VII

Chelsea on Ice

Spring-Summer 1977: The Super 8 film I was planning with Jordan took off like a roller coaster after the success of Sebastiane at the Gate. The John Dee script was pirated and used as a framing device; Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead, and the Angelic Conversations of the good doctor Dee were scrambled with SNIFFin Glue and London’s OUTRAGE. ‘See natures splendours, mans achievements’ – by March, HIH FASION as it was called at first, a R.I.P. OFF Films production, was xeroxed like a fanzine.

Throughout the filming a debate raged about the title of both the film and the company. R.I.P. OFF Films presented ONISWAKIMALIPONCE, HIH FASION and JUBILEE. R.I.P. OFF became Megalovision, and eventually registered as the company which produced Jubilee.

As usual there was no money; but James Whaley, with true bravado, gambled everything on an air ticket to Tehran and arrived back with a cheque for £50,000, one week before we started shooting. Meanwhile, Jordan helped me with the casting, introducing the Slits and Adam Ant. I’d spotted Adam several weeks before at the end of the King’s Road, in a dirty white shirt ripped to show the ‘Fuck’ which Jordan had carved on his back with a razor blade. I moved back to the old studio at Butlers Wharf, which we used as an HQ from which to make the film in the surrounding streets; and John Maybury, a young film student, and Kenny Morris, the drummer of the Banshees, started to build the set in the building next door with rubbish which they brought in from skips. Luciana and I snapped away at concerts, looking for extras. The cast was slowly assembled. Toyah Wilcox arrived out of the blue one afternoon in a long black dress and lopsided haircut with a scarlet bang: she was so enthusiastic it was impossible to refuse her. Jordan persuaded Adam. And James asked Ian Charleson if he would play one of the parts at his gym. With Jenny Runacre, Richard O’Brien, Orlando, Hermine and Little Nell, we were nearly complete. Neil Kennedy, Linda Spurrier and Karl Johnson made up the cast, and ‘Chelsea on Ice’ was under way – with a gun at our heads to finish it before the end of the year.

~

Jubilee, Amyl (Jordan) (Photo: Jean Marc Prouveur)

The censor demanded five cuts in the film as he was certain it was going to have a large following. In the event he was proved wrong: the film drew smaller audiences than either Sebastiane or The Tempest. But armed with statistics of identikit muggings from A Clockwork Orange, he said you wouldn’t want to wake up to Jubilee-style killings in the Sun. I pointed out to him that Jubilee was not more violent than many another film, but that the violence was unglamourised, quite real and seen negatively – not like the balletic celebration of violence in A Clockwork Orange at all. In the end he demanded only one cut, to keep the balance between the various factions who warred over his job. It seemed that it was more than his life was worth to let the film through uncut.

Moreover I had the management of the Gate to consider, whose new cinema Jubilee was opening. They were desperate for a certificate with only a few days to go till the opening. I took the scissors myself and cut seven seconds from the murder in pink polythene sheets. Sex and violence were the censors’ chief bugbears; but sexual violence is almost entirely committed by men, and it seemed to me that this scene was more likely to put men off than turn them on.

~

Signing Up (A Sequence)

CARDINALE BORGIA GINZ (who owned the media): You wanna know my story, Babe, It’s easy. This is the generation who forgot how to lead their lives. They were so busy watching my endless movie. It’s power, Babe. Power. I don’t create it, I own it. I sucked and sucked and sucked. The Media became their only reality, and I owned the world of flickering shadows – BBC, TUC, ATV, ABC, ITV, CIA, CBA, NFT, MGM, KGB, C of E … You name it – I bought them all, and rearranged the alphabet.

~

Megalovision

In Jubilee all the positives are negated, turned on their heads. Its dream imagery drifts uncomfortably on the edge of reality, balanced like Hermine on the tightrope. Its amazons make men uncomfortable, ridicule their male pursuits. Its men are all victims. The heroines have emblematic names – Bod, Boadicea, Anybody; Viv, Viva, Life; Mad and Amyl. Amyl (alias Jordan) is the high-flown historian of the divided culture of beef and cows, mansions and houses: ‘It all began with William the Conqueror, who screwed the Anglo-Saxons into the ground, carving the land into Theirs and Ours. They lived in Mansions and ate Beef at fat tables whilst the poor lived in houses minding the cows on a bowl of porridge, whilst they pushed them around with their arrogant foreign accents. There were two languages in the land, and the seeds of war were sown.’ Through this war Elizabeth I, the nation’s anima, wanders in virgin white; while John Dee, the magus, inventor and universal man reveals to her the shadow of her time. A bitter chill blows through the film. For an audience who expected a punk music film, full of ‘anarchy’ and laughs at the end of the King’s Road, it was difficult to swallow. They wanted action, not analysis; and most of the music lay on the cutting-room floor. Vivienne Westwood, instigator of fashion panic at the World’s End, produced one of her brilliant T-shirts to rip the film to pieces and say how boring it was. To sing of boredom is one thing, to show it quite another. At the opening of the film the audience took sides. One strong man fainted; and a flower-power lady in a long dress danced in front of the audience proclaiming love. Meanwhile the motorbike girls who had stood in for the bike scene, frightening everyone with their leathers and cans of Special Brew, got up and disappeared into the darkness, declaring they were Christians.

