Anvil show their mettle on metal

 

 

Warning — this post contains spoilers for Anvil! The Story of Anvil.

 

2008’s Anvil! The Story of Anvil is surely one of the best rock-music documentaries ever made.  It unflinchingly charts the multiple mishaps that befall Toronto heavy-metal band Anvil during the early 21st century.  Two decades earlier, Anvil had seemed on the cusp of making the big time – for instance, they’d headlined the 1984 Super Rock Festival in Japan alongside Bon Jovi, Whitesnake and the Scorpions – but then they’d faded into obscurity.  However, they never stopped playing and recording, albeit for small (sometimes non-existent) audiences and a very limited fanbase.  Watching The Story of Anvil, I got the impression that the reason for the band’s lack of success was simply a run of bad luck, both catastrophic and comical.

 

For its first 20 minutes, I found The Story of Anvil hilariously funny.  It was as amusing as the legendary spoof ‘rockumentary’ This is Spinal Tap (1984).  Indeed, it seemed ironic that Anvil’s drummer had the same name as This is Spinal Tap’s director, Rob Reiner.  Well, almost – Robb the drummer has two ‘b’s in his first name, whereas Rob the director has one ‘b’.

 

But as the disappointments, disagreements and disasters mount up, as the viewer is subjected to a relentless series of empty concert venues, booking mishaps, record label rejections and scenes where singer / lead guitarist Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow gamely struggles on with his day job, which is delivering trolleys of pre-packaged, catering-company meals through Canadian blizzards, the film stops being funny.  As the fact sinks in that Anvil is a real band, not a fictional one like Spinal Tap, whose middle-aged members are striving to do the thing they love in the face of massive and soul-destroying odds, the film becomes rather tragic.  Particularly gruelling is the scene where, trying to scrape together some money to fund the recording of a new album, Kudlow takes on one of the worst jobs on earth, as a telemarketer.  When it comes to giving people unwanted phone calls and trying to persuade them to buy unwanted products, he’s as successful at it as I would be – he’s miserably crap at it.

 

As the film neared its end, I found myself pleading for the band to have one, just one sustained piece of good luck.  When they’re invited to perform at a three-day music festival in Japan, it looks like the good luck has finally arrived.  But no, they’re then informed that they’re scheduled to play the very first slot on the very first day, coming onstage in the morning when it’s unlikely that most of the audience will have turned up yet…  By this point, I’d concluded that The Story of Anvil was an exercise in utter nihilism, warning about the folly of trying to chase your creative dreams and not accepting your fate as a catering-company delivery man or (in Reiner’s case) a construction worker.  However, in a final twist, the documentary shows the band trudging despondently onstage at the Japanese festival, just before noon, and discovering to their joy that the auditorium is in fact packed with appreciative fans.  Talk about a cathartic finale.  I exhaled such a huge sigh of relief that I almost deflated over my cinema seat.  (Though now that I think about it, and having lived in Japan, I could have told Kudlow and Reiner that you can always depend on the Japanese to show up on time.)

 

It probably wasn’t how they’d wanted to re-establish their name, but The Story of Anvil was such a critical and commercial success that the band got their second wind on the back of it.  Since then, they’ve played at major heavy-metal festivals like Download, Hellfest and Wacken Open Air, provided support for the likes of Metallica and AC/DC and had their songs featured in the soundtracks of movies like It (2017) and TV shows like The Simpsons (1989-present).  Currently, the band is on its Impact is Imminent tour, the East Asian leg of which brought them to my current abode, Singapore, a week ago.

 

 

The weather that evening was the sort of thing that could have appeared in The Story of Anvil as a bad-luck factor stopping an audience from attending one of their gigs.  It’d rained torrentially since the start of the afternoon and there was still no sign of it easing off when I arrived at the venue, the Esplanade Annex Studio, just before eight o’clock.  At least the rain-drenched view outside the studio, of Singapore’s skyscraper-choked Central Area on the far side of the waters where the Singapore River reaches Marina Bay, had an evocatively Blade Runner-type vibe.

