The British Pop Music Film

The Beatles and Beyond

S. Glynn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349351879, 9780230392229
• eBook ISBN: 9780230392236
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The first detailed examination of the place of pop music film in British cinema, Stephen Glynn explores the interpenetration of music and cinema in an economic, social and aesthetic context through case studies ranging from Cliff Richard to The Rolling Stones, and from The Beatles to Plan B.

1

Introduction: Genre, Academia and the British Pop Music Film

Generic focus

Roughly halfway through Terence Fisher’s Kill Me Tomorrow (1957), a low-budget Renown film shot in London and starring Pat O’Brien as a reporter needing cash to fund his son’s eye operation, the hero discusses with the leader of a diamond-smuggling racket how much they would pay him to take the blame for a murder he saw them commit. This key scene, where morality cedes to money, is set in a dimly lit coffee bar, already a short-hand site for youthful anomie, deviancy and promiscuity. The nefariousness of the setting is underlined by the presence of a singer-guitarist: as the plot negotiates its major development, the camera diverts our attention onto Britain’s first rock’n’roll star, Tommy Steele, singing snatches of ‘Rebel Rock’ to a young and enthusiastic audience. While O’Brien exchanges his good name for the sake of his son’s health, Tommy is engendering teenage obstruction and ingratitude. ‘Are you ready, rebel?’ he sings, before presenting his strategy of non-cooperation: ‘If they’re gonna ask you nice, / Make them have to ask you twice. / Have a heart of ice / When you’re at home.’ The first film appearance of a British Rocker is simultaneously the focus for teenage energy and the voice of anti-parental rebellion. This fresh if uneasy relationship between the cinema and the teenager that Fisher’s February release narratively illustrates had, on a broader scale, already been musically brokered with the January announcement that Steele would star imminently in a semi-biographical feature film.¹ The British pop music film was about to be born.

Kill Me Tomorrow is remembered, if at all, for Steele’s brief screen debut,² but the cinematic sub-genre that it heralded is the focus of this study. The film’s yoking of an ageing American star with an emergent indigenous crowd-puller carries both economic and ideological import and enacts in microcosm many of the competing factors that would shape the British pop music film genre. Indeed, this initial employment of British rock’n’roll mirrors the tensions that have historically existed in British cinema, between trying to emulate increasingly dominant American cultural forms and to build on declining indigenous traditions of popular culture. These tensions are inevitably translated into production and marketing strategies, but also inform generic development, which this study will trace. It therefore involves a diachronic investigation of generic roots and industrial interpenetration, especially the relationship to the American film musical and the developing pop music industry, and analyses the production ideology and working practices of filmmakers. A survey of the critical and popular reception of key pop music films, and how this fed into the success of associated musical product, is surrounded by a close analysis of the films themselves from both contextual and textual viewpoints. This synchronic textual approach will focus on the films’ visual style and their narrative ideologies including, where appropriate, the construction of a national variant on the musical genre. This is necessarily informed by the contextual approach, since any analysis of popular music’s visual grammar must be sensitive to the economic, institutional and social factors that shape its development as a cultural form. Indeed, particular to this sub-genre is the necessity of immediacy, with many judging the music and its stars an ephemeral phenomenon needing instant exploitation. In brief, this genre study will illustrate the institutional relationships between film and popular music and the manner in which the visual representations of pop have been inserted into a matrix of economic, socio-cultural and aesthetic ideologies.

Genre terminology and empirical parameters

This study is purposefully named ‘The British Pop Music Film’ since ‘pop’ is understood as more broadly inclusive of the competing musical styles encountered from 1956 onwards and, although the terms rock’n’roll, rock, prog, punk, reggae and hip hop can be used in an oppositional, even antagonistic sense, ‘pop’ indicates the dominant direction that these styles inevitably take.³ The British ‘pop music’ film’s life-span is roughly concurrent with what Arthur Marwick has termed ‘the long sixties’.⁴ For Marwick ‘some time between the early fifties and the early seventies a “cultural revolution” took place in Britain’ resulting in the creation of distinctive cultural artefacts including ‘pop music (above all)’.⁵ Marwick points out the binary oppositions with which the new music was involved: ‘The central feature, undoubtedly, of the cultural revolution was the transformation of the popular music scene … It sprang out of the separate culture of youth, yet it depended upon the spending power of the affluent teenager. It expressed protest against established society and the organised music industry, yet it became a massive commercial enterprise. It was genuinely innovative musically, yet it spawned a mass of repetitive trivia.’⁶ Throughout the ‘long sixties’ a further duality saw youth both celebrated as the harbingers to an exciting and prosperous future and/or condemned as exemplifying a new moral and cultural bankruptcy. They are key motifs around which dominant interpretations of social change were formulated, and British pop music films work within the dynamic of these twin tropes, the thesis, antithesis and final synthesis of what Dick Hebdige has termed ‘youth-as-fun’ and ‘youth-as-trouble’.⁷

