who were Merseybeat revivalists replete with collarless Beatles’ jackets. The Pleasers even had their own one band musical movement – Thamesbeat!
I caught Burlesque and The Pleasers at some college (can’t recall which one) at some point in 1977, and it is curious to recall some of the acts I saw in the late-seventies that no one I know talks about any more. For instance, I subjected myself to Nina Hagen at The Lyceum, but I’m not sure if this was in 1978 or a bit later. I guess people still rave about Hagen in Germany, but she hasn’t been of much interest to UK based hipsters for the past 30 years. She made her initial international impact with a German language cover of the new wavish Tubes’ song White Punks On Dope, done with re-written lyrics as TV-Glotzer. In the early/mid-eighties Hagen made tunes like New York with disco legend Giorgio Moroder acting as producer, and for me that collaboration is the most notable thing about her.
I don’t like Hagen’s voice, so I’ve no idea why I went to see her circa 1978 – I can only assume there was some other act on the bill that I wanted to catch. I can’t remember where I saw Hagen’s one-time boyfriend, the Dutch rocker Herman Brood, but it may have been on a multi-act bill with his consort of that era. Brood is Holland’s most famous rock ‘n’ roll junkie, but I haven’t heard mention of him in London for years, despite his 2001 jump from the roof of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel leading to saturation media coverage of his suicide and subsequent funeral in The Netherlands.
Back in the late-seventies I used to see a lot of bands and my tastes were very varied. I would catch Sham 69 one night and Wire the next; groove to The Vapors on Saturday then freak-out with Gloria Mundi or The Virgin Prunes on Sunday… I even saw Motorhead, but I much preferred The Pirates! Having started out as Johnny Kidd’s backing band, The Pirates had been around since the late-fifties. On record they weren’t bad, although I didn’t really bother with their vinyl, I just liked them live… and in 1978 you’d have been just as likely to find me at a Pirates or Wilko Johnson gig as at a punky-reggae party. I was also going to see British reggae bands like Steel Pulse, Aswad, Misty In Roots and Matumbi. Since I much preferred small clubs to concert halls, I didn’t bother with visiting Jamaican acts although I liked their sounds. The Lyceum Ballroom in The Strand was the biggest place I went to with any regularity. I only ever went to The Hammersmith Odeon once, to see Lou Reed in 1979, and I considered the experience shitty.
Out of the stew of music I caught live 30 and more years ago, it is curious to see what’s disappeared. Amazingly, bands like The Pleasers made it onto CD in the late-nineties, whereas as far as I know the output of Burlesque and Bethnal has never been reissued on that format…
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1977, 1978, Amsterdam Hilton Hotel, Arista Records, Aswad, Barba O'Reilly, Bethnal, Bethnal Green, Billy Jenkins, Bird, burlesque, central London, Charlie Parker, Clive Davis, Crash Landing, east London, Giorgio Moroder, Gloria Mundi, Hammersmith Odeon, Herman Brood, Ian Trimmer, John Eden, Johnny Kidd, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, Lou Reed, Lyceum Ballroom, Matumbi, Melody Maker, Misty In Roots, Motorhead, New York, Nina Hagen, Paul Weller, Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Sham 69, Soho, Steel Appeal, Steel Pulse, The Beatles, The Jam, The Marquee, The Mission, The Pirates, The Pleasers, The Strand, The Sun, The Vapors, The Vibrators, The Virgin Prunes, The Who, Ultravox!, Uncarved, Wardour Street, We've Gotta Get Out Of This Place, Who We Gonna Blame, Wilko Johnson, Wire
Posted in music | 53 Comments »
Friday, July 24th, 2009
I knew 1979 was gonna be a bad year before it even started, although I didn’t see Thatcher’s election as a certainty until it happened. Much of my take on the world back then was filtered through the music I loved. On 29 December 1978 I headed up to Camden to catch a multi-band new wave gig at The Electric Ballroom headlined by The Brian James All Stars. This was the band that eventually became The Brains. Their performance that night was so-so and for me it didn’t compare with the excitement of seeing The Damned live when James was their guitarist (or even when they reformed without him).