 

I was dreading what I’d find when I entered the Annex Studio.  An empty or near-empty auditorium, signalling that the Curse of Anvil had returned?  Or a strictly regulated, typically Singaporean venue with row upon row of seats, where there was no space to get up, move around and shake a leg – imagine having to sit during a heavy-metal concert?  Or worst of all, a combination of both, a place packed with seats but devoid of people?  Thankfully, the interior was seat-less and, while it wasn’t full yet, it seemed to be filling at a steady pace.  I was also pleased to see that a makeshift bar had been installed in a back corner, courtesy of Singapore’s premiere heavy metal-themed pub, the Flying V Metal Bar on Coleman Street.  Among the offerings on its menu were ‘Iron Maiden Trooper Beer’.  Well, with a name like that, I just had to sample a pint of it.  And then I sampled another pint.  And then I sampled another….

 

 

There was a decent-sized crowd present when the support band, local outfit Deus Ex Machina, came on and performed a well-received set.  I liked how the standard heavy-metal T-shirts, long hair and beards sported by 80% of the band contrasted with the appearance of the singer, who had a sensible haircut and was in a sensible short-sleeved shirt and looked like he’d just arrived after a (slightly dress-down) day at the office.  This being Singapore, perhaps he had.

 

Then Anvil came onstage and it was immediately clear how much love there was for them in the room.  While they opened with their instrumental number March of the Crabs (which wasn’t inspired by pubic lice or even by the horror novels of Guy N. Smith, but by Kudlow’s observation that his hand had to move crab-like up and down his guitar strings as he played it) from the 1982 album Metal On Metal, Kudlow wasted no time in leaving the stage and joining the audience below.  At which point, he disappeared amid a sea of adoring fans and amid a forest of arms holding smartphones aloft to film him.

 

 

There ensued 90 minutes of gloriously old-school heavy metal, the tunes interspersed with crowd-pleasing banter from Kudlow.  He got a knowing and affectionate cheer when he introduced one song as being about sticking with your dreams and never giving up, which obviously he knew all about.  He also delivered an anecdote about an encounter with the late, legendary Lemmy, though to be honest his Lemmy impersonation sounded more like Dick Van Dyke’s chimney-sweep in Mary Poppins (1964) than the famously gravelly tones of the frontman of Motorhead.  Generally, after the indignities they’d suffered in The Story of Anvil, it was a tonic to see them up on stage 15 years later, thoroughly enjoying themselves – even if a moment where Kudlow and bassist Chris Robertson saluted each other got a bit Alan Partridge-esque.  The gig also demonstrated what an excellent drummer Robb Reiner is.  A couple of times during the film, he’d been shown at the end of his tether and threatening to quit the band.  Well, I’m glad he didn’t.

 

 

The closing number was probably their best-known song, the title track of Metal on Metal, which was the one featured on The Simpsons and which kicks off with the memorable lines, “Metal on metal / It’s what I crave / The louder the better / I’ll turn in my grave!”  After which, Kudlow couldn’t resist descending into the crowd again.  This time, it seemed like everyone in the venue managed to take a selfie with him.  Well, not everyone.  I didn’t want to break my phone-camera by taking a picture of my bleary, aged, worse-for-wear features.  But I did make a point of going up to him, shaking his hand and thanking him and his band for a job well done tonight.

 

It’s a job he’s still doing, against the odds, and a job he obviously loves.  A lucky man – at last.

 

Only a few Duff moments

 

 

I’ve had a hellishly busy week.  That’s why this report on Singapore’s big musical event of the month is reaching you nine days late…

 

It was with misgivings that I bought a ticket for the concert by the legendary – not always legendary for the right reasons – hard rock / heavy metal band Guns N’ Roses at Singapore’s National Stadium on November 12th.

 

Like many things in Singapore, the ticket was not cheap and, given Guns N’ Roses’ reputation for pissing off gig-goers, I wondered if I would get anything near my money’s worth.  I knew about, for example, their notorious 1992 appearance in Montreal when, thanks to both coming onstage late and leaving it early, they triggered a riot.  (“Come Monday morning, the mayor was looking for apologies and fans were looking for refunds.”)  Or their performance at the O2 in Dublin in 2010 when, after another late arrival onstage had angered the crowd, they played for 20 minutes, then walked off, and only returned an hour later after being strong-armed by the event organisers, by which time many fans had given up and gone home.

 

This year, the band was still being associated with crappy concerts.  Two July spots at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London suffered from “appalling sound, everything was muffled, couldn’t hear Axl’s voice, the support act was cancelled, GNR came on real late, kept fans later, no apologies, fans walking out.”  Their next scheduled gig, in Glasgow, was then cancelled ‘due to illness and medical advice’.

