I've just completed a David Bowie tribute, the most ambitious of my tributes to date. Full statement and piece can accessed here
Cast of characters (in order of appearance): Dick Cavett David Bowie Rip Torn Mae West George Formby John Harris Norman Carl Odam Nic Roeg Woody Wooodmansey Elvis Presley Candy Clark Michael Palin Russell Harty Dudley Moore Peter Cook Buck Henry David Beales John Hurt Richard Burton Malcolm McDowell William Burroughs Cyril Cusack Geoff McCormack Carlos Alomar Ava Cherry Earl Slick Peter Sellers Johnny Mathis Iggy Pop Dennis Davis Graham Lewis Charles Shaar Murray Brian Eno Tony Visconti Robert Fripp Chris Burden Jacques Brel Debbie Harry Rutger Hauer
I composed a new piece for Jon Abbey's AMPLIFY 2020 online festival, which I dedicated to my late friend Carole Chant (83), who died on the 20th of March from Covid-19 related pneumonia.
It can be streamed and freely downloaded from the AMPLIFY Bandcamp page.
This piece was composed with edits of improvisations with found metals which are combined with field recordings made in Iceland, where I first met Carole in 2013 on a field recording trip with Chris Watson and Jez Riley French. These recordings were made in various spots around Snæfellsnes in North West Iceland. I've also used a recording of water underneath a jetty in the Antibes in 2015, as Carole used it in one of her Sounding Out radio shows for Resonance FM. The piece also uses recordings made from the back of Carole's house, where I stayed on recent London visits, as well as from around her neighborhood in Battersea.
I first met Carole in 2013 at a week-long field recording workshop in Iceland with Chris Watson and Jez Riley French. I kept in touch in the following years and stayed at her lovely house in Battersea on a few occasions on recent London visits. She was a wonderful woman with an indomitable spirit, highly creative, fiercely independent, a lively conversationalist, very funny, generous and thoughtful. I will miss her greatly, as will everyone whose lives she touched, of whom there are a great many.
"She was a member of the Scratch Orchestra; an artist; a much loved art teacher for 30 years; a very fine banjo player (although she hated to admit it) playing Bluegrass, English and Irish folk music, and lots of free improvised music; A radio presenter with a weekly programme on Resonance FM, where she entertained and was entertained by all her favourite people from the worlds of experimental, improvised and folk music, and where she played her field recordings of trips she took to India, Mexico and Egypt, armed with a zoom and all she'd learnt on various courses with Chris Watson"
After
reading 'Very Naughty Boys', about Handmade Films, my interest was
piqued to watch The Long Good Friday, especially as I knew it was
shot at a time (1979) before the London docklands was developed, so
would have some historically interesting footage.
It
seems you can't move for the garlands of praise being heaped on this
film, both at the time and in retrospect with a new print of the film
in the cinema in recent years, but, even though Hoskins delivers a
star turn, ably supported by Helen Mirren, the rest of the supporting
cast I thought were very weak, the characterisation paper thin,
performances quite hammy, especially the key character of Hoskin's
right hand man, played by Derek Thompson, who would go on to find
fame in 'Casualty' - he was very unconvincing. He seemed to sort of
sleep walk through the role. I also found it hard to get past the
casting of Brian Hall, better known as the chef in Fawlty Towers, as
one of Hoskins' henchmen - the face was just too familiar from the
wrong context (even though it took me a while to place it).
And
parts of the script really show their age, especially in this scene
with Brian King's character of the bent copper talking to Hoskins
about the proposed 1988 London Olympics and 'nig nogs doing the long
jump..' (ouch). Yes, historically accurate and all that, but I'm sure
the actor would wince in later years to remember the line. No
different I suppose to Vietnamese being called slopes in Apocalypse
Now or the amount of times Samuel L Jackson says 'nigger' in Jackie
Brown - it's authentic without being necessarily gratuitous, but
grates (more so in the 1979 examples).
The
scriptwriter Barrie Keefe did his research amongst the hard men
associates of the Krays and others, but for such a dramatic story the
film has a curious lack of tension and is oddly paced. Hard to
connect with any characters or their eventual fate. The very young
Dexter Fletcher appears in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment (he
would have been about 13 years old) with some street kids being
cheeky to Hoskins. I thought the soundtrack (by Curved Air's Francis
Monkman) was awful, very dated, even for the time, trying far too
hard.
What's
interesting in the current climate is how pro-Europe Hoskins'
character is, and how he might have been fairly knocked out by the
scale of development that came in Thatcher's wake, far in excess of
his dreams I imagine. Interesting too that his character's name,
Shand is so phonetically close to one of the symbols of London's
prodigious development, the Shard.
Barrie
Keeffe wrote a sequel, Black Easter Monday, set twenty years after
the events of the first film. It opened with Bob Hoskins' character
escaping from the IRA after the car was pulled over by police.
Hoskins would retire to Jamaica, then return to stop the East End
being taken over by the Yardies. Perhaps it was just as well the film
was never made.
