Leee Black Childers: Drag Queens, Rent Boys, Pick Pockets, Junkies, Rock Stars and Punks

"Tits have played a big part in history" - Leee Black Childers

In 2012, Leee Black Childers came to London to launch his book Drag Queens, Rent Boys, Pick Pockets, Junkies, Rock Stars and Punks (ah - My People!) He came armed with anecdotes and proved to be a fountain of Old Southern Charm. Below was a piece I wrote at the time for the London Festival Fringe. It was an honour to meet him.

Leee Black Childers 1972

When Leee Black Childers first arrived in New York in the late 1960s, fresh from the simmering backwaters of Kentucky, a cocky request for a cigarette found him looking skywards: towering above him was a stack-heeled Amazonian disporting false eyelashes like tarantula legs, hair an aureole of static-charged frizz. She was primed with panstick and sleek with speed: his first NYC drag queen. 

Jackie Curtis 1971

Leee’s entry into the demimonde of the rotting core of the Big Apple led to his becoming the in-house snapper at Andy Warhol’s Factory, and later vice president of David Bowie’s Mainman company and manager of Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers (who he brought to the UK to join the Sex Pistols on the 1977 Anarchy Tour). 

But in the end, he was always spiritually solid with the anonymous outlaws scratching a living in the anomalous, urban dead zones of London and New York.

In that respect, the tile of the exhibition & book is somewhat misleading. While Childers has taken the titular misfits as his subjects for over 40 years, the photos on display here are largely comprised of the Warhol superstars, the key proto-punks (Iggy and the Stooges, Patti Smith, the New York Dolls) plus Bowie, Debbie Harry and the London scene of ’77.

Iggy 1973

Modest to the point of reticence about his many achievements, Leee’s photos betray a stunning use of murky light, composition and, of course, styling – none of which was born of anything as quotidian as by-rote training: these were collaborations born of sulpahte, sass and whatever satin and tat was to hand.  The photos of the Factory drag queens stand out – particularly a 1970 shot of Jackie Curtis, a plush hussy half lit by a seedy neon dancehall sign, cigarette in hand, hair the colour of dried blood, eyelids weighted with glitter, her gossamer-thin mini-dress dress clinging to her padded contours.

Jayne County 1974

The proud and pugnacious Jayne County snarls at the camera, mimicking the heads of two tiger rugs that flank her – she looks like their human equivalent, equally fierce but with more Max Factor than fur. Patti Smith looks equal parts frail and hard, her obsidian eyes ablaze in that solemn pale cameo of a face, and Cherry Vanilla is depicted simultaneously enjoying cock and crack in an eye-watering fashion.

Debbie Harry 1977

Bowie appears here on his 1974 Russian tour in all his haughty, androgyne glory. Childers had also been tour manager for Iggy and the Stooges in 1972 and the images of the 23-year-old Iggy perfectly stress his diamond-hard, glistening body aglow with sweat and sexual energy, while the Stooges look like the most terrifying gang on earth. 

They had competition in Bowery boys The Heartbreakers though, and the pictures of them in London display a menacing vision of sexuality – Johnny Thunders couldn’t have looked as though he gave a damn even if he’d tried. 

The other London pictures depict some curiously cosy scenes: NME journalist Caroline Coon had half the punks in town round for Christmas dinner in 1977, and it’s charmingly jarring to see Slits guitarist Viv Albertine and Sid Vicious (with an acoustic!) lounging amid the throws and spider plants of Coon’s living room like a pair of urchins who’ve broken into some bourgeois hippy's home and are taking a moment before going in search of the jewellery and silver. A platinumed Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren overlook the brood. 

Cherry Vanilla pipes up, 1976

There’s a grand portrait of chalk-faced Siouxsie, too hardened with hauteur and high dudgeon to care that someone’s waving a lens in her direction and her polar opposite, Debbie Harry, displaying the smiling, cocky, come-hither charm of the savviest starlet in town.

Jackie Curtis 1970

Bowie on the Trans-Siberian Express 1973

Diabolical Angel: Johnny Thunders in London 1977

Hard Day's Night: sleepy rent boys, late 1970s

These kind of outlaws are harder to find in London or NYC today as the cancerous bloom of gentrification slowly seeps into every street and neighbourhood. But they’ll always be with us, skirting the Quicksand of the Everyday, outsmarting the Life More Ordinary – and Leee Black Childers’ subjects built much of that rocky road on which they wilfully walk.

