My Pop Life #265 : Jacky – Marc Almond

Jacky – Marc Almond

And if one day I should become
A singer with a Spanish bum
Who sings for women of great virtue
I’d sing to them with a guitar
I borrowed from a coffee bar
Well, what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you
My name would be Antonio
And all my bridges I would burn
And when I gave them some they’d know
I’d expect something in return
I’d have to get drunk every night
And talk about virility
With some old grandmother
That might be decked out like a Christmas tree

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A version of this blog will appear in my forthcoming book Camberwell Carrot Juice. Check back here for details!

RB

My Pop Life #246 : Taxi Driver – Bernard Herrmann

Taxi Driver – Bernard Herrmann

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I was already deeply in love with the cinema on July 5th 1976.  The day after a surreal and wonderful bicentennial Disneyland experience where Simon and I actually saw The Monkees live (see My Pop Life #168 Pleasant Valley Sunday) we are taken into Hollywood by Nick and his sister Caroline to see the film Taxi Driver.  Neither my diary nor my memory tells me the cinema we visited, but the film  left a lasting impression on me, a stunning cinematic vision of New York City written by Paul Schrader and directed by Martin Scorsese with an outstanding lead performance by Robert De Niro.  It also boasts an outstanding score written by Bernard Herrmann – his final piece of work before passing away two days after it was recorded.  Jazzy, brooding, strange and lyrical it is one of the finest film scores I know, and the very first one I bought as an LP later that year.

America in the summer of 1976 – a triplet of stunning Bergman movies Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light & The Silence in Los Angeles, a Brian de Palma double-bill of Obsession (another Herrmann score) and the far better Stepford Wives at a Cape Cod drive-in,  The Harder They Come my introduction to Jamaica & roots reggae in Santa Monica and All The President’s Men with Redford & Hoffman in, of course, Washington D.C.

I had became obsessed by cinema as a teenager, particularly in the 6th form at school.  Doing 3 A-Levels meant plenty of free periods, and there were some interesting options to fill that free time – all voluntary.  I chose to take Geology O-level and Film Studies, others chose Spanish or Astronomy.  Film Studies was our English teacher Mr Voigt’s domain – a dark-chinned wiry cackler with a magnetic enthusiasm for movies.  He ran the Lewes Film Club (and still does!) and would get each week, in the post, actual reels of film which he would then project for the Film Club members at a special screening.  We would get a little preview of these classics in class, as part of an introduction to the director and how they worked.  If I strain my memory buds I can remember a session on Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho and a dissection of the shower scene and the detective Arbogast’s murder, studying a master at work, all soundtracked by Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock’s go-to composer.  We also studied Georges Franju and his tribute to the silent era Judex,  a class on genre introduced us to The Western with clips from John Ford‘s Stagecoach and My Darling Celementine and the George Stevens film Shane,  Ingmar Bergman‘s wonderful breathtaking Wild Strawberries evocative and stunning, Michaelangelo Antonioni‘s austere simplicity in La Notte and then Luis Buñuel‘s Viridiana with its surreal re-composition by beggars & vagabonds of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.  He also showed us Buñuel’s shocking first film – a collaboration with Salvador Dali from 1927 – called Un Chien Andalou with featured the razor blade through the eyeball, the surreal and perfect metaphor for cinema.  All classics.  As each year passes it becomes clearer to me what an immensely privileged education I had in Lewes.  Despite my dysfunctional family and days of utter misery, my schooling was carefree and nurturing.  I definitely went from council estate single parent problem teenager to middle-class film enthusiast musician and footballer during those golden years.

