What Might Have Been

It's February 1979, and Punk is moribund enough for Legs & Co to get involved and start clod hopping about in plastic sandals and party wigs. If they'd only flipped the record over they would have encountered 'Frigging in the Rigging', a puerile chant full of explicit sexual imagery that is crying out for literal interpretation in dance by five ditzy dancers. Can you imagine the hand gestures?

From Just This Side Of Midnight

I don’t know whether recent allegations about Cliff Richard are true. My only response is that it wouldn’t surprise me, not because I have reason to particularly suspect him but because, in a world where Rolf Harris has been unmasked as a serial sex offender, I now lack the capacity to be shocked by further revelations. Anyway, Cliff fascinates me, and always has done, so I thought I’d look at some of his occasionally very odd oeuvre, today arriving in 1979, already twenty one years into his seemingly endless career.  

Here, Cliff is searching for a green light. He’s been looking for it all night. It’s one of his sleaziest records, ably complemented here by the addition of Hot Gossip in this performance from a 1979 episode of ‘The Kenny Everett Video Show’.

Cliff appears to be lost in a sensuous reverie but, ever the innovator, has clearly worked closely with choreographer Arlene Phillips to invent dogging. The torch wielding, goggle wearing, balaclava clad dancers bring an additional sinister note to the balefully lit proceedings. Cliff, clad all in black, is both victim and voyeur. He’s found half a dozen green lights tonight, and, one way or another, he is going to get fucked.

It's good to be back.

Mike Read, Mike Read, 275-285

Mike Read introduces 

The Village People.

The Golden Age Of Top Of The Pops

003: The Pointer Sisters

The Golden Age Of Top Of The Pops

002: The Olympic Runners

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

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?

Nuances

Showcasing the delicate art of subtle yet convincing screen acting.

001 Richard Kiel

Victim

In his long career as a state sanctioned killer, James Bond has taken an inordinate amount of lives (he’s also been indirectly responsible for loads more deaths, but let’s park that for now). To be fair, most of his targets were trying to kill him or, at least, were in the employ of the agents of evil, so he sometimes has a point but, even so, that’s a hell of a lot to carry around. This new series will look at some of Bond’s victims, more specifically the ones that, if he had a conscience, might occasionally shake their gory locks at him in unpleasant dreams: the ones who suffered, the ones who screamed, the ones who died in cruel and unusual circumstances.

Take this bloke, for instance. He’s a pilot and a common or garden villain only distinguished by a great moustache. Halfway through the flight, he leaves the cabin, pulls a gun, shoots out the control panel and then bails out leaving James without a parachute in a plane that’s about to crash. Little things like that don’t bother 007, of course, who simply jumps out, catches the pilot up, then knocks him about and nicks his parachute from him before kicking him away into the ether.

What’s disturbing about this incident is that the doomed pilot gives out two screams as he floats off: the first full of indignation at being kicked in the face and forcibly parted from his life saving device, and a second anguished, horribly strangled cry as he realises that he is now as dead as a doornail, but will have to hang around hopelessly and helplessly waiting to hit terminal velocity and begin his long drop to the ground. 

What do you do with that time? What does that realisation of impending annihilation do to the human mind? Baddie or not, it’s an awful way to go. I hope you’re proud of yourself, Bond.