Afterwards, the film turned prophetic. Dr Dee’s vision came true – the streets burned in Brixton and Toxteth, Adam was Top of the Pops and signed up with Margaret Thatcher to sing at the Falklands Ball. They all sign up one way or another.

~

The End of Entertainment

ANGEL: The show that made Tyburn look like a picnic – save your souls! Real nails, real hammers. Naked as nature intended. The impresario has spared no expense GOLD FRANKINCENSE MYRRH plus the Daughters of God LIVE ON STAGE. It’s your last chance – the show is about to end: Cardinal Borgia Ginz is going into the car-park business.

BORGIA (to his aides): There’s more bread in cars than people – and they don’t have to be entertained. I build their houses, plan their roads, plant the trees and run the buses. They’re all working for me. I call it improvement, PROGRESS, Babe. And they follow blindly. I’m their life insurance. Without progress life would be UNBEARABLE – progress has taken the place of heaven. It’s like pornography, better than the real thing.

AMYL: Our school motto was Faites vos désires réalitées; ‘make your desires reality’. Myself I preferred the song ‘Don’t dream it, be it’. In those days desires weren’t allowed to become reality. So fantasy was substituted for them – films, books, pictures, they called it art. But when your desires become reality you don’t need fantasy any longer, or art.

~

Little England

At the end of Jubilee our heroines, fleeing from the dying cities, across the Iron Curtain to a dream England of the past: the England of stately homes, which are the indispensable prop for the English way of life. The soap operas of our lives demand them – anyway, they’re big at the box-office. Any film or TV series that has one is half-way to success. Private schools are housed in them, so the children of the wealthy get a taste for them young. Everyone else is encouraged to gawp at them during bank holidays. Longleat, where we made the end of the film, is one of these. Thoroughly commercialised, a banker’s cottage, it appears in the schoolbooks as possessing architectural merit. In fact, it’s a square, rather ugly house, with a misproportioned façade. Without its pepper-pot roof it could be a research lab in the depressed international style of the new universities. The house is in the grip of a deadly blight. My first view through the fine Victorian planting of trees and rhododendrons was of a valley filled with a thousand caravans, in the middle of which it looked like a beached whale. Signposts directed you to ‘Cream Teas’ or the ‘Kama Sutra Apartments’ – under-eighteens discouraged, and a grave warning of the erotic nature for the rest. The cream teas were mediocre, served in a basement canteen; and the sexy paintings, by one of the sons of the house, were a last-ditch attempt to bring the place to life. The bleak Victorian panelling had been daubed in emerald and purple, with figures in heavy impasto coupling lugubriously. In one bedroom a rhino horn was glued to the bed-head of a four-poster to encourage its flagging occupants. Outside, the orientalism was echoed by a sad little yin and yang garden, with some tatty cherry trees planted haphazardly round the figure-of-eight pond.

Beyond the penicillin mould of caravans lay the Safari Park, a grid of aimless tarmac roads that meandered over the old park, between high wire fences reminiscent of Ashford Remand Centre. The centuries-old oaks, now dying, were wrapped up in barbed wire and plastic in a forlorn attempt to stop the marauding exotics from destroying them. Baboons and Siberian tigers eyed you malevolently as you drove past. Nell said, ‘I’ve never been to the country before. It’s so fascinating – and the animals – I have a passion for fur.’ We filmed both outside and inside the house. Jordan facing a rhino with her spiky hairstyle, horn to horn – and at one of the gate posts we used as the border checkpoint, with its ominous fence, a red flag is draped. Much of this ended on the cutting-room floor, particularly the last scene where our stars, in the flight from reality, had tea with the ageing Hitler and his wife. One piece that went had Hitler painting those lurid murals, talking to himself about the problem of inflation – ‘We came to Dorset. It’s the perfect place for retirement. Josef suggested it after we met in Berlin. The people here are much too dozy to notice me, and if they did, much too polite to say anything. We’re thinking of giving it up, retiring to the sun – Eva suggested South America.’

~

Entering Dorset

MAD: Daddy’s quite a lunatic – I hope we don’t end up fighting. He’s banned most things – it’s the most conservative regime in England. The place is a sort of holiday camp for retired trade unionists – he’s modelled his administration on Butlin’s. Everything’s done to the rule book – no Deviation in Dorset, you’ll get no help from anyone. Daddy always said the trouble with Rome was too few lions. There are more lions in Dorset than in Africa.

CRABS: It’s not true.