 

Meanwhile, I’m not a fan of stadium rock shows, where the venue’s scale and the distance between most punters and the stage kill any sense of intimacy.  And I was not enthused about seeing a band at Singapore’s National Stadium because I’d read some complaints about it on Trip Advisor.  The main gripe was that the place doesn’t let people bring food or drink onto the premises, obliging them, inside, to spend ages waiting in queues at the stadium’s vendors, where refreshments are sold at predictably high prices.

 

I had to work on November 12th until six o’clock.  As Guns N’ Roses were officially due onstage at seven – “Huh,” jeered a colleague, “do you really expect Axl Rose to come onstage at seven?” – I hopped on a taxi and went straight to the stadium lugging a knapsack full of important work material.  This meant I had to spend a couple of minutes at a security desk outside one of the stadium’s entrances while a lady went through every nook and cranny of the knapsack, rummaging among papers, books, stationery, my (empty) lunchbox, etc., with airport-style thoroughness.  But that security lady was undeniably chatty and pleasant.

 

Having made it inside, at about 6.50, I joined a queue to get some beer – also airport style, with lines of people threading through twisting passages formed by retractable-belt stanchions – and spent the next 20 minutes glancing nervously down into the arena and at the distant, empty stage, hoping that Axl Rose and co. would come on a little late.  I also feared that the beer would have run out by the time I reached the counter, although I was reassured when a guy propelled a trolley past me, laden with crates of Tiger beer, in the direction of the vendor.  Presumably much needed.

 

 

Each customer, incidentally, was allowed to buy a maximum of four alcoholic beverages at a time. If you purchased four Tiger beers – as I did, not wanting to experience that queue a second time – these came in four plastic glasses planted in an eggbox-like tray.  Transporting them without spilling anything, down to my seat near the bottom of one of the terraces, required mind-reader levels of concentration.  Furthermore, I had to decide where to stash those drinks when I reached the seat. The only space for them was on the floor between my feet, which meant I spent the gig reminding myself, “Keep your legs apart!  Keep your legs apart!”

 

Most of the stadium is roofed over.  Only one section of it, directly opposite the stage, is exposed to the elements.  The cheapest concert-tickets were for seats in that open area but, this being the wettest month in the Singaporean calendar, I’d decided not to risk it. There’d been a downpour earlier that day and, sitting there, it was possible that whilst listening to Guns N’ Roses performing their famous ballad November Rain, you’d be subjected to November rain for real.  Thankfully, the bad weather held off that evening.  The show’s most expensive tickets, meanwhile, were for the pitch, which was beyond the barrier a few rows below where I was sitting.  Spectators there could snuggle against the front of the stage.  Also, they were enviably unconstrained by having rows of seats all around them and could dance and jump and jig around as much as they liked.  Although the folk passing on the other side of the barrier, heading towards the stage, seemed to be mainly moneyed, middle-aged expats and I doubted if Axl and the gang would be looking down on much mosh-pit action tonight.

 

 

So, there I was, weary from a long day at work, jaded after waiting in a lengthy refreshments queue, worried that an accidental twitch of my foot might knock over my hard-won quartet of beers, and wondering if the evening ahead would prove to be a giant waste of money.  Then, at 7.30, the lights dimmed and…  The general stadium-crowd roared with excitement.  The well-heeled crowd pressing against the stage-front suddenly became densely spangled with light as hundreds of smartphone-cameras sprang into action.  From the speakers rushed the blood-stirring chords of It’s So Easy, a song on the first and best Guns N’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction.  And on the towering screens that flanked the stage, there appeared…  Axl Rose!  Duff McKagan!  Slash!  Or as someone sitting near to me exclaimed, “Sla-a-a-a-ash!”

 

 

I’d seen footage of Axl performing a few years ago, as temporary vocalist for AC/DC, and he’d looked worryingly porky.  But he’s slimmed down since then and is in decent shape again.  McKagan looked admirably lean and mean.  As for Slash…  Well, he’s evidently been putting too much middle-age spread on his sandwiches lately, not that the excess pounds affected his guitar-playing.  He and Jacob Rees-Mogg remain the only two men on the planet in 2022 who aren’t embarrassed to wear top hats in public.

