extract from email i sent frank kogan and
others just after release of F&F (i hAve no
idea what the one-word sentence "wing."
means, btw...)
... if any of you are still puzzling at my
previous email’s “two reasons” for have my
goat gotten by Temple on brit comedians,
here’s my full Sight and Sound review of THE
FILTH AND THE FURY – or rather, my full
pre-edited submission, plus some
unfinished ideas I ran out of space and time
to include. S&S actually did a nice job
calming down what follows, which is
stylistically overripe and contorted, but
probably – in its professional
unpublishability – better represents my
deep reactions.
THE FILTH AND THE FURY
SYNOPSIS: Interviews old and new, footage
shot 1975-79, and video recordings from
television at that time are combined to tell
the story of the Sex Pistols, the key outfit in
the emergence of UK punk. Narrated
primarily in voiceover from the surviving
band-members – John Lydon, Steve Jones,
Paul Cook and Glen Matlock – the
background, cultural and political, is
sketched; followed by a portrait of the
group’s formation, public arrival, combined
chart success and media outrage, and
collapse while touring America. A hitherto-
unseen interview with mascot-bassplayer
Sid Vicious (real name John Beverly), who
died the following year of a heroin OD, is
framed by the others as talking heads today,
discussing how and why it all happened, and
how much responsibility their manager
Malcolm McLaren, not interviewed except in
archive footage, can be considered to hold
for the triumphs or the catastrophes.
REVIEW: In late 1976, 20 years after
Presley’s worldwide arrival, the Clash
delivered their notorious rejectionist
manifesto of punk renewal: ‘NO BEATLES
STONES OR ELVIS IN ’77’. Implied here was a
self-removing, rarely honoured promise: ‘NO
PISTOLS OR CLASH IN ’97. Just one reason
why Julian Temple’s return, two decades on,
to the subject matter of The Great Rock’n’roll
Swindle (1980), the movie that gave him a
career (of sorts) in Hollywood, can only
betray the material – the Pistols’ brief,
calamitous career – that it noisily claims to
be rescuing.
In fact, despite its much-touted cloud of
previously unseen footage and video
material, the documentary is little more
than a clumsy bid for atonement on Temple’s
part for his earlier role as Malcolm
McLaren’s puppet on the set of Swindle,
directing to the latter’s brief (which
including reducing the band, in Osmonds/
Jackson 5 tradition, to inept cartoons). Yet
by gracelessly demonising McLaren – often
by editing in fragments of Swindle, itself a
prankishly radical essay in self-
demonisation – The Filth and the Fury
panders to all participating survivors, as
they retrospectively primp up their stories.
This time round our blithely revisionist
director makes sure he’s ‘in’ with the ‘lads’
(not to mention this spring’s rock-nostalgic
magazine-cover strategies at EMAP… )
Insofar as Temple manages a structure at all,
the story is framed by two events. The first
is the band’s debut television appearance,
shown in full. Host Bill Grundy patronises,
goads and hits on this bevy of nervous kids:
with Rotten cowed by the occasion, Jones
seizes the stage, cussing – as requested – in
language both archaic and stilted: “What a
fucking rotter!” Result: a notorious headline
in The Daily Mirror (whence the film’s title)
– yet the most obvious point to make today is
how mild this once-epochal palaver now
seems. Mid-evening sit-coms routinely
dribble out stronger stuff
The second event was less ‘Bash Street Kids’,
yet its encrustations of myth remain just as
unaddressed. In 1979, in the wake of his
girlfriend Nancy’s murder in the Chelsea
Hotel, chief suspect Sid Vicious OD’d on
heroin, this probable suicide the instant of
the movement’s utter failure on its own
terms. Haunted by the sordid debacle of his
best friend’s public immolation, Johnny
Rotten is allowed to vomit forth slanderous
towards one-time co-conspirator McLaren –
yet the ‘anti-drugs’ line he takes,
preeningly moralistic and evasive, simply
turns him into Sting saving the rainforest.