Michael Voigt – MPOV – was spotted one Saturday in Brighton with his family in The Golden Egg.  Teenagers are randomly merciless and this became a weird badge of shame for The Mpovian.  But he was a truly great teacher and he showed me how to watch films,  for which I am forever grateful – a wonderful foundation in the subject and I followed up by visiting the Brighton Film Theatre on North Street, just down from the clocktower and long since disappeared, usually on my own but occasionally with a girlfriend and on one memorable occasion with someone else’s girlfriend (they’d separated!)   I remember Lacombe Lucien a tremendous French film directed by Louis Malle with Shirine, and Nick Roeg’s Don’t Look Now which blew me away completely, Fritz The Cat a pornographic cartoon which was unmemorable, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye which has stayed with me ever since, Jack Nicholson in Hal Ashby’s film The Last Detail sealing his crown as my favourite actor (along with Malcolm McDowell whom I worshipped), Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac severely testing my newfound film snobbery but winning me over with its stark haunting close-ups and extraordinary atmosphere and Woody Allen’s Love & Death making me laugh more than anything I had ever seen,  Picnic At Hanging Rock creating another potent atmosphere which I scarcely understood at the time, makes much more sense now, Coppola’s stunning creation The Conversation starring Gene Hackman, and then Robert Altman’s Nashville, a miraculous piece of work, with overlapping characters and dialogue, little plot if any, and a complete vision which demanded attention.

Inevitably my memory of films from the mid-70s blurs / overlaps (like Nashville) from Brighton into my early years at LSE when I worked at The Other Cinema, tearing tickets (The Battle of Algiers, Tout Va Bien, High School & other Fred Wiseman docs) followed in the same location by the now legendary Scala Cinema before it moved to King’s Cross and Channel Four took the space (The Girl Can’t Help It, Supervixens, Night Of The Living Dead, The Wicker Man, Cabaret, Solaris, The Goalkeeper’s Fear Of The Penalty, Pink Flamingos etc) just down the road from my digs off Charlotte Street.  It was there that I met Dominique Green, Paul Webster, Don McPherson and Stephen Woolley (see My Pop Life #23 Somethin’ Else) all of whom, like me, went on to work in the film industry and who are all dear friends.  Before the internet of course, the only place where you could witness transgression in safety (relatively!) was the cinema, and cinema clubs could skirt the censorship laws and screen stuff with actual sex.  Downstairs at the Scala all-nighter was a rock’n’roll punk poem of transgression where the tribes would meet on amphetamines and indulge their anti-establishment tastes.  I’d already seen the establishment version of soft porn Emmanuelle somewhere in Brighton, the hazy glowing golden skin and languid movements now a cliché in a bottle.

The first film I can remember seeing was The Sound Of Music with Mum and Paul in Eastbourne sometime in the 1960s.  The only other film I remember with Mum was Oliver! and we had the soundtrack LPs to both films at home, and knew every word off by heart.  The first film I went to see on my own was in the fleapit aka The Odeon on Cliffe High Street Lewes,  where I saw a double bill of Zulu and Those Magnificent Man in Their Flying Machines one day, maybe with Pete Smurthwaite. The cinema closed in 1971, partly I’m sure because of people like me referring to it as the fleapit and putting nervous people off from visiting.

The Odeon, Cliffe High Street, Lewes

The 1970s was peak cinema viewing time for me.  There was actually no need for snobbery because the Hollywood mainstream was so potent – Cuckoo’s Nest to A Clockwork Orange to Chinatown, The Godfather part 2, The Outlaw Josey Wales, even Jaws. All directed by young turks blowing old Hollywood away – Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, Kubrick. Terribly exciting times.  But I’d developed a taste for the subtitle and an eye for composition and shot.  Foreign films entered the bloodstream.  Woman In The Dunes.  Alexander Nevsky.  Pather Panchali.  Only study greatness…

At school there was a fella in the year above us called Russell Beck who invited some of us to see a short film in one of our free periods.  He’d drawn and painted it all on two pieces of sellotape stuck together and projected it onto the white wall to a groovy song.  It was so inspiring and brilliant.  I started to imagine wipe shots using passing trains to Seaford while waiting on the platform for the Polegate train. It became my most important thing.  Cinema.  Films.  More important than football, than music, than girls.  Well almost.

