Performance Music

Mad Cyril redecorating Joey Maddocks' bookies in Performance... I'm currently reading Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones, and a recurring street name that figures in the early part of the Stones' saga has me musing on yet another clandestine reference found in Cammell and Roeg's film. In the latter half of the 60's, Rolling Stones business was conducted from an office at Maddox Street in Westminster, and what's more the office was numbered 46a. Hmm...

Speaking of music and Performance I was listening to the soundtrack recently and augmented the session with a track from the CD In a Persian Garden - The Santur by Iranian musician Nasser Rastegar-Nejad, issued by the World Music label Lyricord. The track in question, Dashti, played on hammered dulcimer would be better known to Performance fans as the music that plays during the scene where Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg make love. It's a beautiful and hypnotic piece of music and it's omission from the Warners CD soundtrack is a shame. Fortunately, In a Persian Garden - The Santur is still in print on CD and available for download from Amazon so fans could easily make their own Performance OST should they wish...

Oz Archive

I’m planning to retro-fit my ipad later with the entire run of Oz magazines which I stumbled across this morning – all available to download as good quality pdf files courtesy of the University of Wollongong. Essential reading for students of 1960s counterculture. The archive also contains the original Australian run of Oz before editor Richard Neville relaunched the magazine in London in 1967. Read online or download here

Back in September I posted the cover of International Times #87 (September 1970) which featured a reworked still of Mick Jagger from Performance. Looking thru the Oz archive earlier today, the cover of #15 struck a cord, and another connection between Cammel and Roeg's film and an underground publication. Oz 15 from 1968 features a cartoon by Australian artist Martin Sharp, of Mick Jagger, which appears in slightly different form in Performance as a concert poster for the Turner Purple Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, prominently displayed in the scene where Chas is washing the paint from his hair...

Performing and Performance

One more Performance cover, from the March 1969 issue of Films and Filming... The image of James Fox being flagellated was very much in keeping with the magazine's queer slant and was indicative of Robin Bean's tenure as editor which saw the magazine feature increasing amounts of nudity on the cover, much of it naked male flesh, making it a sort of gay counterpart to the Continental Film Review and earning it the alternative moniker Queer and Queering... The long labor pains Performance suffered is illustrated in the course of Films and Filming, the March 1969 issue features advance stills from the film, but Gordon Gow's review for the film would not appear until April 1971 which is about right - the film was belatedly released in the UK in January 1971. Gow gave it a 3 star review (Not to be Missed) and declared the film "stunning and brilliant"...

Nothing is true, everything is permitted

45 years ago this week the Underground newspaper IT (or International Times) was going to press with issue 87, the front page leading with a story on the yet-to-be-released Performance, feigning outrage at the film's "kaleidoscope of transvestism and sado-masochism", and offering some advice for readers: "Warner Brothers are warning people not to see it while tripping - they could well be right". For more IT check out the archive

Michelle, ma belle...

One last thought, related to my screening of Godard's Weekend - does anyone know what happened to Michèle Breton after she appeared in Performance ? I had read something a few years ago to the effect that upon completion of the film she rapidly descended into the Paris heroin underworld. A google search reveals conflicting testimony that she's alive and well and living in Germany, while another account suggests she had taken her own life. The only solid evidence of her in later years comes in the introduction of the Umlands' Donald Cammell biography which reveals that Performance writer Mick Brown managed to track her down for his 1999 book (which I don't have a copy of!). Considering she appears in two of my favourite films and then seemingly vanishes, I'd love to know what happened to her...

A Mars for Performance

Performance: The Biography of a 60's Masterpiece, Paul Buck's excellent study of Cammell and Roeg's seminal film was the first book I read this year, and I enjoyed it so much I gulped it down in four short sittings. I must admit I initially approached the book with some trepidation - the film had already been extensively written about by Colin McCabe as part of the BFI Film Classics line, and Mick Brown for the Bloomsbury Movie Guide series, and the film was given considerable coverage in Rebecca and Sam Umland's excellent 2006 book Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side. Was there anything left to say about Performance ? Well, yes as it happens. Paul Buck's overview of the film from a sketchy storyline written in 1967 entitled The Liars through to the film's final edit in late 1969, is fresh and exciting, the author evidently well placed to discuss the film - he's been watching Performance for the past 40 odd years and witnessed a pre-release version of the film which included a scene where Chas (James Fox), ambushed in his flat savors a masochistic moment when a dying Joey Maddock's draws a straight razor across Chas' shoe, a scene Buck reveals was a reference to the eye-slitting shot in Un Chien Andalou

A treasure trove of information for Performance fans, the real jewel of the book is Buck's scene by scene examination of the film in which he decodes the myriad of obscure references Cammell injected into the film. I'll leave it for interested readers to discover them for themselves, but I'll mention one memorable revelation, which is virtually impossible to spot on home video. At the 36.24 mark there's a point of view shot of Chas looking down at the doorway of 81 Powis Square, and among the items placed in the shot are some milk bottles, a carton of cream and four Mars bars - the Mars bars being a subliminal reference to the Redlands drug bust in February '67 and the apocryphal story that when the police entered Keith Richards' home, the arresting officers found Marianne Faithful with a mars bar inserted in her vagina. By the time Performance was released this ludicrous and thoroughly untrue story had been well planted in the public consciousness as the kind of routine hedonism the Stones and their entourage engaged in. Still, the story caused Marianne Faithful much distress at the time and the placing of the mars bar in the shot was rather cruel. Of course no one actually knows who was responsible for this, whether it was Cammell or a mischievous set dresser, so this is one secret it seems Performance is not willing to give up...