I don’t remember who was bottom of the bill on 29 December 1978 at the Electric Ballroom. I hope it wasn’t 4th Reich, who used to do a lot of central London support slots at that time; they were one of the worst named punk bands of that era. As far as I could tell this group weren’t political, they had a female singer and their most memorable song was a cover of the early sixties hit Bobby’s Girl. But the name 4th Reich was so stupid that I never paid them much attention, although I saw them at least half-a-dozen times as support to other bands. Billed immediately beneath Brian James was Squeeze. I was more interested in Squeeze then than I would be now, since I’d rather liked their Packet of Three EP (more to do with John Cale’s production than the band’s live sound); their subsequent chart hits failed to groove me. Anyway, at some point it was announced that the Squeeze van had broken down with them and their equipment in it, and since they couldn’t make the gig, the The Police would play instead.
I knew before I heard them that any band calling themselves The Police had to be terrible. The filth were scum and no one in their right mind would name their group after the old bill. Brian James hadn’t pulled much of a crowd, and there were only about 50 punks in the Electric Ballroom, which I guess had a capacity of something between one and two thousand. When The Police took to the stage everyone in the venue walked away from it and headed for the bar at the back of the room. Pretty much the entire audience had their backs turned on Sting and company for their entire set. Unfortunately this was the most memorable thing about the night… Not a good gig.
I don’t remember what I did that New Year, my recollection of the following one is much better since I was back at the Electric Ballroom to see in 1980 with a double-bill of The Lurkers and Adam & The Ants. Musically this was a much better night than Brian James and The Police a year and two days earlier. That said, while the Ants were playing a girl who was standing close to me tried to pull Adam off-stage, and rather than taking it out on her, the bouncers beat me up. Then, because I looked a mess with my bloodied face, I got pulled by the filth on my way home. I’d picked up one of the free clear vinyl flexi-singles The Lurkers used to give away at their gigs, and the old bill held me for ages while they tried to work out what this was. I told them it was a record but they didn’t believe me; apparently they’d never seen a flexi-disk before. Eventually, after a radio conversation with their controllers and a close inspection of the grooves, they concluded my Lurkers freebie was indeed a record and not some drug paraphernalia, so plod let me go with a warning that if I was caught fighting again, I’d be nicked. I headed off with their verdict on my flexi-single still ringing in my ears: “Very clever!” Little things impress little minds.
Three days later I made my way to Wardour Street in Soho to catch Eater who’d been advertised as playing at The Marquee. This schoolboy punk band were best known for bitching that The Sex Pistols were too old, and I really dug their super-dumb sleaze-bag thud. Unfortunately, being almost as young as me (I was sixteen at the time), they tended to bicker a lot. When I arrived at 90 Wardour Street (now a swanky Terence Conran restaurant, but back then a rock and roll toilet) on 3 January 1979, there was a sign saying Eater had split up and Marseille would play instead. I’d heard the Marseille song Do It The French Way and seen pictures of this Liverpool based group, so I knew they weren’t for me. Back then people didn’t use the phrase New Wave of British Heavy Metal, but that’s what Marseille were subsequently tagged.
I was on my own and since Eater weren’t playing, I decided I’d only go inside if some of my mates were around. I couldn’t see anyone I knew but got talking to punkette in the queue and since she was going in, I decided to hang with her. I warned her that Marseille played heavy metal and we should go somewhere elsewhere. I wasn’t interested in Marseille but I was taken with the girl, so I parted with 50p to get in. Afterwards we both agreed that Marseille sucked and I walked the punkette down to Charing Cross station, where she caught a train to south east London. Unfortunately she didn’t invite me to go home with her but I did get her phone number. When I got around to calling the punkette a week later, she wouldn’t meet me coz I’d taken so long to bell her. I was playing cool, not hard to get.
