Sunday 21 January 2018

Lone Star





Staring into the Klieg lights beyond the pool made lurid red spots flash in front of her eyes. The moustachioed assistant director, in white cap, plus-fours and golf shoes that had never known turf, yelled into his bullhorn. “Ohhhh-Kay. Number ones ready to slide. Quiet on the set. ROLL ’EM – ACTION!” She launched herself down the waterslide, threw her arms in the air and beamed, landing in the now rank water which shot up her nose and made her brain go all fuzzy and her eyes bulge. She swam up, remembering to smile again just as she broke the surface, where a plastic lily hit her in the face.

Her momma had been predictably concerned about her coming out to Hollywood alone, (“Is all that glitters worth worrying me into ma grave, lil’ girl?”) though she was less innocent than her momma supposed and less conceited than the local girls had supposed. She could still see their sneering faces on that dull, languid afternoon she was crowned Miss Texas 1931, standing there with a sunburst smile but cold with terror inside. The hatred of her peers drifted up to the platform like a cloud of poisonous sulphur, and she was glad of the warm breeze whipping wiry strands of her amber hair across her eyes, hiding the fear she was sure they betrayed. But the talent scout and photographers saw only that broad, dazzling smile and sun-ripened glow of her slender limbs, and the telegram from Warner Bros arrived two weeks later.

She’d decided on “Elissa Gray” after the studio declared her given name too cornfed. Not Grey, but Gray – like a dove-coloured evening gown or a silvery fox fur. Black sounded too heavy for her and its opposite hue had been bagged by Alice White. Brown reminded her of the Hicksville she’d escaped.

Primped, plucked and begirdled, her first part saw her sneering at Sally Eilers in a speakeasy scene in a film called Feelin’ Tomorrow Like I Feel Today (“Saaaay sister!”). Three more parts followed, but her spoken lines had plateaued at five. Now she was a Buzz Berkley girl, she had no lines. But she did have several close-ups and her highest salary yet. If this kept up, she could move to a better part of town. But she had a long way to go before she’d be a neighbour to the leading lady, she of the pot-roast-rounded all-American face and smooth undulations of peroxide hair ending in clusters of pin-wheel curls. As American as apple pie. A $9,000 a week apple pie. She shone alright, and was so American, so unlike the foreign stars you sometimes saw on the lot who really did have hollows where their cheeks should be, and under their heavily hooded eyes, too. They walked with the seductive strut of streetwalkers and the hauteur of empresses.

She and her fellow chorines wore bathing suits of sequins and transparent gauze that didn’t retain water. To onlookers, it resembled a two-piece at a short distance. Anklets and a silver skull cap completed their look. Most of the girls had dimpled cheeks that mimicked their equally soft thighs, though all their legs were lengthy and tapering. But few would have made it past Mr Ziegfeld’s eye in New York. They were supposed to appeal only to the average American boy. Gosh-darned pretty things, but not quite beautiful. Not disarmingly so - or more so than the leading lady, anyway. The kind of girls those boys sat in the dark might hope to share a life with. Who they could court, marry, make babies with (and then . . . what?) Elissa looked around. She knew one of the principals had been a backline Ziegfeld girl. She was easy to spot. There she was, her figure astonishing – athletic, yet pliant. Like satin draped over sinew. Elissa ground her jaw. It felt as though she’d been chewing gum for 24 hours. She’d thought “face-ache” a comic myth, but the repeated exhortations yelled through the bullhorn to smile had given her exactly that. The girls might not all have Ziegfeld figures, but they all had million-watt smiles. They’d been chosen for the wideness of their smiles as much as for the length of their legs.

She’d spoken with one of the featured girls the other day. Her name was Millie and she had a black helmet hairdo, like Colleen Moore, whose madcap films Elissa had enjoyed at her local picture house back home aged 11, sitting on the tip-up seats with their stiff and cracked maroon leather which always stuck to her tender pink thighs in the suffocating summers. That was all of  . . . ten years ago, was it? (Only ten years?) She thought Millie’s bob out of date, but it made her look less amorphous among the chromium chorus of silvery-blonde heads, plus she had a speaking part. She fingered the brittle fuzz of her own peachy, tightly Marcelled, possibly ruined locks.




Elissa had heard all the stories about girls getting a leg-up from big stars of both sexes. She wanted no part of this. Not because she was lousy with empty morality, but because she wanted to get there – wherever there was – under her own steam. She’d gotten into this paradisical aquacade without compromising herself and planned to go further on the same merit. Though she realised so noble a notion might see her carrying cocktails aloft at the Brown Derby rather than get her name above a title. Sometimes she wondered if she wasn’t fated to sabotage her chances. She’d never taken stock of her situation, just drifted. How much she actually wanted all this had only recently occurred to her.

Home was currently a cramped apartment in a one-storey Spanish Mission-Revival court near the Bunker Hill district. Spare time was spent out on the patchy, heat-parched grass of the central court with the other girls, taking sunbaths, painting their toenails and smoking cigarettes while the gramophone ground out one tinny record after another. In the centre of the court there was an ornamental fountain which the landlady was touchingly proud of, though its tiles were cracked and there were often cigarette butts and dead spiders floating in it. The building itself had lengthy cracks in the outer whitewashed stucco walls from the Long Beach earthquake earlier that year. These the landlady couldn’t afford to ignore and fretted over them daily (“Oh, dearie me, gosh darn diddly, those cracks!”)

