Month: May 2024

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The writer on the edge of forever

 

From wikipedia.org / © Pip R. Lagenta

 

I’ve just discovered that yesterday, May 27th, would have been the 90th birthday of writer Harlan Ellison.  I don’t know if nowadays I’d describe Ellison as one of my all-time favourite writers, but he was certainly a massive influence on me when I was growing up and trying to write stuff myself.  Here’s an updated version of something I wrote about him in 2018, just after he’d passed away at the age of 84.

 

Harlan Ellison was often categorised as a science-fiction writer, although he once memorably warned anyone who called him a science-fiction writer that he would come to their house and ‘nail’ their ‘pet’s head to a coffee table’.  In his lifetime the Cleveland-born Ellison authored some 1800 stories, scripts, reviews, articles and opinion pieces, but it’s as a short story writer that he was best known.  In fact, when he was in his prime, from the 1960s to 1980s, he was responsible for some of the boldest and most exhilarating short stories I’d yet come across.  He seemed to push both his imagination and his writing energies to the very limit.

 

Describing his stories is difficult, but the nearest comparison I can think of is the fiction of Ray Bradbury.  However, Ellison’s work also had counter-cultural and radical political tones that encompassed both the idealism of the 1960s’ civil rights movement and Summer of Love and the cynicism and despair that came with the Vietnam War and, in the 1970s, Watergate.  His short stories frequently contained a palpable anger too.  Yes, Ellison had a lot of anger in him.  More on that in a minute.

 

By focusing on his short stories, I don’t wish to denigrate his occasional novels.  Indeed, I’d rank 1961’s Spider Kiss alongside Iain Banks’ Espedair Street (1987) and John Niven’s Kill Your Friends (2008) as one of the best rock ‘n’ roll novels ever.

 

Ellison wasn’t a big name in the UK but in the 1970s – perfectly timed for my development as a teenager – Britain’s Pan Books brought out editions of several of his short story collections, like The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (1969), Approaching Oblivion (1974) and Deathbird Stories (1975).  All had gorgeously psychedelic covers by (I think) the artist Bob Layzell.  It’s fair to say that my 14 or 15-year-old mind was blown by them.

 

© Pan Books

 

I also loved how Ellison prefaced each story with a short essay describing how it had come into being.  These pieces gave insight not only into his combative personality but also into the rich life-experiences he’d had, or claimed to have had.  Before establishing himself as a writer he’d been, among other things, a truck driver transporting nitro-glycerine, a hired gun and a tuna fisherman.  This inspired me when I was a budding writer to try my hand at different jobs and build up my experiences, though the stuff I ended up doing – stacking shelves in Sainsbury’s, working in a shoe warehouse, serving as a warden at Aberdeen Youth Hostel – was rather less glamorous than the items on Ellison’s CV.

 

Some of his work also appeared on television, although TV was a medium he generally had a low opinion of.  In a 2013 interview he accused it and other modern forms of entertainment and communication of having “reduced society to such a trivial, crippled form that it is beyond my notice.”

 

For instance, he scripted the 1967 Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever, which has Captain Kirk, Mr Spock and Dr McCoy catapulted back in time to 1930s America and confronted with an agonising time-travel-related moral dilemma.  Do they intervene in an accident and prevent the death of a woman called Edith Keeler who (despite being played by Joan Collins) is a noble political activist dedicated to peace, pacifism and public service and with whom, predictably, William Shatner’s horn-dog Captain Kirk has fallen in love; or do they let her die, which means her political movement won’t gain power in the USA, delay her country’s entry into World War II and allow the Nazis to become masters of humanity, which will happen otherwise?

 

Thanks to its inventive and thought-provoking spin on time travel, The City… is the best episode of the original series of Star Trek.  In fact, as I don’t like any of the later TV incarnations of Star Trek, I’d say it’s the best Star Trek episode, full stop.  Ellison, however, was unimpressed with how the show’s producer Gene Rodenberry and his writing staff rewrote his script and watered down some of its themes and was never slow to sound off about it afterwards.  It may be significant that his later short story How’s the Night Life on Cissalda? (1977) features William Shatner attempting to make love to a revolting-looking alien creature.  Shatner’s toupee falls off in the process.

 

© Desilu Productions

 

More time-travelling figures in the Ellison-penned episodes Demon with a Glass Hand and Soldier that he wrote for the TV anthology show The Outer Limits (1963-65).  Years later, he was incensed at what he saw as plagiarism of elements of his Soldier script by James Cameron while he was making the first Terminator movie in 1984.  Ellison threatened to sue and got a payment of 65-70,000 dollars from Cameron’s financiers and an acknowledgement on The Terminator’s credits.  By 2014 Ellison had mellowed to the point where he could see the funny side of it.  He played himself in an episode of The Simpsons in which he gets into an argument with Milhouse Van Houten.  When Millhouse comments, “I wish someone would have come from the future and warned me not to talk to you,” Ellison grabs him by the throat and screams, “That’s my idea!”

 

In fact, Ellison was highly litigious.  After discovering his writing, I found an interview with him in an American magazine called Future Life where he talked about suing Paramount Television for stealing an idea of his, about a robot policeman and a human one who are partnered together, and turning it into a TV show called Future Cop (1976-78).  “We’re going to nail their asses to the barn door!” he declared in the interview.  Later, when I was playing rugby for my school and while we were trying to psych ourselves up against our opponents, I inadvertently let slip with Ellison’s phrase: “We’re going to nail their asses to the barn door!” I exclaimed.  That earned me some strange looks from my teammates.  Nailing asses to barn doors was not part of the common vernacular on south-of-Scotland rugby pitches.

 

I can honestly say that for a period when I was a teenager, Harlan Ellison, with his mind-bending fiction, his braggadocio, his adventurous backstory and his take-no-shit-from-anyone attitude was the person I wanted to be.  Of course, as I grew older and became less impressionable and more mature, and learned more about Ellison, that changed.  I began to appreciate that Ellison’s persona involved a fair bit of self-mythologizing, egotism and unwarranted bloody-mindedness.  When Stephen King observed that he knew one writer who was convinced that Ellison was the reincarnation of Jonathan Swift and another writer who referred to him as a ‘son-of-a-bitch’, I found myself in sympathy with both viewpoints.

 

And by the time I read a profile of him in a non-fiction book called Dream Makers (1980), written by Charles Platt, I was disappointed but somehow unsurprised to encounter a character rather too driven by vanity and rather too desperate to impress.  Ellison and Platt later fell out badly, violently it’s said, though not as far as I know about the Dream Makers profile.

