The filth and the fury
The premiere of The filth and the Fury has just ended at the Phoenix to a reception of mass nostalgia. Forty year-olds in 'fuck the millennium' T-shirts are creaming for more, most of them intoxicated by more than just the atmosphere. A group of students in front of me are earnestly discussing music's potential for social amelioration. Everyone in the crowd either thinks, or wishes, they'd been at the 100 club back in '78. I retain considerable doubts about whether this is 'for real', but I'll keep them to myself for fear of being lynched by middle-aged advertising executives wearing dog collars. They still seem a bit too volatile after the excitement of watching the 'contextual' riot scenes.
Julien Temple enters the cinema nervously despite the applause; waving a cigarette - "mind if I smoke" - and simultaneously grabbing an ashtray from the flustered- looking attendant. I was expecting someone a bit more showy, a bit more punk hubris, but there's no mohican or safety pins in sight. Instead, he's dressed down in designer combats and a tight top. I suspect he's daunted at the prospect of a student audience more likely to ask about those heady eighties days of directing Absolute Beginners and Earth Girls are Easy, than the finer points of his 'rockumentary' aesthetic. He needn't have worried, however, as the audience are definitely 'on side', (after all, the man's practically a Sex Pistol himself), but, just to make sure, he's brought his own interviewer and close personal friend, Alan Jones. Jones informs us, that, like Temple, he became part of the Sex Pistols crowd by hanging around the King's Road boutique jointly owned by Malcolm Mclaren and Vivien Westwood, before graduating to the more sober pleasures of film criticism.
Jones begins by asking about the film's genesis:
JT: I made the film to document a life-changing experience of my own, but also, out of a sense of unfinished business. Having made The Great Rock and Roll Swindle I felt I owed the Pistols something. The band, particularly Lydon, needed their own mythology, independent of Mclaren.
AJ: Could you outline briefly, the idea of the Swindle.
JT: The Swindle was made as a kind of 'dark joke', promoting the idea of a commercial masterplan, and playing down what ingenuity the band actually had. The Pistols message was always 'be individual', but many of their fans became mindless replicas. We wanted to confuse that anorak element.
Unfortunately, the pendulum swung too far and Mclaren was presented as a Doctor Frankenstein figure, injecting life into inanimate yobs.
AJ: Practically, then, how did the new film come about?
JT: Film Four suggested the idea to me. Then it was basically a process of improvising out of hundreds of hours of old footage left over from the Swindle. I had the freedom of not knowing what the fuck to do next and smashing the materiel together pretty randomly. Most of all, I wanted the money.
AJ: In all the interviews, the band members are only seen in shadow. Why was that?
JT: Well, there's nothing worse than wrinkly old rock stars, is there? I suppose I wanted to create a sense of nostalgia. I didn't want to undo the band's mystique completely.
AJ: Why, in this film, did you attempt to show the social climate of the time?
JT: I wanted to show modern 'kids' quite how revolutionary a time it was.
It was necessary to point out that nothing since has gone beyond the impact of the Pistols. There was a time gap between the band and the world. They were unbelievably modern. Sadly, they would just blend into the mainstream now.
AJ: So do the Pistols have a continuing relevance?
JT: The film should serve to remind people of what is possible, in terms of changing the status quo. Individual power is even more under attack than it was then, so the importance of changing attitudes is even greater.
AJ: What do you hope the making of this film has achieved?
JT: Hopefully, I've managed to humanise the band. It was especially important to show that Sid wasn't just a cartoon. He was humorous about the whole thing, and, perhaps most of all of them, had a real overview of what was going on. Most of all, I wanted to leave an iconic image of punk; to recreate the feeling I had on first seeing them, that they were aliens playing guitars.
25th May 2000