My
Father took me on my first visit to London for a few days in Easter
'81. We went to see Rowan Atkinson do a stand up show, but could only
get one ticket, so Dad let me go in and he went to see The Long Good
Friday, but left before the end to come and collect me (I suppose it
never occurred to him that I could wait till the film finished). It
was years before he saw it in full on TV. He took this photo of me on
Carnaby Street. Turns out the film's production office was located
here !
Revisited J. Lee Thompson's masterful Cape Fear for the first time in a good 20 years and found it immensely satisfying. Initially storyboarded by Hitchcock, the cinematography follows his penchant for unusual composition, deep shadow, close-ups etc., to great effect. Thompson's decision to film in black and white was an inspired choice - he felt colour would be too distracting - as it heightens the all-pervasive sense of threat and unease that ratchets up throughout the film.
Mitchum is pitch perfect as Cady: impudent swagger, cool as fuck, iron will, unstoppably dogged in his pursuit of Bowden and his family, deeply damaged and misogynist; a brute who uses his forensic knowledge of the law to run rings around his prey. What's interesting about his portrayal is you don't out-and-out hate him at first, he has a certain menacing charisma.
Whereas in Scorsese's overcooked remake De Niro plays Cady as a completely insufferable fucking prick. Mitchum's Cady deftly uses the law like a game of chess, but as things really start to kick off Peck's Bowden attempts to flout the same law in a desperate attempt to gain the upper hand. It's a war of nerves till the end. It's interesting, that's not a phrase you see much these days (it was used in the film posters at the time), but it's vividly evocative, with a certain cold war paranoia about it too, as befits the times.
Thompson originally wanted Hayley Mills to play Bowden's daughter Nancy, as she had a stronger allure for Cady's foul intent. To my mind, Lori Martin was excellent as Nancy because she is so innocent, thus making Cady's brutal intrusion into her life all the more traumatic.
She's an only child, rather sheltered, more like someone out of an early 40s movie, her whole dress sense and hairstyle curiously middle-aged. Thompson admitted to being a bit tough on her as he really wanted Mills, but admits Martin was really good. She would have been about 15 at the time. Apparently she did suffer nightmares for a time after filming. In a very sad postscript, she died by suicide in 2010 at 62 after struggling with mental illness and drug abuse in the wake of her husband's death in 1999.
Whereas Juliette Lewis' portrayal in the remake is more knowingly sexual and curious (she would've been 17). Censorship in the 60s meant that the word rape could not be used, yet when the word 'attack' is used, it still carries considerable threat because the implication is clear. The hints and suggestions of actual levels of violence are more disturbing for not being shown in the original.
The 90s remake is more upfront and reflective of changed times. Scorsese tends more to an almost operatic reading of the story, ending in a near-biblical finale with raging storm and Cady speaking in tongues as he drowns. All very overwrought, with De Niro hamming it up 90.
Bernard Herrman's score is magnificent, and the orchestration has a lot more subtlety than Elmer Bernstein's orchestration in the remake. It also, on close listening, has elements that aren't in the remake too. I wish there was an album version of this. Whilst I do like the remake score, you realise how it tends to bludgeon rather heavily at times, after hearing the original score. It could be suggested that the tension in Mitchum's performance was partly informed by his deep aversion to the actual location in Savannah where much of the filming happened - as a teenager he had been charged with vagrancy and put on a chain gang.
When the fight in the river was being filmed, Peck apparently once hit Mitchum for real by mistake, but being the pro, Mitchum kept playing the scene, but when he got back to his trailer, he "literally collapsed" due to the impact of the punch and said that he felt it for days after wards. According to Mitchum: "I don't feel sorry for anyone dumb enough who picks a fight with him (Peck)."
Meanwhile, Polly Bergen suffered minor bruises in a scene where she struggles with Cady. He was supposed to drag her through various doors on the set, but a crew member mistakenly left all those doors locked, so that when Mitchum forced Bergen through the doors, she was actually being used as a battering ram to push them open.
When the film wrapped Mitchum gave the director a present - a straightjacket !
Based on a studio session in London in 2017, this trio album is now available. A particular pleasure to work with such fine gentlemen and wonderful improvisors.
My new solo album, Gleaming Seams, is also now available in a limited edition of 50, and digitally at Bandcamp.
So, I decided to mark the 40th anniversary of Unknown Pleasures by composing a Joy Division tribute, Day For Night, which can be heard here. Cast of characters (in order of appearance): Tony Wilson Peter Hook Peter Saville Iain Gray Bob Dickinson Malcolm Whitehead Bernard Sumner Liz Naylor Stephen Morris Genesis P. Orridge William Burroughs Martin Hannett Ian Curtis Jon Savage Jon Wozencroft Orson Welles Martin Sheen Dennis Hopper Alan Hempsall
Ralph Gibson, Hand Through Door, from The Somnambulist, 1969.