Leee Black Childers. Born: Louisville, Kentucky 1945. Died: Los Angeles, California 2014.

This piece was originally published by London Festival Fringe in December 2012

Skinheads: a Hard Case

Skinheads have long been misunderstood. This subculture’s perceived links to far-right politics have somewhat soured their contribution to subcultural style. To make claims for it is to hit a cultural nerve and be laid open to accusations of filtering out noxious ideologies to concentrate on aesthetics alone.

However, things are rarely as black and white as they seem, if you’ll pardon the expression, and while there were undoubtedly factions of racist and violent Skins or 'boneheads' – those who were afraid of everything and worked overtime pretending they were afraid of nothing – there were legions of other Skins whose way of life was a celebration not of whiteness, but of roots: they were working-class with class.

Dress to the left c.1972

The original sixties Skins morphed out of the Mod scene. For Mods whose means were as slender as their silhouettes, petrol-blue Italian mohair suits were out - but Sta-prest, button-down Brutus shirts and steel-capped leather boots (shiny enough for a modette to stare into and make up her Ace Face) were in. The template for this approximated look was the dockyard worker’s uniform: with a few tweaks and some painstaking attention to detail, it was sharp, clean and tough enough to be seen in during an amphetamine-fuelled evening of skanking to blue beat, ska and soul in the racially mixed and harmonious dancehalls of south-west London.

Suedeheads c.1971

By and by, like ice floes in the spring, these Mods (‘Hard Mods’) split from their peacock-like brethren (‘Smooth Mods’). By now, the latter wore their aspiration tonsorially by adopting hairstyles that spoke of leisured grooming while the former went to the other extreme with a clipped head that spoke of practicality, manual work and self-assurance. This style, the original Skinhead crop, was inspired by the young West Indian men they danced beside. These Rude Boys kept their wiry, unruly & coarse locks under strict control by keeping one step ahead of the razor. From this cut Skinheads would receive their new name come the fag-end of that most mythologized decade.

Best foot forward, c.1971

In 1969, many male Skins had partings shaved into their crops, running from crown to forehead, though this was mostly hidden beneath a pork-pie trilby, worn on the back, not the top of the head. Over the check shirt (Brutus, Ben Sherman or Jaytex) an original Skin would wear a Wrangler or Levi’s denim or corduroy jacket, or perhaps an RAF great coat or donkey jacket. Anything, infact, as long as it wasn’t fashion, that most bourgeois of concerns; this was about style. However, all coats and jackets faded in the grand shadow of the sheepskin coat, the Skin Symbol par excellence.

'ard Modettes c.1968

The distaff members of the Skin and Suedehead cult distained the buttock-hugging acrylic strides favoured by their mainstream sisters of the ’69-72 period (though the Skinbird’s affection for the mini-and-fishnets combo came later), but their faces owed much to the Modette style:  lips painted cardiac-arrest pale, Cleopatra eyes, and eyebrows plucked to oblivion. Their hairstyle was also modernist at this point – a tufty, micro-fringed crop with feathered sides. Beneath their flat-fronted slacks or bell-bottoms, they’d more than likely be wearing monkey boots or clumpy flare-heeled brogues. Their brothers and boyfriends would be shod in a bewildering array of reflective leather: loafers, Italian brogues, leather-uppers, 8-eyelet DMs, or Norwegians.

Jackie-friendly suedehead couple c.1973

Come the very early seventies, Skinheads began to evolve into Suedeheads - some of who took their terrace stomp all the way to Top of the Pops in the form of Glam (Slade, after all, started out as faithful Suedeheads). 

Nobody's Fools: Slade in 1969

With a softer, smoother surface up top, the silhouette broadened at the shoulders with the arrival of the Crombie (more often than not a Chesterfield masquerading as Crombie, but let’s not split stubble) in all its midnight black or natty navy sleekness. A pocket square was often pinned in the breast with a diamond-studded pin. Amazingly, a brolly and bowler was sometimes added to this get-up, thereby creating a bizarre caricature of a City Slicker.

Skins and Suedeheads were increasingly less easy to spot in the mid-seventies period, largely because their style had evolved so far from its origins that they were virtually unrecognisable, walking the mean streets of the East End in knitwear, polo-necks, cords and, surreally, long fringes. 

