Today is the fifth anniversary of the opening of the magnificent ‘Billy Elliot: The Musical‘.  We’re extremely excited that, to celebrate this milestone, Lee Hall - the Tony award-winning and Oscar nominated author of both the original ‘Billy Elliot’ film and the stage adaptation – has written an exclusive guest post for TFAD.

Over to Lee:

It’s strange to be contemplating the 5th Anniversary of ‘Billy Elliot: The Musical’ at the same time as productions are about to open in Chicago and Korea. Seeing the Korean boys on Youtube singing my songs in Korean was a truly surreal experience.

In theatre you don’t expect things to last; even the most longlived shows are gone within a year – everyone moving on. But somehow musicals are different. They are more like furniture. But what is quite strange about Billy Elliot is what seemed preposterous and unlikely when I dreamed up the idea 15 years ago – the rather daft (I thought) juxaposition of ballet and miners – not only turned out to be real (at one point there were competing “Real Billy Elliots” in various ballet companies) but that the received wisdom on my first draft was that no one would want to see a boy do ballet, let alone a film about something as outmoded as ’strikes’.

But strikes and ballet are still with us though mining is not. In 1995, when I was first planning the screenplay, it seemed unthinkable, even after the decimation caused by the failure of the Strike, that mining would virtually cease to exist. But. ten years later. when we opened the musical the unthinkable had happened – there were only a few thousand miners left. In 1984, there were around 200,000 men working in the mines alone -just think of all the other jobs which must have gone in the industries connected. I believe there are less than 5,000 now. Yet we still ship in hundreds of thousands of tonnes of coal from the Ukraine or China, where the safety conditions are comparable to those in Britain circa 1870.

Billy Elliot isn’t agitprop, although it proudly uses the traditions of the Seventies theatre Stephen Daldry and I grew up on. But what is most thrilling for us is that we did make an uncompromising musical about Unionism, gay boys, with nine year olds effing and blinding, with a song celebrating the coming death of Maggie Thatcher – all things we initially thought would shut the show. And not only that – we somehow got Elton John to write it. If anyone had predicted this when I was writing the screenplay, I would have laughed it out of court. But it has been seen by literally millions of people and garnered arm fulls of Tonys on Broadway. In a landscape that seems to think musicals are escapist nonsense with an ironic wink at the Mums and Aunts out with their tweenage daughters – the fact that we not only got away with it but beat those anodyne shows at their own game seems a miracle.

But of course it isn’t. Of course people want to see things which speak about life in the round, hardships, life and death – even fucking economics. Indeed especially economics – look at ‘Enron’. People aren’t stupid. I adhere to a philosophy that even the most difficult and abstract themes should be vivid and entertaining – and as long as you do that folk are actually hungry for something more challenging than ‘Wicked’ or ‘Legally Blonde’ – however entertaining those shows are.

I don’t see anything entertaining about something which doesn’t surprise me or make me think. Very little is truly entertaining if it hasn’t made you laugh AND cry – in my book. I think that’s what this blog is celebrating. Popular Art that you can consume like a big bag of sweets but is still Art – not just lowest common denominator pap but fresh, distinctive and, above all, full of imagination – expanding the possibilities of what we can feel, what we can enjoy – and therefore who we are. I know it sounds preposterously high falutin’ – but surely that’s what Art does. Pap makes us less than we were before, a proper piece of Art will make you more.

Hopefully the legacy of ‘Billy Elliot‘ won’t just be that boy dancers can safely come out of the closet – though that has been the case. The Royal Ballet has for a few years now had as many applications from boys as it has from girls – something which had never happened before as girls out numbered boys 3 to 1. But my real hope is that it inspires angry, disaffected kids, like I was 15 years ago, to say “I can do better than that: They think that’s political!? They think that’s challenging!? They think that’s emotional!? I’ll bloody well show them.” Cos only then will we get the theatre we deserve.

Erykah Badu has made what is, without a doubt, the most politically charged and provocative music video of the year when she decided to walk down a Dallas sidewalk towards the site of John F. Kennedy’s assassination while undressing.