 

While Axl, Duff and Slash loomed large on the screens, I wondered why Dizzy Reed didn’t appear on them too.  Keyboardist Reed, after all, has been in Guns N’ Roses since 1990.  He remained in the band after Slash, Duff, guitarist Gilby Clarke and drummer Matt Sorum quit in the 1990s, and he even stuck with Guns N’ Roses throughout the seemingly never-ending recording of the Chinese Democracy album, finally released in 2008.  This was when Axl operated a ‘revolving door’ policy regarding Guns N’ Roses membership – though guitarist Richard Fortus and drummer Frank Ferrer, recruited during this period, remain in the present line-up – and, apart from Reed, the band sometimes seemed to consist of Axl ‘and your granny on bongos’.  So where was Dizzy?  Did he have a hump on his back or a wart on his nose that made his bandmates too ashamed to show him off?  It wasn’t until halfway through proceedings that Axl announced ‘Mr Dizzy Reed on keyboards’, and the screens finally gave us a glimpse of this elusive but long-time and loyal bandmember.  I snatched a picture of the moment.  Here’s Dizzy!

 

 

This evening, Guns N’ Roses played 27 songs over three hours, a very pleasant surprise.  Considering some of those notorious past performances, I feared I might get three songs in 27 minutes before they called it a night.  The lengthy setlist did have a few drawbacks, though.  It meant we were treated to the whole musical smorgasbord that is the Guns N’ Roses experience, which in my opinion contains a few lows as well as numerous highs.  There were a few too many wibbly, wanky guitar solos designed to remind us that Slash hasn’t lost his musical prowess, as if anyone needed reminding.  That said, it was fun when he did an instrumental workout of Albert King’s Born Under a Bad Sign.

 

Also, though the setlist was weighted towards their late 1980s / early 1990s stuff, with a half-dozen songs coming from the mighty Appetite for Destruction, it was inevitable that something would slip in from the long-awaited, then much-derided Chinese Democracy.  I actually like the title track, which they bravely served up immediately after It’s So Easy at the start.  But the same album’s Better, which came a few songs later, just sounded a mess.

 

And then there were the ballads.  I realise that every heavy metal band in the world feels obliged to record a ballad now and again – well, every mainstream heavy metal band, as I don’t recall Cannibal Corpse ever recording something slow and smoochy to keep the ‘lay-deez’ sweet – but there is something about your average Guns N’ Roses ballad that sets my teeth on edge.  Probably it’s Axl’s voice, a melodramatic beast at the best of times.  When it’s emoting through the likes of Don’t Cry from the 1991 album Use Your Illusion I, for which tonight Axl donned a show-bizzy silver-lame jacket, I find it hard going indeed.

 

 

But my least favourite Guns N’ Roses ballad is the afore-mentioned November Rain, also from Use Your Illusion I, which seems to drone on forever.  Two hours into the set, the song hadn’t been played, and I began to entertain hopes that I’d get through the evening without hearing it.  Maybe the band would forget to play it?  But no.  Axl sat down at a piano and began tinkling its ivories and the bloody thing started.  At this point, a large percentage of the crowd, who thought November Rain was the best thing ever, sprang to their feet and started waving their lighters, or phone-lights, en masse in the air above their heads.  This made me feel like I’d suddenly been teleported into a Bryan Adams concert just as Bryan was starting to sing Everything I Do, I Do It for You (1991).  At least, for this rendition of November Rain, Slash didn’t attempt to play his guitar on top of Axl’s piano, as he’d done in the song’s video.

 

 

But enough of the negatives.  What of the positives?  Well, there were plenty.  Lots of spiffing tunes off Appetite for Destruction for a start: Welcome to the Jungle, Nightrain, Rocket Queen, etc.  Though for some reason not Mr Brownstone, which, the show’s official statistics tell me, makes this the band’s first gig since 1993 that they haven’t played the song.

 

I was also pleased that they treated the crowd to their bombastic cover versions of Wings’ James Bond theme Live and Let Die (1974) and Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1973).  Yes, they throw all subtlety and nuance out of the window and, basically, murder both songs – but they murder them gloriously.  For Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, Axl put on a cowboy hat, which made me wonder if he was acknowledging the fact that Dylan originally wrote the song for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah’s masterly western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).

 

Splendid too were their covers of the Who’s The Seeker (1970) and the Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog (1969).  The latter was sung by Duff McKagan with the instrumentation stripped back and it made for an impressively intense couple of minutes.  Commendably, McKagan wore a Motörhead T-shirt for part of the show.  Also, by coincidence, I’d just finished reading Sing Backwards and Weep (2020), the autobiography of the late, great grunge singer Mark Lanegan, in which Lanegan credits McKagan with helping to rescue him from homelessness and drug addiction in the late 1990s.  An all-round top bloke, then.