But I didn’t become a film director.  If I spent time on regrets, which I don’t, it might be on this.  I’d have been a good one I think.  I have made three short films,  inevitably.  One art/nature film called The Murmuration with Andy Baybutt which I talked about in My Pop Life #87  about Debussy, one pop video with Mark Williams and The Crocketts called Host also partly shot on the West Pier in Brighton incidentally, and one drama called The Last Of The Toothpaste which used Bernard Herrmann’s music for Hitchock’s Vertigo as its soundtrack.  It was a good idea without a good ending and thus failed as a piece sadly.  So I never really had a good calling card for my embryo directing career.  My first screenplay New Year’s Day was the closest I got, because before I signed the deal I seriously felt that I should direct it and called the director to tell him.  He was fucking furious and told me that he would develop his own film on the same subject if I did that.  A turning point.  I relented and let him direct it, and I’m still proud of the result despite the extraordinary depths of pain and personal frustration I and Jenny went through on that beknighted project. See My Pop Life #226 Exit Music For A Film and many other posts.  Pick the scars.  Ouch.

My main relationship with film has thus been first as a fan,  second as an actor, third as a writer (I’ve written seven, had one made).  I’ve written a lot about my acting experiences on film sets, particularly Alien 3, The Boat That Rocked, Withnail & I, Impromptu, Sus and Exorcist Dominion, and there are many others to come I hope.  But I haven’t written at all about being a film buff, a film snob or a collector of film music.  This current pandemic finds me and my wife Jenny in Brooklyn watching the Turner Classic Movie channel with enjoyable regularity, catching up with The Searchers, Lawrence Of Arabia, An American In Paris, Rocco & His Brothers, Carmen Jones, The General, Five Easy Pieces, The Red Shoes and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?  All introduced with enthusiasm and nuggets of enjoyment by the presenters.  The experience has completely reignited my passion for cinema, reminded me of who I am.

Los Feliz Cinema, Los Angeles

The Phoenix, East Finchley

The Holloway Odeon

I have spent many many hours of my life inside darkened rooms watching films.  I was a member of the National Film Theatre on the South Bank in London (eg Gordon Park’s Leadbelly with dear Beverley Randall, the extraordinary Russian anti-war film Come and See by Elem Klimov, Imamura’s The Ballad Of Narayama) as well as watching films at the London Film Festival each autumn which would only get a limited run/ never get released  – stuff such as Idrissa Ouedraogo’s marvellous Yaaba or Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, many Indian films over the years.   I’ve been a regular at the Screen On The Green (Hidden Agenda, The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, Truly, Madly, Deeply) the Everyman in Hampstead (The Exterminating Angel, All About Eve, Yojimbo), the Phoenix in East Finchley (Babette’s Feast, Raise The Red Lantern), the Electric on Portobello Road (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Babylon, For A Few Dollars More) the Renoir in Bloomsbury (Rue Cases-Negres, Diva, Chocolat), the Lumiere in St Martin’s Lane (The Sheltering Sky, Ran, we walked out of The Cook, The Thief… and Jenny wanted to storm the projector box!) and the Odeon in Holloway Road (Stand By Me, Toy Story, Desperately Seeking Susan).  We would visit the Duke Of York’s, oldest cinema in Britain when we lived in Brighton (Let The Right One In, Cinema Paradiso, City of God) but they never screened my baby New Year’s Day, calling it “too commercial” a lie which still bites me to this day.  It was a local film by a local person, the very definition of arthouse independent cinema … and the premiere was at The Marina multiplex….anyway… calm down…

I’ve been to the Cannes Film Festival three times – notably in 2000 when Jenny, Gwen Wynne and I saw the world premiere of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon getting a six-minute standing ovation.  I was lucky enough to work with Ang Lee in 2018 down in Savannah, Georgia on Gemini Man.  I didn’t have the nerve to tell him we’d called it Crouch End Tiger, Hendon Dragon.   And then Will Smith bought out a screen at a Savannah multiplex the night Black Panther opened and took the cast & crew to celebrate.  Earlier Jenny had been in Cannes 2004 and seen Chan-Wook Park’s Old Boy, and by 2011 I was working on his English language film Stoker, and happily told him she had been there when he’d won the Grand Prix.  Golden threads.

