Speed-walking up Regent Street after the Victoria line
closed on the hottest day of the year so far, I was overwhelmed by the anxiety
of missing the first film as well as the ever-present sense of Floydian past as
London’s sunny streets blurred the perception of time around me. Maybe I’ve
read too much Peter Ackroyd and Michael Moorcock, but psycho-geography is real, as indeed is psychedelic-geography, man. Only last week I’d been in the 100
Club in which the Yardbird's Jeff Beck smashed guitars for Michelangelo Antonioni, whilst Middle Earth still haunts Covent Garden as does UFO Club Tottenham
Court Road, music and place pulls you right back, as does film: combine all
three and it’s not just Grannie who takes a trip.
In terms of the where, the Regent Street Cinema is
celebrating the 130th anniversary of the first film screening in
this country from the Lumiere Brothers and it also happens to be the alma mater
of former architectural students Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright
who all attended when what is now Westminster University was Regents Street
Polytechnic. Add Roger’s old Cambridge friend Syd Barrett and then another,
David Gilmour (the Floyd were a five piece for a brief moment) and you had a
group that was at the forefront of British psychedelia from 1966 onwards.
Yet Another Movie is a season of Floydian films
assembled by Sophia Satchell-Baeza, a freelance researcher and curator of
impeccable taste, who set the scene with details from Nick Mason’s biography. Mason
attributes at least his and Roger’s fascination with lighting and staging to
their broader education as “Architectural Abdabs” (an early group name) at the
Poly and, with Rick and Syd’s more emotional musicality it was understandable
that they’d be drawn to film and vice versa.
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Speak (1962) and The Committee (1968)
with introduction from series curator Sophia Satchell-Baeza
The Pink Floyd improvised a score for fellow Regent
Street alum, John Latham’s 1962 Avant Garde flicker Speak, in 1967 but
the version we saw today featured a proto-industrial electronic score from the
artist himself which, along with the rapidly changing images on screen, drove a
couple of the audience to head for the bar early. It’s remarkable that over 60
years on this work can still startle and disturb (possibly for medical reasons
admittedly). Latham didn’t want any “tunes” breaking out accompanying his
free-flow and like so many artists of this scene, wanted the watchers to impose
their own meaning or, indeed, lack of… we turned on but maybe didn’t all drop
out or relax to float downstream.
Latham's film and others were used as background projections by the band in ground-breaking ways as what we would recognise as the modern concert experience was created as a mixture of sight and sound. The Floyd’s score can be found on the massive Early
Years boxset as can outtakes from their other films including those
screened today including the entirity of the next film on Blu-ray.
The Committee (1968) I haven’t seen on the big
screen or in this restored state and whilst Nick Mason describes their score as
a jumble of extended sound affects there are certainly some representative
examples of extended instrumentals which sound like either an early version of Keep
Smiling People a piece played in their 1968 spring tour and which morphed
partly into their proto-post-rock classic Careful with that Axe, Eugene.
Robert Langdon Lloyd and Paul Jones discuss meaning
The Committee was written by an economist and
social scientist, Max Steuer, then as now a lecturer at the LSE and a founding
member of the Centre for Philosophy and Social Science. It was his only film
but it is not surprisingly a reflection of his concerns about the way society
is managed. It’s not clear whether the committee(s) in question make decisions
or whether they are large-scale focus groups to help the powers that be command
and control through informed opinion testing, but there’s a sinister management
elite behind them alright… maybe.
Director Peter Sykes had approached Syd for a score but
when he came up with an improvisation in early ’68 and suggested that it be
played backwards, he turned to the other four for a more disciplined outcome
and its this we hear, from the opening electronica to the Hammond organ driven
main theme and that early Eugene, hinting at menace and possible violence – I
wonder if Michelangelo Antonioni was watching and listening? More on that
later…
Some versions of the film start with a quote from Joseph
Shumpeter which lays out the agenda... our likes and dislikes do not amount to
a programme of independent action: are we really more concerned with the
strategies of games than living a clear-headed existence? But this is perhaps
more help than the audience needs.
Arthur Brown sets the party alight
The story opens with a car driving through country lanes,
the driver (Tom Kempinski) incessantly chewing wine gums as he blathers on to a
seemingly hapless hitch-hiker – the Central Figure (Paul Jones) – about the
inconsequentialities of his life. They stop in a glade so that the driver can
check his engine and he carries on his prattle as he does so. The Central
Figure is impassive, smoking a cigarette and wandering around the clearing –
seemingly relaxed.
Then, almost out of nowhere, we feel unease as the driver
sticks his head under the sharp edge of his car bonnet… the Central Figure
looks intent for a brief second and then slams down the bonnet completely
severing the man’s head. In the silence that follows he remains calm,
continuing his smoke and his even-paced stroll. Finally, he drags the body into
the car and, bizarrely, sews the head back on. His wrong-headed acquaintance
continues on his journey, bewildered.
Later he is called to a special Committee… is this
heaven, a higher force or an advanced form of market research? It’s an
interesting film as you try to make sense of it and Paul Jones is very good at being distant and disaffected.