 

 

And I was very happy that, for the third song of their set, they performed Slither (2004) by the underrated Velvet Revolver, the group Slash, McKagan and Matt Sorum formed with Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots during their estrangement from Guns N’ Roses.

 

Even with 27 songs played, it was inevitable that they missed out a few things I’d have loved to hear.  They performed nothing off their album of punk and hard-rock covers, The Spaghetti Incident? (1993), which nobody in the world seemed to like apart from myself.  Their boisterous version of the UK Subs’ Down on the Farm (1982), which Axl sings in a hilarious ‘Mockney’ accent, would have slotted in nicely tonight.

 

And I’d have welcomed a rendition of the sweary, vitriolic and exhilarating Get in the Ring, off their other 1991 album, the imaginatively titled Use Your Illusion IIGet in the Ring is basically a rock ‘n’ roll update of the Scottish poetic tradition of flyting.  It contains such lyrics as “I got a thought that would be nice / I’d like to crush your head tight in my vice,” and takes aim at all the “punks in the press” who “want to start shit by printing lies instead of the things we said…  Andy Secher at Hit Parader, Circus Magazine, Mick Wall at Kerrang!, Bob Guccione Jr at Spin…”  If they updated that shit-list for 2022, which modern-day journalists would be on it, I wonder?

 

Oh well.  You can’t have everything, I suppose.

 

As the band took the stage at 7.30 that evening, and as everyone around me went wild, it occurred to me that this was the first time in almost two years I’d been at a concert.  After all the restrictions imposed by that cursed bloody virus, it felt marvellous to experience live music again.  Yes, I had a massive, uplifting sense of joy and relief…  Just because I was seeing Axl Rose and the crew amble into view on two giant stadium screens.  Not something I ever expected to happen, but it did.  Thanks, guys!

 

Coltrane’s sweetest notes

 

© BBC

 

Actor and comedian Robbie Coltrane, who died on October 14th, seemed part of the furniture in British TV shows and films when I was in my late teens and twenties.  His performing talents, gallus manner and considerable physique made him impossible to ignore.

 

Also, as someone who’d grown up mostly in Scotland, I – and everyone I knew – appreciated the fact that he was a Scottish lad.  Originally, he’d been one Anthony MacMillan from Rutherglen, with his stage name inspired by the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.  It’s fair to say that Scotland did not get much attention in the London-centric media of 1980s Thatcherite Britain, except when it fleetingly made the news as the site of yet another factory or colliery closure. (Admittedly, things are only slightly better in 2022.)  Thus, seeing Coltrane on popular, national telly or in movies reaching international audiences, and seeing him be unashamedly Scottish too, felt like a victory.

 

Anyway, here are a dozen of my dozen favourite TV and cinematic moments involving Robbie Coltrane.

 

The Young Ones (1984)

Coltrane made three appearances in the groundbreakingly anarchic BBC comedy show The Young Ones.  I remember him best in the episode Bambi, which may have been the first time he registered on my radar.  Bambi is the one where Rik (Rik Mayall), Vyvyan (Ade Edmondson), Neil (Nigel Planer) and Mike (Christopher Ryan) appear on University Challenge (up against a snooty team from ‘Footlights College, Oxbridge’ comprised of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Ben Elton), while Motorhead play The Ace of Spades in their living room.  Observing the shenanigans through a microscope is Coltrane as a genteel, old-fashioned Scottish doctor (“Absolutely amazing! Human beings the size of amoebas!”), possibly modelled on Dr Finlay in the 1930s stories by A.J. Cronin.  Coltrane brings the episode to an abrupt end when he accidentally drops an éclair on the specimen slide, burying Rik, Vyvyan and co. in creamy goo.

 

Laugh???  I Almost Paid My Licence Fee (1984)

During the early 1980s, Coltrane featured in three TV comedy sketch shows, Alfresco (1983-84), which also featured the afore-mentioned Fry, Laurie, Thompson and Elton; A Kick Up The Eighties (1984); and Laugh??? I Almost Paid My Licence Fee (1984).  In the latter, Coltrane made several memorable appearances as a West-of-Scotland Orangeman called Mason Boyne.  With his imposing bulk and craggy features, and wearing a black suit, bowler hat and sash,  Coltrane certainly looked the part.  Laugh? was produced by BBC Scotland and this was one of the very few times when the broadcaster was bold enough to have a go at the Orange Order and its paranoia about all things Popish.  “It’s all here, Matthew Chapter 2, Verses 1-10,” says Boyne, citing the Bible in support of his assertion that the Pope is the Antichrist.  “All you have to do is… jumble the words up a bit.”

