This year we celebrate the 75th birthday of British filmmaker Derek Jarman. Jarman was born on January 31, 1942. I’m always discovering and then keeping tabs on these timely anniversaries of our countercultural forebears, and I’m happy to highlight this one even if I’m getting to it about 7 months too late. The good news is that now we’ve got 4 more months to celebrate the groundbreaking filmmaker and his intense, chromatic, radical cinema. Jarman died of an AIDS-related illness in London in 1994, but not before creating a body of work that has only grown its audience since the filmmaker’s death.

Here are Open Culture’s words on Jarman’s 1978 punk rock film, Jubilee…

Derek Jarman was too old and too accomplished to be a punk. By 1977, the openly gay filmmaker and artist was already 36 and had an impressive CV that included doing set design for Ken Russell’s The Devils and directing Sebastiane, a landmark in gay cinema, notable for not only its frank depiction of the male body but also for its dialogue which was entirely in Latin. Nonetheless, Jarman gathered together notables from London’s burgeoning punk scene, including a young, lithe Adam Ant, to create Jubilee –the first and, arguably best, punk movie ever. You can watch it above.

The plot, as such, centers on Queen Elizabeth I who, with the help of court occultist John Dee (played by Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Richard O’Brien), sees her land 400 years into the future. It’s a Britain filled with garbage and plagued with crime. Queen Elizabeth II, for instance, was killed in a mugging. As Queen Elizabeth I wanders around the wreckage of the British Empire, she encounters a bunch of leather-clad toughs including Amyl Nitrite (played by Malcolm McLaren protégé Jordan), Crabs (Little Nell, also from Rocky Horror) and Mad (Toyah Willcox, who would later go on to delight a generation of toddlers by voicing The Teletubbies). The highpoint of the movie is, without a doubt, is when Jordan performs a risqué dance to a glammed up version of Rule Britannia.

Jarman tapped into the same feelings of anger, disillusionment, and nihilism that the Sex Pistols articulated. As Jarman told The Guardian in 1978, “We have now seen all established authority, all political systems, fail to provide any solution – they no longer ring true.” Jubilee feels like a John Waters movie without the gross-out gags. A Paul Morrissey movie but with a clear sense of political purpose. It’s giddy, uninhibited, violent and occasionally quite disturbing.

Here’s Jarman’s Jubilee…

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Getting back to posting about this year’s observance of the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, I’m interested in another take on the season that announced the rise of the hippie. While the phrase Summer of Love conjures images of willowy hippy girls and long haired hippie dudes frolicking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, at the same time there was another kind of revolution happening on the other side of the world. While America’s West Coast was getting blazed on peace and love, London was in a full swing cultural upheaval of their own as a generation of young people rejected post-war austerity for their own take on American sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Here’s the word from the Daily Beast…

There came a moment when London first shook off the coils of hidebound British society, the sobriety of convention, the obedience of norms that had made it a funless place in its post-war years. As no other city has ever done, London suddenly owned a whole decade and became synonymous with the culture of that decade—the 1960s.

So much of what makes London what it is now is came from that time. There was a cultural and social insurrection that transformed every idea of what was permissible in society and in the arts.

Here’s a BBC doc about London’s version of that most psychedelic season…

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If you follow me on Facebook you might have seen my ornery post last week wherein I linked to an announcement about Leonard Cohen’s new album, and complained about my Nashville music peers constantly celebrating “great” songwriters who shouldn’t even be allowed to mutter Cohen’s name in their prayers. GREAT is a big word, and while I certainly stand by all my friends’ and peers’ rights to love what they love, there aren’t a lot of songwriters in this world that I would call GREAT.

Lyrics are almost always the weak spot for me when people mention less than GREAT songwriters that they love. Frankly, melodies are the easier part of the job, and my GREATS list all have great melodies too, but they’re not still toying around with silly story songs, and dumb near rhymes, and they actually manage to get some sense of rhythm into their words. Cohen is one songwriter on my list, and Tom Waits is another.

When I discovered this video on YouTube I thought it was just a fan tribute, but it turns out that No Visitors After Midnight is an actual DVD release that collects two live Tom Waits performances from BBC Studios, London, July 27, 1979 and PBS Soundstage, Chicago, 1975.

Here’s a GREAT songwriter…

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Over the weekend Open Culture pointed back to one of its own posts to remember Jimi Hendrix’ death in London on September 17, 1970.

Here are a couple of great acoustic performances with some words from Open Culture…

Solo acoustic recordings of Hendrix—film and audio—are incredibly rare. In fact, the only other footage may be the short clip above of Hendrix at a party playing a partial blues rendition of “Hound Dog.” If like me you’re a fan of Hendrix, acoustic blues, or both, these videos will make you hunger for more Jimi unplugged. While Hendrix did more than anyone before him to turn guitar amps into instruments with his squalls of electric feedback and distorted wah-wah squeals, when you strip his playing down to basics, he’s still pretty much as good as it gets.

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Keith Moon “The Loon” was born on August 23, 1946. Moon was a flat-out genius, one-of-a-kind rock ‘n’ roll drummer who found a perfect home for his chaotic style in a little band called The Who. Moon was also the poster boy for excessive appetites, and one of rock’s most famous casualties.

From playing in the rubble of post-war London to demolishing his drum kits with his fitful, energetic attack, to his untimely death in 1978, here’s Living Famous: Keith Moon…

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The Clash’s eponymous first album was a classic that didn’t get released in America until after their second album was released here. Give ‘em Enough Rope is generally considered a slick, American produced sophomore jinx of an album, but I’ll be posting about that soon. The band loses their manager and heads back to London, balanced on the edge of legendary status, but needing to prove themselves with a third record. They hole up in a rehearsal space in a warehouse, and proceed to do nearly nothing but play soccer and play music. As they slowly write a new collection of songs they also play the pop, folk and old rock ‘n’ roll classics that they all love, abandoning punk rock’s “Year Zero” aesthetics to simply revel in their love of music. They write. They rehearse. And they record one of the greatest albums of all time, London Calling.

Today’s post continues our look back at 30 years since the end of The Clash with The Last Testament: The Making of London Calling…

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I love the Blank on Blank project’s animated takes on archived interviews. In this episode Tom Waits waxes on Stonehenge, Hawaii and everything in between. Here’s the lowdown…

Waits had just released the concert film, Big Time, when he was interviewed by Chris Roberts at a London recording studio; you can hear music playing softly in the background throughout the tape. So what’s the secret to interviewing Tom Waits?

He’s a natural raconteur. A great one. You just get out of the way and let him do his thing, perform. If you can nudge the jokes along, so much the better. – Chris Roberts

Here’s Tom…

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45 years ago, in 1970, Rod Stewart released this second solo record, Gasoline Alley. Classic tunes like “Cut Across Shorty,” “It’s All Over Now” and the title track make this Stewart’s first great solo record, delivering on the promise of 1969′s An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down and setting the stage for Every Picture Tells a Story and the massive success of the song “Maggie May.” Of course, in the early 1970′s it was hard to tell the difference between Rod’s songs with the Faces and his solo tunes which often featured members of the Faces listed in their credits. With that in mind, let’s celebrate Gasoline Alley with a Faces show at the Marquee in London in the year of its release…

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