And Hollywood. Yes we used to live there.  It’s a lot.  I loved it, Jenny hated it.  It is shallow and ambitious and in-your-face rude.  But it is warm and smells delicious and the sky is blue.  Living in Los Angeles in the 1990s I loved the culture of film which is woven into that city’s architecture, industry and culture – a city where films really matter and get discussed both as commerce and art.  Arguments about choosing which film release would get your dollars on an opening weekend, every single week.

The Egyptian Theatre, Hollywood Boulevard

I was there on Oscar night 1993 when Neil Jordan & Stephen Woolley & Stephen Rea & Jaye Davidson came back from the ceremony with Neil’s statue for Best Screenplay for The Crying Game (we had six nominations) and I got to hold the damn thing in my sweaty drunken hands and marvel.   Over our years there we patronised the New Beverley Cinema (owned by Quentin Tarantino since 2014) which shows arthouse classics and overheard Robert Forster, the lovely actor from Jackie Brown coming out from a screening of a Charlie Chaplin film I think in 2002 saying “Sure I’ll read it, but I can’t get a picture financed you should know that“.  He’d had a Best Supporting Actor nomination five years earlier.  The shine wears off.  We went to the Nuart, the Vista, the Arclight and the magnificent Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard which has handprints in the concrete outside and stars embedded in the sidewalk.  It’s all around and just out of reach.

Here in New York we have the Film Forum in Tribeca/West Village which has been screening independent programmes since 1970 and where we go to see films by Visconti or Ozu or Buñuel, Chimes At Midnight or the ‘recent’ Aretha Franklin pic from 1972  Amazing Grace ram-packed with church elders visiting from Jersey.

We have the Metrograph on the Lower East Side which also screens classics – when I read that they were showing my favourite Andrei Tarkovsky film Andrei Rublev I booked two tickets and treated my buddy Tony Gerber whereupon he returned the favour and took me to Lina Wertmuller’s highly original Seven Beauties at the same screen with his wife Lynn and daughter Ruby.  It is a genuine pleasure in normal times to make a date and see a movie and I miss it a great deal.   As a member of BAFTA NY  we get invited to screenings, often with Q&A sessions with the director or actors involved especially in the awards season and we’ve been to literally scores of these over the last six years.  (The Revenant, Secret Life Of Pets, Queen of Katwe, Hidden Figures, You Were Never Really Here).  Catching up is then done via DVD screeners which get mailed to members so that we can vote for best film best actress and so on.  Roma is my favourite film of the last few years, an absolute treasure of film-making from Alfonso Cuarón from beginning to end, head and shoulders above what anyone else is currently doing, but I have to mention Stephen Woolley’s production of Lone Scherfig’s Their Finest – a film about film-making in the Second World War.  It is the finest thing he has done I feel and I told him so.

Taxi Driver so took me that I went to that shop on Brewer Street – it’s probably gone now – where they sell posters and other memorabilia amid the strip clubs and dodgy geezers appropriately enough, and bought the magnificent blue poster of De Niro walking down a Lower East Side street in 1975, a classic New York City image.  I had it in my bedroom for a couple of years before someone stole it when I had a party.   Later, as a hopeful monster I was offered a recall audition for a small part in Gangs of New York but I was ambitious then for more than three lines so I said no and missed my chance to rub shoulders with Marty.  He’s one of the great directors no doubt, even though his vision is narrow and repetitive he knows how to make a movie.  He remembers the Taxi Driver shoot :

“For instance, the tracking shot over the murder scene at the end, which was shot in a real apartment building: We had to go through the ceiling to get it. It took three months to cut through the ceiling, and 20 minutes to shoot the shot.”

