Alien invasion

Aargh, I’m feeling very sorry for myself.  I’m on antibiotics and painkillers, thanks to a nasty infection inside one of my cheeks (apparently the culprit is likely a cracked tooth).  The right side of my face now resembles a cross between a Cabbage Patch doll and a chipmunk.... all swollen as if I’m storing nuts in it for the Winter, skin shiny and stretched like an overblown balloon - it’s not a good look.

And it hurts and I’m tired and and antiobiotics bring you down, don’t they?  So what do you do when you feel like shit?  You find yourself irresistibly drawn to tacky 1960s so-bad-they're-good sci-fi films ...

Thank goodness for ‘The Terrornauts’ being aired on the charming ‘Talking Pictures TV' channel earlier today.  I’ve caught quite a few gems (I almost typed ‘germs’ then, how apt) on this station, I get hooked in quite easily by anything from the ‘30s and ‘40s for instance, often with wooden acting and those strange clipped British accents that no longer exist.  And the outdated language – those frightful scoundrels!   I’m mesmerised by the décor in the houses (they can make me feel quite funny, as if I’ve been there in a previous life).  Ancient city sequences do it too – the sit-up-and-beg cars trundling down half-empty streets and thin people in hats and coats looking in Georgian-glazed shop windows, or those heady bucolic scenes where the birdsong is overpowering and you can almost smell the blossom, even in black-and-white.  Frequently the stories in these films come second, I just like immersing myself in their atmosphere.

1960s films are natural favourites too;  style and fashion and subject matters often more resonant, some evoking my own ‘60s early childhood – and movies featuring bands or groovy soundtracks are of special interest of course.   But there’s nothing quite like the ambitious yet amateurish props and op-art sets of 1960s sci-fi to soothe a sore face.

For sheer silliness ‘The Terrornauts’ (1967) had it all.  I curled up on the sofa this morning and welcomed its ridiculousness.  The main hero, Joe, played by Simon Oates, was immediately recognisable from his role in popular TV series ‘Doomwatch’ and stayed quite serious to the last even though he had to deliver a classic f’nar f’nar moment  about a strange alien device, “It’s a kind of vibrator, can’t you feel it?”  

His sidekicks were a somewhat mixed bunch including Charles Hawtrey , immediately bringing to mind the Carry On films, and Patricia Hayes, whose comically prosaic lines delivered in characteristic Cockney accent didn’t disappoint.    I love the way some people  can be abducted and transported through outer space in the middle of the night and yet they never panic...   

As hoped, and expected, there were plenty of kitchen implements too disguised as spacecraft, swimming cap headwear with wires attached (that our heroes plugged into funnels on top of boxes through which ‘knowledge’ could be transferred to their brains), a feathery sort of monster with tentacles, one crab claw and a juddering (cardboard?) eye on its side worthy of any small child’s drawing, and some nasty alien ‘savages’ with green skin wielding spears, whose thirst for (female, of course) sacrifice put actress Zena Marshall’s life in danger...  sort of.

Here's a brilliant trailer:

Just the tonic I need, especially as I'm looking and feeling like I've been invaded by aliens myself right now.  Pass the penicillin...!

The answer is in the soil

I loved it so much I tuned in to i-Player and watched it all the way through twice in less than a week, and now I’ve ordered the DVD too.  If that isn’t a reason to pull on my patent lace-up blogging boots and finally write something here again then I don’t know what is.  

It’s the film Arcadia.  Did you see it?  I missed it on BBC Four when it aired a few weeks ago but thanks to the spot-on recommendation from a good friend who has the measure of my tastes, I turned out the lights, settled back into my chair at my desk under the stairs (the suitably quirky and shadowy cubbyhole from which these posts emanate) and treated myself to it on my PC.  By the eerie blue glow of the modem I let it take me into its part-dream, part-real landscape – one inhabited by the monochrome ghosts of our distant past and the colourful eccentrics of our more recent one,  a place that could only be Britain.  Oh I loved it.  It’s so far up my street it’s in the front door and helping itself to tea and biscuits. 

I didn’t really know what to expect; none of the reviews I’d read beforehand could really give me an accurate insight, and so I realise I probably can't give one here either. Perhaps that’s part of the beauty of this film– its inability to be easily categorized.  I was trying to persuade Mr SDS to watch it with me the second time and found myself struggling to answer his queries.  “What’s it about?”  he asked. I couldn’t explain that one easily.  The British countryside?  Nostalgia?  Nature? The changing seasons?  Life and death?  Folklore?  Any one of those themes would have put him off, and all were too simplistic, so I had to choose my words carefully. 