So 1979 started badly and ended badly too with a beating at the Electric Ballroom. There were some good gigs in-between, with The Specials just before they broke being particularly memorable. First time I caught them was bottom of the bill to the reformed Damned (without Brian James) and The UK Subs (I think), at The Lyceum Ballroom in The Strand. The Specials were even better when I saw them headlining at The Nashville in South Kensington – unfortunately they had the same support band both times, Madness, who were fucking awful. The best gig I saw at The Marquee that year was Slaughter and the Dogs on Monday 3 September. The most impressive act at The Lyceum in 1979 is hard to pin down, Pure Hell from Philadelphia were memorable – but I’m unsure whether I saw them there in 1979 or the year before. Ditto Destroy All Monsters, who I saw at The Lyceum, but this might have been in 1980 rather than 1979. Both Pure Hell and Destroy All Monsters were right up there with some of the class US acts I’d seen in 1977, such as The Dictators and The Dead Boys. But even The Fall, who I’d hated when I’d seen them at The Marquee the year before, were excellent supporting Stiff Little Fingers at The Lyceum in 1979. The audience loathed them and Mark E. Smith did a perfect job of winding up the massed ranks of punk zealots. Smith is very entertaining when he has an audience that really hates him, but under all other circumstances I find him a bore.
I was also going to see a lot of the mod revival bands in 1979: Purple Hearts, The Mods, The Chords, Secret Affair, Back To Zero etc. But rather than the big events like Mod’s Mayday at the Music Machine, the best gigs were smaller ones at places like The Notre Dame Hall off Leicester Square and at The Global Village under the Charing Cross arches (then a straight disco, but later the gay nightclub Heaven). I liked catching bands from around London who you could see play every few weeks, and if they had a pop sensibility that made them even better. I saw both The Vapors and The Members repeatedly in 1979, as well as some of the more dire-hard acts like Chelsea and even Raped; the latter more after their name change to Cuddly Toys. So there was some good music, some bad music, but the winter of discontent was the real groove sensation – even if it was followed by the affront of Thatcherism. And since the current economic crisis is reopening the revolutionary possibilities that the ruling class wants us to believe were closed down back then, the seventies are on my mind a lot right now….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1979, 4th Reich, Adam and the Ants, Adam Ant, Back To Zero, Bobby's Girl, Brain James All Stars, Brian James and the Brains, Camden, central London, Charing Cross, Chelase, Cuddly Toys, Damned, Dead Boys, Destroy All Monsters, Do It The French Way, Eater, Electric Ballroom, Global Village, John Cale, London, Lyceum Ballroom, Madness, Margaret Thatcher, Mark E. Smith, Marseille, Music Machine, Notre Dame Hall, Packet of Three, Pure Hell, purple hearts, Raped, Secret Affair, Sex Pistols, Slaughter and the Dogs, Soho, South Kensington, Squeeze, Stiff Little Fingers, Sting, Terence Conran, The Chords, The Dictators, The Fall, The Lurkers, The Marquee, The Members, The Mods, The Nashville, The Police, The Specials, The Strand, The Vapors, UK Subs, Wardour Street, west London
Posted in music | 37 Comments »
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the old St Martin’s School of Art campus. The building stretches between Charing Cross Road and Greek Street. The frontage is impressive but the interior takes me straight back to Soho in the 1970s, when London was truly down and dirty. In the main entrance there’s even a ‘blue’ plaque stating the Sex Pistols played their first gig at the college in 1975. A lot of bands played at St Martin’s over the years, and you’d have thought the administration could have found a better group to commemorate than the Sex Pistols.
I’m not sure when the Sex Pistols moved into their Denmark Street rehearsal room, but if they were there by November 75 it would have been literally just a stroll across Charing Cross Road to get to the gig. Not much further away is the site of the old Marquee Club at 90 Wardour Street, the building that housed it is now demolished. The Sex Pistols played the Marquee but I managed to avoid them both there and at St Martin’s. That said, I did spend a lot of time at the Marquee in the late-seventies. Although the Marquee was originally located on Oxford Street and much latter moved to Charing Cross Road, the Wardour Street address is its core location and the club was run from there between 13 March 1964 until 18 July 1988.
