It was a real shame that there was some empty seats at the
Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre Film Club for an ultra rare screening of Peter
Whitehead’s Tonite! Lets All Make Love in London (1967) because those that
were stuck out in the sticks missed a real treat. Tom Benson one of Dumfries
and Galloway Film Officers introduced the film and fortunately for the
attentive audience Tom had an extensive knowledge of this not particularly well-known
British director.
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| Peter Whitehead. |
Tom started by telling us that Peter Lorrimer Whitehead was
born of solid working class stock in Liverpool in 1937. How he won a
scholarship to Cambridge University to study science and became a moving figure
in the counter-culture of the sixties. His first foray into
filmmaking was as an apprentice for nine months, working with a news cameraman
for an Italian TV station formulating euro trash type reports from London. But it was when Bob Dylan did his last
solo/acoustic tour which ended at the Royal Albert Hall on May 9th
and 10th 1965 in front of sell out audiences that he decided to film
an evening at the same venue in June 1965 consisting of modern beat poets
including Allen Ginsburg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti giving live and taped
readings. This 33-minute film called Wholly
Communion (1965) was shot with only 44 minutes of film stock on a 16mm
camera. His next film opportunity came when Andrew Loog Oldham, the Simon Cowell
of his day and the manager of the then virtually unknown white blues band
called The Rolling Stones, contacted him to make a quick film about the bands
weekend tour of Ireland on the 3rd and 4th September
1965. Charlie is My Darling (1966)
was the first documentary film about the band. Tom told us that for the first
time a restored and extended version of the film has been finally been released
on DVD. In the 1970’s Whitehead all but abandoned cinema and embraced falconry,
moving to the Middle East to rear falcons under the
patronage of the Saudi Arabian Royal Family, returning to the UK
in the 1990’s to write novels.
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| Allen Ginsburg at the Royal Albert Hall 1965. |
A Pop Concerto for
Film is how Whitehead described tonight’s movie and Tom informed us that
the documentary was structured, and that it was influenced by the pre British New Wave Free Cinema documentaries. The
title track Interstellar Overdrive was by, a then, unknown band
called Pink Floyd, it was the director who financed its recording to the tune
of £80 and it was this longer version that appeared in the film and not the one
to be found on their 1967 debut album Piper
at the Gates of Dawn.
Before the main feature we were shown some pop-related film
that Whitehead had made prior to putting together Tonite! Lets All Make Love in London. These included Jimmy James
and the Vagabonds appearing live at various venue’s including one near Windsor
Castle, an interview with the unrecognisable Move who had just arrived in
London from Birmingham, pop promo’s from the Small Faces and the Irish
traditional band The Dubliners, a great live rendition of Hey Joe from Jimi
Hendrix and Eric Burdon with the second incarnation of the Animal’s singing
When I was Young in a pop promo that remains influential to this day.
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| Painting Pop. |
The documentary it self is spit into sections. The first
being based on Michael Caine’s words ‘The
Loss of the British Empire.’ We see the guards parading at Buckingham
Palace watched by men in bowler hats and three-piece suits. We observe a guard
collapsing under the weight of his stiff upper lip and Whitehead is stopped
from filming by the good old British bobby. All of which is meant to satirise
the decline of the British class based aristocracy.[1].
Other sections are titled Dollies, Protest[2],
Pop Music, Movie Stars, and Painting Pop whose titles are self-explanatory. The
final section however is entitled A Scene from the USA where we get to see Hugh
Heffner’s Playboy Bunnies open in London and American visitors like Roman
Polanski and Sharon Tate arriving at the premiere of Cul De Sac, Lee Marvin in London to film The Dirty Dozen, model and actress Donyale Luna filmed at Portobello
Road market. In 1966 she became the first African American to appear on the
cover of British Vogue.
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| Donyale Luna. |
The camera films various talking heads, some talk a load of
middle class drivel about free love and fashion while other’s like London
School of Economics educated Mick Jagger and artist David Hockney talk some semblance
of sense. Hockney discusses the difference between nightlife in California and a
city like London where if you want to go out after 10.30 in the evening you
will need a large amount of money to pay an exorbitant entrance fee to get into
some over rated club where a drink will cost you a £1 but in a local pub for
the same amount of money you would get 8 pints of beer! Meanwhile Jagger
implies his support for the use of violence against the authorities to get your
point across when more legitimate avenue’s has been exhausted. He reveals that
there’s no secret to song writing, either people like your work or they don’t
but its important they know you exist. But more interestingly he opines that if
your hungry you don’t have a lot of time to worry about moral things like
fighting wars or what’s happening in society you obviously have got more
important things to concern you, if your not hungry you can start worrying
about these things. He also said that he thinks that as the years go by there
will less and less work for people to do as machines will do it for you. And
that people will end up working for no more than 4 hours a day (little did he imagine
part time working with 2 or 3 jobs!!). He went on to question what people would
do with their time? He obviously would never have foreseen the amount of mind
numbing TV that is now on offer.
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| Whitehead with Mick Jagger. |
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| David Hockney |
An interesting and in-depth discussion took place after the
screening mainly concerning the music and politics of the late sixties or what
has been described as ‘the swinging London scene’. For me, it’s subject matter
reinforced my long held view that the swinging sixties only happened for
certain people, generally the sons and daughters of the upper class or wealthy
middle classes. It does goes some way in disseminating the myth of the sixties,
as most young people during this period were too busy working for a living, paying
the rent, saving up for a car or like me saving to get married (well it was the
Summer of Love!). The documentary had a rough and ready experimental feel to
it, like the observational or verite cinema of people like Dziga Vertov or
Jean-Luc Godard. But like Jagger’s statement about song writing one gets the
impression that Whitehouse’s filmmaking is made to please himself and if others
like it then all well and good, if they don’t hard luck. I think that is can safely
said that Monday nights film club audience appreciated the work of Peter
Lorrimer Whitehead.
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