Hat tip Will M.

Tim Maddison, who is both my friend and a film poster expert from our new sponsor, The Movie Poster Art Gallery, has written a superb post on the genius of Polish film posters.

Over to Tim:

Imagine you’re a designer of film posters. Today. Now. On your desk (or desktop) arrives a commission to create a poster for the latest big release. Great! Wrong. Because create doesn’t really come into it any more. Beneath your fingertips, through a simple keyboard, lies the greatest capacity for graphic creativity known to man, an ability to meld colour and shape not just into every conceivable form, but to explore beyond the conceivable into an abstract kingdom of limitless potential. Ready to dive in? Well you’d better keep your towel on, because you won’t be making any waves. Instead, just get busy grouping those generic star’s photographic headshots, give them a nice simple over-tone, vaguely metallic, slightly gloomy (or a white background, if the client is bold); make sure you check the parts that touch-in is oh-so very definitely required by you…I mean, why am I even saying this, you know what to do…make it like all the others.

You, the designer, might at this point drift off over your coffee and dream of an Oz-like land where the executives, agents and stars had no say over how you sold their product, where the posters created to accompany Hollywood’s biggest releases were the creations solely of your unbound imagination; no tick-list, no formula. Your name, signed at the bottom. This Oz-like land, this designer’s nirvana?

Well that would be Poland.

For nearly 30 years, Poland was home to the most unchained school of nominally commercial graphic design ever seen. The country had a respectable existing history of poster design, but the death of Stalin in 1953 and the subsequent cultural thaw saw Socialist Realism give way to something without precedent.

Unlike the pure abstraction and optimism of the Constructivist movement, that earlier great moment of freedom in revolutionary art before Stalin’s 19^th c. conservatism closed its fist, Polish artists surrendered to the dark currents of the unconscious, to the surreal, even to the nightmarish; natural responses to the intervening experience of apocalyptic war and brutal Soviet repression. Humour is certainly present, but often with an unsettling edge. The diversity and sheer freedom and invention in the Polish school is shocking to anyone raised on the restrictions of western commercial art. And yet, of course, the greatest Polish film posters are those where the boldest designs are underpinned by the artist’s inspired grasp of something essential about that movie, or its star, or its tradition.

One tradition that Polish artists grasped better than any was that of the Western. Westerns were hugely popular in Poland, and artists like Flisak and Gorka created their own hazily surreal images of Western myth, semi-abstract figures with over-size wide brimmed hats, set in dusty hues of desert orange and red, fingers trigger-ready. See above for a great example; Jerzy Flisak’s 1966 poster for Howard Hawk’s classic ‘El Dorado’.

The great years of Polish poster design run roughly from Stalin’s death to the end of the 1980s, with perhaps the 1950s – 1970s marking the true high point. Highly collectible, these affordable classics have found an eager audience, not least in Britain.

Ironically, political freedom coincided with what many people feel to be the Polish school’s decline into decadence, a hyper-real nightmarish surrealism that rapidly became a cliché of its own, cold and lifeless, devoid of the freedom and wit that had been its singular flag.

Will we see their like again?

Come the revolution!

Over at Cappuccino Culture, film critic and friend to TFAD, Pete Hoskin has written an excited celebration of The Welcome Return of Nicholas Cage in Werner Herzog’s recent reimagining of the seminal Abel Ferrara-Harvey Keitel collaboration ‘Bad Lieutenant’. Over on The Big Picture’s website John Berra has written a similar piece recommending the remake. In case you’ve never seen the original, or are uncertain about whether to check out Herzog’s new filming, we’ve put together a small compendium of clips to ensure you become every bit as excited about ‘Bad Lieutenant’ as Pete and John (and us).

Firstly, we have trailers for the two pictures. When watching them, what’s most interesting – aside from the lunatic vivacity of that leaps at you even from these two-minute adverts – is that much of the praise that Ferrara’s version received is now being given to Herzog’s. For a film to be acclaimed by critics as a classic example of trashtastic cinema is very rare. For it to be remade, by an equally out-there actor and a director just as talented as his predecessor, and for that remake to be similarly celebrated by critics, is close to astonishing.