But in the wake of the punk explosion, a new generation of Skins emerged alongsidethe countless other youth cults of the 1979-83 period, and this was when racial politics really entered the equation along with the emergence of Two Tone. The East End of London was the principal territory of the new Skin, but in the New Towns - those concrete citadels of the Home Counties - Skinhead was huge.

Sorts

Skins now wrapped up against the chill wind of Thatcherism in Harrington jackets (burgundy or black cutting the sharpest dash), accompanied by orange-tab Levis with three-inch turn ups, all the better to expose the inky-black DMs rising up their calves. Added to this were form-fitting Fred Perry shirts, V-neck sweaters and whip-slender braces. Hair ranged from the near-bald ‘shadow’ of the number one crop to smoothies and suedes. Skinhead girls (or ‘Skinbirds’) now sported the classic feather (or ‘Chelsea’) cut – short on the crown, with fringes at the sides and front; the crown might even be shaved, with feathery bangs flopping over the forehead. Many Skinbirds had a tendency to bleach their remaining follicles to within an inch of their lives - and they never let their roots grow out. Ever. Denim minis were worn with itchy black fishnet tights and spotless cherry red DMs (or white socks with shoes). Snug Fred Perry t-shirts and Ben Sherman check shirts were often a real boon for those Skinbirds blessed in the mammary department.

Skinbirds, Brighton 1980

Overall, the look became more extreme (tattoos were widespread), but it was no less sharp, although suits were never seen on Skin revivalists. But the rot had set in, and Skinheads began to splinter spectacularly: into Trojans (originals), Neo-Nazis, SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice), casuals and ‘plastic’ Skins (i.e. High Street pretenders), Two-Tone and Oi! fans and later, gay fetishists. For a subculture that had originally stressed roots, pride and respect, the fact that some Skins could now be seen Mod-bashing on Margate seafront or in Bethnal Green underpasses showed how withered those roots had become.

Neo

Like all the subcultures of the post-punk era, true Skins still exist, albeit in diminished numbers. Many 21st-century Skins are often a combination of the best elements of the subculture; their politics, if they have any, do not interfere with their love of ska, Fred Perry or feather cuts. But then as now, there are those who sully the name: a head case is a hard case to crack.

Reggae-pop! 1970

Potential Piccadilly Palaver 1970

Sharp

Blur busy appropriating, 1993

Allen's Oeuvre

El Tel and the Boys: The Specials in 1979

Skinbirds c.1982

Kids are United

"Don't care for you or your camera, mate."

Rockers: Folk Devilry in Leather

Rockers have been suffering from a mistaken subcultural identity for over fifty years. Teds, those frothily-quiffed dandy thugs in Technicolor facsimiles of Granddad’s 1911 Sunday Best, were not Rockers. And though the Greaser tag eventually became interchangeable with Rocker, flowing alongside Rockabilly and later Psychobilly, into one big, grease-slicked reservoir, Rockers were at first out there on their own, a very pre-Swinging Sixties phenomenon.

Their roots were in the immediate post-war era: an historical incubating period for nearly every youth cult, big or small for the next 25 years. Between 1945 and 1950, the average wage of teens in Britain increased at twice the average rate of the adult wage. This new prosperity collided with the explosion of American Rock ‘n’ Roll, Hollywood’s take on insubordinate youth in The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle and Rebel without a Cause, and, oddly, the construction of arterial roads around major British cities – veritable racetracks with the circumference of a metropolis. British motorcycle building hit a peak in these years too, and the youths who roared up and down the freshly set concrete on these gleaming monsters became known as ‘Ton-Up Boys’ (Ton-Up being slang for driving at 100mph), whizzing by in a phalanx of smoky leather, smoggy exhaust smoke & inky blue denim.

Where it all began: Brando as Johnny in The Wild One (1954)

By the early sixties, the Ton-Ups had become as well known – if not better known - for their devotion to Rockabilly and a singular style of dress, as for their motorcycles, and the Rockers were born (Teds, conversely, had by now passed into history – at least as a visible youth cult). Rockers now began to strip down and soup up their bog-standard factory motorcycles, which ended up closely resembling racer bikes: speed not comfort was the desired end.  Storming north and south of the river and around London’s  arterial roads was thirsty work, and while battered leather, reflective slicked hair and the tribal stomp of engineer boots quickly became unwelcome – if not banned – in dancehalls and ‘respectable’ pubs, The Ace Café, the Ace of Spades and the Chelsea Bridge Tea Stall quickly became Rocker haunts, not only for slurping endless mugs of sickly-sweet beige tea while chuffing unfiltered tabs, but as starting and finishing points for increasingly competitive & treacherous motorcycle races. Rockers were loathed by ‘motorcycle enthusiasts’ and the feeling was probably mutual.

