LETTER FROM BRITAIN

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

OLD FLAMES, NEW CRUSHES

Cynthia Rose

by

The Phantom Of The Paradise will always be the kind of film which says more about rock than Let’s Spend The Night Together because, as director Brian DePalma sussed, rock’s peripheral personalities (model girlfriends, vampiric execs, ligging TV presenters) wield a mighty slice of the music’s frisson. They reflect its impact on the average fan, only they do so in a heightened, highly publicized way.

Lately some of these figures have reemerged from the various trajectories into which the Swinging ’60s once launched them, with far more telling and eerie results than we’ll ever see in a Stones film. Take Jane Asher, the slender, red-haired actress who once declined to become Mrs. Paul McCartney—only to plunge into a decadelong battle with anorexia, her career and sanity finally salvaged through marriage to caricaturist Gerald (The Wall ) Scarfe. Asher’s turned up twice a lately; each time playing a ’60s woman concerned with children, and each time cast opposite James Fox, Mick Jagger’s foil in Nick Roeg’s seminal Performance. In that, Fox played a London gangster enticed into the confusions inherent in Jagger’s rock-star figure; in real life, the actor became badly addicted to drugs and saved himself through religious fanaticism—a cause he still proselytizes today.

Stephen Poliakoff is the youngest of several bright and innately political playwrights (Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, David Hare) who’ve engineered a renaissance in British theatre. He saw Asher and Fox in a TV play, about a post-hippie couple agonizing over their inability to conceive a child, and decided to take things a step further—by writing a whole film, Runners, around them.

Poliakoff is well-known for his drama’s evocative connections to both youth movements and music (his play City Sugar starred first Adam Faith, then Tim Curry as a DJ), and with highly imaginative imagery, Runners forced Britain’s seemingly secure past to confront a shaky present. It poses a story about two runaway kids, one of whom remains lost. (There are many such possible stories, as unemployment forces hundreds of Northern kids to search for a

future in the South and the crumbling capital, with real consequences in teen profuture in the South and the crumbling capital, with real consequences in teen prostitution and drug addiction.) The trick is that, this time, the obsessed Fox (working in tandem with Asher, a mother whose son has disappeared) manages to track down his daughter two years after everyone else gives her up for dead. And what he finds is a perfectly ordinary teenager, making the best of an ordinary job and mucking along with the help of friends.

The film—which should open this summer—shows us how Fox and Asher, ’60s _ archetypes, never really became parents precisely because they couldn’t stop being children (their Search in London takes on all the aspects of a kids’ holiday). The children of today’s Britain, by contrast, can’t afford even the option of being indulged: Fox’s rediscovered Rachel reveals that she ran away not to escape her family but to end her fears of never having any work, by finding some. It’s a powerful plea for youth to be accorded greater dignity; for their problems to'be treated as deserving of more than the now-obligatory concert discount upon production of a UB40 unemployment card.

As Poliakoff points out so resonantly, this is a generation for whom Britain’s feted ’60s heyday is meaningless. Barefoot songstress Sandie Shaw (of “Always Something There To Remind Me” fame, she’s still the only female solo singer to reach No. 1 in the UK three times) was an icon of that era— idolized and imitated. Now married to Palace Video magnate Nik Powell, Sandie’s just cut her first LP in eons (it’s called Choose Life) for his new label, and a single from it (“Wish I Was”) is out this week. A year ago, 1 remember watching some old Shindig footage with Sandie Shaw sitting down the row in the same cinema, absorbed by her own translucent beauty and sultry tones onscreen. Afterwards, the manager told me she had asked him for a copy of the tape; she had “probably just been too stoned” she said, but she didn’t remember ever filming the show at all.

Sandie’s famous toes remain shod now, and her new songs bear titles like “Moontalk” or “Dragon King’s Daughter”; it’s hard toimagine Poliakoff’s constituency buying her single with its breathy background chorus, MOR orchestration and refrain of “Wish I was the garden round your tree.” I tried my pre-released tape on the one punkette—resplendent in Mohawk, skull earrings and shredded jeans—in the Virgin Megastore where Sandie’s husband sells his videos. She gave it an earnest listen and wrinkled her nose; her boyfriend said it “sounded dirty.”

These lovebirds had sacks full of 12-inchers by the March Violets (“Crow Baby,” “Groovin’ In Green”)', Sex Gang Children and Crown Of Thoms—they’re part of the blemish ’n’ bruise set who get off to the groan and drone of Gothick schlockrock. Often (cf. The Specimen, authors of “The Tomb” and “Wolverines”) this genre is more glam than lurid; which explains why while he likes Crown Of Thorns, she stressed her allegiance to Leeds’ Sisters Of Mercy. What with a “No Rest For The Wicked” all-nighter at London’s Scala Cinema on Saturday, and the revamped Gun Club (supported by the Sisters) at the Lyceum on Sunday, this was going to be a weekend for this couple to remember.