The evocative wee small hours saxophone on the soundtrack was played by jazz musician Tom Scott, leader of the band LA Express, who weirdly enough get mentioned in my America ’76 diary on the following page from the Taxi Driver entry “shall we go and see LA Express or Barry Lyndon?”  We did neither.  The album also has  De Niro’s monologues over Herrmann’s score including the iconic scene where he is talking to himself in the mirror, stuff he improvised and which doesn’t appear in Schrader’s extraordinary screenplay.  I was lucky enough to get cast in one of Paul Schrader’s films ie one he directed (Exorcist Dominion which was shot in Morocco in 2002) but I never asked him about Taxi Driver.  I don’t think I wanted to be a fanboy because of my Bowie experience (My Pop Life #54 Art Decade) but really sometimes I should just ask the damn question.

Bernard Herrmann conducting

Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese & Robert De Niro on the set of Taxi Driver

you talkin’ to me?

 all photographs by Steve Schapiro

Taxi Driver is a film about loneliness, alienation and feeling small.  It is about an inarticulate unconnected man who becomes aware of his own lack of agency and resolves to do something about it.  New York City has an air of menace and danger, and is full of people hustling, using other people.  It doesn’t make sense.  It is Babylon.  Travis Bickle becomes an avenging angel, a dark purifying psychopath who dreams of doing something, being somebody, and the film is a terrifying prophecy of the future of our culture.  Within four years John Lennon had been shot dead on his own doorstep in New York.  Now we get school shootings and other horrific empty nihilistic spasms of violence as a matter of course.  It’s a scary film, a red flag and a vision of hell.  But it is where we live, still, in 2020.

Bernard Herrmann scored Citizen Kane, North By Northwest, Psycho, Vertigo, Fahrenheit 451 and The Devil and Daniel Webster for which he won an Oscar.   And many others of course.  He is one of an armful of composers (did I mention Ennio Morricone?) who can change the image you’re watching because of what you are hearing.  His work always elevates the artform into greatness.

Film – and theatre, and television – all help us to understand who we are as individuals, and as societies.  They help us to understand other cultures too if we are curious.  Artists are curious because that is how we are made.  The offensive remarks of the British chancellor this week suggesting that artists should all retrain thanks to the pandemic are to be utterly condemned for the ignorant arrogant philistinism that they are.  He should be forced to spend a month without art, without culture, without entertainment of any kind.  We are always the first to feel the recessions, and the last to get back to work.  We choose to create because – and I speak for myself – I do not feel good when I am not creating.  Film was my chosen medium of creativity but I have dabbled in other arenas.  It is what makes my heart beat.

Oh my favourite films you now ask, rather belatedly?  Well, today, they are:

Casablanca  –   Michael Curtiz

Andrei Rublev   –   Andrei Tarkovsky

O Lucky Man   –   Lindsay Anderson

Roma   –   Alfonso Cuarón

Once Upon A Time In The West   –   Sergei Leone

The Seven Samurai   –   Akira Kurosawa

The New World   –   Terrence Malick

The Exterminating Angel   –   Luis Buñuel

The Conversation   –   Francis Ford Coppola

Lawrence Of Arabia   –   David Lean

The Holy Innocents   –   Mario Camus

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid   –   Carl Reiner

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I note that cinema chains are adapting to the pandemic by opening from Thursday to Sunday only, or by closing completely, some are trying to get folk to buy tickets for online screenings.  I hope and pray that when we are through this powerfully challenging covid moment, and we will be, that cinema will still be here to uplift us and encourage our natural empathy.