When I went to the Marquee in the 1970s, Big John the bouncer would be standing at the entrance, I’d pay between 50p and a pound to see the band, and as I walked down the corridor to the first bar I’d hear Jerry Floyd or Ian Flemming spinning disks as a warm up. The place is etched in my memory, and so is how dirty Soho and the rest of London were at that time. When I walked into St Martin’s yesterday it reminded me of how great London used to be before it was cleaned up and gentrified. The Marquee in the late-seventies was peeling, and so was the rest of London. St. Martin’s is in ruins today and repairs are avoided because this institution was merged with The Central School of Art in 1989, Central St Martin’s is now a constituent college in The University of the Arts London, and is moving to a new purpose built campus in Kings Cross in 2011.
Wandering around St Martin’s yesterday I could feel Soho history wafting through the corridors, and some of it smelt rank. The building was built around 1938 and at the time would have been really grand. Now there are little locked rooms all over the place, and I wonder if when they’re finally opened there will be a yield of dead bodies. No one seems to know what is locked behind those doors. While plodding tourist ‘heritage’ items like the Sex Pistols now form the official history of St Martins, it has a much more interesting subterranean past. To give just one example, beat novelist Alexander Trocchi was employed by the sculpture department on a pretty much a full-time basis between October 1964 and March 1966. As far as I’m aware that episode is still fairly blank in terms of published biographical accounts of Trocchi’s life.
Moving on, I guess everyone imagines Soho was best in whatever state they first got to know it. My real love affair with the place was between 1974 and 1980, from the ages of 12 to 18. This was the era of the dirty bookshops and sex cinemas. The sleazy feel of the place at that time totally grooved me and I hated the way it was subsequently cleaned up. If you read the memoirs of fifties London gangsters then they tend to bemoan the arrival of the sex shops, which they say brought about the decline of the family businesses that gave the area its distinctive feel. What those who first discovered Soho in the nineties are nostalgic about I haven’t a clue… But luckily for me it looks like the credit crunch is taking what was once my favourite part of London back to the state I think it ought to be in; i.e. a dirty rotten mess. Who knows, I might even catch Sohoitis once again! Yes, going into St Martin’s yesterday gave me a real whiff of a London I know is no longer lost forever….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1970s, 70s, Alex Trocchi, Alexander Trocchi, central London, Central School of Art, Charing Cross Road, Denmark Street, Greek Street, Ian Flemming, Jerry Floyd, London, Marquee Club, Oxford Street, seventies, Sex Pistols, Soho, St. Martin's School of Art, University of the Arts London, Wardour Street
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography | 34 Comments »
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
Because actress Lana Clarkson and her sadistic killer Phil Spector met in an LA hostess club, the producer’s conviction for murder earlier this week turned my attention once more to 1960s London variants on the ‘lonely men pay pretty girls for conversation’ clip joint racket. Murray’s Cabaret Club where Profumo Affair sex scandal girls Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies worked is the most famous London hostess joint. Being glitzy, Murray’s presented itself as a cabaret but the real draw was the more fatal combination of drink and hostesses. But Murray’s wasn’t the only such club in London in the sixties, other examples include Churchill’s and Winston’s. The staff often circulated between these places; for example, my mother Julia Callan-Thompson worked at Murray’s in the early sixties and then moved on to Churchill’s for a few years.
Gangsters like Frankie Fraser and the Kray Twins were inevitably familiar with many London clubs and their owners, and among those mentioned in Fraser’s various books are Billy Hill’s former wife Aggie Hill who ran The Modernaires in Old Compton Street and The Cabinet Club in Gerrard Street, Tommy McCarthy’s Log Cabin in Wardour Street, Al Burnett’s Stork Club and The Astor; Bertie Green acquired the latter establishment after Burnett let it go. The clubs operated by Aggie Hill were aimed at the criminal fraternity, whereas others were successful precisely because of the frisson created when high society mixed with the more successful members of the so called ‘dangerous classes’.