The success of both ‘Bad Lieutenants’, of course, hinges upon the unhinged performances at their centres. Here’s one of the most affecting moments from the original movie: a blasphemous implosion of self-recrimination and anger as Harvey Keitel says, ‘I’m sorry’.

Both films feature a significant amount of self-medication. In Herzog’s version, Cage has a considerably harder time obtaining legal drugs than he does getting hold of some semolina pilchards.

It is, I think, entirely accurate to say that the most maniacal characters associated with either film appear, not in front of the camera, but behind it. More has been written about Werner Herzog’s insanity than about his movies (he is, after all, the director who continued an interview with Mark Kermode despite having just be shot). And when Pete Hoskin described, ‘The way his eyeballs bounce around in their sockets … and all those amphetamine fiend mannerisms and twitches…’ he could, just as accurately, have been talking about most people’s first impressions of Abel Ferrara as of Nicholas Cage.

Hat tip ‘The Word Magazine’ weekly e-mail.

“There is a mystic association between the most ancient of English themes and the boomingest dub reggae, a link that Dreadzone, Ultramarine and The Orb have highlighted. It rises once again on this album by unconventional Yorkshire-born folk-roots artist Ian King – “a dry-stone waller by trade and a punk by nature” – who partners up with dub king Adrian Sherwood for this fascinating record. ‘Panic Grass And Fever Few‘ takes English folk songs, traditional ballads, political broadsides and a few of King’s originals and transposes them into the pulse and throb of modern production. It’s not a reggae album as such but metaphorically it puts a dash of Lee “Scratch” into your glass of English perry. “

My first exposure to Swans was inauspicious. I’d never heard of them and they were supporting my beloved Fall at some toilet venue of a London Polytechnic (remember those?) Because I am short-sighted, I always sought to get to gigs early so I could get as close to the stage as possible, since you can’t mosh in specs (yeah okay, now they’ve got those twisty indestructible ones, but not back then). Anyway, I think I spent the entire set of Swans with my fingers in my ears hoping they wouldn’t bleed. I didn’t give it a further thought, until Uncle John Peel played “Clay Man” and my ribcage started resonating from physical memory of the gig. OMG (to employ an anachronism), suddenly it all made sense. Primal doesn’t do the music justice. In fact it slanders it, since this was pure urban in the way that dub step today could not have emerged from Devon.

Okay, how to describe the music. Slowed down, repetitive, but so insistent that it can’t but help penetrate your skull and whirl around there like the devil is doing a slow foxtrot with your grey matter. This is trance, not done electronically, but with electrified strings. Then there are Michael Gira’s lyrics themselves. Gira wrote about naked power relationships. The I and You of love songs, but these were tales of debasement, abuse, domination and submission. Not in any sexual way, but two people up against one another, one will prevail and one will go down to the canvas. For this is how New Yorkers back in the day interacted with one another. Possess or be possessed.

“your flesh is soft.
your flesh is clay. flesh is easy to shape.
flesh is easy to shape. now you’re a clay man”   “Clay Man”

I read up everything I could on Gira, which wasn’t much cos Swans were very much avant garde. I tried to buy his prose –  I sent an air mail letter with a $20 bill and a note saying “I know I shouldn’t send cash through the mail, but I’d simply love a copy of your book and you can’t get it in the UK”. Nothing for months. My envelope came back redirected, assumed I’d had the wrong address. But then I noticed carefully typed along the bottom borders, “If you shouldn’t, don’t”…

And that sums up the man. Intense. Clipped. Self-contained. What I did manage to uncover in time, was that Gira’s writing starts off as anybody’s, but then he takes a scalpel to it and removes every last pound of verbal adipose. He pares down and pares down, until he is left with a basic, unadorned expression of pure power relationship. I’m sorry, but this man and this album are overlooked works of genius. Of course, I acknowledge the heaviness of the delivery will not be to most people’s tastes. But when I want to ramp it up in my life, on “Cop” goes and the first bars of “Half-Life” take me straight there.