Opening Theme :

God’s Lonely Man :

After Herrmann died, David Blume arranged some of the themes in a more lounge style, and this version while smooth and harmless is also very evocative.  Not sure if Bernard would have approved, and it doesn’t appear in the film

My Pop Life #175 : One Better Day – Madness

One Better Day   –   Madness

Further down, a photo booth, a million plastic bags
And an old woman filling out a million baggage tags
But when she gets thrown out, three bags at a time
She spies the old chap in the road to share her bags with
She has bags of time
Surrounded by his past, on a short white line
He sits while cars pass either side, takes his time
Trying to remember one better day
A while ago when people stopped to hear him say
Walking round you sometimes hear the sunshine
Beating down in time with the rhythm of your shoes

Was there ever a more disappointing year for pop music than 1984?  Looking back at the album releases and the top singles I am staggered by the unifying theme – great artists releasing substandard material, and very few inspirational youngsters filling the huge gap. Exception and the big album of the year was Purple Rain by Prince, while Frankie Goes To Hollywood dominated the UK radio and singles charts but I bought very little current music in 1984.  I was filling gaps, discovering genres, crate-digging, conducting archeological excavations and sometimes realising that people I’d scorned as a teenager were actually pretty good.  The albums I did buy from 1984, in 1984 :

Goodbye Cruel World  –  Elvis Costello & The Attractions

The Pearl  –  Harold Budd & Brian Eno

Mister Heartbreak  –  Laurie Anderson

Diamond Life  –  Sade

Best of ‘The Poet’ Trilogy  –  Bobby Womack

Keep Moving  –  Madness

Not as many as usual.  Later I would buy Prince, The Bangles, Luther Vandross, Dr John, Franco & TPOK Jazz, Van Dyke Parks, Gilberto Gil, The Judds, Prefab Sprout, Youssou N’Dour, The Style Council, Steve Reich, Run DMC and Pat Metheny, but even with those additions I think you can see how thin on the ground 1984 was musically.  Springsteen made Born In The USA the title track of which became a republican anthem (he didn’t sing it live this year 2016).  Perhaps the date was casting shade.  1984.  Throughout my life we’d all lived under the spectre of George Orwell‘s chilling and prescient novel.   That collection of numbers, that date had loomed like the monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey – the other magical sentient date..in The Future.  It always presaged doom, totalitarianism, a jackboot stamping on a human face into infinity.  Now we were here and…well, life went on, like it does.  Like it did in 2001.  And like it will next year.

The big singles were Relax, Two Tribes, The Power Of Love, When Doves Cry, Purple Rain, the others were What’s Love Got To Do With It, I Feel For You, Ghostbusters, Any Love, It’s A Miracle, Careless Whisper, Smalltown Boy, Solid, Like A Virgin, I Just Called To Say I Love You, Hello, Take A Look At Me Now, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Do They Know It’s Christmas.

I liked very little of it.  Disappointing : Bowie with Blue Jean, Stevie Wonder (sigh), Elvis Costello’s worst LP to date, ditto McCartney, ditto Paul Weller.

And then Haircut 100 split up. ( Joke. )

And then Jerry Dammers and Special AKA released Free Nelson Mandela. (Not Joke)

Flying the flag for musical growth, and one step beyond their previous work The Rise and Fall (1982) was the Madness LP Keep Moving, in particular the song One Better Day, which haunts me even now and can move me to tears.  I’d loved the band since their first single The Prince,  multi-cultural British ska birthed in Camden Town via Jamaica. In those early days their skinhead fans and their whiteness made me feel a little uncomfortable at some of the gigs, although the majority of fans were not skins.  Then, aware of this stain on their pop life, the Madness videos started to include black people and the band rose above it all – for example Embarrassment is about a girl who’s going to have a baby with her black boyfriend.  The other groups who’d come up on the ska-revival Two-Tone wave The Specials, The Beat and The Selecter were all multi-racial anyway, but by 1984 they’d all split up.  Madness were on Stiff Records and this was their last LP with the maverick punk label.  It was their finest record to date – I’d bought them all, and they’d just got better and better.  So had The Undertones, but they’d stopped, so had The Jam and they’d split, so had Elvis Costello and he’d gone a bit over-produced, his songs weren’t to his impossibly high standard.   I’d also bought the collected videos of Madness which we watched endlessly, because they were so full of joy and nuttiness. I’m not sure there are a better collection of videos in pop history.  They made me want to be in the band.  Playing the saxophone.  Doing slightly robotic dancing.  Having a laugh with a gang.  