Those hostess and related clubs that weren’t fronts for organized crime generally paid protection money to gangsters. Frankie Fraser writes about Billy Howard receiving a ‘pension’ from Bruce Brace for ‘protecting’ Winston’s. Howard’s son Michael Connor in his book The Soho Don suggests his father and Brace were actually partners in the club. Connor says criminal convictions prevented Howard from openly owning premises licensed to serve liquor, and therefore his name didn’t appear on legal papers. Howard’s interest in Winston’s is affirmed by Jimmy Evans in his autobiography. In the late-sixties Joseph Wilkins took over the establishment with help from Evans. Brace insisted later he was terrorised into giving the club away; a claim that might be substantiated from the fact that no money changed hands during the course of this transaction. According to Evans, Howard would have come out on top in a fair fight, but he put the frighteners on the old-timer by threatening him with a gun. Howard’s son Connor tells a more complex story about his father’s pragmatic decision to walk away from Winston’s, but the end results still chime with what Evans has to say. With Howard neutralized, Brace had no choice but to sign the club over to Wilkins.
After he took over Winston’s, Wilkins was also running various escort agencies in partnership with Wally Birch. These included La Femme, Glamour International, Playboy Escort and Eve International. Regular catalogues of girls available for hire were produced and rather unsurprisingly in 1976 Wilkins was jailed for living off the immoral earnings of the prostitutes he controlled. Prior to this Wilkins had been jailed for the way he obtained club licenses, and later on in the eighties he did time for drug smuggling. Writing well after the event in 1992, James Morton was able to give Joe Wilkins and Wally Birch’s misdemeanors detailed coverage in his book Gangland: London’s Underworld.
Club links to organized crime meant that the hostesses who made their living from these joints didn’t always have the most pleasant of working conditions. To give an example, a minder called Big Alf Melvin who worked at The Bus Stop was treated very badly by his boss Tony Mella. One night Mella pushed this minion too far and was shot by him. Mella managed to stagger into the street where he died with his head in the lap of one of his hostesses. Meanwhile, Melvin turned the gun on himself and blew his own brains out. Melvin and Mella are covered by Morton in Gangland.
Club hostess Lisa Prescott had a very bad time in December 1966 after being picked up by gangsters at either Churchill’s or Winston’s – depending on who’s account you believe. One commentator, John Pearson, even has it both ways, saying Winston’s in his book The Profession of Violence and correcting it to Churchill’s in the follow-up The Cult of Violence. Regardless, Prescott was taken to a flat in Barking where Frank Mitchell was hiding out after being sprung from Dartmoor by associates of the Kray twins. Mitchell and Prescott engaged in a series of sexual acts over a number of days. Then on Christmas Eve, Mitchell was taken to a van outside the flat and shot because the Krays found him hard to control and figured that the easiest way to save face was to kill him. Prescott who’d been paid about £100 to have sex with Mitchell was taken to a party and told to forget she’d ever met him. A terrified Prescott saw in the New Year working as a hostess; she also found herself having occasional unpaid sex with Albert Donoghue, who she believed had murdered Mitchell and suspected was planning to kill her. Many commentators view Donoghue as a red-herring, and believe the murder was actually committed by Freddie Foreman.
The confusion of Winston’s and Churchill’s probably becomes more understandable if you know that Churchill’s was originally set up by Bruce Brace and Harry Meadows, with the active involvement of Billy Howard. Meadows eventually gained sole control of the venture, with Brace and Howard setting up across the street as Winston’s. They’d lost a lot of money when Meadows eased them out of the first club, so they gave their next venture a similar name to wind him up.