MAD: Yes – it’s in The Guinness Book of Records. And tigers, though some say there’re more of those in Scotland.

~

With Jubilee the progressive merging of film and my reality was complete. The source of the film was often autobiographical, the locations were the streets and warehouses in which I had lived during the previous ten years. The film was cast from among and made by friends. It was a determined and often reckless analysis of the world which surrounded us, constructed pell-mell through the early months of 1977. The shooting script is a mass of xeroxes and quick notes on scraps of paper, torn photos and messages from my collaborators, and the resulting film has something of the same quality. Just as it seems that it is settling down it’s off in another direction, like a yacht in a squall. Unlike Sebastiane there are now no amusing stories to tell, as if they occurred they were engulfed in celluloid and quickly integrated into the finished work. Whereas in Sebastiane we lived in a world outside the film, in Jubilee our world became the film. A first note to myself makes the position quite clear –

JUBILEE

is a fantasy documentary fabricated so that documentary and fictional forms are confused and coalesce.

~

The two middle-aged ladies who play bingo in Max the retired mercenary’s dingy bingo palace in Islington set the scene:

1: They got Maureen.

2: I told you, she had the look, you can tell you know (she wipes away a tear).

1: Don’t be so sentimental Joyce.

2: She was so young.

1: What do you expect, she never carried a gun, not even a knife.

2: I know she couldn’t get used to it.

1: I told her last week in Sainsbury’s – ‘… at least a hat pin Maureen’.

2: They threw the toaster in the bath and she was electrocuted.

1: Oh my God!

2: What can you expect with millions unemployed?

~

Max himself is equally alienated but in a different way, as he destroys the weeds in his garden.

MAX: The army was a con. It was a way of solving the unemployment problem before they gave up entirely. You’re more likely to die of red tape than a bullet in the Guards. I ran a sideline selling the boys to the local punters in the pub. The army sees more action in bed these days. Dammit, this carnation’s got mildew (he sprays it with Pledge). We never got a chance to kill anyone so I killed the weeds in the garden of an evening.

VIV: Yes, it must have been frustrating in the army.

MAX: Yeah! Think, the world’s sitting on enough megatons to blast the sunrise into the west, and no one’s prepared to press the fucking button. It’s a fucking waste. Think what it all cost – I’ve paid my taxes …

~

In a world that can be incinerated at any moment the will to action fades. Boredom stands at the antechamber of the Apocalypse. Values and qualities cease to exist when all can be reduced to ashes.

Viv, the artist, in many ways one of the most sympathetic characters of the film, pleads for action. But her reality – an empty black room – reflects something quite different.

VIV: Painting’s extinct, it’s just a habit. I started when I was eight copying dinosaurs from a picture book. It was prophetic.

~

The twin brothers, Angel and Sphinx, stand on a windswept roof. Sphinx looks at a distant highrise.

SPHINX: That’s where Angel and I were born. Never lived below the fourteenth floor until I was old enough to run away. Never saw the ground until I was four. Just locked alone with the telly all day. The first time I saw flowers I freaked, I was frightened of dandelions – my gran picked one and I had hysterics. Everything was regulated in that tower block, planned by the social planners to the lowest common denominator. Sight: concrete. Sound: the telly. Taste: plastic. Touch: plastic. The seasons regulated by a thermostat.

~

Through the world our little gang of media heroines move socially upwards – ‘they all sign up in the end one way or another’. But Borgia Ginz, who owns the media, plays a double game as he rearranges the alphabet.

BORGIA: You’re signed up. Now what are we going to call you? ‘SCUM’ hahaha!

That’s it! That’s it! ‘SCUM’, that’s commercial. (Aside) It’s all they deserve.

Outside the plush offices in Buckingham Palace, which Borgia inhabits, and from which he plays ‘the Power game’ – ‘as long as the music’s loud enough we won’t hear the world falling apart’ – the streets are bleak with random violence in which the police indulge their natural belligerence, no longer on the side of either law or order. As Amyl puts it succintly:

AMYL: On my fifteenth birthday law and order were finally abolished, and all those statistics that were a substitute for reality disappeared, and the crime-rate dropped to zero.

~

And that, with its sanitised end in Dorset, was Jubilee.

BOD: After the surprises of the week we decided to go to the country. Nowadays one’s days are numbered in the city. We headed west through the scattered and ruined streets with the night sky flickering with the fires that had burnt ceaselessly from our childhood. High above criss-crossed the spider’s web of a technology that was dying. Telephone wires and pylons whose angry buzzing was slowly falling into silence.

~

Jubilee opened and many of the critics dismissed it as ‘Chelsea on Ice’, believing ‘reality’ is an art-ful black and white film set in some Northern industrial town. But now image is everything, as a Prime Minister fused with the Saatchis invites us, like a smart hostess, on board Battleship England – set firmly on a course to OBLIVION.

MAX: My idea of a perfect garden is a remembrance poppy field.

~