I’ve always wanted to be in a gang, but never really surrendered to it.  I don’t surrender very easily.  I’ve been in some gangs, but always felt like an outsider in there.  Either a council-estate kid in a middle class environment as a teenager, or an educated kid in a working-class environment.  Or an actor in a football team.  Or an actor in a band.  Or just a weirdo who doesn’t fit in enough.  Must be a choice.  I resist surrender.  Because I do not seek oblivion I will never be an alcoholic or a junkie.  I’m scared of oblivion, of disappearing.  Most of the music I like is controlled.  It’s not messy, it’s not people losing control.  It’s beautiful, melodic, harmonic, sweet.  But I wanted to be in Madness so much.  They influenced the band I was in, Birds Of Tin, but not enough. See My Pop Life #149.

Mike Barson was the musical genius on the piano, but his influence infused every musician, from bass player Mark Bedford (who later guested on Robert Wyatt’s cover of Costello’s Shipbuilding) to gimmick side monkey Chas Smash who went from rude boy dancer to trumpet player, from Chris Foreman on guitar and songwriting to Lee Thompson on saxophone (who I wished I was), from Woody on the kit to Suggs on the lead vocals.  They were tight, musical, lyrically interesting and wonderfully arranged pop songs,  vignettes of British life from Baggy Trousers to Embarrassment, My Girl to House Of Fun. They were probably my favourite band in the early 80s – them and Costello and Talking Heads.

Sloane Square, Chelsea

But if 1984 was a meagre year musically for me,  theatrically it was promising.   Armed with a law degree 😉 – I’d been to Edinburgh three times, got my Equity Card,  played the Donmar in Steven Berkoff’s WEST.    Then in early 84 I’d worked at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs with Danny Boyle (directing an incredible play called Panic! by Alan Brown).   It was an extraordinary piece of work which ran for all of two and half weeks as I recall.  Worthy of a post of its own.   Then in the late summer the 3rd director in the building a brilliant young Simon Curtis invited me to be part of his first production which was to be a play for Joint Stock Theatre Company called Deadlines.  I was thrilled, and it turned out to be one of my most satisfying and rewarding theatrical adventures.  Simon was extremely encouraging, open, intelligent and funny.  I ended up playing six parts and getting a new agent out of it : Michael Foster.   Also cast : Kathryn Pogson, Paul Jesson, Shirin Taylor, Tricia Kelly, Paul Mooney.   Writer :  Stephen Wakelam.  Play : unwritten.

A young Simon Curtis in 1985, one year after Deadlines

Joint Stock was a unique theatre company.  Formed by Max Stafford-Clark and others in the early 1970s, it had become a collective in 1974 while they produced David Hare’s play about China ‘Fanshen‘, co-directed by Max and Bill Gaskell.  This meant that every member who had ever worked for the company could attend company meetings and AGMs and vote.  In practice people deferred to Max and Caryl Churchill, both of whom were enthusiastic enough to actually attend meetings.  There was an administrator, but no Artistic Director – each big decision eg – what play shall we do next ? directed by who ? written by who ? was decided on a collective vote.  Some were already plays, but more often the show would be devised by the company.