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“No Rest” featured Brigandage, the formerly Damned Dave Vanian, and “Carcrash International” (some Sex Gang Children jamming with some of Crisis)—as well as belly-dancers, a fire-eater and the usual Hammer horror-film footage. As it, happened, however, the Sisters Of Mercy edged ahead of the whole line-up, obviously buoyed along by the indie success of their latest epic, “Anaconda.” Their crowd featured many clumps of worshipful nubiles togged out like bonafide Brides Of Frankenstein (some of whom, as a colleague commented, smelled like they’d been entombed for years). This female following— evident even when the Sisters’ version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” failed miserably

enough to almost clear the entire Brixton Ace on another occasion—is largely due to frontman Andrew Eldritch and his endless gyrations. Without Eldritch, an Iggy imitator stranded somewhere between Stiv Bators and a fellow from Austin, Texas called Ty Galvin, the Sisters might stand some sort of real chance as a band; Ben, Mark, Craig and their drum machine look and sound like your Joe Average HM heroiworshippers. Their dead healthy demeanor forms an odd backdrop for Andrew’s (“Spiggy”) leatherclad shtick (like the Pistols before ’em, they cover Stooges stuff, in this case an uncredited version of “1969” appeared on their first EP). But, in fact, their own heavyhanded parables such as “Alice”—the story of a heroine “pressed against the wall in her party dress” needing you “to tell her she can have it all”—are preferable to their large range of covers. “Parody” their thang may be, but at this stage the Sisters are too weak to do more than play it safe.

The old sports of the original punk era are still about, of course. Gaye Advert still cohabits with TV Smith in Sheperd’s Bush (Gaye’s “working in animal welfare now”), and the weak German band the Dragons released their vehemence-and-violins version of “Anarchy In The UK,” its composer Glen Matlock noticed EMI re-releasing his previous Rich Kids LP, Ghosts Of Princes In Towers. While he thus power-popped out with the now-pompous Midge Ure on turntables all over the U.K., Matlock also donned suit and tie for a middle-of-the-road TV chat show appearance as a “forefather of punk.” Coming on after a clip of Creature Siouxsie in full arachnid array, Glen seemed both ill at ease and out of place. And nobody even thought to ask if he still had a band, which of course he does. They’re called the London Cowboys, and in fact Glen penned the single they released last week to muted acclaim (“Streetful Of Soul”). Like his Spectres before them, the Cowboys seem damned to the doomed end of the pub circuit by prevailing fashions; Positive Pub rather than Positive Punk.

Matlock’s sentiments may have devolved from “I am the Anti-Christ” to “Let’s get crazy,” but there are always others to take up the mantle of political commentator where he left it. One such outfit is the Republic, an ambitious 18-month-old ninepiece calypso collective who features a three-man horn section, two South Americans (on bass and congas) and a most surprising female vocalist named Sarah-Jane Morris. It was flame-haired Sarah-Jane whose extraordinary voice (something like Josephine Baker at 40 singing basso profundo to please a severe set of monks “getting into” the warmer climates of jazz) broke the band. It hooked Charlie Gillett, discoverer also of Lene Lovich’s larynx, who said he signed. them to his Oval label “because I had never heard anything like that sound before”. And Sarah shines on “My Spies,” their first A-side (if resembles a ’60s spy-show theme tune).

Just like the Sisters Of Mercy, The Republic do a lot of covers—only theirs are rewrites of stuff like the Mighty Sparrow’s “Chivers” or Guadeloupe’s “El Conjunto.” I’m not sure about Sarah-Jane’s voice myself, and I’m definitely uncertain about where their cajun accordionist (one of the group’s co-founders and its main writer) fits

in. But the whole band in action on an original like “Don’t Believe”—their antiFalklands number—sounds like half the Notting Hill carnival coming down the street ahead of schedule.

The great crush epic, of course, has always given pop some' of its most personalized politics, and just now I can’t take my ears off a memorable new example: the Maisonettes’ “Heartache Avenue.” God knows if anything else on their forthcoming album (Maisonettes For Sale) will live up to it, biit coming on the heels of John Cale’s superb live rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel” and Die Goldenen Vampire’s German rockabilly version “Hotel Zur Einsamkeit,” this is a blissful pop revision. “I found a place to live/I got it the hard way/A permanent address to give/I got it for always...Heartache Avenue”; this is the work of a quintet, but it’s crooned by one Lol Mason over the icing-smooth harmonies of backup cuties Elisa and Carla. The backbeat is neat, the keyboard action sparkling and it just goes to show that there’s more than a touch of the torch abroad still—however unpromisingly un-romantic reality seems. ^