 

Also falling out with Ellison was the late English writer Christopher Priest, who took issue with Ellison’s editorship of the Dangerous Visions series of science fiction anthologies in the early 1970s.  There was supposed to be a third volume in the series but for reasons known only to Ellison himself it never appeared, leaving a lot of commissioned stories in limbo and depriving a lot of authors of potential earnings.  This seems hypocritical of Ellison, considering how famously touchy he was about payment for his own work – he’s said to have once mailed a wayward publisher ‘213 bricks’ and a ‘dead gopher’ as a protest.  Priest even wrote a short, investigative book about Dangerous Visions 3’s non-appearance, inevitably entitled The Book on the Edge of Forever (1994).  Priest’s website notes how an anonymous review of his book on Amazon, headlined Mean-Spirited Jealousy and giving it one star, “bears all the hallmarks of Mr Ellison’s own unmistakable style: florid overstatement and a fog of half-truths intended to cloud the issue.  Well worth a visit to witness the great man in action, a rare sight!”

 

© Fantagraphics Books

 

And although Ellison was a vocal supporter of the USA’s Equal Rights Amendment, much of that good work was undone in 2006 when he groped the writer Connie Willis onstage at an awards ceremony.  I’ve seen a clip of the incident and am inclined to think Ellison believed he was indulging in some harmless japery, but that’s not to say he wasn’t massively disrespectful towards Willis and didn’t make a colossal arse of himself.  He also did himself no favours when, after he’d issued an apology – one commentator described it as something that “could only loosely be construed by a chimpanzee whacked on smack as an apology” – and after Willis hadn’t acknowledged it, he ranted abusively about her on his official message board.

 

Still, as I came to know the artist’s failings, and revised my opinion of him, I focused more on the quality of the art itself.  And with Ellison, some of that art was amazing.  Here’s a list of ten of his short stories that bowled me over when I read them.

 

Delusion for a Dragon Slayer (1966).  An unremarkable little man suddenly finds his soul transplanted into the body of a Conan-the-Barbarian-type swordsman in a blood-and-thunder fantasy land.  What follows is a merciless dissection of the inadequacies of the nerdy males who read sword-and-sorcery stories.  I actually write sword-and-sorcery stories, so I’m allowed to make sweeping generalisations like that.

 

Pretty Maggie Money Eyes (1967).  This sad, haunting story is about a woman’s spirit inhabiting a Las Vegas slot machine and the down-on-his-luck gambler whom she – possibly – takes pity on.

 

© LQ / Jaf Productions

 

A Boy and His Dog (1969).  A post-apocalyptic satire that’s a spot-on blend of anarchy and irreverence, featuring as its main character a young hoodlum and an intelligent, telepathic and sarcastic canine.  It was filmed in 1975 by L.Q. Jones, with a youthful Don Johnson in the lead (human) role.  Though the movie version isn’t perfect, it still holds up better than a lot of other, more portentous sci-fi films made in the same decade.

 

Along the Scenic Route (1969).  A biting analysis of the relationship between Americans and their cars, Scenic Route details how a couple out for a leisurely drive end up competing in a lethal demolition derby.  It prefigures a lot of ‘dystopian-vehicle’ movies like Death Race 2000 (1975) and the Mad Max ones.

 

One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty  (1970).  Another of Ellison’s time-travel tales, this grippingly melancholic one is about a man going back in time and befriending his younger self while he’s a bullied, insecure child.

 

Bleeding Stones (1973).  This is quite simply a story that made my jaw drop with its combination of brutality, blasphemy and surrealism.

 

© Pan Books

 

Hindsight: 480 Seconds (1973).  End-of-the-world stories are a dime-a-dozen in science fiction, but the brilliantly simple yet elegiac concept behind this one has always stayed with me.  It’s about a poet who volunteers to stay on an about-to-be-destroyed earth after the rest of humanity have been evacuated, so that he can provide a commentary on his planet’s dying minutes.

 

I’m Looking for Kadak (1974).  This Kurt-Vonnegut-meets-Woody-Allen-type comedy is about the tribulations facing a group of blue, eleven-armed aliens on a far-flung planet who’ve converted to Judaism.  The minyan – quorum – for communal Jewish worship is ten, and they want to sit shiva, i.e., conduct the rituals of mourning for a departed friend.  The problem is that there’s now only nine of them on the planet.  So the hero sets off on an epic quest to find a long-lost Jew, Kadak, in the hope he’ll serve as the tenth.

 

Shatterday (1975).  In this unsettling tale, a man accidentally phones his own apartment one evening and finds himself talking to himself.  In fact, this other self is a sinister doppelganger who’s appeared from nowhere and is planning to usurp him from his existence.

 

Count the Clock That Tells the Time (1979).   Taking its title from a sonnet by William Shakespeare, this describes how a lethargic never-do-well gets trapped in a weird, ghostly netherworld.  It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of wasting time and frittering your life away – something you couldn’t accuse the famously prolific Ellison of doing.

 

So, thank you for the entertainment and the inspiration, Mr E.  May you rest in un-cantankerous and non-litigious peace.

 

© Pan Books

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The jolly films of Roger (Part 2)

 

© American International Pictures

 

Following on from my last blog-post, in which I paid tribute to the prolific, indefatigable and – it has to be said – thrifty filmmaker Roger Corman who died on May 9th, here’s a round-up of my favourite films that Corman directed.

 

A Bucket of Blood (1959)

Character actor Dick Miller worked regularly with Roger Corman.  His biggest role for him was in a movie that’s also Corman’s best work of the 1950s, the horror-comedy A Bucket of Blood.  Miller plays a would-be avant-garde sculptor called Walter Paisley who’s increasingly frustrated at his lack of talent.  This isn’t helped by the fact that, to make ends meet, he has to work as a busboy at the local Beatnik café, which is full of pretentious tossers going on about what creative geniuses they are.  “Be a nose!  Be a nose!” the hapless Paisley cries as he tries and fails to fashion a recognisable human visage out of a lump of clay.  After accidentally killing his landlady’s cat and then killing an undercover cop who’s trying to implicate him in some drug-dealing at the café (Paisley memorably cleaves his head with a skillet), he hits on a way of producing perfectly proportioned statues: committing murder and coating the bodies in clay.  Frankly, the resulting corpse-statues look hideous, but that doesn’t stop the Beatniks at the café proclaiming Paisley an artistic genius.

 

Their lack of taste in sculpture mirrors their lack of taste in poetry.  At the beginning we hear Beatnik bard Maxwell Brock (Julian Burton) delivering an epic, and epicly bad, poem called Life is a Bum, which goes: “Life is an obscure hobo bumming a ride on the omnibus of art…  The Artist is, all others are not…  Where are John, Joe, Jake, Jim, Jerk?  Dead, dead, dead!  They were not born before they were born, they were not born…  Where are Leonardo, Rembrandt, Ludwig?  Alive, alive, alive!  They were born…!”

