The Golden Age Of Top Of The Pops

002: The Olympic Runners

The Golden Age Of Top Of The Pops

001: Dandy

Burn, Baby, Burn

Disco Inferno courtesy of 'The Bitch'.

After The Stud

For all its artistic faults, ‘The Stud’ was extremely successful in financial terms and, naturally, a sequel was created, this time concentrating completely on perhaps the first films least interesting character, sophisticated slag Fontaine Khaled, as played by the increasingly witchy looking Joan Collins.

‘The Bitch’ is a mess from start to finish, so much so that I was surprised to see in the credits that someone had actually written it, and that someone actually claimed to have directed it (it was the same man, Gerry O’Hara, who should be ashamed of himself).

The format is familiar – short sex scene, long disco scene, tiny amount of plot, short sex scene, long disco scene, tiny amount of plot, short sex scene, etc. The world presented is supposed to be opulent and decadent, but just looks incredibly boring and the interiors, especially Fontaine’s bedroom, are unspeakable, like a Russian oligarch’s box room, jam full of fur, onyx and disgusting contemporary art.

There is a story in there somewhere, something about The Bitch getting stitched up by an Italian super lover on the make, a sort of role reversal of the first film that could have provided a mildly ironic counterpoint, although I should say at this stage that my reading of the ‘plot’ is subjective, and that there are no dramatic scenes to support this, and the actors are unable to convey the range of emotions needed to tell any sort of story, so who knows what the point is. Actually, it's pointless, and that's all there is to it. Now I'm not a person who insists on meaning, as long as the journey is enjoyable, as long as the trip is worth it. 'The Bitch' isn't worth it, and it isn't enjoyable, which to me is the true definition of pointless.

Characters from the first film crop up every now and again and, despite only a few months having passed between ‘The Stud’ and its sequel, they all seem terribly aged and exhausted, as if their wild lifestyles have finally caught up with them. If there had been a third film, it probably would have starred a bunch of skeletons.

There is disco dancing, which I like, especially a silly but enjoyable routine featuring Cherry Gillespie from Pan’s People and a topless lady with an impressive afro. Mostly, however, the cast and extras clomp about to unhip tunes by Quantum Leap, Leo Sayer and The Three Degrees, or, somewhat pathetically, to a track called ‘Everything Is Great’. It isn’t.

There’s a scene set in some tacky, sticky nightclub where the ‘beautiful’ people are chaotically throwing shapes to some rubbishy disco track, and the camera zooms in on a pair of flashing feet in a pair of stiletto shoes. It starts off alright but, within seconds, the feet have lost it and are all over the place, crashing down in an attempt to stomp the beat to death. Does the camera turn away? No. Do we cut to something else? No. And that’s ‘The Bitch’ in a nutshell and why I don’t like it. They don’t care, so why should I?

The Bitch

 

Getting Down

What's His Game?

‘The Stud’ may have seemed the perfect suburban adult entertainment in 1978, but today the signifiers of sophistication displayed in the film (furs, cocktails, poppers, loafers, top loading VCR's, Joan Collins) give it a laughably kitsch appeal that just about make up for its shortcomings as a work of art.

Based on a best selling ‘novel’ by Jackie Collins, the film tells the story of an ambitious London nightclub waiter turned greeter turned club manager Tony Blake, played by saturnine Swiss actor Oliver Tobias. Tony wants his own club but, in the meantime, is stuck with ‘Hobo’ (absolutely nothing like ‘Tramp’), a swinging cellar populated by wealthy and unbearable middle aged people making jokes about child molestation, Legs and Co. dancing and a cool black DJ in a great big cowboy hat playing Leo Sayer records.

On top of this (literally) he has to contend with his boss, bored socialite Fontaine Khaled (played by Jackie’s sister Joan) who sees Tony’s frequent and vigorous affections as part of their working relationship, and has no qualms about letting him know this on a regular basis. What unfolds over the course of the next hour and a half is a tacky maelstrom of recrimination, class consciousness, disco, angry parrots, homosexual assault, wrinkly nudity, uncomfortable looking lift sex, uncomfortable looking swing sex and an eight minute filler sequence where Tony simply drives through the countryside in his MG.

Glowering Tobias gives a fairly wooden performance, and Joan Collins, as ever, makes your skin crawl. The film itself is obviously low budget, dimly lit and poorly located, re-using shots over and over and slumping unceremoniously from one scene to another. The result is a slightly crushing experience, detailing as it does the depressing, sleazy lives of idiots in a dingy, miserable world where prostitution and borderline paedophilia are presented as the zenith of jet set glamour.

In its defence, the film is very funny on all sorts of (mainly ironic) levels, and has some memorable dialogue (once you’ve seen it, you won’t be able to check your reflection in the mirror without growling ‘you handsome bastard’). It is also quite clearly and cynically designed to make as much as money possible by cutting costs and appealing to the lowest common denominator at every turn, so we shouldn’t expect a cinematic masterpiece. That said, the climactic scene, where a crushed and humiliated Tony fights his way out of the club as the countdown to the New Year begins, finally bursting out into the (day for) night at the stroke of midnight and taking a massive breath of clean and uncorrupted air actually achieves a level of profundity missing elsewhere in the film and, as he saunters off into the night, you wonder where’s he’s going and what (and who) he’ll get up to next. Sadly, the sequel ‘The Bitch’ is all about Fontaine and is irredeemably awful. But we'll pick that scab tomorrow.

