Performance

Last night I had a strange, delightful, only marginally worrying experience. I went to see a screening of “Performance”, the Jagger/Fox fronted 1970 fever dream from Douglas Cammell and Nicholas Roeg. It was presented at Newlyn Picture house by filmmaker Mark Jenkin, and academic Mark Fox.

I was excited. Performance is one of my foundational texts*. For teenage Sam, the world depicted in the film, a hallucinogenic London caught (trapped) in the crowded, chaotic flat of Jagger’s character Turner was all I ever wanted. I have watched it, I would estimate, upwards of twenty times but not in the last decade.

I can’t quite remember when I first saw it. There are two scenarios: I might have taped it from a late-night broadcast (many films were acquired this way. Watched on a Sunday morning and glanced at concerningly by parents as they passed through the living room) which was how I got my first copy of Rocky Horror and Tommy but it is more likely that I took it out of my university library.

Primarily as a means of escaping Herefordshire (you’re fine, Hereford, you just weren’t for me) I successfully applied to study for my arts foundation at London College of Fashion. This was beneficial to me in many, many ways but one of the particularly exciting ones was access to the full University of the Arts Library. Aside from thousands of books, thousands of magazines (particular shout out to the full run of The Face) it had a stellar and stuffed film library. I would head home after each shift with bags filled with DVDs, which I would watch until about 4 or 5 am when I would very sensibly go to bed so I could make lectures at 9. I had, and still have, a glutton’s appetite when it comes to culture. I will ingest anything, high or low, old or new as long as it looks interesting. This has, I think finally been proved useful now that I’m an author. A head filled with disparate, scattergun, things is a useful thing to have when you’re writing.

Anyway. Alongside the classics, alongside French new wave, Derek Jarman and old Surrealist silent movies I watched American B-Movies, slashers, classic and less classic horror and anything I vaguely liked the title of. The DVDs were bound in blank cases so I couldn’t even go by the cover. Performance was there. I would have read about it in a magazine, at that point religiously following every thread from every interview about an assortment of favourite bands. The Stones and Jagger high amongst them. I became (was/continued to be) fascinated with Jagger, and Turner seemed like the perfect version of him. Certainly, he’s more interesting than Jagger is, if you believe those around him. It led me to dying my hair black and getting a long feather cut as proof that whatever the film’s lessons, themes or warnings were, I was determined to ignore all of them and happily blur myself into some ersatz Mick.

I hadn’t got a Notting Hill townhouse to fill with the decaying trappings of empire and Afghan holidays, but I did steal a Moroccan footstool, orange and purple rug (sent off for from The Times in 1974) from my grandparents and fail in a petition for a coveted camel saddle to furnish my student flat. I watched it to imagine myself there, in the basement room after Chas had left, perhaps. I watched it because London, whilst great, turned out not to be the same as London in the late sixties/early seventies and if I watched Performance enough then it would imprint on the backs of my eyes and let me pretend for a day or two.  It was the same thing that had led me to Tommy years before, and The Man Who Fell to Earth soon after. They formed a patchwork of visual touchstones, ideas and themes that stayed with me.

I’m not going to critique Performance here, I couldn’t, it’s too ingrained. It is and will remain perfect to me. Its odd, jarring insistence on not being easily explained is still marvellous, after all these years. Its abrupt, funny, weird and melancholic turns are just as head spinning. Seeing it on a big screen just made all of that clearer. No, the only thing I feel vaguely qualified to speak about is how odd it is to see a film that was once as familiar as my face in the mirror after not seeing it for so long. And to recognise not just that face, but the little splinters of glass that clearly bedded deep and stayed put. Healing over and poisoning my blood (the best kind of blood poisoning). What I found interesting was seeing how much of the film recurs in what I’m writing now.

There are other films, films I’ve watched more often, more recently, that I’m vaguely conscious of referencing. Ideas and themes that I recognise as mine (hell, there’s a scene in one book that so far nobody who’s read it has realised is a beat for beat Rocky Horror remake) but it was oddly comforting to recognise things I’ve been writing post Gorse in Performance.

Shifting narratives, broken rock’n’rollers, East End gangsters. The collapsing and merging of personalities. That very specific bathtub. The sense, too, of a timeslip. A space disconnected from reality. It was gratifying to see that the film had such a lasting effect on me, and that those influences have lingered.

I feel like it’s a little like tending a garden. It doesn’t matter how many flowers I plant, how carefully I cultivate the ground or plan the paths, the whole thing is riddled with weeds. Films like Performance and The Fall books like Last Exit have scattered their seeds in the soil. Germinating, hiding in the grass. Developing long taproots that extend deep and wait. It doesn’t matter what I do, some things are always going to emerge in my writing, and I’m delighted with that.

Because the flowers are beautiful, but the weeds will win every time.

*The others are Velvet Goldmine, Hedwig and the Angry Inch & The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The five points of my pentagram of film.

Jagger, Anita Pallenberg and Michelle Breton in the bath. I did try and get an image of just the bath but I don’t actually think you ever see it…empty…in the film.