 

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

 

The Raven (1963)

As a kid, I loved this movie, the fifth of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for American International Pictures.  The tale of a trio of feuding magicians played by Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, it’s more fantasy than horror – but spiced with delightfully ghoulish moments, such as when a torturer checks the temperature of a red-hot poker by pressing it into his own arm, or when Price opens a little casket and is discombobulated to find it full of human eyeballs.  (“I’d rather not say,” he croaks when Lorre asks him what’s inside.)  It’s like a version of Walt Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) for morbid children.

 

Needless to say, the film’s connection with Edgar Allan Poe is extremely loose.  In fact, it’s only Karloff turning Lorre into a raven twice during the film that allows Corman to tack the title of Poe’s most famous poem onto it and have Price recite the poem mellifluously during its opening scene.  Meanwhile, in the role of Lorre’s son, we get a 26-year-old and amusingly wooden Jack Nicholson.

 

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

 

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

A non-gothic movie Corman made whilst in the middle of his Edgar Allan Poe cycle, the sci-fi chiller X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) is about a scientist, played by Ray Milland, who experiments on his own eyes and ends up seeing beyond the usual visual spectrum perceptible to humans.

 

I wrote about this movie last year in a post about its scriptwriter, Ray Russell.  “Milland’s increasingly penetrative vision goes from letting him see though clothing – hence a party scene where, to his bemusement, the dancing revellers appear to be cavorting in the nude – to letting him see the distance edges of the universe, where horrible things lurk.  How one reacts to the film today depends on how one reacts to the special effects that Corman, a famously thrifty filmmaker, deploys to represent Milland’s visions.  They vary from psychedelic patterns and filters to (when he’s peering into human bodies) flashes of what are obviously photos and diagrams taken from human-anatomy manuals.  The effects are either desperately ingenious or just plain desperate, depending on your attitude.  Still, the film cultivates an effective mood of cosmic horror and the ending is nightmarish in its logic.”

 

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Corman’s majestic adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, scripted by Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell (with a second Poe story, Hop Frog, stitched into the plot for good measure) and beautifully shot by the great Nicolas Roeg, showcases Vincent Price at his sumptuously evil best.  He’s Prince Prospero, who’s holed up in his castle with an entourage of loathsome aristocrats while a plague, the Red Death, decimates the countryside outside.  Price and friends happily live a life of decadence, fuelled by drink, drugs, sex and diabolism – rather like Boris Johnson and his lackeys and minions partying at No 10, Downing Street, during Covid-19 and breaking all their own lockdown restrictions – while refusing to help the neighbourhood’s terrified peasants.  However, when they decide to enliven their social calendar with a fancy-dress masque, the masque is gate-crashed by a mysterious, Ingmar Bergman-esque figure swathed in a red robe.  Guess who that is.

 

© Alta Vista Productions / Anglo-Amalgamated / Warner Pathé  

 

Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

Made the same year as Masque, Corman’s Ligeia has Price in a more sympathetic role, playing a haunted and reclusive man who tries to put his troubles behind him and find happiness with a new wife (Elizabeth Shepherd).  Unfortunately, his former wife, though dead, is still around in spirit form and won’t leave him in peace.  Tomb of Ligeia has a slightly over-the-top ending, but the build-up to it, involving black cats, flag-stoned passageways, cobwebs, candlelight, hypnosis, Egyptology and some spectacular monasterial ruins filmed at Castle Acre Priory near Swaffham in England’s County Suffolk, is spookily wonderful.

 

The Wild Angels (1966)

“Just what is it that you want to do…?”  “Well, we wanna be free, we wanna to be free to do what we wanna do.  And we wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time.  And that’s what we’re gonna do….  We’re gonna have a good time, we’re gonna have a party!”

 

Scottish alternative rock / dance band Primal Scream immortalised this exchange from Corman’s The Wild Angels, between Frank Maxwell’s preacher and Peter Fonda’s Hells Angel, by sampling it on their 1990 dancefloor hit Loaded.  Though to be fair, the American grunge band Mudhoney got there first when they sampled it on their song In and Out of Grace two years earlier.  It’s also recited at the climax of The World’s End, Edgar Wright’s underrated sci-fi / horror satire from 2013, during the face-off between Simon Pegg and a supercilious alien intelligence voiced by Bill Nighy.

 

In addition to Fonda, The Wild Angels features Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd – supposedly Dern and Ladd’s daughter Laura was conceived during filming, so Laura Dern is something else we have Roger Corman to thank for – and the baby-faced Michael J. Pollard shortly before he played W.C. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde (1967).  The script, officially written by long-term Corman associate Charles B. Griffith and unofficially rewritten by Peter Bogdanovich, is minimalist. While there’s stuff about Fonda’s Hells Angels chapter pursuing a stolen bike, and about Dern’s character being shot by the cops and having to be rescued from a hospital, it’s mainly a frame for scenes in which the Angels offend Middle America.  Corman did his research by throwing parties with free beer and marijuana for real Hells Angels.  He had Griffith attend them and make notes while those Angels recounted their wild (and no doubt exaggerated) tales of life on the road.

 

© American International Pictures

 

At least Griffith and Bogdanovich don’t pull their punches.  In the script, the Angels come across as pretty assholey, particularly with their love for Nazi symbols and memorabilia.  This causes a confrontation between them and a World-War-II veteran (Dick Miller again) early in the movie.  When Dern’s character dies and they organise a funeral for him – predictably, the church service degenerates into an orgy – the coffin is draped in a Nazi flag.  The real Hells Angels, some of whom had appeared in the film, were so annoyed by Corman’s portrayal of them that they threatened to both kill him and sue him (presumably not in that order).  If that wasn’t enough, Corman had Frank ‘Dodgy Connections’ Sinatra breathing down his neck, concerned about daughter Nancy’s safety among the Angels on the set.  Actually, the story of an exploitation director making a biker movie who unwittingly antagonises the Hells Angels and the Mafia sounds like it would make a good exploitation movie.

 

The Trip (1967)

Corman, Fonda and Dern were united for this movie, scripted by one Jack Nicholson.  Yes, it’s about a trip, a hallucinogenic one, experienced by a TV commercial director played by Fonda, wearing a sensible red V-necked sweater.  He takes LSD as a reaction to the break-up of his marriage and the trip initially happens at the home of, and under the watchful eye of, a friend played by Dern, wearing a sensible eggshell-blue polo-neck and fawn jacket.  These scenes were filmed in the house of Albert Lee, leader of the rock band Love.  The cost-conscious Corman was surely pleased to discover that Lee’s house had so much psychedelic décor already it hardly needed to be dressed up for the film.  However, when Fonda hallucinates that he’s killed Dern – he hasn’t – he panics and flees down to Sunset Strip.  Then things really get groovy.