Moving on, like Lana Clarkson, many women who worked in London hostess clubs in the sixties swung between showbiz proper and hostessing. Again, my mother Julia Callan-Thompson is a good example. She did a bit of modelling and film-extra work alongside hostessing at Murray’s and Churchill’s. She wasn’t as successful as Clarkson in films, but that was partly because her main interest was inner exploration. At the end of the day, beatnik concerns were closer to my mother’s heart than showbiz. Obviously, unless they are looking for a rich husband, the women who work as hostesses aren’t really interested in the men who pay them for conversation. In the case of my own mother, she much preferred the real hip scene to the sham of bourgeois marriage.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Aggie Hill, Al Burnett, Albert Donoghue, Alf Melvin, Barking, Bertie Green, Big Alf Melvin, Billy Hill, Billy Howard, Bruce Brace, Christine Keeler, Churchill's, Dartmoor, east London, Eve International, Frank Mitchell, Frankie Fraser, Freddie Foreman, Gangland, Gangland: London's Underworld, Gerrard Street, Glamour International, Harry Meadows, James Morton, Jimmy Evans, John Pearson, Joseph Wilkins, Julia Callan-Thompson, Kray Twins, La Femme, Lana Clarkson, Lisa Prescott, Log Cabin, London, Mad Frankie Fraser, Mandy Rice Davies, Michael Connor, Murray's Cabaret Club, Old Compton Street, Phil Spector, Playboy Escort, Profumo Affair, sixties, Soho, Stork Club, The Astor, The Bus Stop, The Cabinet Club, The Cult of Violence, The Modernaires, The Profession of Violence, The Soho Don, Tommy McCarthy, Tony Mella, Wally Birch, Wardour Street, west end, Winston's
Posted in Julia Callan-Thompson, True crime | 19 Comments »
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
While Julian MacLaren-Ross could turn a reasonable sentence, I’ve always felt the cult that exists around this writer is based more on his sad bohemian life than his books. Therefore it has taken me a few years to get around to reading Paul Willetts 2005 biography of this bourgeois clown. Fear & Loathing In Fitzrovia is a fantastically well researched book, and for fans of MacLaren-Ross I’m sure it provides them with everything they want. For the rest of us there is a certain amusement to be gained from the repetitious nature of the MacLaren-Ross spendthrift life-style, which resulted in endless moonlight flits, but it only serves to confirm what most readers already know, he was ultimately a bore.
Since I’m not a MacLaren-Ross enthusiast, I found his biography rather more interesting for the way it mapped Bohemian London in the 1940s and 1950s than how it dealt with his life, and as such it might be cross-referenced with other works about that period such as Nigel Richardson’s Dog Days In Soho: One Man’s Adventures in 1950s Bohemia. I found it curious that Willetts makes no mention of Colin MacInnes, a writer who like MacLaren-Ross frequented the French pub and various Soho drinking clubs; both of them also did a huge amount of work for the BBC. MacLaren-Ross was born in 1912, MacInnes two years later, and both left London as children to return to England more or less as adults. Both were considered difficult by their cultural industry peers, and both ‘enjoyed’ a rather nomadic life-style. However, while MacLaren-Ross was straight and suffered from some unbelievably sad sexual fixations (the most notorious instance of this being his pursuit of Sonia Orwell), MacInnes was gay. Given the latter writer’s taste for rough trade, it perhaps isn’t surprising that MacInnes embraced the working class youth culture of the 1950s and celebrated it in his novels, whereas MacLaren-Ross appears to have resented it.
Willetts has written as good a biography as one could hope for about MacLaren-Ross, but a compare and contrast exercise with MacInnes would have proved much more interesting. There are so many similarities between them that seeing where and how differences emerge is illuminating. That said, Fear & Loathing In Fitzrovia does at least demonstrate yet again that a posh education and at least the appearance of coming from an over-privileged background count for more within the British literary establishment than actual talent. So while class issues are never far from the surface in the Willetts tome, a more overt exposition of such matters would have been very welcome. For all their bohemian gloss, at the end of the day both MacInnes and MacLaren-Ross are bourgeois and square. Real life lies elsewhere. Nonetheless, Willetts is to be congratulated on his research, a very thorough job; and obviously he’s not to blame for the fact that bourgeois social relations conspire to make biography such a dominant genre within the book trade.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: BBC, Colin MacInnes, Dog Days In Soho: One Man's Adventures in 1950s Bohemia, England, Fear & Loathing In Fitzrovia, French House, French pub, Julian MacLaren-Ross, literary establishment, London, Nigel Richardson, Paul Willetts, Soho, Sonia Orwell
Posted in books, literature | 16 Comments »
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009
This is the autobiography of British exploitation legend Stanley Long, London’s answer to Russ Meyer, as ghosted by by Simon Sheridan. Long started out as a photographer, then moved onto stag films for the 8mm home market, before making a couple of non-sex documentary shorts in the late 1950s. However, it was his nudie cuties Nudist Memories (1958), Nudes Of The World (1961) and Take Off Your Clothes And Live (1963) that first made him into a figure that anyone with more than a passing interest in cinema would want to check out. Long went on to make a very notable trilogy of mondo films: West End Jungle (1960), London In The Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965), which take in both a series of night clubs and the commercial sex scene in Europe’s leading city. A good deal of the footage is faked, but these flicks are nonetheless crucial documents of London in the early to mid-sixties. Long is only listed as cinematographer and producer, but claims he was effectively their director; and that his business partner of the time – Arnold L. Miller – who took the main credit, had only a nominal role in the creation of these trash classics. Long certainly has plenty of interest to say about them. I’ll quote some blurb about West End Jungle to set the tone : “A journey into the dark heart of London, filmed in the actual places of vice…. West End Jungle offers the definitive insight into the seedy reality and cunning artifice of the sex workers of early 60s Soho.” (That’s from the sleeve of the recent DVD rather than Long’s autobiography).