Arcadia is about all of those things, but in a glorious, eccentric mash-up.  It’s a collage of existing footage, seemingly quite random and yet crafted in such a way as to deliver an unspoken narrative about past, present and future.  It’s arty, but not arty-farty.  And it taps into something that I can imagine only those of us who were brought up in Britain could really, truly get, if you know what I mean.  That could sound worryingly jingoistic; in these horrible times of racism, the rise of the Far Right and Brexit madness I’m almost afraid to mention ‘Britishness’ as a thing – it’s feels almost shameful.  But this film somehow gets to that ‘quintessential’ stuff we all recognise, without passing judgement – an innate identity we can’t help but have because of our experience.  It’s the Britain of BFI Public Information films, Nationwide, maypoles, Alice In Wonderland, foxhunting, the North/South divide, the Wicker Man, Stonehenge, punk.  Mystical, prosaic, carefree, dark, beautiful and brutal -  all these contrasting things and more.  Actually I was quite surprised to find that its creator,the Scottish film-maker Paul Wright, is only 37, because it’d be easy to presume it came from the experience of someone with a few more years under their belt.  (I’m thinking: my age!) I was also put in mind of Julien Temple’s style of montage, which I’ve always enjoyed in his documentary films such as The Filth and The Fury and Oil City Confidential – his characterful way of peppering his work with odd little archive clips.

At least one thing I could tell Mr SDS was that within the first five minutes we'd see some black-and-white footage of the village just up the road from us, where cows were wandering through the deserted main street and where happy-faced women waved to each other across the road from their cottage windows.  Like most of the film, there is something deep and dreamlike in this sense of familiarity now so warped by the passing of time.  There might even be something from your neck of the woods - if you check out this BFI page for it, you can access the sources from which the clips were taken and it's a fascinating selection - I was deeply side-tracked by this later so be warned...

Enhancing it all too is a rather brilliant soundtrack which comes courtesy of Portishead’s Adrian Utley, Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory and folk singer Anne Briggs.

Here's a sample of the music to whet your appetite.

Anyway, what am I doing, taking up your time reading this waffle when you could be watching it?!  There’s only 7 days left on i-Player.  

More from Frendz, Feb 1972

Adverts that caught my eye - something from Milos Forman, before he directed One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and more:

And apparently the Blackheath Foot'N'Death Men, who appeared at 'a nasty ball' advertised below, were hairy, freak, counter-culture Morris Dancers:

Dead of night

So, it’s the 31st October and the temporary signs are up in the local Co-op: ‘No eggs / flour sold to anyone under 16’ while at the same time the shelves are crammed full of tacky over-priced crap which is only valid for use one night a year.  What’s that all about?  Back in my day (oh, here we go…) we just draped old sheets with cut-out eyeholes over ourselves then ate baked potatoes before a game of Murder In The Dark (which I never really understood how to play, to be honest).  We didn’t dare venture outside (for fear of too many real ghosts).  

Today I will venture outside, in fact I am daring to venture down to London, to meet a stranger in a strange place (all in the name of work, you understand) just as dusk falls on the city and its streets no doubt fill with people rushing home from their jobs, perhaps to change into Hallowe’en costumes bought from Tesco.  I just hope I don’t encounter too many of them on the train home.  There’s something special about central London after dark for me, though: ghosts of a different kind.  I still find the city exciting, it's full of nuanced memories and part of me will wish I could extend my visit to have a few drinks and go to see a band maybe, before flopping down on an unfamiliar bed in a high-up hotel room, a parallel world away from my quiet rural existence - but I can't!

Anyway, as a mere nod to the date and hopefully as an antedote to all the crass commercialism surrounding it, here’s a little snippet from one of my favourite old films, Dead Of Night (1945).  If you've never seen it, it's a classy portmanteau style horror comprising five disparate stories, all linked through being experiences or tales told at a gathering by each guest in turn.   And there's a twist ending, of course.  It’s exquisitely English, exquisitely 1940s and exquisitely chilling in the most perfect, understated way. 

Don't be a dummy

Quadrophenia, my first time

So Quadrophenia was screened on BBC4 on Friday.  It’s nearly 33 years since its release but I still love that film (even with its well-known chronological / continuity errors!)  I saw it soon after it came out, at the local Odeon, which just happened to be a five minute walk from my college.  It immediately attracted the attention of some of us who’d just started on the Art Foundation course.  Terry, a kind and unassuming mod, was very excited, and suggested that we skive off one afternoon to catch it, so a little gaggle of us did just that.  There was Ivor, the Sid Vicious lookalike (except that he had curly hair – the bane of his life) and his soul-boy mate Jake (white socks), my fellow punk friends Jill (slightly Siouxsie-ish) and Andy (chided for wearing 'Jam' shoes with bondage trousers), parka-clad Terry, and me (spiky peroxide-white hair).  Being a midweek matinée the cinema was nearly empty and we spread ourselves over two seats each, right in the middle.  Munching on bumper packs of Opal Fruits and Butterkist, we lapped up the gritty tale of a troubled young mod from ‘60s London and his cohorts, as they battled through a lot more than just the obvious conflicts with their nemesis rockers, to a vibrant, evocative soundtrack. For a start it was a much better way to spend time than designing a label for a box of dog biscuits (to a soundtrack of marker pens squeaking on paper), but, more than that, for us teenage viewers it had it ALL.  Music, parties, youth tribes, aggro, sex, drugs, unsympathetic parents, disillusionment, misunderstanding, fashion, anger… 

Like Quadrophenia’s central character, Jimmy, there were some lost souls in my local punk scene too.  Jimmy could have been pink-haired Allie, whom I remember admiringly for being one of the first to buy proper Crazy Colour from London (while the rest of us were still using food colouring).  Being a punk meant everything to him but he had that unsettled edge, as if constantly seeking something he was never going to find.  The last time I heard of him, an unhappy home life and hard drugs had taken their toll and he’d ended up in a psychiatric hospital.  I hope he recovered, and didn’t take a trip to Beachy Head. 