 

Seen today, The Trip is inevitably something of a museum piece and the low budget means some of its fantasy scenes are ropey.  Bits where Fonda, now wearing a baggy white shirt like a romantic poet, is pursued by medieval, cloaked-and-cowled figures on horseback through what is obviously modern-day California are particularly cringey.  But there are enough genuinely weird things – Fonda having a question-and-answer session with Dennis Hopper on a carousel, Fonda making love to a lady under some heavily patterned lighting that makes them look like psychedelically-coloured chameleons, Fonda having a panic attack inside Dern’s wardrobe – to make it memorable.  And if you enjoy a good 1960s-movie psych-out sequence, the one where the heavily-tripping Fonda blunders into a night club during a live rock performance is awesome.

 

© American International Pictures

 

Bloody Mama (1970)

Like The Wild Angels, this Corman movie isn’t so much a story as a series of outrages, with reprobates lurching from one confrontation to another.  Unlike The Wild Angels, the characters in Bloody Mama are based, very loosely, on historical figures – Depression-era America’s notorious Barker-Karpis Gang, supposedly led by matriarch Kate ‘Ma’ Barker.  Many have argued that Ma Barker’s reputation as a criminal mastermind was invented by the media and by J. Edgar Hoover, keen to justify the FBI killing an old woman when they finally caught up with her and shot her.  As the fictionalised Ma Barker, lording it over her four gormless gangster sons, Shelley Winters gives a scenery-chomping performance that dominates the film and blinds you to its various budgetary and exploitative shortcomings. God-fearing, gun-toting, racist, incestuous and psychotic, she seems a monstrous metaphor for America itself.  This is underlined when she herds her sons around the piano to sing Battle Hymn of the Republic.

 

Among the sons, Don Stroud gets most to do as Ma’s eldest, Herman. He’s a hulking thug to begin with but, in some unexpected character development, gradually forms a mind of his own.  Film buffs, though, will be more excited by the presence of a young Robert De Niro, playing well-medicated son Lloyd.  At one point he gets high on glue, causing an uncomprehending Winters to exclaim, “When you’re working on those model airplanes, you get to acting awful silly!”

 

Incidentally, Bloody Mama was such a money spinner for American International Pictures that they demanded another Depression-era gangster movie.  Corman, though, was willing only to produce the follow-up, Boxcar Bertha (1972), and a young lad called Martin Scorsese got the directing gig.

 

When I first started writing this tribute to Roger Corman, I was going to title it THE MAN WHO ROGERED HOLLYWOOD, though I soon decided that sounded disrespectful.  But Corman literally did roger Hollywood.  Without his opportunities and tutelage, Coppola, Scorsese, Cameron, Nicholson, etc., might never have got to where they did, and many landmark movies during the last half-century of Hollywood’s history – from the Godfather movies to the Scorsese-De Niro collaborations, from the Terminator and Avatar series to a host of classic films including Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984), Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1989), Carl Franklin’s One False Move (1993) and Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential (1997) – might  not have seen the light of day.  And many of his own movies, cheap though they were, were a great deal of fun.  No wonder Quentin Tarantino loved him.

 

Not bad for the guy who directed It Conquered the World (1956) and produced Dinocroc vs Supergator (2010).

 

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

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The jolly films of Roger (Part 1)

 

From instagram.com / Roger Corman

 

Roger Corman, who passed away on May 9th at the venerable age of 98, wasn’t so much a filmmaker as a movie factory.  IMDb credits him with 491 producing credits, and that’s not counting the two movies being produced by him and categorised as ‘upcoming’ at the time of his death: the generic-sounding Crime City and the definitely Cormanesque-sounding Little Shop of Halloween Horrors.

 

Even during lockdown in 2020, when most folk his age were lying low because they knew contracting Covid-19 was likely a death sentence for them, Corman was so desperate for something celluloid-related to do that, according to the Hollywood Reporter, he “launched a self-named Quarantine Film Festival to judge short films made while filmmakers shelter in their homes.”

 

Corman was famous for things besides his work ethic and prolificness.  Firstly, there was the legendary thrift and speed with which he made his films.  For instance, in his 1955 Western Apache Woman, actor Dick Miller – at the start of a long association with Corman – played two characters in the same scene, an Apache and the settler who shoots him.  While figuring out how to film the fiery – and potentially costly – finale of 1960’s House of Usher, Corman heard there was a barn about to be demolished in Orange County.  He got permission to do the demolition himself, burned it to the ground, had cameramen film it and used the burning-barn footage to represent the burning mansion at the movie’s climax.  And the original 1960 Little Shop of Horrors, long before it became an Alan Menken musical and was remade by Hollywood in 1986, was shot in two days.  Supposedly, Corman did it in response to a bet that he couldn’t make a film in two days.

 

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

 

Secondly, as a producer, he gave a lot of aspiring, up-and-coming talent a chance to get behind or in front of the camera and show the world what they could do, whilst learning the mechanics of filmmaking on the job.  The young filmmakers who graduated from the Corman School of Moviemaking make a pretty awesome list: Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, Carl Franklin, Curtis Hanson, Monte Hellman, Ron Howard, Gale Anne Hurd, Jonathan Kaplan, John Sayles and Robert Towne.  A few others, like Paul Bartel and Jack Hill, never quite escaped the ‘exploitation filmmaker’ tag, but made some fascinating movies nonetheless, while Allan Arkush became a prestigious, Emmy-nominated TV director.  Meanwhile actors whose careers received invaluable leg-ups from Corman included Charles Bronson, Bruce Dern, David Carradine, Peter Fonda, Pam Grier, Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper, Tommy Lee Jones, Jack Nicholson, Talia Shire and, yup, Sylvester Stallone.  Even Sandra Bullock was aided on her way to fame by a role in the 1993 Corman-produced jungle-epic Fire on the Amazon.

 

I’m sure this was due to economics as much as altruism.  He could pay his young, unknown and inexperienced directors, writers, actors and technicians less.  When Ron Howard worked for him, and they had a row about Corman’s stinginess, Howard was assured: “Ron, if you do a good job for me on this picture, you’ll never have to work for me again.”  (And no doubt he’d have a chance of being remembered not just for playing Richie Cunningham in the 1974-84 sitcom Happy Days.)  But the lessons Corman’s alumni learned about making films on tight budgets and schedules were invaluable for their later, more prestigious careers and they’ve generally been grateful for the breaks he gave them.  Scorsese, for example, has spoken about how Corman taught him the importance of preparation when you’re shooting on a budget and the wisdom of getting the most difficult scenes filmed at the start of the schedule – which in Scorsese’s case, with the 1972 Corman-produced gangster movie Boxcar Bertha, were the ones involving a train.