Final word on the film: I can't match Paul Bucks' long association with the film but I've been obsessed with Performance for 20 years now. I can actually point to the exact date, day, even hour when I first saw the film. On October 2nd, 1993 BBC2 screened the film in a late night slot (11:35pm) as part of a season of films entitled Hollywood UK. The BBC2 screening I subsequently discovered was slightly cut, with some violence trimmed from the sequence where Chas is attacked in his flat. Later I found the film as a sell-through Warners VHS tape (packaged as part of a generic line of gangster films), but sadly the film was even more cut than the BBC2 screening. Worse still, some of the cast members had their lines poorly dubbed. Performance then returned to BBC2 on May 28th 1995 as part the Forbidden Weekend, a program of censor-baiting films, and this edition of the film restored the violence removed from the previous BBC2 screening, making it the longest Performance seen since the film's initial release. Warners issued this version on VHS in 1997 as part of their Mavericks line, and while the film was now essentially uncut, the irritating dub job remained. Thankfully, when Warners rolled out the film for DVD in 2008, the film played uncut and with all the original cast members voices re-instated. At the time of writing, this is still the best version of Performance available although it comes with a caveat - during Memo From Turner, Mick Jagger's line "Here's to old England" is inexplicably missing from the soundtrack (the line can be heard in this lo-fi clip, at the 2.47 mark.) 

Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance

I'm currently reading Rebecca and Sam Umland's excellent 2006 biography of Donald Cammell, and as a taster for things to come I caught a screening over the weekend of Chris Rodley and Kevin Macdonald's 1999 documentary Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance, the first important study of this criminally neglected film maker who took his own life in 1996 with a gunshot to the head. Cammell might have made just four films over the course of nearly four decades but he lived a rich and strange life. Before he made film making his life's work, Cammell was a portrait painter of some renown, he was a sexual adventurer among the glitterati of 60's Paris and London, extremely well read (Borges was a lifelong favorite) and was fascinated by esoterica and ritualism. Incredibly Cammell met Aleister Crowley when he was a young boy - Cammell's father wrote one of the first biographies of Crowley (The Man, the Mage, the Poet).

Donald Cammell interviewed in 1992

The core of the documentary is the incredible history of Cammell's signature film Performance admittedly much to the detriment of Cammell's other films - Demon Seed (1977) is passed over in one short clip, while the lost classic White of the Eye (1987) is discussed all too briefly. Cammell's final film Wild Side (1995) is barely mentioned perhaps due to the shoddy treatment the film received by the studio who financed it. That aside, the discussion on Performance is quite extraordinary. Almost everyone from the film is interviewed - Anita Pallenberg remembers acting the awkward love scenes with Mick Jagger and the aggravation it caused with her then boyfriend Keith Richards; James Fox recalls his sojourn among the faces of South London in research for the film ("Jimmy Fox was regarded as one of their own" confirms Johnny Shannon who played mob boss Harry Flowers in the film); Jagger himself reads out an impassioned letter he and Cammell wrote to Warners who were appalled by the film's violence, while Nicholas Roeg who forged a symbiotic co-directing partnership with Cammell for the film is visibly upset over his split with Cammell during the fallout from the film.

Johnny Shannon and James Fox

Elsewhere sharing their thoughts and memories of Cammell are his brother David (who was associate producer on Performance), Cammell's wife China (pronounced Cheena), Cathy Moriarty (who starred in White of the Eye), Barbara Steele who knew Cammell from the Swinging London days and Kenneth Anger who cast Cammell as Osiris, Lord of Death in his 1972 film Lucifer Rising. Cammell himself appears in the documentary interviewed in 1992 and is engaging, intelligent, charming and in good form. But in his private life Cammell was given to fits of black depression, frustrated no doubt by the amount of film projects he was force to abandon. Friends admit that Cammell was perhaps his own worst enemy, he simply couldn't work within a studio system of film making. One close friend speculates that Cammell's inability to get films off the ground ultimately freed him to commit suicide at his Los Angeles home in April 1996, with a bullet to the brain, eerily echoing a scene in Performance.

A quick glimpse of Donald Cammell under the covers with Jagger and Pallenberg, from an outtake from Performance

Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance remains unavailable in any official edition at the time of writing, but the complete film can be seen over at YouTube. All four of Donald Cammell's film are currently available on DVD. Performance and Demon Seed are on Warner DVD. Dutch label Mælström put out a barebones but English-friendly White of the Eye (DVD reviewed here). The director's cut of Wild Side is available courtesy of Tartan, and includes Cammell's 14min short film The Argument, which was originally shot in 1971 but remained unedited until the film was reconstructed and mixed by Frank Mazzola in 1999.