Attempts to define a generic taxonomy are notoriously difficult. Christine Gledhill notes that there are no ‘rigid rules of inclusion and exclusion’ and that genres ‘are not discrete systems, consisting of a fixed number of listable items’.⁸ A flexible model notwithstanding, empirical assumptions need to operate and this study addresses a comparatively narrow range of films in which British ‘pop’ musicians star and in which their music features diegetically:⁹ these pre-existent pop stars will be seen to offer both an ideological reading to the viewer and an economic spin-off to the industry. As such, this study will not explore pop music’s contribution to mainstream film scoring: therefore while John Barry’s appearance and performance in Beat Girl (1959) will be analysed, his work for Bond movies will not and, while their music contributes significantly to the feel of their respective film vehicles, Traffic do not appear in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (Clive Donner, 1967), nor do Manfred Mann in Poor Cow (Ken Loach, 1967): their music is not a vehicle to enhance the musicians’ iconic status, nor does it make a direct narrative contribution to the film. David Bowie’s ‘straight’ acting roles either side of Absolute Beginners (1986), as in The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976) and Basquiat (Julian Schnabel, 1996), are omitted since Bowie does not sing in the course of these films – hence they cannot be categorised as pop music films. In addition, this study has limited its scope to fictional and narrative films, partly because documentaries – such as concert films aka ‘rockumentaries’ – necessitate a different set of generic criteria already rehearsed elsewhere,¹⁰ but mainly, agreeing with the editors of Celluloid Jukebox, because of a ‘belief in pop itself as a form of fiction making’.¹¹

The intended advantage of this precise categorisation and systematic approach is to avoid the overriding weakness in film genre study, notable from André Bazin and Robert Warshow’s pioneering essays on the western and gangster film respectively,¹² which is termed by Barry Langford as ‘endemic critical selectivity’.¹³ Conversely, a cursory glance at the music film output of Elvis Presley¹⁴ illustrates Steve Neale’s claim that many films demonstrate a degree of ‘overlap’ between genres.¹⁵ For Andrew Caine ‘the pop film constitutes the definitive hybrid form of production’¹⁶ and several of the musical films under discussion here could also be classified as British examples of the biopic, the social-problem film, exploitation cinema, comedies, the faux documentary, even a gangster film. It is for this reason that the term ‘pop music film’ is employed in this study rather than the generically ‘purer’ term ‘musical’.

Genre and the problems of definition

Genre remains a troublesome constant in film studies. Is it a theoretical concept of analysis or a function of industry and market forces? Does it work to ease or restrict the changes in national cultural forms? Is it best assessed as a product or a process? Rick Altman explains genre as a polyvalent concept: it acts as a blueprint, ‘a formula that precedes, programmes and patterns industry production’; as a structure, ‘the formal framework on which individual films are founded’; as a label, ‘the name of a category central to the decisions and communications of distributors and exhibitors’; and as a contract, ‘the viewing position required by each genre film of its audience’.¹⁷ Steve Neale concurs, seeing genres as a kind of ‘systematised articulation’ that ‘are not to be seen as forms of textual codifications, but as systems of orientations, expectations and conventions that circulate between industry, text and subject’.¹⁸ This study will replicate this tripartite structure for its case studies, investigating production histories (including marketing), the film texts and their consumption.

The latter category extends beyond Neale’s industrial emphasis to recognise how critics, spectators and cultist fans, alongside production publicists, contribute to the ‘intertextual relay’ in which any film is embedded and its genre status established.¹⁹ Generic marketing can thus be categorised as ‘all the different discourses of hype that surround the launching of a film product onto the market, while consumption refers not just to audience practices but also to practices of critics and reviewers’.²⁰ While it will collate trade and national press reviews to demonstrate the ‘parental’ culture’s critical reaction to ‘youthful’ pop music films, this study will not elaborate the role of taste formations among critics and audiences since this area has been explored in detail by Andrew Caine’s Interpreting Rock Movies, using the critical framework of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction.²¹ I follow Caine in defining the genre as housing films that ‘all starred figures who were primarily pop artists rather than actors’²² but believe that extensive/exclusive scrutiny of these intertextual relays can lead genre criticism away from the film text itself, which this study sees as central to its dual investigation of the genre’s formal and socio-historical import.

Genre and life-cycles

Literary theorist Franco Moretti offers a beneficial metaphor for genres when he calls them ‘Janus-like creatures, with one face turned towards history and the other to form’.²³ Commenting on Moretti, Andrew Dix advocates that genre critics should ‘turn cubist themselves, looking both at sets of formal conventions that define different film-types and at what these conventions signify historically’.²⁴ Formal conventions and historical significance constitute the twin concerns of this study. Dix understands that his elaboration of this metaphor introduces ‘a false dichotomy between form and history’ since formal or internal elements of a genre are not separate from historical processes but are imbued with them: genre criticism, he concludes, should be ‘historicist through and through’.²⁵ While genres were traditionally seen as fixed forms, media theory increasingly regards them as dynamic in form and function. For David Buckingham ‘genre is not … simply “given” by the culture: rather it is in a constant process of negotiation and change’.²⁶ A tripartite schema to describe this process has proven very popular in genre studies. For Thomas Schatz a genre’s three ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Genre, Academia and the British Pop Music Film
• 2 The Primitive Pop Music Film: Coffee Bars, Cosh Boys and Cliff
• 3 The Mature Pop Music Film: Bombs, Beatlemania and Boorman
• 4 The Decadent Pop Music Film: Politics, Psychedelia and Performance
• 5 Afterlife: The Historical Pop Music Film
• 6 Conclusion: Music Matters
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index