As the subculture grew stronger, the outfit became tougher, largely born of practicality. The leather jackets became increasingly studded, patched and covered in enamel or metal pin badges. Levis were tough, midnight blue and wide-legged, with turn-ups of several inches plus. Under these, a Rocker would sport the classic Lewis Leather biker, or engineer boots. Hair was Brylcreemed into shimmering pomps, ramrod stiff quiffs, or slick, swept-back waves; certainly nothing the chill air could shift while roaring up the North Circular, were you forgoing your helmet or peaked leather cap (latterly a much-favoured fetish item). A fluttering white silk scarf and aviator goggles completed the look. Of an evening, the boots might be replaced by crepe-soled brothel creepers in a spectrum of rainbow colours and off came the leathers to reveal Daddy-O-style bowling shirts. 

Pomps 'n' Pepsi

Rocker girlfriends (for they were nearly always girlfriends – they didn’t have subcultural autonomy like their rival Mod sisters) wore a similar daytime get-up, but with a wild bouffant & more eyeliner than a silent movie star. When the sun went down, she’d shimmy into a circulation-hindering pencil skirt, a bullet bra and a pair of spike heels. Thus attired, the Rocker couple would dance to Elvis, Bo Diddley, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Billy Fury, Johnny Burnette, Wanda Jackson and Link Wray. 

Gene und Eddie: rumble

Their drug of choice was beer, for Rockers where emphatically – almost puritanically – anti-drugs. The reason for this appears to be little other than Mods’ fondness for them: anything Mods liked, Rockers emphatically hated. A Rocker would have no more necked a Purple Heart than he or she would have donned a parka and jumped on a Vespa.

Circa 1960

By the late '60s, after a succession of well-publicised seaside clashes with Mods a few years earlier had helped create Folk Devils out of both cults, Rockers began to splinter as elements of their world became appropriated (as usual) by hippies who liked motorbikes, i.e. Hell’s Angels. Easy Rider, released in 1969, was anathema to Rockers, and it’s hardly surprising; it’s harder to think of a more wholesale hippie theft of Rock ‘n’ Roll than this beardy, weirdy, much-lauded film. From here on, the ‘Greaser’ tag took over.

In the early-mid ’70s, old Teds and Greasers became one on the cultural imagination: both were seen as vaguely tragic throwbacks. Teds undoubtedly helped this attitude along with their innate conservatism. The social and political changes of the sixties and seventies hadn’t touched them, and they liked it that way. Greasers were not cut from the same cloth, but they were united with Teds in their hatred of Punk, come ’76, casually beating several shades of Crazy Colour out of the King’s Rd crowd of a Saturday afternoon for what they were doing to ‘their’ Rock ‘n’ Roll. Fortunately, youth creates afresh, and those who loved their parents’ ’50s and ’60s Rockabilly as much as the new-fangled three-chord thrash combined the two and Psychobilly was born, alongside a passionate Rockabilly revival, with bands like The Cramps, The Polecats and The Meteors leading the way. Psychobilly and the new rockabilly were faster & harder than the originals, and former style took the original look to cartoon extremes – 10-inch quiffs, shaved temples, brightly coloured tattoos: and this was just the girls.

Hard Girls: the backbone of all badassery

The Rockabilly revival never truly died out and remains a solid subculture today; a colourful, hardcore, obsessive alternative to a world that seems to drift from the bland to the blander, day in, day out.

Your author's father on the speedway, 1958

Dude 'tude

Rita Tushingham and Colin Campbell in The Leather Boys (1964)

Chelsea Bridge

Dahn The Ace

Originally published on Queens of Vintage.com, August 2009

Love in the Time of Chlorine: Deep End (1970)

In the early eighties Julie Burchill wrote: “The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, infact, things to make women more like chums and less like millstone medallions.”