The music for the film was put together by the enigmatic Biddu, a talented writer, arranger and producer who had a few glory years in the UK charts with hit records like Carl Douglas’ ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ and Tina Charles’ ‘I Love To Love’ before returning to his native India. Appropriately for this low rent celluloid opus, the soundtrack LP was released by US infomercial giants Ronco, famous for severely editing tracks to fit more on an album and their immortal range of household must haves like the Veg-o-matic and the Buttoneer.

Anyway, here is a pretty comprehensive American trailer, which will give you a damn good idea of what you’re up against.

If you were wondering, by the way, Oliver Tobias' Wardrobe is by Herbie Frogg.

The Stud

Music Machine

To say that ‘Music Machine’ is my favourite British disco film sounds like faint praise but, in actual fact, it’s a film I have a lot of affection for, a bona fide UK exploitation film that is obviously in the thrall of ‘Saturday Night Fever’ but has all the edge of ‘Summer Holiday’.

Ill-fated Gerry Sundquist plays Gerry, a bit of a chancer who is also a bit of a dancer. When his local nightclub holds a competition for a pair of disco freaks to appear in some dodgy film, Gerry decides that this is his moment and goes all out for the prize, enlisting the fabulously exotic daughter of an African diplomat (played by ‘New Faces’ star Patti Boulaye) as his partner.

There’s the usual trials and tribulations on the way to the big night, dirty tricks, disappointments, confrontations, fallings out and flirtations but, for some reason, the only scene I can really recall is Gerry jerkily dancing up umpteen flights of stairs to the high rise flat where he lives with his Mum and Dad. In true ‘pad it out’ exploitation style this takes a long, long time - but does neatly summarise why Gerry lives for disco: his life is shit, his prospects are zero, the lift is broken but, on the plus side, but he can dance a bit and, when he’s doing it, everything else goes away.

We’ve looked at youth cults before, as well as the transcendent qualities of dancing, and the two bump clumsily into each other here. Ultimately, ‘Music Machine’ is a cheap cash in, and the familiarity of the settings and the depressed feel of late seventies Britain is enough strip it of any trace of stardust – but there’s an endearing, poignant, totally understandable truth there in the way that it shows how young people live for Saturday night, and seize the opportunity to go out and get out, to momentarily escape their limited lives and the adult grind that is just ahead of them. You’re a long time grown up, for Christ’s sake, so why not be able to look back and remember that you once wore a white suit and danced like John Travolta?

Feeling The Love

Britain is not a nation of dancers, a statement borne out by forty odd years of watching young people mill about and bump into each other to music every week on pervert’s playground ‘Top Of The Pops’. Even the dancers on the programme couldn’t dance or, at least, despite having some individual skills, found themselves trotting around and doing half-hearted high kicks in whatever piss poor routine Pan’s People, Ruby Flipper or Legs & Co were scheduled to do that week. 

In 1978, however, for a few minutes at least, everything changed. The catalyst was Donna Summer, and the soundtrack was her phenomenal hit record ‘I Feel Love’. Faced with the relentless propulsive energy (literally, the sequencer sounds like an outboard motor) of this superlative track, even the British could dance. Ignore Legs & Co, by the way, they’re just getting in the way (if you’re wondering, they are sat in a plywood car because they have just ‘interpreted’ Jonathan Richman’s ‘Roadrunner’). 

Look at the audience, though, the poor, lumpy proletariat who have been pushed around and out of the way all day and ran the risk of being groped by The Hairy Fuckflake or worse: they are energised, invigorated, alive. This isn’t just disco, this is a primal force and, somewhere deep in the collective consciousness, there is a memory of how to rhythmically and vigorously move to music. How much more fun is that than shifting your weight from foot to foot and hoping for the best?

The British Private Press

This is Jasper. Yes, they have awful hair, now let's move on. Jasper have a core trio of drums, bass and guitar, and a couple of multi instrumentalists who provide keyboards, additional guitar and a pretty tidy horn section. They all sing. Their LP is a cut above many private press albums, featuring some  interesting and well arranged covers and three self penned tracks, although they're not particularly good. A tight little band, a bit glam, bit pop, bit disco, their occasionally camp album is well worth fifty new pence of anyone's hard earned.

Here's a medley of the sort of stuff which I'll bet used to go down a storm in the caravan clubs, holiday camps and miners socials they played in. It could never really be described as cool, but it certainly has something. This was recorded in Huddersfield on an undisclosed date, but I'm guessing early 1978.

Disco Verite

I don't always agree with Adam Curtis, but I'll watch anything he makes. 'All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace' has been a fascinating trip, although I have occasionally shouted at the telly. I've no wish to trivialise his work, but I particularly enjoyed the archive footage of various disco dancers he used to illustrate the last film in the series, so here are some snapshots.

Just like me, Adam has his own blog which he sometimes uses as a testing ground for new projects; unlike me, Curtis is not that interested in disco.