This is now a forgotten way of life.  All of those Arts Council-funded theatre companies have gone :  7:84, Shared Experience, Joint Stock, Paines Plough.  Slashed by Thatcher’s reduction of the State.  1984 was the year of the miner’s strike, Coal Not Dole stickers, and the rise of cardboard city in Waterloo as new regulations on signing on created a new wave of homelessness, particularly of those between 16 and 20.  Suddenly there were people sleeping in shop doorways in London on The Strand.  Then there was an IRA bomb at the Tory Party conference in Brighton at The Grand Hotel.

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one of the greatest band shots of all time: the cover of ‘7’ the 3rd Madness LP

Keep Moving was Mike Barson’s last album with Madness, and he left the band once they recorded a couple of videos – Michael Caine and One Better Day, which was their last for Stiff Records, and funded by the band themselves including Barson, seen playing the vibraphone, who flew in from Amsterdam for the shoot.

Arlington house, address: no fixed abode
An old man in a three-piece suit sits in the road
He stares across the water, he sees right through the lock
But on and up like outstretched hands
His mumbled words, his fumbled words, mock

Arlington House is behind Camden High Street.  It housed – and still houses among it’s more commercial premises – homeless men, and has since 1905.  It was the last of the Victorian workhouses, built by politician and philanthropist Lord Rowton in the 1890s to house London’s working poor.

Camden Lock

I used to shop for music shoes and clothes in Camden Town, whether in Dingwalls (‘The Lock’ in the lyrics) or the Record and Tape Exchange on the High St, or one of the many independent stores in that square mile of post-punk grubbiness.  Over the years I’ve been to many gigs in Camden Palace (Culture Club), The Electric Ballroom (The Vibrators) or Dingwalls (X-Ray Spex).  The Dublin Castle.   More recently at the re-opened Roundhouse or the Jazz Cafe.

When I started acting in Moving Parts Theatre Company in 1981 two of the company’s founders – Ruth MacKenzie and Rachel Feldberg – lived in Oval Road just behind Arlington House with the young director Roger Michell who would later go on to direct The Buddha Of Suburbia, Notting Hill and many other successful films.  I would see him years and years later at Michael Foster’s 50th birthday party and he hailed me “Haven’t you done well !”  I looked behind me.  No, he meant me. I smiled.  “Me?  What about you !!” I realised that seen from the outside, my journey looks good and fine, but what about the invisible thrashing through the undergrowth with a blunt machete to reach a small ledge of safety that no one ever sees ?  Eh ?!?  WHAT ABOUT THAT?

Gentrified many times Camden still retains its scruffy down-at-heel ambience, partly due to scruffy down-at-heel junkies, and partly due to people who want to look scruffy and down-at-heel.  But there have always been homeless people there – see Waterloo, see Soho, see Bayswater. And having been homeless myself for a period of time as a teenager (see My Pop Life #84 All Along The Watchtower) I always felt moved by this song, describing a couple walking the streets of NW1.  Street people.  Nowhere to store their stuff, carrying it all around.  Nowhere to wash apart from the hostel, who close their doors at 8am.  I would be interviewing some of these people for my first play Sanctuary in 2 years’ time, using The Joint Stock Method.  And later, some of them would be invited to The Drill Hall to see the play.

The woman in the video is Betty Bright – Sugg’s wife.  Graham McPherson – Suggs – who wrote the song with Mark ‘Bedders’ Bedford – looks impossibly young in the video, but wears the kind of clothes that I used to try and find, and still do to be fair.  Checks.  Tartans. Doc Martens.  There’s a DM shop on Kentish Town Road next to Camden tube which makes an appearance in The Sun & The Rain video.  I had a pair of red patent leather DMs.  In fact I still have them.  I owe some of my so-called style to Madness Suggs chic, (some to Bryan Ferry chic, some to rock’n’roll and some to Laurel & Hardy).

The chorus is unbearably sweet, given the subject :

She’s trying to remember one better day
A while ago when people stopped to hear her say

‘Walking round you sometimes hear the sunshine
Beating down in time with the rhythm of your shoes
The feeling of arriving when you’ve nothing left to lose…’