 

© BBC

 

Caravaggio (1986)

Throughout the 1980s Coltrane had supporting or minor roles in many British or made-in-Britain films.  These include, incidentally, several forgotten fantasy and science-fiction ones: Death Watch (1980), Flash Gordon (1980), Britannia Hospital (1982), Krull (1983) and Slipstream (1989).  Okay, Flash Gordon hasn’t been forgotten – unfortunately.  Anyway, in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, he gives a performance that’s stayed in my memory more than most.  He plays Scipione Borghese, the 17th century cardinal who becomes the patron of the turbulent Italian painter.  As usual with Jarman, there’s striking set design, deliberately littered with anachronisms, and the film sees the debuts of Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean.

 

Mona Lisa (1986)

Coltrane also provides good support in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa.  He plays Thomas, a garage-owner who offers sanctuary for the movie’s main character, old friend and harassed ex-convict George, played by the incomparable Bob Hoskins.  Thomas has no bearing on the film’s plot, which sees George employed by a gangster (Michael Caine) to drive around and look after high-class prostitute Simone (Cathy Tyson), whom he gradually falls in love with. But the friendship Thomas offers George is one of the few specks of light in a bleak film.  His best line comes when he walks in on George while George is watching a dodgy video he’s obtained – discovering to his horror that it features his beloved Simone in some hardcore porn.  Innocently, Thomas asks, “Channel 4, is it?”

 

Tutti Frutti (1987)

The pinnacle of Coltrane’s 1980s work, the tragi-comedy series Tutti Frutti is surely the best piece of television to come out of Scotland.  At the time, I remember the New Musical Express hailing it as ‘the best TV show ever’, though sadly those know-nothing kids running the 2022 online version of the NME didn’t even mention Tutti Frutti in their Coltrane obituary.  Written by John Byrne, Tutti Frutti has Coltrane as Danny McGlone, who’s drafted in to sing for a vintage Scottish rock ‘n’ roll band called the Majestics after their original singer, Danny’s older brother, is killed in a car accident.  The Majestics are on a death-spiral, largely due to the antics of guitarist Vincent Driver (Maurice Roëves, who died last year).  Driver styles himself as ‘the iron man of Scottish rock’, but his personal life is a destructive shambles.  The band’s conniving manager Eddie Clockerty (a never-better Richard Wilson) doesn’t help things, either.

 

One consolation for Danny is another recent addition to the band’s line-up – guitarist Suzy Kettles, played by Emma Thomson with an impressively convincing Glaswegian accent. He gradually falls for the sassy Suzy, though she has her own issues – an abusive ex-husband, who happens to be a dentist.  Can Danny and Suzy get together while, around them, everything descends into a hellhole of fights, farce, humiliation, depression, knifings, suicide and extreme dental violence?  Due to copyright problems over its title song, written and recorded by Little Richard in 1955, Tutti Frutti didn’t get another airing for a very long time.  Happily, it’s now available on DVD and three years ago was shown again on BBC Scotland.

 

© BBC

 

Blackadder the Third (1987)

Coltrane played the celebrated lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson three times on stage and screen.  His best-remembered performance as the famously irascible Johnson is in the Ink and Incapability episode of the much-loved TV comedy Blackadder, wherein the crafty title character (Rowan Atkinson) and his hapless minion Baldrick (Tony Robinson) accidentally incinerate the one and only copy of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) prior to its publication.  This leaves them with just one night to write a replacement dictionary before Johnson finds out and inflicts his wrath upon them.  In the funniest scene, Johnson boasts that his dictionary “contains every word in our beloved language.”  To which Blackadder offers him his “most enthusiastic contrafibularities.”  He sticks the knife in by adding, “I’m anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.”

 

Henry V (1989)

Sir John Falstaff, a prominent character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, is actually dead at the start of Henry V.  However, in this cinematic version, writer and director Kenneth Branagh couldn’t bear to leave out the portly, garrulous rogue, so he showed Coltrane as Falstaff in an all-too-brief flashback.  Falstaff was a role Coltrane was clearly born to play and it’s a tragedy he never got cast in a proper adaptation of the two Henry IV plays (or for that matter The Merry Wives of Windsor).