In an age when subconscious folk-memories
of 1977 are endlessly mobilised within the
media industry to scare up uncritical
tolerance of every next marketable youth
wave, this documentary needed, at a minium,
to confront its principals with history as
it’s run since, and the difficult realities
this has revealed. wing. Unsurprisingly,
gravity and the good life have thickened up
these once-skinny alt.celebrity bodies – but
to interview them in friendly silhouette,
daylight streaming past their now somewhat
Grundified outlines, is bad cowardice, in
context. Especially when long-noted
contradictions, historical inaccuracies and
boilerplate rock-chat cliché are all also
allowed to wobble by unremarked. It’s as if
the same obsequious video-eye amber that
Temple mummifies poor dead Sid in must
necessarily gum up the living. A director
less compromised by his own wannabe-punk
imopulses might perhaps have cut through to
fresh insight at any one of several available
clues and sub-surface conflicts.
Just one example, ruinously wasted: images
from their benefit performance at a party for
the children of striking miners, during a
tour when their position as high-profile
media-demons had them banned from most
orthodox venues. A relaxed and smiling
Rotten handing out cake to tots was a truth
that had to be hidden at the time, for the
sake of establishing the intransigent
“rawness” of punk truth-telling: bedsides,
publicity-wise, the ‘humanising’ effect of
any such counter-demonisation would have
been fairly swiftly sentimentalised.
But sentimentalisation comes in many forms.
Much of Filth’s feebleness stems from its
spavined attitude to class. Where the ex-
Pistols continue – almost despite themselves
– to cast weird, revelatory light on the
mutilations of the English working-class
sense of itself, Temple does his best to
muddy everything they give him, to re-
present the chafing inflammation within the
band of subtly distinct social layers and
tensions – the roots of its iconocastic energy
- as mere personality clash; while the
unpersoning of McLaren, his banishment to
the role of mere deluded bourgeois parasite,
effectively reduces punk to that most beer-
bellied of its industry bowdlerisations, ‘a
kick up the bum for the music business’.
Actually, only within the dream-field of
McLaren’s titanically irresponsible
improvisation and self-absorbed utopian
carelessness could two such inchoately
ambitious, clever and unlike prole
sensibilities as Lydon’s and Jones’s have
combined, let alone fused, mutated and
flared.
The unprecedentedly offensive blizzard of
taste-free marketing which followed Sid’s
OD was a disaster, rock-careerwise – but
only because it flushed out Rotten’s
fundamental rock’n’roll decency, at the
expnse of his iconic flagellant daring a a
performer. Unburdend by such pseudo-
Situationist games-play – and by McLaren’s
semi-queer fascination with boy-band sex
appeal as a motor of social conflagration –
the weary Pistols might well have have sunk
their differences for a time (with each other,
with their record company). Not splitting,
they could have become the next Jethro Tull,
desexed, artistically serious, and
pathetically irrelevant.
[inc bits never completed/supplied to S&S]
Paul Tickell’s BBC2 documentary, Punk and
the Pistols, very effectively intercut its
material with clips from Quatermass and the
Pit: here, following someone’s throwaway
remark about Rotten’s performance style, the
band footage is intercut with clips of
Lawrence Olivier as Richard III, Hunchback
Dick, to supply menace, camp monstrosity,
as well Shakespearean interjection and
commentary, the ambivalence of our
response to the first protecting the second
from its apparent pretentiousness. As an
overused gag, this most of all reminds us
how Temple’s original mentor, McLaren,
invoked Dickens to explain the Pistols,
casting himself as a pervert Fagin. But then
this entire documentary never escapes the
shadows of the predecessors it claims to
supplant.
Time has mellowed them; and in Temple it’s
diluted a sensibility that was never that
strong in the first place: much is made of
punk’s links to music hall and vaudeville
comedy: but the truth of this is [xx] when
the credits give “special thanks to the comic
genius of” a grab-bag of [xx] comedians, an
obsequious [xx] that’s more cowardly than
provocative.
“the humour/music hall”: yeah, right... Like
‘Bodies’ is just a Music Hall turn, a laff
(“She was a girl from Birmingham/she had
had an abortion”)
the working class no longer knew what
‘working class’ meant: but any notion what it
might mean is never broached. Implication
is, of course, that it’s the band-members,
except that – over and above basic
personality clashes – they barely recognise
each other as of a kind: “John came from
another world,” says Steve: “He was more
intellectual”. (As for the world Sid came
from… )
― mark s, Tuesday, 8 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
four years pass...
one year passes...
two years pass...