D.O.A : A Rite of Passage. (18.)
Directed by Lech Kowalski.
Featuring John Lydon, Sid Vicious, Nancy Spungen, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Terry Sylvester. 90 mins. Released on Dual Format Blu-ray and DVD by Second Sight.
When I was a kid I had a friend who lived on a rough estate. In the house two doors down from him, there was a News Of The World front page stuck up in an upstairs window proclaiming Punk: the Shocking Truth. (I was never quite sure if that was a sign that the householder was a punk enthusiast or was trying to spread a warning to impressionable uvz.) Teddy boys; Mods and Rockers; Acid House: youth culture used to turn up these moral panics every decade or so but apart from Elvis's rotating hips, none sent the willies up the establishment quite like Punk. Now punk has been explained away and rationalised and deconstructed and assimilated and it's all la la la Vivienne Westwood in the V&A, and la la la Situationism and oh darling Malcolm McLaren and Glen Matlock doing corporate gigs advertised in City AM, but at the time it was nasty and scary and meaningful. Nobody would say that director Kowalski did a stellar job, but in its artless way, DOA captures that better than anything else.
There's a line in A Clockwork Orange, addressed to Dim by Alex, “Enlightenment comes to those that wait” which is surely the case with this. Initially, this documentary about the Sex Pistols first and last tour of the USA must have been seen as a huge waste of time. Now its insights into events 40 years ago seem effortlessly profound and genuinely shocking. Time has been more than kind to the film, but the film left it plenty to be kind to.
Supposedly documenting the Sex Pistols doomed tour of America, the film largely fails to capture what was going on. McLaren is noticeable by his absence, and the band mostly only appear in concert footage. (The disc's extras explain at some length why this is so and the various scrapes the crew got into trying to film it.) Without enough material to make a film, it was off to London to capture the scene there.
The result is a ragtag assemblage of scenes that don't follow much of a course but probably get across more than a proper documentarian could've done with the same subject. In London, there is concert footage of Matlock's spin-off group The Rich Kids, and Sham 69 with an emotional Jimmy Pursey pleading with the audience to stop fighting. There's Generation X with Billy Idol sporting his Buffy The Vampire Slayer look, his curled lip already on the lookout for the main chance. And there is a really magical performance of Oh Bondage Up Yours by the X-Ray Specs. The London shoot also resulted in the now infamous bedtime interview with Sidney Vicious and Nancy Spungen, their inadvertent parody of John and Yoko's Bed-In.
Though we may regret the lack of footage from the American tour, what is here is timeless. If not for this film we wouldn't have a record of Johnny Rotten final on-stage pronouncement, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated” or Vicious swinging his guitar at some redneck who was taunting him. I'd never seen DOA before but a lot of it is very familiar; it has been plundered by so many films since.
You see the general and majors of Punk, but also some of the fodder. The film drops in on a Terry Sylvester, lead singer of Terry and the Idiots, sometimes acclaimed as the world's worst punk band (which would logically make them the best) and his spectacularly drab existence somewhere grey in London's suburban expanses. When it was made, all this must have felt like awful filler but Terry and his berk profundities give the film real insight. (If nothing else, the film demonstrates to a shocking degree just how spectacular grim life in Britain, even Swinging London, was in the late seventies. God, it looks miserable, worse even than the New York of the time which was at least showily deprived.) This is the swamp from which the Punk stars rose from and feed off of. Terry is the sheep who follows and swallows. Is the Punk ideology giving his existence some meaning, or is its nihilism just enticing him to make a bigger mess of his life?
Among the various parody establishment ghouls in the film, such as Bernard Brooke Partridge of the GLC who seemed to make a career out of complaining about punk, is Mary Whitehouse. It passes uncommented that she makes the insightful comment on the movement. “It's no good trying to deal with punk. You've got to go back and you've got to look and you've got to build again. I'm not shocked by punk, I'm shamed by it." No matter how much you like the music - and for me, The Pistols are one of this nation's greatest bands and Never Mind The Bollocks is a genuinely seminal album – punk was about our national failure, and a self-satisfied failure at that. For all the talk of it being a great burst of creativity, which it was, it was much more a belch of laziness and entitlement and discontent that played into our prejudice. And we all fell for it – not conforming, being different, not doing the 9 to 5. Yeah, we showed them.
Punk, and the Sex Pistols in particular, have been well served by the cinema, especial considering how brief it all was. But, for all their merits, The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, The Filth and The Fury or Sid and Nancy never really tackled the grim realities of it as fully as this does. It may have been dead on arrival, but it is full of life now
Extras.
D.O.A. A Punk Post Mortem. An interview, about 30 minutes, with former NME journalist Chris Salewicz, who was the co-director of the London section. It's fun and informative.
Dead On Arrival: The Punk Documentary That Almost Never Was. Nearly two hours of talking heads, often interviewed on Skype, going over the making of the film. Admittedly informative and there are some interesting contributors (Midge Ure surprisingly enough) but an excess of Americans make it a bit of a trudge. Americans talking about punk is usually a bind but especially if that American is John Holmstrom, founder of Punk Magazine who appears every five minutes or so, lording it over proceedings like he is the Sir Kenneth Clark of punk, and seems able to suck the life out of any topic.
