From Bohemian Rhapsody to the Buddy Holly Story

I was recently interviewed for an article about the factual accuracy of musical biopics, written by Tom Fordy for the Telegraph. Following on from last year’s Queen film, Bohemian Rhapsody, which was criticised for manufacturing and being loose with the truth (notably in relation to Freddie Mercury’s diagnosis and disclosure that he had AIDs), there was a rash of articles that explored the printing of musical legends. With the recent release of the Rocket Man about Elton John, similar thought pieces have made a return.

            Fordy asked me to talk about the ‘truth’ of the Sex Pistols-related film Sid and Nancy and the Joy Division films Control and 24 Hour Party People. One thing that I wanted to get across, which is in the piece, is that music films rarely do a good job of dealing accurately with bands. They are oriented towards star turns by individuals, including the ability of an actor to assume the persona of a lead singer or musician. What they do not manage to capture is intra-band politics. Hence, Gary Oldham delivers an astonishing performance in Sid and Nancy, where he embodies the spirit of Sid Vicious. Andrew Schofield’s limp turn as Johnny Rotten could hardly be called nuanced, however. Similarly, the various Joy Division films have worked hard at capturing the tics of lead singer Ian Curtis, but have spent far less time on the other members of the band (this seems particularly unjust, as Joy Division are one of the rare bands in which each member’s contribution is equally vital). Bohemian Rhapsody offers a partial exception to this rule, with its attention to detail spreading beyond the lead singer. The fact that Queen members Brian May and Roger Taylor acted as consultants to the film presumably helped here, as did the fact that the group had already developed ways of portraying themselves on screen, notably in the video for ‘The Miracle’, in which four young children do a great job of being Queen.

            Another thing that I talked about with Fordy, but which did not make it into the article, is that this analysis of historical accuracy should be extended to documentaries. It is presumed that they get closer to the reality of singers and musicians than acted portrayals, but I’m not sure this is always the case. On the one hand, musical biopics such as 24 Hour Party People or the Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan film I’m Not There have done a better job of capturing musicians and scenes than most parades of talking heads could ever do. On the other hand, a documentary can be just as partial as a biopic. They will be oriented towards one version of the truth or one member of a band. Take, for example, the three attempts that director Julien Temple has made to tell the Sex Pistols’ story. He has spoken of the Rotten-oriented The Filth and the Fury (2000) as being a ‘corrective’ to his earlier film, the Malcolm McLaren-instigated Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1980). This did not stop him from having another crack at the Pistols, however, providing a more London-based setting in The Knowledge (2008). Each film has its moments, but they are also indicative of the fact that the Sex Pistols’ story is too rich and diverse to be contained. A further point about documentaries is that their tendency to place social context around music can be just as falsifying and mythologizing as the manufacture of narrative events in biopics. About ten years ago I heard a great talk by Richard Witts, in which he took apart the documentary Factory: Manchester from Joy Division to Happy Mondays, indicating that its scene-setting footage of Salford, which was supposed to visualise the milieu in which the members of Joy Division emerged, was in fact taken from an era prior to their births. It had originally been employed to illustrate ‘before’ and ‘after’ images of slum clearance, but the film implied that those slums were still there.

And there’s a final thing that I didn’t mention to Fordy at all. When analysing the ‘reality’ of music films, the focus tends to be on truth to history, truth to personality or truth to sociology. There is less discussion about truth to music. But which films best manage to capture the spirit of a song? Musical biopics are not the place to look. With their orientation towards narrative and character they lose the ability to deliver a good tune. Documentaries can edge closer to the marvels of music. As I have written elsewhere, there is something exciting about hearing music talked about. It sets up a thrill of anticipation for the moment that the song in question finally arrives. Ultimately, however, the films that best communicate what music feels like for us – the fans - are not the ones that concentrate on its makers. It is the reception of music that comes across most effectively. Therefore, if you want to see a movie that conveys the musical impact of Elton John, you would be better off watching the bus scene in Almost Famous than digesting Rocket Man.

And which moment of film best captures the essence of Queen? It’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in Wayne’s World of course. 
 

         