“No one beats your head in like a Cop with a Club in jail” never a truer word sung…

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Clay Man

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Cop

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Lcossolous : Little Boots
DJ Harvey’s new project give us an expansive and edgy piece of modern day Balaeric dub.

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Mock n Toof : Farewell to Wendall
Ex DFA signings Mock and Toof have created a very enchanting track which I am currently describing as folk disco !

In what we hope will be the first of a series of posts examining, and embedding, short films of note, we take a look at what is certainly the short of the moment: François Alaux and Hervé de Crécy’s logo-rific ‘Logorama’.

Many of the winners at the 82^nd Academy Awards were painfully predictable. The recipients of the four acting Oscars, for example, were so certain to win, for so long before Oscar night, that the attendance of the other nominees was (regardless of the British media’s concerted hope-raising re: Carey Mulligan) entirely ceremonial. There were, though, still some shocks. As our friends Wael Khairy and Shawn Slovo will enjoy pointing out, Simon and I were slightly shocked that ‘The Hurt Locker’ took Best Picture. But we (and others evidently far better at predicting the apportioning of Oscars than we are) were far more surprised that ‘Precious’ took Best Adapted Screenplay, and positively gobsmacked that neither ‘The White Ribbon’ nor ‘A Prophet’ took Best Foreign Language Film.

But there was a still greater shock: Nick Park didn’t win Best Animated Short. A statuette for Aardman’s latest Wallace and Gromit caper, the Christmas Day television ratings triumph ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death’, seemed more certain than any certainty and surer than any sure thing. For Britons, Nick Park is the Sir Steve Redgrave or Sir Chris Hoy of Oscar contenders: no matter how disappointing and ultimately empty-handed our other heavily-tipped prospects are, his gold is guaranteed. He’s simply just better than everyone else – and by an embarrassingly enormous margin. Prior to 2010, the only time he’d failed to convert a nomination into an Oscar, he lost to himself. (In 1991, Park’s ‘Creature Comforts’ beat his ‘A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit’ to the Academy Award for Best Animated Short.)

This year, however, he was actually defeated. What we expected to be the fifth Oscar for Park became instead the first Oscar for the French creators of an eye-catching quarter-of-an-hour cartoon about consumerism called ‘Logorama’. (Actually, it was the first Oscar for the film’s executive producer, but it should have gone to Logorama’s creators.) For whatever importance it has – and it has very little importance indeed – I’ll state clearly that ‘Logorama’ is not a better film than ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death’, and did not deserve to beat it at the Oscars. Park’s picture is deeper, richer, more varied and more charming. It displays both more craft and more artistry, and is obviously the work of long-time masters of animation on their best form. ‘Logorama’, meanwhile, is a masterpiece in the original sense: the work that announces an artist’s graduation from apprentice to master.

And yet, discounting the initial surprise it occasioned, ‘Logorama’’s victory feels right. There’s little that another Oscar could do to enhance Nick Park’s career, or the Wallace and Gromit franchise, whilst the careers of those behind ‘Logorama’ (which is a very fine film very much worthy of acclaim) will benefit tremendously from its award. Their film deserves to be seen and, now that it will be forever referred to as ‘the Oscar-winning short ‘Logorama’’, it has far more chance of attracting the audience it merits.

‘Logorama’ is set in a version of Los Angeles built of, and populated by, thousands of logos. Pedestrians are the AOL instant messaging icons; duplicates of the Pringles man drive trucks and chat up the Esso girl; the MGM lion lives in the zoo; all the police officers are Michelin men; and the film’s villain is Ronald McDonald. Once the story starts, the influence of Robert Altman is almost as obvious as the influence of Quentin Tarantino and, in particular, of ‘Pulp Fiction’. There are significant dollops of both Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ and Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’; a few other movies are referenced directly; and the styles and sensibilities of many more are played upon. ‘Logorama’ is a film composed completely of pre-fabricated components but – because of its vitality; it’s commitment to its concept; and its clever turns – it feels sharply original.