In Quadrophenia, Jimmy did take a trip to Beachy Head on The Ace's stolen scooter - and my college friends and I couldn’t quite figure out if he’d intended to go over the edge with it as well.  Still, we enjoyed the whole film.  Terry particularly loved the soundtrack, the scooters and the clothes, of course.  Jill, Andy, Ivor and me were quite chuffed to see Toyah – she was still a bit of a punk figure largely from her ‘Jubilee’movie appearance – and I think Jake was quite happy just to see Lesley Ash being shagged in an alleyway.   But the main thing was its relatability, in spite of its retro theme.  At that time I didn’t really care about the past and had little interest in music or fashion from another era.  I would have turned my naïve and snotty punk nose up at a Who single (I know...) - yet I liked some of what I’d heard by mod revival bands because they were contemporary.  Daft as it sounds now, ‘Mod’ to me then only meant 1979 Mod ! Some months before seeing Quadrophenia, my local gig venue had put on an all day mod event...

Wonder what the prize was for the 'best decorated parka'..? 

Punks and mods had mingled relatively easily there – just as we did at college too - because for the main part we felt some kind of allegiance.   A mutual liking for the Jam probably helped us to cross those boundaries too.   Any rivarly between us was generally confined to light-hearted ribbing.  Some elements of our look were shared, like short hair, straight trousers and multiple badges, and separated both tribes equally from hippies, teds, skinheads and disco kids.    I guess we had a joint feeling of being in the margins through our own choosing.  Our parents laughed at the records we bought... "is that how you're supposed to play a guitar now, then?" ...and couldn’t understand our sartorial obsessions... "I suppose they wear wet jeans'n'all?".    Kids got beaten up for the way they dressed and teenage dreams were shattered by adult reality.  Of course Quadrophenia acknowledged all of that.  It couldn’t have been a better time for me to see it.

When some other friends said they wanted to go to the pictures just a week later, I was happy to join them and watch it all over again.  And I watched it again last Friday night, all these years on.  Even from this distance and with some very different priorities and cares, I recognised a lot of those teenage feelings once more. 

A little bit of inspiration for the Who from Slim Harpo

The Sixties soundtrack of our lives, part two

Here’s another great, evocative song that sounds as if it really should be in a Sixties film:

This one sets more of a pastoral scene for me, so here’s a little bit of clichéd imagery to go with it…

Scene I

Shimmery, white material fills the whole screen – slowly the camera zooms out and gradually it becomes apparent that it is the fabric of a dress.  It zooms out further to reveal the young woman wearing it, the shape of her body just showing through the flimsy summer frock which is made slightly transparent by the bright sunlight.  She’s walking through the long grass of a meadow, a dreamy expression on her pale face. The scene continues to zoom out until she is only a small figure in the distance, then it angles up to show just the vivid blue, cloudless sky.  A white bird flies silently across, left to right…

Scene II

… You choose…!  I’m no good at this film directing malarkey.

The Sixties soundtrack of our lives, part one

Don’t you sometimes just hear a song and think “this should be in a film”?  I mean the kind of song that brings to mind images of Susannah York - or Michael York for that matter – in the type of movie that is probably set in London or another cosmopolitan city.  Both song and film have to be from the Sixties, ideally.  This is a world of coffee bars with Formica table tops or bowler-hatted men lusting after their dolly-bird secretaries.  Perhaps the scene shows two young lovers walking down a quiet street in early evening, pigeons fly upward as the couple approach them, then our hero and heroine turn a corner and we view them from the back as they disappear into the distance and the closing credits take their place on the screen.  Or maybe the kohl-eyed female lead is leaning out of a window, chintzy net curtains and blonde hair blowing in the breeze, as the camera pans out to the view she sees, of a city full of bustling crowds and red double-decker buses… introducing us to a world we’re going to be immersed in for the next ninety minutes.

Songs which work really well for me which are already in films include the wonderful ‘To Sir With Love’ which just succeeds on so many levels.  Who could fail to be moved by it in some way?  Or how about the superb intro to ‘Up The Junction’…

But other songs are just random singles, lone B-sides or album tracks perhaps, which never did get included in a film score, and I reckon they should have been.  Cue this song from 1968, the B-side to ‘Race With The Devil’ by The Gun.  It’s somewhere in the middle of my imaginary film, and I see a beautiful man, maybe he’s driving along a coastal road in an open-top car, the early morning sun refracted artily on the chrome trim of his MGB.  I don’t know what his story is yet, but it’s sure to be full of surprises, secrets and probably a fair few groovy club scenes.

More make-believe soundtrack songs to follow in future instalments…