 

© American International Pictures

 

The fuss made over Corman’s many protegees obscures an important fact, that as a director himself – he had 56 directing credits – he could be pretty good.  The movies he directed can be divided into three phases.  First came the ultra-low-budget ones, mostly Westerns and science-fiction flicks, that he churned out in the late 1950s.  If you’re to believe IMDb, he managed to make nine of these in 1957 alone.  Many you’d struggle to appraise as ‘good’…  But when you compare them with the cheap schlock being made by other exploitation filmmakers at the time, they definitely have a spark that elevates them above the herd.  One thing about late-1950s, micro-budget, black-and-white sci-fi movies that strikes you now when you view them on YouTube is how dreary most of them seem – but dreariness isn’t a charge you could level at, say, Corman’s It Conquered the World (1956), though you could level a lot else at it.

 

At the beginning of the 1960s, he convinced his regular studio, American International Pictures, to tackle something different: a series of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, made in colour and with larger budgets than usual (which doesn’t mean their budgets were large by anyone else’s standards).  These kicked off in 1960 with House of Usher and continued with The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963) – actually based on an H.P. Lovecraft story, with the title borrowed from a Poe poem – The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and Tomb of Ligeia (1964).  All but one feature the impeccable horror-icon Vincent Price as their leading man and they’re enlivened too by appearances from an older generation of horror-film actors: Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone.  And let’s not forget Barbara Steele, the queen of 1960s Italian horror cinema, who pops up in Pit.  Corman’s Poe films are atmospheric, brooding – several of them have Price mourning a dead (but actually not-so-dead) wife – at times gorgeous and generally a lot of fun.  They had a big impact on peculiar children like me, who caught them on late-night TV in the 1970s.

 

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

 

Finally, in the late 1960s, Corman became involved in movies about the youth cultures of time – Hells Angels in The Wild Angels (1966) and hippiedom in 1967’s The Trip – and gangster films like The St Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) and Bloody Mama (1970), possibly inspired by the success of a wee film called Bonnie and Clyde (1967) around the same time.  Worn out by directing, Corman concentrated on producing from the early 1970s onwards.  Apart from some uncredited directing on 1978’s Deathsport and 1980’s Battle Beyond the Stars, he returned to the director’s chair only once, in 1990, for an adaptation of Brian Aldiss’s novel Frankenstein Unbound (1973).  Aldiss also wrote the short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long (1969) which was developed into Steven Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001), making him perhaps the only writer who could boast of having his work filmed by both the famously low-budget Corman and the famously high-budget Spielberg.

 

Thereafter, Corman formed a series of movie production and distribution companies – New World Productions, Millennium (which was quickly renamed New Horizons Pictures) and Concorde Pictures.  Going through all the movies that came off their conveyor belts, and had Corman’s name in their ‘producer’ credits, would be an exhausting and probably impossible task.  But there are certain ones I’m fond of.

 

© New World Pictures

 

Firstly, I like Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000 (1975), about a futuristic car race where the goal is not to finish first but to rack up as many points as possible by running down as many pedestrians as possible.  A young Sylvester Stallone plays the villain, a driver so evil he mows down his own road crew for some extra points.  Bartel followed this with another movie about car chases and car crashes, the more family-friendly Carquake (1976).  I loved this as a kid – the fact that I saw it on a double bill with The Giant Spider Invasion (1976) probably made it seem, comparatively, so good.  Among its oddball pleasures are cameos by Stallone and Martin Scorsese playing a pair of KFC-chomping Mafiosi.

 

I’m also a fan of Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978) and Rock n’ Roll High School (1979) directed by Allan Arkush with some contributions from Dante.  The latter film starred the excellent P.J. Soles, shortly after she’d appeared in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), and the legendary punk-rock band the Ramones.  Apparently, Corman had wanted the movie to be about disco music, until Arkush and Dante persuaded him that having the Ramones in it was more likely to piss off the teenaged audience’s parents.

 

© New World Pictures

 

I enjoyed Corman’s 1980 rip-off of Star Wars (1978), the aforementioned Battle Beyond the Stars, ostensibly directed by Jimmy T. Murakami (and co-written by John Sayles).  Its crew included a young James Cameron,  working as a modelmaker, special effects technician and art director.  Supposedly, Cameron impressed Corman by designing for the film a spaceship called Nell (controlled by a female-voiced computer) whose twin engines were, frankly, shaped like breasts.  Cameron also worked on Bruce D. Clark’s Galaxy of Terror (1981), a cash-in on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), which I like simply for its eclectic cast – Ray Walston; Sid Haig; Zalman King, future director of ‘erotic’ movies like Wild Orchid (1990) and Delta of Venus (1994); Grace Zabriskie, who played Sarah Palmer in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017); Erin Moran, who played Ron Howard’s little sister in Happy Days; and Freddy Kreuger himself, Robert Englund.

 

And I’m somewhat fascinated – I don’t know why – by Adam Simon’s Carnosaur (1993), which was based on Harry Adam Knight’s 1984 novel of the same name.  Knight’s Carnosaur had featured the idea of cloned dinosaurs running amok in the modern world years before Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990).  When it was announced that Steven Spielberg would turn Crichton’s book into a film, Corman cannily adapted Knight’s book to the screen and released it the same year as Spielberg’s blockbuster.  I imagine Knight found it galling that while Spielberg filmed Crichton’s novel with state-of-the-art animatronic and computer-generated effects, Corman’s low-budget effects for Carnosaur involved a man wearing a dinosaur-suit.  Also, cheekily, Corman cast Diane Ladd (who’d been in The Wild Angels) in Carnosaur while her daughter Laura Dern was starring in Jurassic Park.

 

Later, more giant monsters would feature in Corman’s association with the Syfy channel.  He supplied it with a succession of less-than-epic, self-explanatorily titled monster movies like Dinocroc (2004), Supergator (2007), the inevitable Dinocroc vs Supergator (2010), Dinoshark (2010), Sharktopus (2010) and Piranhaconda (2012).  Actually, as Wikipedia notes, “Supergator was turned down by the Syfy channel, but Corman made it anyway.”  I’ve watched a couple of these on Britain’s Horror Channel and, well, what can I say?  There are probably worse ways to reduce your brain to an inert, insentient pulp.  But not many.

 

However, my favourite films among Corman’s output are definitely ones that he directed himself.  I’ll talk about them in my next blog post.  Stay tuned…

 

© American International Pictures

Posted on

My favourite gigs

 

© Chrysalis

 

My previous blog-post was about seeing Deep Purple live in concert.  This was the most recent of many gigs I’ve been to.  Indeed, by my calculations, I’ve seen about 160 musical acts perform live, starting with veteran Scottish hard rock / heavy metal group Nazareth, whom I saw in Aberdeen in 1984.

 

Anyway, this has got me thinking about the best gigs I’ve ever been to.  Here are my favourite eight.