The chief reason ‘Logorama’ works so well is that its makers – directors François Alaux and Hervé de Crécy, their co-writer Ludovic Houplain, and the assorted animators involved – truly understand the short film form. This is not a short that’s auditioning to be turned into a feature: it is a 16-minute movie whose style and substance is exactly suited to its length. The points it makes about the ubiquity of branding, and the distance this puts between our advertising-saturated society and the real world, are powerful but simplistic. They seem potent within a short film, but would grow one-dimensional and dull if stretched to anything like feature length.

Similarly, we would soon resent the bright, crowded visuals, and the games of ‘spot the logo’ they inspire, if ‘Logorama’ lasted longer than it does. For the brief time we are exposed to them, however, they are a delight. By keeping their short film short, Alaux and de Crécy ensure that every moment of it is amusing. (Though no other moment is quite as amusing as the hilarious juxtaposition of the Jolly Green Giant and the ‘Parental Guidance: Explicit Content’ sticker.)

Everyone who watches ‘Logorama’ asks similar questions: How is it legal? Why didn’t McDonald’s smother it in lawsuits? How many logos are used? Are any (or all) of them advertising? I don’t have the answers. (Except that, apparently, over 2500 logos are featured. I have no idea if that’s accurate: I’m not going to count.) Although those questions are interesting to me, I care far less about the answers than I do about encouraging film fans to watch ‘Logorama’. It’s time my introduction ended, and that you began to enjoy a marvellous little movie that is, albeit only in the original sense, very much a masterpiece.

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Bollywood Freaks : Don’t Stop Till You Get to Bollywood
The title explains all ! this is definitely one of my favourite ever cover versions.

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Dr Foxes Old Time Stringey Band : Kids (MGMT cover )
A very endearing and radical departure from MGMT’s poppy original.

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Florence and the Machine : You Got the Love (The Xx remix )
Don’t know where you start with this, Florence covering Candi Staton then being remixed by The Xx who turn a questionable cover into a dubstep delight .

On TFAD we want to start a new occasional series, where contributors write about a great album and what it means to them. If you want to get involved please e-mail me your post and we’ll get it up on the blog.

Over to me:

In December 1979, a music-obsessed suburban teenager sat on the bus after school, reading his NME on the way to buy The Clash’s third album, ‘London Calling’. It was with a small amount of trepidation, after the let down of their second album, ‘Give ’Em Enough Rope’, that I stepped into Bonaparte Records in Guildford. ‘London Calling’ was on the turntable; ‘Guns of Brixton’ was blasting out from the record shop PA. My doubts disappeared. I knew at once that this was a very special record.

I listened to the album right through twice in that crowded record shop before handing over the fiver I’d saved from my Saturday job and dashing home with my prize. Over the next few weeks, I played it almost to death. Thirty years later, as I write this, that very same, and by now very scratchy, vinyl is playing on my Rega Planar 3 – and it still sounds just as fresh and exciting as ever. It’s no exaggeration to say that, in a lifetime of buying music, ‘London Calling’ is the album that’s most important to me. It’s my ‘Kind of Blue’, my ‘Sgt Pepper’.

Like Joy Division’s austere masterpiece ‘Unknown Pleasures’, which also celebrated its 30th birthday last year, ‘London Calling’ has the power of all great art to invoke a time and a place. It transports me back to a happy commuter town adolescence filled with mates, movies, bands, John Peel, NME, gigs and trashy Sci-Fi novels.

The album’s cover – dominated by Pennie Smith’s now-iconic photo of Paul Simonon smashing his bass at a gig in New York – is a perfect scene-setter: ‘London Calling’ is The Clash’s tribute to pulsing guitars, reggae bass lines and rebellion. The nineteen tracks feature continual classics, from ‘Guns of Brixton’ to ‘Spanish Bombs’, to the glorious ska rampage of ‘Wrong ’Em Boyo’ and the unlisted final song, ‘Train in Vain’. There isn’t a single duff track.

But the throbbing heart of the album is the title number. ‘London Calling’ is an anthem that grabbed me by the throat when I first heard it – and that still does today.

London Calling

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Guns of Brixton

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Wrong ’Em Boyo

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Train in Vain

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You can download the whole album here.