Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
At the height of their international success, the Pet Shop Boys made a movie. But following the collapse of their record label EMI, the production entered into a Rights Limbo. In other words, nobody quite knew who owned what when it came to the production, meaning no one could screen the film or release it on DVD or Blu-ray. It wasn’t clear whose permission they would need to seek and who they would need to pay to do it.
This limbo status started to come to an end on 14 December 2018. On that night, the Regent Street Cinema in London hosted a special screening with a Q&A session from the film’s director, Jack Bond. The whole purpose of the screening was, as stated during the event, to challenge anyone who claimed to have a stake in the film. If they were to come forward and prove they had sufficient claim to the film to stop the screening, then it wouldn’t happen. And it turned out nobody did.
I was at that screening, and the director was able to drop quite an interesting fact about the film. Namely, that it didn’t ever have a budget. Never in the production did they have a defined figure, an amount of money they needed to tailor their production around. Whenever Jack Bond asked the record label bosses what money he had to spend, they evaded the question. “What do you need for the film?” the reply would come, “We will sort it out”.
It’s fair to say that the history of popular music contains many tales of record labels ripping off their artists. Dodgy accounting practices, alongside outright criminal practices, meant that the vast sums of money in popular music in the 20th century often ended up nowhere near the artists. It does raise the question of quite how much money the record label was making off the Pet Shop Boys at this point that it was easy for them to just offer to spend whatever they wanted on making a film rather than, I don’t know, properly cost and openly finance what was going on.
To be fair, the offer of a bottomless cheque didn’t mean that this production was going to end up with Avatar levels of spending. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, in imagining the film, had thought of it in terms of kitchen sink meets magic realism. Grim scenes of drab domesticity in Blackpool would be offset with visual flights of surreal fancy. A fantastical framework that could then be filled with new performances of their big hits to date.
But as the production progressed, they began to wonder what, maybe, the limits were to the spending promises of the record label. So, during the production they decided to tell EMI that what they really needed for the film was a Spitfire aeroplane. The response came back a few days later. They had the use of two Spitfires. For a few days of shooting. Starting Monday.
Which is the reason why, at around 35 minutes in, the actor Neal Dickson appears, effectively reprising his performance as Biggles from the 1986 British action movie, setting up a very WWII fighter plane-heavy performance of Divided By Zero. The arbitrary weirdness of all this is not remotely jarring to the production: by this point, the deliberately surreal aspects had grown as production went along. The narrative – such as there is – sees the band casually wander through a series of surreal set pieces and images, Tennant dressed smartly as if on the way to the opera, while Lowe’s look suggests he’s heading to an illicit rave in a freezing warehouse.
Alongside them, a host of British thesps – Gareth Hunt, Joss Ackland, Barbara Windsor – all ham it up gloriously. It’s fun, and it has a hint of the uncanny. But also ,nothing really matters. The sheer scale of the visual invention and directless journeying makes it a satisfying watch – but there’s probably not enough to it to justify a rewatch – beyond the songs, of course.
And here’s where the film does excel. I was a huge Pet Shop Boys fan as a kid and remembered the publicity when the film was released. But I was too young to see it in the cinema – a 15 rating saw to that – but when a VHS release followed a year later, I finally able to watch it. No one else in my family was remotely interested in it, so it joined a small band of films that I could only watch when no one else in my family could stop me – late night viewings in a dimly lit living room, volume down low, so as to not wake anyone.
Watching the film again in the Regent Street Cinema transported me back to those late-night viewings. The busy cinema around me seemed to melt away as I stepped through a portal to the past and was back on that sofa, in a dark room. Watching a quiet film which even had (voice drops to a whisper) hints of nudity.
I think it might relate to having grown up with the rise of MTV, but I didn’t find watching it a remotely jarring experience as a kid. I was already used to style being far more important than narrative sense, and this film’s surreal swagger as it strung together set pieces into effectively new music videos to go with great pop tunes. It seemed more jarring to adult me, who is maybe more jaded (or more knowledgeable?) when it comes to the weaknesses of cinematic surrealism.
Age caused another change. Young me didn’t really care for the title track, which seemed slow and boring when we could be having more driving pop brilliance. Stepping back through the portal through to current times, I was really struck by how beautifully cinematic the title track is. It’s built around a composition Ennio Morricone sent them when they were first thinking about making a film, and its haunting, elegiac feel hits different now I’m older.
It’s material from the film’s musical numbers that was to be the basis for the official video for their cover of “Always On My Mind”. Indeed, if you want a very good idea of precisely what this surreal, flawed, interesting film is actually like before trying it, it’s maybe worth starting with this music video. Images, ideas and performances from the film are crammed together. Even as a huge fan of the band, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone, but I can suggest that if you’re intrigued by this video, it might be worth giving it a go.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 