There are some choice moments as the Committee members enjoy a party
with music from Arthur Brown along with his Crazy World, in front of an audience that includes a few familiar faces such as John "Hoppy" Hopkins who set up the London Free School, co-founded International Times (IT) and, with producer and early Floyd manager, Joe Boyd, the UFO Club at which the group were the house band.
Like so much of today's efforts, this film came out of the general philosophical and political underground centred in London. British psychedelia is often considered less radical than its US counterpart but there is no doubt of the commitment to experimentation and alternative views of how society should be organised.
 |
| Iggy... aka Evelyn Joyce |
Iggy the Eskimo Girl (2002) + Tonite,
Let's All Make Love in London (1967), Introduction by Sophia
Satchell-Baeza and Dr Alissa Clarke, De Montfort University, co-curator of the
Cinema and Television History Institute's Peter Whitehead Archive
Iggy the Eskimo Girl (2002) featured film shot in
the late sixties of Syd Barrett’s sometime girlfriend – also known as Evelyn
Joyce (no relation) and who is featured on the cover of his first solo album, The
Madcap Laughs, adorning the newly painted floors of his flat in Egerton
Court which he shared with the artist Dougie Fields. Directed and filmed by
Anthony Stern, partly for a film originally called The Wheel, he repurposed the
materials to create this tribute to Syd’s latter-day muse which was set to the
blistering 170-odd seconds of See Emily Play, Syd’s Floyd’s finest
moments in pop. Stern’s distinctive stop-start technique – he worked with Peter
Whitehead, see below – still leaves the audience discombobulated and, unlike
“Emily” it’s pretty clear that Iggy did “understand”.
Tonite, Let's All Make Love in London – a
Pop Concerto for Film – was presented in a recent remastered format and looked
very fresh. It starts with Peter Whitehead’s rapid cutting as he synchronises
dancers in swinging London’s clubs to a trippier version of Interstellar
Overdrive than we’re used to, which still allows for some remarkable
alignments as Syd’s lighter flies up and down his fretboard, Nick’s cleverly
propulsive light touch, Roger’s angry bass (it’s still furious 60 years later…)
and Rick’s elegant anticipation. Wright was the only classically trained
musician having attended the Royal College of Music for a while before changing
course and knowing how to hold an improvisation together in the manner of his
jazz heroes. Whitehead filmed the band recording both this and an improvisation
called Nick’s Boogie, and it’s a great document of the band in their
psychedelic pomp with Syd leading on guitar and that cigarette lighter.
It’s split into sections addressing: Loss of the British
Empire, Dolly Girls, Protest, Pop Music, Movie Stars, Painting and the US
scene. There are some of the talking heads you would hope all of whom have to
contend with Whitehead’s curt interview technique which certainly leaves Julie
Christie slightly defensive but then she also comes across as open and genuine,
relishing strength of relationships and her week on holiday away from everyone
after finishing Dr Zhivago. In comparison Andrew Loog Oldham comes
across as about as genuine as Malcolm Maclaren or Simon Cowell, being too busy
planning for tomorrow rather than worrying about today and deliberately
over-tutoring one of his new charges in the studio. That said, Vashti Bunyan is
allowed to get on with it… ALO was a master of marketing and probably still is!
Julie Christie
His most famous success, The Rolling Stones were filmed
previously by Whitehead for Charlie is My Darling (1966) and they’re
here too in revelatory film as fans throw themselves at the stage and each
member – Charlie apart – before being thrown back into the crowd like so many
fish. Jagger is interviewed and almost ties himself up by fretting about the
future we now enjoy in which machines mean we only work four hours a day. Oh.
Hang on…
Michael Caine frets about the end of empire and its
influence on the shortness of skirts whilst there’s more sexism to come much to
Lee Marvin’s delight. In the section on the opening of the Playboy club in
London, we see Dolly Reid who, fact fans, was later to feature in Russ Meyer
and Roger Ebert’s Hollywood exploitation pic, Beyond the Valley of
the Dolls (1969). It’s as the chap representing Hugh Heffner says, in London
there was a relatively small scene and you could expect to find “faces” in most
of the key haunts. Indeed, we see Terrence Stamp, Jim Brown and Sharon Tate
arriving at the premiere of her husband, Roman Polanski's film Cul-de-sac
(1966).
The same was true of Cambridge creatives with Sophia
Satchell-Baeza reading out excerpts from Jenny Spires’ diary about how, this
ex-girlfriend of Syd’s in Cambridge met Whitehead and suggested his film needed
not juts current pop music but something from the underground. She was thinking
Astronomy Domine but her went with the entirely instrumental Interstellar
Overdrive… she was living with Syd and his new girlfriend in Soho and offered
to introduce the director to Barrett, no problem, he had known him since their
Cambridge days… Like minds, a few streets apart in swinging Soho, and on the
same artistic plane. What are the odds?
More overlap and co-incidence were to come and I’ll tell
you all in the next post…
Jenny Spires and Syd
+hill+trip.jpg)
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