Dance to the Video

Earlier in the month I attended Orchestral Joy Division at the Royal Albert Hall, an event that was organized by the band’s old bass player, Peter Hook, in conjunction with Tim Crooks, conductor with the Manchester Camerata. There were three guest vocalists, one of whom, Bastien Marshal, became an Ian Curtis impersonator for the night. He had Curtis’s look and idiosyncratic dancing moves spot on. Is struck me, though, that Marshal is young and has grown up in a world in which he been able to access footage of Joy Division at the same time as he been able to access their sound recordings. This was not the case for me growing up. I first heard Unknown Pleasures not long after it came out. I heard Closer when it was released. Throughout this time I had not seen the band perform, though. I was too young to see them live and I had missed their three appearances on television. Two of these took place on the Granada network, so (I think) they were restricted to the north of England only (I was in the midlands). The third was on BBC2’s Something Else. This was a programme that I did see occasionally, but I missed this particular episode. In fact, I can’t remember when I did first see the Joy Division clips. It probably wasn’t until the end of the 1980s, when the first documentaries on the band began to appear. Three things follow on from this. The first is that what has become an ‘iconic’ dancing style, simply wasn’t so at the time. Most of the people buying and listening to Joy Division records didn’t get to see Curtis’s moves. The second is that the ‘iconic’ sleeves of the records took on even more weight. The sleeve to Unknown Pleasures in many ways was Joy Division. There were also key photographic images, but in contrast to Curtis’s manic dancing, these were stills. Conversely, the third thing is that is that if you did manage to see television clips in the pre-MTV and YouTube age, they did tend to stay with you. You had to register them whole. Johnny Marr suggests in his autobiography Set the Boy Free that Curtis cribbed his dance moves from David Bowie, via a one-off television appearance on the Dinah Shore Show in 1975. The evidence does appear to be telling. The question, though, is how did Curtis get to see this American programme?

           

Another thing that struck me about Orchestral Joy Division, and which also struck me when I saw Peter Hook and the Light at the Round House in 2017, is what a towering song ‘Ceremony’ is. If anything, it is even more powerful musically (but not culturally) than ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. It’s an unusual late twentieth century song, however, as it doesn’t have a definitive recording. The surviving members of Joy Division issued it as New Order’s debut single. This almost felt like a cover of Ian Curtis’s intended version. Then, when the studio recording by Joy Division was released on the Heart and Soul box set in 1997, this didn’t seem like it was the ultimate version either. Maybe, it is this situation makes the song so redolent live. It can only be completed by Joy Division fans.

Pop of Ages

Period dramas have a common fault: they are confined in their period. Set and costume designers study the trends of the era in which the drama is set; they then decorate their rooms and their characters wholly in those contemporary styles. The problem is that styles co-exist. Many people in the 1970s, for example, wore fashions from the 1950s and 1960s. Many homes of the period had modern gadgets, but they also had heirlooms, second-hand furniture and antiques. The same is true of any era. They are amalgams.

And what is true of the past is also true of the present. This struck me on a recent holiday to Corfu. We stayed at the house of some friends while they were away. My three year old daughter was kindly donated the room of their 15 year old son. If you see children’s rooms on television or in films they usually only have the most up-to-date toys. Those toys are strictly from that child’s age group. This rarely happens in real life. The boy’s bedroom in Corfu was a case in point. It had some things that you would expect from a child of 15: a computer, some computer games, To Kill a Mockingbird on the bookshelf. It also had books by the brilliant Dr Seuss, a pirate ship, and Star Wars’ Lego.

It is not just the case that you are too lazy to clear out your old toys when you are that age. You also have a strange amalgam of tastes. This same holiday provided me with reminders of my younger self. Our host had many of the punk and post-punk records that I grew up with. As usual, it was more exciting to play familiar records from someone else’s record collection than to play them from my own. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures was one of them. I have it at home, but hadn’t listened to it for a while. Seeing it in Corfu reminded me what a great record it is.

I put it on and it took me back. My maturity was all over the place when I first heard it. I was twelve. I already knew enough about the pain of the world to feel the depth in ‘New Dawn Fades’ (‘a loaded gone won’t set you free . . . so they say’). I was also daft, and so I joined in when my friends-and-relations laughed at the opening phrase to ‘I Remember Nothing’ (Ian Curtis’s long cry of ‘weeee’ made us think of urine).

We were the right age for punk. Jon Savage has claimed that punk fans were divided between the ‘arties’ and ‘social realists’. This may have been true for older teenagers. From an adolescent’s perspective the music was instead balanced between enlightenment and childishness. Punk was the sound of a generation who thought that they were smarter than their parents (and they were often right about this too). It was also the sound of silliness.

It was possible to like both elements. I enjoyed the Damned as much as I admired Crass. I had records by GBH and by the Gang of Four. While some bands were strictly po-faced, others were comedians. There were also groups who slipped between the adult and the immature. The Sex Pistols most obviously. Their songs ranged from the profound depths of ‘Holidays in the Sun’ (Greil Marcus once commented: ‘no one has yet seen all the way to the bottom of “Holidays in the Sun,” and probably no one ever will’) to the (very) low humour of ‘Friggin’ in the Riggin’’ and ‘Belsen was Gas’. They could even swerve between the two in a single song: what should a 12-year-old make of ‘Bodies’? What should a 50-year-old make of it?

There may be little difference. What is true of punk is true of much other popular music. It is adolescent in the most interesting sense, being both sophisticated and moronic. One reason why it has so much impact when you are young is because you believe the music harnesses eternal truths. One reason why it still hits you when you are old is because your teenage spirit never quite dries up.