 

The Proclaimers – Aberdeen Ritzy, 1987

I didn’t know what to expect when some mates got me along to a concert by Craig and Charlie Reid, better known as Scottish folk-pop duo the Proclaimers.  I liked the Reids – their hit song that year, the politically charged Letter from America, was already becoming Scotland’s great anti-Maggie-Thatcher anthem – but I had no idea what they’d be like live.  Also, they were performing at Aberdeen Ritzy, a place I had an aversion to because I’d once worked there as a member of the floor-staff and it was the least enjoyable job I’d ever had.

 

I had no reason to be apprehensive.  The gig felt like a giant, joyous football match where the entire crowd supported the same team and that team was winning 10-0.  I suspect one reason why the Proclaimers went down so well that night was because the Aberdonian audience could relate to their song Throw the R Away, which is about the frustrations caused when standard English-speakers can’t understand your accent.  Which is a common hazard if you speak Aberdonian.

 

The Jesus and Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr, My Bloody Valentine, Blur – the Rollercoaster Tour, London Brixton Academy, 1992

From Craig and Charlie Reid to two more Scottish siblings called Reid.  These were Jim and William Reid of the feedback-drenched East Kilbride noise-niks the Jesus and Mary Chain.  Their Rollercoaster Tour date at Brixton Academy in 1992 offered not only excellent support from American alternative rockers Dinosaur Jr and dreamy, swirly shoegazers My Bloody Valentine, but also a chance to sample a young, up-and-coming band called Blur.  Though my reaction when I saw Damon Albarn onstage wasn’t that he was destined to be an icon of the future Britpop movement but that he resembled a very young, musical version of Norman Wisdom.

 

© Blanco y Negro

 

Meanwhile, the headliners blew me away.  Promoting their recent album Honey’s Dead (1992), which was packed with behemoth tunes like Reverence and Sugar Ray, the Jesus and Mary Chain performed in silhouette against a giant blood-red backdrop.  This made them look like the imperious Masters of the Universe.

 

The Manic Street Preachers – Sapporo Penny Lane, 1993

Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers were promoting their album Gold Against the Soul when they turned up in the Japanese city of Sapporo, at whose Hokkai-Gakuen University I worked at the time as a lecturer.  Though in Britain they were seen as having a punk edge, the Japanese took their fondness for glam clothes and eyeliner as meaning they were another Guns n’ Roses.  Thus, their gig at Sapporo’s Penny Lane drew a lot of Japanese girls wearing silk scarves and floppy hats, who kept squealing “Rich-ee!” at the Manics’ guitarist, Richey Edwards.  The gig was both excellent and dramatic – the drama coming when the highly-strung Edwards freaked out about an illuminated fire-exit sign at the other end of the auditorium that he claimed was putting him off his performance.

 

Since then, that gig has haunted me in two ways.  Firstly, around the same time, I bought the Japanese edition of Gold Against the Soul.  Years later, long after Edwards’ tragic and never-explained disappearance in 1995, I listened to it again and discovered the CD case contained a second tray that I hadn’t noticed before.  In it was a bonus CD, a live one of them performing in Japan.  When I played it, I felt poignantly transported back in time – for there, in the crowd, were those Japanese girls shouting “Rich-ee!” again at poor, doomed Richey Edwards.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Masao Nakagami

 

Secondly, when I saw the Manic Street Preachers again last year, in Singapore, they played a new song called Still Snowing in Sapporo, which I learned was inspired by that long-ago gig in 1993.  How weird, I thought, to be in the audience listening to them playing a song about a concert 30 years earlier… knowing I was were probably the only person in the audience who was at that concert.

 

The Beastie Boys – Sapporo Jasmac Plaza, 1995

I almost didn’t attend this gig, which also took place while I worked at Sapporo’s Hokkai-Gakuen University.  The show was due to begin at 7.00 PM – concerts in Japan tended to start when the tickets said they would – and the same evening I had to give a late lecture until 7.20 PM.  Plus I calculated that by the time I got from the university campus to the venue, the Jasmac Plaza, the Beastie Boys would already be an hour into their gig.  It didn’t seem worth it.

 

However, a few weeks before the concert, it was announced that work had been completed on a new Sapporo subway line, which had a station called Gakuen-Mae directly below the campus where I was working.  I also discovered that the next station along the new line, Hosui-Suskino, had an exit that was only a block from the Jasmac Plaza.  And a subway train left for Hosui-Susukino from Gakuen-Mae every evening at 7.30.  I figured that if I caught the 7.30 train, and moved very fast, I could be at the concert hall in the Jasmac Plaza ten minutes later – hopefully not yet halfway through the Beastie Boys’ set.  Fate seemed to be urging me to buy a ticket, so I did.

 

That evening, I finished my lecture on the stroke of 7.20, ran like hell for the subway station and charged down what seemed like half-a-dozen escalators, descending deeper and deeper into the earth.  The train was already at the platform and I ran and jumped through its about-to-close carriage doors.  At Hosui-Susukino, I sprang out of the train, ran up more escalators, ran along a city block into the Jasmac Plaza and up several staircases to its fourth floor, where the concert hall was.  Live music blasted out of speakers above me.  I dashed into the hall, gasping for breath, my university lecturer’s suit, shirt and tie soaked in sweat…  And I discovered that the Beastie Boys weren’t on stage at all.  What I was hearing was a support act that hadn’t been mentioned on the bloody ticket.  The Beasties didn’t appear until forty minutes later.

 

After that, it needed to be a superb gig to justify all the hassle and indignity I’d suffered.  Which, thankfully, it was.

 

© Mute

 

Nick Cave – Edinburgh Princes Street Gardens, 1999

During the 1999 Edinburgh Festival, goth-rock troubadour Nick Cave – without his band the Bad Seeds – performed in Edinburgh’s Princess Street Gardens, which meant he had the craggy Edinburgh Castle rock, crowned by the battlements of the castle itself, as a spectacular backdrop.  But there was a problem.  Taking place in the castle was the Edinburgh Tattoo, that celebration of tartan-swathed, bagpipe-wailing Scottish military kitsch held every August; and the Tattoo organisers were not happy about having to compete against a concert below in the Gardens.  Indeed, a few evenings earlier, the Gardens had hosted the psychedelic / space-rock outfit Spiritualised and their percussive beats had caused the Lone Piper – the bagpiper who appears on the ramparts at the Tattoo’s finale to play the lament Sleep Dearie Sleep – to lose concentration and mess up the tune.  This evening, to placate the Tattoo, Cave wasn’t allowed to start playing until it had finished, meaning the audience turned up at the time specified on the tickets but then had to wait an hour.  To keep us entertained, some local performance-poets were brought onstage, including the late, lamented Paul Reekie.