 

Nuns on the Run (1990)

Nuns on the Run, which has Coltrane and Monty Python’s Eric Idle as criminals trying to escape some nastier criminals and taking refuge, and donning disguises, in a convent, is truly a one-joke film.  That joke is seeing Coltrane dressed as and pretending to be a nun.  It’s a pretty hilarious one, I have to admit.  Though totally inconsequential, Nuns on the Run works better than another comedy he was in during the same period, The Pope Must Die (1991).  North American distributors, nervous about the film’s sacrilegious title and noticing Coltrane’s girth, unsubtly renamed it The Pope Must Diet.

 

© HandMade Films / 20th Century Fox

 

The Bogie Man (1992)

This TV film adapted to the small screen the Alan Grant / John Wagner comic book about a Scotsman with psychiatric issues who believes he’s Humphrey Bogart (or characters Bogie played in the movies) and goes around fighting crime. The TV version was panned by the critics, disowned by Grant and Wagner, and as far as I known has never been reshown.  While I found it underwhelming, I enjoyed Coltrane’s performance as the lead character – occasionally, when not channelling Bogart, he lapses into impersonating Sean Connery and Arnold Schwarzenegger too.  Also, Craig Ferguson, years before he became a superstar on American television, gives a nice supporting turn as the cop on Coltrane’s trail.

 

Cracker (1993-95)

Arguably Coltrane’s greatest role, his work in Cracker as Dr Edward ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald, a criminal psychologist helping out a dysfunctional team of detectives (Christopher Eccleston, Geraldine Somerville, Lorcan Cranitch) won him the British Academy Award for Best Actor three years in a row.  Grim and intense, with the only humour coming from the arrogant, flamboyant and self-destructive Fitz, the show was at its most gruelling during its To Be a Somebody story at the start of season 2.  This involves a terrifyingly credible killer (Robert Carlyle), who’s ended up the way he is largely because of trauma he suffered in the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster.  It also features the murder of one of the show’s main characters.

 

© Granada Television

 

Goldeneye (1995) and The World is Not Enough (1999)

Coltrane’s entertaining turns as ex-KGB man Dimitri Valentin, now a would-be entrepreneur in post-Communist Russia, are among the highlights of these two Bond movies, which have Pierce Brosnan playing 007.  Valentin certainly gets the best lines.  In Goldeneye, when Bond holds a gun to the back of his head and he hears the click of its safety catch, he observes: “Walther PPK, 7.65 millimetre. Only three men I know use such a gun.  I believe I’ve killed two of them.”   And in The World Is Not Enough, when Bond interrogates him about sultry oil tycoon Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), whom Bond has recently bedded, and demands, “What’s your business with Elektra King?”, he retorts, “I thought you were the one giving her the business.”  Valentin, who runs a hellish-sounding country-and-western club in one film and a caviar factory in the other, was devised at a time when Russian oligarchs could be depicted as lovable, comic Arthur-Daley-from-Minder-type grifters; and not sinister billionaires laundering mountains of dirty money in the City of London and buying their way into the heart of the British establishment.

 

From Hell (2001)

Like The Bogey Man, this movie adaptation of Alan Moore’s labyrinthine graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, published in instalments from 1989 to 1998, was disdained by its original creator.  However, if you can erase all memories of Moore’s From Hell and focus solely on the film, it’s decent.  For one thing, it looks at the Ripper’s hideous murders from the perspective of characters commonly neglected in previous films on the subject – his female victims.  Coltrane gives a solid performance as Sergeant George Godley, the loyal, capable and intelligent assistant to the film’s hero, the vulnerable, opium-raddled Inspector Frederick Abberline (Johnny Depp).  A scene where Godley and Abberline are filmed from behind as they approach the funeral ceremony of one Ripper victim, dressed in black suits and bowler hats, even evokes Laurel and Hardy.  (In fact, at one time, Coltrane and Robert Carlyle had tried unsuccessfully to get a Laurel and Hardy movie off the ground.)

 

Thereafter, Coltrane achieved global popularity playing Hagrid in eight Harry Potter movies and got regular gigs doing voice-work in items like The Gruffalo (2009) and Brave (2012).  None of this was my cup of tea, but good on him for securing well-deserved fame and, presumably, fortune too.  It’s just a pity that a few years ago ill-health caught up with him, which deprived our TV and movie screens of his always-welcome presence.

 

© Eon Productions