Simon Matthews - Looking for a New England

Praise for Simon Matthews

Psychedelic Celluloid covers the swinging sixties in minute detail, noting the influence of pop on hundreds of productions Independent

Addresses everything with a thoroughness and eye for detail thats hugely impressive Irish News

The ultimate catalogue of musical references in film and TV from the swinging sixties Glass Magazine

Impressively comprehensive positively jam-packed full of trivia and amusing anecdotes We Are Cult

A must-purchase for fans of British films and pop music Goldmine

For anyone with a love of the music, fashions, and the scene, or for anyone who simply adores movies, Psychedelic Celluloid is a handy book to own Severed Cinema

1

INTRODUCTION

Most people today know what Swinging London looked like: a visual and aural landscape where the latest clothes, the latest music, the latest cars, the latest design and the latest art were well to the fore and central to whatever was happening. This explosion of the counterculture brought a golden period in which the emerging dominance of UK pop music became bound up with hip contemporary films, both home-grown and international. A massive revolt, in fact, against the austere, shabby world of the 1940s and 1950s and a deliberate embracing of modernism that spawned a pop culture that peaked somewhere between the release of All You Need is Love by The Beatles (67) and the emergence of Ziggy Stardust from his chrysalis five years later. If one had to choose just one example that somehow exemplified it all, you could do a lot worse than home in on the BBC2 series Colour Me Pop , which ran from June 1968 to August 1969. Born out of the huge interest in all things pop and youth-orientated in 19678, it was a bolt-on accessory to Late Night Line -Up , the arts and current affairs programme broadcast from 196472.

Late Night Line-Up itself was produced by Rowan Ayers father of Soft Machines Kevin and usually presented by Joan Bakewell. A selection of those featured during its eight-year run reads like an alternative Sgt. Pepper -style collage: Peter Sellers, Little Richard, David Frost, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Tony Hancock, Duke Ellington, Yoko Ono, Willy Brandt, Dave Brubeck, Otto Skorzeny, Malcolm Muggeridge, Peter Ustinov, Coco the Clown, Michael Foot, Maurice Chevalier, Ivor Cutler, Sammy Davis Junior, John Peel, Cecil Beaton, Joseph Losey, Alfred Hitchcock, Harold Pinter, Bob Hope, the men from U.N.C.L.E. (Robert Vaughn and David McCallum), playwright NF Simpson and Brigitte Bardot. This broad-brush approach, the idea that everything contemporary was part of a unified whole, was replicated in Colour Me Pop . Each week, this showcased artists filmed in a more authentic and less staged environment than the uber-mainstream Top of the Pops, with no boundaries set about who might appear. The roster of acts appearing during its run ranged from The Tremeloes to Jethro Tull, from Bobby Hanna (deemed then by some to be the next Eng elbert) to Caravan and from Gene Pitney to Giles, Giles and Fripp. All were treated as being part of the modern scene and taken seriously, too: pop now had a space of its own, late at night, on BBC2.

A harder point to pin down is when and why this type of approach ended. If 19689 was peak Swinging London, it was also the point, arguably, at which the contraction and demise of that world started. An example of this might be Paul and Barry Ryan, a duo with fabulous looks they originally modelled for Vidal Sassoon and a modest catalogue of hit singles, who signed to MGM in August 1967 for an advance of 100,000 (about 3m today), offset partly against future film appearances. They made no films and by June 1969 Barry, Paul having retired by this point, quit MGM for Polydor. Likewise, Eric Burdon, another MGM act, spent six months in LA in late 1969, fruitlessly searching for a film role: it would be 13 years before he finally got one, in Comeback , shot in West Germany in 1982. Both the Ryans and Burdon would have expected, after the huge box-office returns for A Hard Days Night , Help! and Blow-Up , that any half-decent UK pop artist would move automatically into films. Sadly for them, the problem at MGM in the late 60s was that Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey took up so much studio time that suitable projects they might be considered for simply didnt materialise.