Directed by Lech Kowalski.
Featuring John Lydon, Sid Vicious, Nancy Spungen, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Terry Sylvester. 90 mins. Released on Dual Format Blu-ray and DVD by Second Sight.
When I was a kid I had a friend who lived on a rough estate. In the house two doors down from him, there was a News Of The World front page stuck up in an upstairs window proclaiming Punk: the Shocking Truth. (I was never quite sure if that was a sign that the householder was a punk enthusiast or was trying to spread a warning to impressionable uvz.) Teddy boys; Mods and Rockers; Acid House: youth culture used to turn up these moral panics every decade or so but apart from Elvis's rotating hips, none sent the willies up the establishment quite like Punk. Now punk has been explained away and rationalised and deconstructed and assimilated and it's all la la la Vivienne Westwood in the V&A, and la la la Situationism and oh darling Malcolm McLaren and Glen Matlock doing corporate gigs advertised in City AM, but at the time it was nasty and scary and meaningful. Nobody would say that director Kowalski did a stellar job, but in its artless way, DOA captures that better than anything else.
There's a line in A Clockwork Orange, addressed to Dim by Alex, “Enlightenment comes to those that wait” which is surely the case with this. Initially, this documentary about the Sex Pistols first and last tour of the USA must have been seen as a huge waste of time. Now its insights into events 40 years ago seem effortlessly profound and genuinely shocking. Time has been more than kind to the film, but the film left it plenty to be kind to.
Supposedly documenting the Sex Pistols doomed tour of America, the film largely fails to capture what was going on. McLaren is noticeable by his absence, and the band mostly only appear in concert footage. (The disc's extras explain at some length why this is so and the various scrapes the crew got into trying to film it.) Without enough material to make a film, it was off to London to capture the scene there.
The result is a ragtag assemblage of scenes that don't follow much of a course but probably get across more than a proper documentarian could've done with the same subject. In London, there is concert footage of Matlock's spin-off group The Rich Kids, and Sham 69 with an emotional Jimmy Pursey pleading with the audience to stop fighting. There's Generation X with Billy Idol sporting his Buffy The Vampire Slayer look, his curled lip already on the lookout for the main chance. And there is a really magical performance of Oh Bondage Up Yours by the X-Ray Specs. The London shoot also resulted in the now infamous bedtime interview with Sidney Vicious and Nancy Spungen, their inadvertent parody of John and Yoko's Bed-In.
Though we may regret the lack of footage from the American tour, what is here is timeless. If not for this film we wouldn't have a record of Johnny Rotten final on-stage pronouncement, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated” or Vicious swinging his guitar at some redneck who was taunting him. I'd never seen DOA before but a lot of it is very familiar; it has been plundered by so many films since.
You see the general and majors of Punk, but also some of the fodder. The film drops in on a Terry Sylvester, lead singer of Terry and the Idiots, sometimes acclaimed as the world's worst punk band (which would logically make them the best) and his spectacularly drab existence somewhere grey in London's suburban expanses. When it was made, all this must have felt like awful filler but Terry and his berk profundities give the film real insight. (If nothing else, the film demonstrates to a shocking degree just how spectacular grim life in Britain, even Swinging London, was in the late seventies. God, it looks miserable, worse even than the New York of the time which was at least showily deprived.) This is the swamp from which the Punk stars rose from and feed off of. Terry is the sheep who follows and swallows. Is the Punk ideology giving his existence some meaning, or is its nihilism just enticing him to make a bigger mess of his life?
Among the various parody establishment ghouls in the film, such as Bernard Brooke Partridge of the GLC who seemed to make a career out of complaining about punk, is Mary Whitehouse. It passes uncommented that she makes the insightful comment on the movement. “It's no good trying to deal with punk. You've got to go back and you've got to look and you've got to build again. I'm not shocked by punk, I'm shamed by it." No matter how much you like the music - and for me, The Pistols are one of this nation's greatest bands and Never Mind The Bollocks is a genuinely seminal album – punk was about our national failure, and a self-satisfied failure at that. For all the talk of it being a great burst of creativity, which it was, it was much more a belch of laziness and entitlement and discontent that played into our prejudice. And we all fell for it – not conforming, being different, not doing the 9 to 5. Yeah, we showed them.
Punk, and the Sex Pistols in particular, have been well served by the cinema, especial considering how brief it all was. But, for all their merits, The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, The Filth and The Fury or Sid and Nancy never really tackled the grim realities of it as fully as this does. It may have been dead on arrival, but it is full of life now
Extras.
D.O.A. A Punk Post Mortem. An interview, about 30 minutes, with former NME journalist Chris Salewicz, who was the co-director of the London section. It's fun and informative.
Dead On Arrival: The Punk Documentary That Almost Never Was. Nearly two hours of talking heads, often interviewed on Skype, going over the making of the film. Admittedly informative and there are some interesting contributors (Midge Ure surprisingly enough) but an excess of Americans make it a bit of a trudge. Americans talking about punk is usually a bind but especially if that American is John Holmstrom, founder of Punk Magazine who appears every five minutes or so, lording it over proceedings like he is the Sir Kenneth Clark of punk, and seems able to suck the life out of any topic.