Long’s first big successes were a couple of late mondo movies he made after splitting from Miller: The Wife Swappers (1969) and Naughty! (1971). The former is a series of vignettes about wife swapping, while the latter deals with pornography. In his book, Long details how he developed these projects without ever getting bogged down in boring detail. Less satisfactory are the accounts of the films from around the same time that were directed by his business partner of that era, Derek Ford. Movies like Groupie Girl (1969) simply aren’t as good as the more strictly documentary-style material over which Long appears to have exercised far greater control. X-Rated fails to make the point that Ford’s more fictional efforts are markedly inferior to the faked documentaries at which Long excelled.
Likewise, while the slightly later film Eskimo Nell (1974) is fun, Long talks it up rather too much. It isn’t nearly as good as the series that followed on from it: Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1975), Adventures of a Private Eye (1977) and Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate (1978). Long makes no bones about the fact that these films were a knock-off of the hugely successful Confessions comedies staring Robin Askwith. Personally I prefer the Adventure flicks, they show lots of London locations as I remember them from back in the day; Long didn’t have a big enough budget to hire a film studio. However, the section of Long’s autobiography covering these movies was a slight disappointment to me because I’d already heard most of the stories he relates on the commentaries he recorded for their DVD reissue. That said, Long very honestly admits that Private Eye is the weakest movie in the Adventures trilogy. With that one he moved away from blue collar jobs that lent themselves to picaresque narration. The strength of these films lies is their visual comedy, but the best scene in Private Eye takes place in a hostess club, and hinges on a series of verbal misunderstandings. Fred Emmey believes he is buying the services of a high class call girl, but this is actually Christopher Neil in drag, playing a private dick who is trying to purchase blackmail photographs from the wrong man.
Earlier on in his book, Long provides some cool insights into a couple of cult film-makers via his work as a cinematographer on both Repulsion (directed by Roman Polanski) and The Sorcerers (directed by Michael Reeves). Unfortunately, towards the end he tails off into a snore-fest of anecdotes about John Mills. Since Long surely knows he is far more interesting than a luvvie like Mills, I assume he ends his autobiography on this show-biz note in the hope of flogging a few extra copies to celebrity obsessives (one should not be surprised by this, it goes with his background as an exploitation film-maker). Despite the disappointing ending, X-Rated is still a fun read and useful source book on British exploitation cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, 60s, 70s, Adventures of a Plumbers's Mate, Adventures of a Private Eye, Adventures of a Taxi Driver, Arnold L Miller, Christopher Neil, Confessions, Derek Ford, Eskimo Nell, Fred Emmey, Groupie Girl, John Mills, London, London In The Raw, Michael Reeves, Naughty!, Nudes of the World, Nudist Memories, Primitive London, Repulsion, Robin Askwith, Roman Polanski, Russ Meyer, seventies, Simon Sheridan, sixties, Soho, Stanley Long, Take Off Your Clothes and Live, The Sorcerers, The Wife Swappers, West End Jungle, X-Rated: Adventures of an exploitation filmmaker
Posted in books, film | 23 Comments »