Deep End, Jerzy Skolimowski’s dreamlike, blackly comic coming-of-age masterpiece, brought back into the world by the BFI after over 40 years in the wilderness, tells a different story. For fifteen-year-old Mike (John Molder-Brown) becoming a man at the fag end of that most mythologised decade is not an experience from which he’ll emerge swaggering, self-assured and sexually blasé. Ultimately, little else but the pitfalls and dangers of the adult world are left etched in his blank doe eyes.

Mike is a school leaver newly employed at a seedy public baths. His older co-worker, Susan (Jane Asher) is a coral-haired Fulham femme fatale, equally sexy and mean. Susan tells Mike he can supplement the meagre wages by being ‘nice’ to the ladies who use the baths (“the gentlemen too”), even suggesting they swap clients according to taste. Mike’s initial fascination for Susan segues into unrequited love before blooming malignantly into fatal obsession. In dealing with life on the clammy-palmed brink of manhood, Deep End couldn’t be further from the Technicolor fraternal hi-jinks of the Hollywood model.

Skolimowsi was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1938, the son of a resistance fighter executed by the Nazis. A graduate of Poland’s National Film School, he went on to collaborate with his contemporary Roman Polanski on the script for the latter’s feature debut, Knife in the Water (1962). Skolimowski’s star seemed in the ascendancy with Le Depart in 1967, a French film that won the Golden Bear at Berlin Film Festival, but his subsequent films (including Deep End) were little seen. His claim that he only ever makes films to please himself is borne out by the fitful artistry evident in the hit-and-miss work of his canon. He gave up film for painting in 1989, only returning to the former profession in 2010 with the Vincent Gallo vehicle Essential Killing which won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival. Essential Killing could not get a release in America – a state of affairs which would have been a mighty blow for a director preoccupied with which direction the wind is blowing, but far less so for this uncompromising rebel soul.

Deep End, shot in 1970 and released the following year, may have pleased Skolimowski, but it didn’t find the public of 1971 in thrall. The mood of that time in the popular imagination has been oversimplified (hindsight does lend itself to oversimplification). As a result, Deep End, where it has been appraised at all, has been smeared with the facile idea that it represents the end of sixties optimism. And while the early Heath-era London of Deep End does revel in a certain kind of urban bleakness where the gains of the previous decade are noticeable by their absence, the fact is Britons were then actually enjoying an unparalleled period of post-war material joy: between 1970 and 1973 the vast majority of ‘ordinary’ households for the first time owned a car, a fridge, a television – and had their own bathroom. Yet in Deep End, the crumbling bath house relies on those few who have missed out, for whatever reason, on this material mobility. So if Deep End represents anything socially, it is not those who merely miss the sixties and its gains, but those who simply missed out. Likewise, Susan’s cynical, sexual libertinism can be seen not as the end result of a dead or failed social revolution, but the start of a new one – for the 1970s were the Real Sixties, the decade in which the new sexual order became quotidian. 

It would be reactionary to equate Susan’s sexually liberated attitude with her casual cruelty. The alleged egalitarianism of the sixties has done nothing for her: she’s a carnal prole gal making use of her physical charms before her bitterness curdles their power - the only power she has, or may ever have. And who’s to say her ease in matters sexual is a result of swinging London? Girls with no fear of men or their own sexuality are far older than the sixties.

The genius of Deep End is how overtly engaged it is in gender and sexual politics, but without allowing either issue to smother or drive the narrative. Skolimowski’s touch is light enough to forefront these issues without making us feel like ideologically drunk bystanders on the front lines of the early seventies sex wars.

As Mike, John Molder-Brown (resembling a very young and curiously sexless Brad Pitt) is the embodiment of innocence and driven by base sexual impulses. He looks disconcertingly young - like a boy who’s never cooked a meal, ridden alone on a bus or read a newspaper. On his first day at work, he is literally thrown in at the deep end of the pool by a bunch of his cocky, mean contemporaries; he flounders there, metaphorically, for much of the film. Mike is the antithesis of Karl Michael Vogler’s lecherous swimming teacher, slapping the damp, lycra-clad rumps of his gauche teenage girl students and fucking a bored-looking Susan in a disused cubicle. Mike’s also a greenhorn counterpoint to Susan’s foul-tempered, blokey fiancée, Chris (played by former sixties pirate radio DJ Christopher Sandford).