 

One consequence of this was that when Cave finally did come on, the end-of-Tattoo firework display was erupting above the castle.  Talk about a spectacular entrance.  And the ensuing gig was worth the long wait.  The songs, mostly stripped-down versions of stuff from 1997’s The Boatman’s Call and 1996’s Murder Ballads, were wonderfully enhanced by the gothic surroundings – the rock, the castle and finally a gorgeous full moon ascending into the starry Edinburgh sky.

 

The Waterboys – Newcastle, Tyne Theatre and Opera House, 2003

In the mid-1980s, there was a considerable buzz about the Waterboys, who were expected to go stratospheric and join U2 and Simple Minds as one of the big Celtic rock bands of the era.  Instead, under the leadership of Edinburgh man Mike Scott, they decamped to Ireland, became a folk band for a while, and rock superstardom never arrived.  I actually preferred their folky stuff (like 1988’s When Ye Go Away) to their rather bloated rock stuff (like 1985’s The Whole of the Moon).

 

For this 2003 gig in Newcastle, the band did an hour of gentle, melodic music, kicking off with a version of the Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses, which Scott decided to play because he’d “had it in his head all day,”  There was an interval during which the Geordie crowd enjoyed a pint or four in the Opera House bar.  And then it was back into the auditorium for a second hour of up-tempo rock music.  The relaxed and nothing-more-to-prove Scott clearly wanted to have a good time and wanted to give his audience a good time too – which he did, in spades.

 

© Geffen Records

 

Alabama 3 – Newcastle, University of Northumbria, 2005

This was the best blues / country / techno / electronica / indie / trip-hop / acid-jazz gig I’ve seen, courtesy of the best (and possibly only) band in the world whose music ticks all those boxes, the Alabama 3.  They’re not from Alabama, but from South London.  Also, there’s eight or nine of them rather than three.  With so many band-members onstage, and such a stew of different sounds, this gig at the University of Northumbria was inevitably a bit of a shambles – but what a glorious shambles.  Their track Woke Up This Morning, which at the time served as the opening theme for The Sopranos (1999-2007), was particularly epic.

 

Primal Scream – Norwich UEA, 2009

I wasn’t expecting a great deal in 2009 when the Bobby Gillespie-fronted alternative rock band Primal Scream turned up at the University of East Anglia, where I was in the middle of doing a full-time MA.  Feeling creaky and long in the tooth by then, I assumed my best gig-going days were behind me.  I was too old for the mosh-pit, for jumping around and getting into the exuberant spirit of things.  Meanwhile, I’d seen Primal Scream a few times before and found them a bit hit-and-miss.

 

But I ended up really, really enjoying myself.  I managed to snag a position right at the edge of the stage, giving me a perfect view.  And Gillespie and the gang were in blistering form.  Primal Scream concerts can feel schizophrenic because their music veers between harsh, experimental electronica (like 2000’s Kill All Hippies) and loose-limbed, traditional Rolling Stones-style rock ‘n’ roll (like 1994’s Jailbird), but here it didn’t matter.  They just alternated.  They’d do one hardcore electronica number (accompanied by a brain-frying lightshow), followed by a Stonesy number, then another electronica one, then another Stonesy one, and so on.  Somehow, tonight, it worked brilliantly.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Phil Guest

Posted on

In at the Deep end

 

 

I love live music and I live in Singapore, where in recent months there’s been much excitement about major bands and singers coming and staging concerts.  But I’ve felt like the title character in Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834) when he laments, “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”  Yes, there’s been a buzz about Singapore being south-east Asia’s number-one stop for famous musicians on tour.  But frankly, as a grumpy old punk / goth / heavy-metal guy, the music made by the acts performing lately in Singapore really isn’t my thing.  Indeed, if I had to choose between listening to it and sticking a sharp stick into my ear, I’d probably go for the ‘sharp stick’ option.

 

Firstly in January 2024, Singapore’s National Stadium hosted half-a-dozen concerts by English group Coldplay, whom Wikipedia describes as a ‘pop rock’, ‘post-Britpop’, ‘pop’ and, supposedly, ‘alternative rock’ band.  I regard Coldplay as being so wimpy they make Belle and Sebastian sound like Rage Against the Machine.  That’s all.

 

Then in February English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran played the National Stadium too.  Regarding Ed Sheeran, I can only say I agree with the late Mark E. Smith, mainstay of the fabulously unhinged post-punk / alternative rock group the Fall, who likened him to “a duff singer songwriter from the 70s you find in charity shops.”

 

And then, in March at the National Stadium, Taylor Swift put on six shows of her Eras tour.  That meant for a week Singapore’s usually orderly streets were filled with fans from all over Asia – ‘Swifties’ I believe they’re called in modern-day parlance – clad in spangly skirts, pink gowns, cowboy hats and friendship bracelets and with rhinestones arranged in the shape of hearts adorning their faces.  Taylor’s lengthy stopover in Singapore – the only shows of the Eras tour in Asia – prompted politicians in Thailand and the Philippines to grumble about the generous subsidies Singapore offered for each concert.  According to the Straits Times newspaper, these allegedly “were contingent on Swift not performing in other South-east Asian nations.”   To be honest, as someone immune to Taylor’s musical charms, if I was a politician in Thailand or the Philippines, I’d be thanking Singapore for keeping her away from my shores.

 

Anyway, this is a preamble to the fact that, last week, I felt totally starved of decent live music – I hadn’t been to a gig for half-a-year – and did something I wouldn’t normally do.  I bought a ticket for a Deep Purple concert.

 

Deep Purple are often referred to as one of the ‘holy trinity’ who, in the 1970s, fathered heavy metal.  But while I love the other two members of that trinity, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, I’ve never been into Deep Purple.  To me, they didn’t have Led Zeppelin’s knack for coming up with irresistible guitar riffs nor that band’s ability to experiment, successfully, with other musical genres: blues, folk, reggae, rockabilly, world music.  And they didn’t have the splendidly ominous sound of Black Sabbath, which would influence future sub-genres of heavy metal like black and doom metal.

 

© Phonogram Ltd

 

I also wasn’t into Deep Purple because, even as a teenager in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the band seemed like ancient history to me.  This was because when I was at secondary school in Scotland, Deep Purple had split up – temporarily, it turned out – and spawned a bunch of splinter groups with former Purple members as their movers and shakers.  Ritchie Blackmore, Purple guitarist from 1968 to 1975, had formed Rainbow, which during the early 1980s included in its line-up Purple bassist Roger Glover.  For a while, Rainbow had as their singer the late Ronnie James Dio, a man I greatly admired, and I think their 1976 song Stargazer is a work of stomping, over-the-top brilliance.  But their later stuff I found mostly lame.