Susan is as sexually experienced as Mike is inexperienced, and their traditional gender roles are reversed at the most basic cinematic level: Mike is the object and Susan is the subject. She controls every sexual situation she’s in, as do other female characters – the ‘continental’ Soho whore, the smouldering “fat beauty” gloriously played by Diana Dors. Susan turns on Mike like a hellcat when he suggests she might be anything other than the mistress of her own fate (having found a cardboard cut-out of a nude ‘Susan’ on the doorstep of a Soho clip-joint, he yells at her on the tube that it can’t really be her because “You’re not like that!”. In response, she snaps “What AM I like? What am I supposed to be like?”)

As Mike comes to know Susan better, he begins not to see her as on object, but as a symbol of idealised womanhood, despite her cruelties such as offhandedly revealing to a besotted Mike that she’s engaged, throwing a dirty snowball at a dog and taunting the baths’ receptionist over her weight. Mike’s naivety preserves his romanticism and leads to one of the most comic exchanges in the film (“I love her,” he tells the policeman Susan’s called over after he gropes her in the cinema. “You perverted little monster!” he snaps back). This curious position of Mike’s is so rare as to make the film more of an oddity than it already is. For while Susan’s character seems entirely modern, (her strumpetry supposedly the result of first-wave feminism which has reached its zenith in the 21^st century) Mike’s fits in nowhere. He is neither of the past nor the present, unrecognisable as either a continuation of a historical male ‘type’ or a familiar modern figure: the bewildered innocent, inexperienced heterosexual male object is a type you will search nearly 120 years of cinema for in vain.

For Mike’s unquestionably the seduced, objectified virgin – nowhere more than in a scene with Diana Dors as his first lady client. She imprisons him in the bath cubicle, near-suffocating him against her mighty cleavage. In a breathless sexually drugged trance, she mauls Mike around the room while fantasising (apparently to the point of orgasm) about George Best scoring goal after goal in the FA Cup Final (“Tackle, dribble, dribble . . . he pushed it in, just inside the post . . . you can’t keep Georgie out . . . SHOOT!”). While Dors still looks every inch (or three) an icon of cheap glamour, the satin skin, pert pneumatic charms and clouds of silky, solarised hair that made her the Monroe of austerity Britain have long since fled. Once liberated from her looks however, she proved to be a character actress of some substance. (In an era where actresses are dieted, buffed, nipped and tucked way into middle age and beyond, it’s something of a shock to learn that Dors was a mere 39 here).

The Dors scene isn’t an isolated comic moment. Later, in grubby old Soho, Mike tries and fails to follow Susan and Chris into a nightclub (an awkward, embarrassing attempt at a foray into a decadent milieu - another deep end into which he pitches and flounders). So he hangs around Wardour Street buying countless hot dogs from a vendor played with artless hilarity by Bert Kwouk (and not, as cult mythology has it, Damo Suzuki, singer of Krautrock band Can, who soundtracked the film along with Cat Stevens).

The Soho scene, its inky darkness barely illuminated by silvery neon, is one of the few extended glimpses we get of 1970 London, and is a fine contrast to the dank, daytime mossy-hued suburban streets and the more predominant washed-out Eastern Bloc colour palette so particular to post-swinging, pre-glam British films (Many exteriors, however, were filmed in West Germany. The bathhouse ones were shot in Leytonstone.)

But it’s the surreal, hallucinatory touches that make Deep End a cult gem. The first example of this - when Mike falls in the pool within minutes of starting work - is so jolting in its incongruity, it’s like a scene spliced in from another film altogether. It looks like a nightmarish underwater ballet. The final scene justifies Skolimowski’s assertion that “As a poet my mind is trained along the path of poetic associations”: Mike and Susan’s pearly naked bodies, carnally linked and suspended in the icy blue wash, which is being slowly tainted with the scarlet mixture of blood and the more vivid red of viscous, spilt paint. In the damp air above the water, a lamp swings like a noose while Cat Stevens’s ‘But I Might Die Tonight’ soars then fades on the soundtrack.

Happily, Jerzy Skolimowski is not a forgotten or unjustly marginalised master of his field – but he is, as the world’s best film writer David Thomson has said “isolated . . . intractable”. And as a new audience has now discovered his masterwork, the very different kind of isolation in which Deep End was held for over 40 years may now enter history.