 

Meanwhile, David Coverdale, who’d been Deep Purple’s singer from 1973 to 1976, had formed Whitesnake, which during its early years contained such other Deep Purple stalwarts as drummer Ian Paice and keyboardist Jon Lord.  I liked the 1980 Whitesnake album Ready an’ Willing for its agreeable, aggressively bluesy sound, but later albums like 1981’s Come an’ Get It and 1984’s Slide It In seemed, in their inuendo-heavy way, to be about the size of Coverdale’s todger and his irresistibility to the ladies, and I gave them a body-swerve.  Later still, Whitesnake metamorphosised into a then-modish, American-west-coast hair-metal band à la Motley Crue, which in my mind made them yet more unspeakable.

 

© EMI

 

I’m writing about this in detail because, at my school, the great Deep Purple break-up had resulted in there being two antagonistic tribes among the kids who were into heavy metal.  Those who had the Rainbow logo (with a giant fist bursting out of the sea and grabbing hold of, yes, a rainbow) emblazoned on the backs of their denim jackets, and who thought David Coverdale was a giant dickhead.  And those who had the Whitesnake logo (WHITESNAKE spelt in joined-up letters by an ultra-long and ultra-squiggly white snake) emblazoned on the backs of their denim jackets, and who entertained a similarly uncomplimentary opinion of Ritchie Blackmore.

 

Incidentally, there was a third Deep Purple splinter group on the go at the time – Gillan, unsurprisingly fronted by Ian Gillan, who’d served as the Purple vocalist from 1969 to 1973.  But nobody I knew at school liked poor old Gillan or his eponymous band.  My beef with Ian Gillan, though, is that afterwards, from 1983 to 1984, he sang with the mighty Black Sabbath and the album he recorded with them, Born Again (1983), is dire.

 

In 1984, Deep Purple reformed with their most popular line-up: Blackmore, Gillan, Glover, Lord and Paice.  But I had zero interest in this.  And while over the decades since, I heard about comings and goings within the band – Blackmore quitting again in 1993 and Steve Morse replacing him a year later, Glover departing in 2002 and being replaced by Don Airey, and Morse leaving in 2022 with Northern Irish guitarist Simon McBride stepping into his shoes – I’d never felt any inclination to listen to their music or see them live.  In fact, I could only name three Deep Purple Songs: Smoke on the Water (1972), Black Night (1970) and Hush (1968).  Oh, and Woman from Tokyo (1973), which makes it four.

 

And it didn’t surprise me to learn that Deep Purple was why Mark E. Smith (him again) sacked Marc Riley, bassist, guitarist and keyboard player (and future DJ) from the Fall.  Riley got his marching orders in part because Smith saw him dancing to Deep Purple in an Australian nightclub: “Get in the hotel and stay there till I tell you.” Smith raged.  “You don’t need to be dancing to Smoke on the Water.”

 

Anyway…  Onto last week’s Deep Purple gig, which took place at Singapore’s Star Theatre.  I found it a mixed bag – but the good bits in that bag were enough to make the evening worthwhile.  It was noticeable how Simon McBride and Don Airey, the band’s newest members, did a lot of heavy lifting, embarking on lengthy guitar and keyboard instrumentals that allowed Gillan, Glover and Paice, all in their mid-to-late seventies, to take a break.  Admittedly, Airey is no spring chicken himself, but presumably being behind a keyboard is less tiring than having to prowl continuously around a stage or belt continuously at a drumkit.  My tastes in music developed after the advent of punk rock and I’ve been conditioned to believe that instrumental solos are inherently evil, and believe that those who perpetrate instrumental solos should be locked away for 20 years in Prog Rock Prison.  However, tonight, I made an effort to switch off the punk part of my brain and just enjoy the quality musicianship on display as McBride twiddled his guitar-strings and Airey plinked his keyboards.

 

 

One of a long line of rock guitarists from Belfast – see also Gary Moore, Vivian Campbell, Gerry McAvoy and Eric Bell – and, at 45, three decades younger than his Deep Purple compadres, McBride must find these moments a dream come true.  According to Wikipedia, McBride started to teach himself guitar when he was nine years old and while he was listening to his dad’s hard-rock collection, which included Deep Purple, on the family stereo.  Now, 36 years on, there are times when he’s practically carrying Deep Purple on his shoulders.

 

Airey knows how to play too and, perched over his keyboards and grinning manically like a mad scientist at work over a table laden with smoking vials, he was clearly enjoying himself.  Incidentally, in the past, Airey has played with Rainbow, Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, Saxon, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, among many others, and thus has a heavy metal CV to die for.

 

 

Of the other members… Roger Glover and Ian Paice did what was required of them.  Whenever the giant screen above the stage showed a close-up of Paice, he seemed to me to be a dead ringer these days for the actor Timothy Spall.  Which is ironic since Spall has played a rock drummer – he was Beano Baggett, the hapless tub-thumper with fictional 1970s rock band Strange Fruit in the underrated 1998 comedy movie Still Crazy, directed by Brian Gibson and written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.

 

 

As for Ian Gillan…  Well, I don’t want to rag on him because of his age, but his voice has definitely seen better days and there were moments, as he tottered stiffly about the stage, when he looked like he was in pain.  Also, during some of the stretches in the songs when he wasn’t required to sing, he’d hirple offstage where, presumably, a chair awaited him.  Still, I’m past the days when I used to believe that old rockers should be forced to retire and make way for the Young Turks.  Probably that change in attitude is because I’m now an old codger myself.  If Gillan still enjoys what he does, and people are still willing to pay money to watch him do it…  Good on him.

 

 

The songs were well-performed even if, tune-wise, they didn’t leave much of an impression on me afterwards – I can still only identify four Deep Purple songs.  And at the end, rather wonderfully, the band signed off with three of those four: Smoke on the Water, Hush and Black Night.  As Gillan finally managed to hit the operatic high notes, and Airey channelled the spookily thunderous organ sound that was the speciality of the late Jon Lord, the hairs rose on the back of even my sceptical neck.  Finally, I understood why so many people loved this band.

 

Loved?  A lot of people evidently still love them. The concert attracted a good-sized crowd, not all of them old buggers like myself, and everyone seemed extremely happy by the end.  It was just a pity that many folk spent the gig staring at their phones whilst dutifully filming everything.  Jesus.  Why remove yourself from the occasion and gaze zombie-like at tiny figures moving about a tiny stage on a tiny screen?  Why not immerse yourself in the excitement and drama of what’s actually happening around you?  It’s also, needless to say, disrespectful of the performers onstage.  (Suede’s Brett Anderson made this point forcefully in the same theatre six months ago.)  Honestly, there were times when the auditorium was so densely flecked with glowing phone-screens you felt you were flying over Las Vegas at night.

 

I’m no bigger a Deep Purple fan now than I was before the gig, but credit where it’s due.  Despite the occasional shortcoming, they made an effort and put on a decent show, when they could easily have coasted on past glories and phoned in their performances.  I only wish someone had de-phoned the audience.