“Shimmering” was the word she always thought befitted her adopted city. Whenever she stepped out of the court, pocketbook in hand, she’d look down the dusty, sun-baked stretch of Figueroa Street with its row of cracked palm trees stretching away from her, to the intersection at First Street, where the streetcars went clanging by, all of it shimmering in the eternal heat, January or July. The light never failed to astonish her. So fine, blinding, icy, pure. The Los Angeles sun never seemed like the Texan sun she’d grown up under. Not red and burning, but white and intense, as if coated in permafrost, turning the skin of her 21-year-old hands leathery. When the sun set, the sky was burnished with vistas of scarlet-streaked gold. She’d had to buy some sunglasses with circular lenses. Everyone here wore them, even if they were already protected from the sun’s glare by big, splashy hats. Back home, she’d only ever seen shaded glasses worn by half-blind old ladies who’d been born in the twilight of the civil war and spent the days driving their bath chairs aggressively down Main Street.

She roomed with a girl from Ohio whose sallow, sharp features and long face (“Kinda like a skyscraper, huh?”) had condemned her to crowd scenes in the movies. Not that this seemed to bother her. She was warm, urbane and dry, and she rarely smiled. She wore her short-sleeved ivory silk blouse tight, no brassiere and polka-dotted slacks teamed with cork-wedge heels. She called herself Fritzi Mahone and had an over-dyed, butter-gold long bob, side-parted and dry and dead as autumn leaves. Elissa envied Fritzi her confidence though she wasn’t at all sure Fritzi envied her her beauty, even though the fact of having or not having that could mean the difference between eating and starving for a girl in this town. Elissa suspected Fritzi had come out to Hollywood not for stardom, but for marriage to a mogul and was just biding her time as one of the pancaked faces in the back-lot crowd. Fritzi had once gotten the two of them an invite to a party in Beverly Hills. They’d been picked up in a peacock-blue, block-long Pierce Arrow, which made the both of them giggle, squeal and clap their hands with delight. They were taken to that neighbourhood where the streets were lined with identical palms shooting 60ft into the sky and driven past huge stuccoed and colonial-style mansions clad with cascades of lush pink bougainvillea and sat at the crests of stunning emerald lawns nourished by ever-spinning water sprinklers. Not a soul was abroad on the sidewalks. Despite its hushed beauty, Elissa thought the neighbourhood resembled a gilded ghost town. She was surprised, if not shocked, to see this earthly paradise accommodating an oil rig at one fork in the road. It was nothing next to the ones back home, but its incongruity was jolting. It made her think of home, but did not make her homesick.

At the party, after a couple of glasses of what she was told was “real” French champagne (“Natch, a pair a’dumb starlets wouldn’t know all champagne’s French” Fritzi smirked) she noticed Fritzi and several other girls pairing off with corpulent producers, disappearing up the vast Mexican-tiled staircase and though various doors. The rest of the guests clinked glasses, blew plumes of blue, unfiltered smoke into the air, laughed loudly, talked shop or sophisticated smut. She had sat rigid and alone on a black leather moderne couch, trying her damndest to seem glacial, bored and disdainful, like Constance Bennett. But she was unnerved by an older, immaculate-dressed man, Italian, perhaps, who began to stare at her. He was built like a bullfrog, his face soft and blotchy, like a baked apple. According to a drunken redhead with a phoney East Coast soh-ci-ahrty accent who was probably younger than her, the man was apparently some big noise at MGM. “I make it my bis-huness to get as close to as many cigar-chompers as pour-sible,” she’d said, before slipping into slang: “I’m hipped on the subject.” The man kept staring at Elissa with chill, smokyslate eyes. If he’d moved, it would have been like a cigar store Indian blinking and juddering to life. Elissa kept swallowing and felt her eyes and lips getting dry, even imagined she was twitching. She stood up and walked from the room, stumbling slightly and asked a butler the way to the nearest bathroom. 

The floor-length liquiescent satin gown she’d borrowed slithered against her thighs as she walked. The nearest bathroom was bigger than her entire apartment and looked like somewhere a Pompeiian whore might have bathed, all black onyx and Egyptian chartreuse marble with gold fittings. She leant against the vanity unit, trying to get her breath and avoid her reflection, coming at her from several angles. For a 21-year-old starlet, she looked, she thought, tired and strained. God only knows how she must look to others, then. Good looks weren’t enough on their own, momma always said. Though she suspected momma was suggesting she add virtue and pliancy to her arsenal, not sophisticated chat and considerable wit. Her strained good looks were worth more than her sensitivity here, she reflected. Eventually, her desire for a cigarette overwhelmed her and she’d returned to the party to find the man gone and her clutch where she’d left it on the couch. She later discovered from Fritzi that the man was a mobster, a hoodlum in a high place. People did as he said, Fritzi told her, especially girls, and told her some yarn about a party in Chicago where a naked chorus girl had been dangled out of a 50th floor penthouse window by her ankle in sub-zero temperatures and had been purple as a choked corpse when he’d hauled her back in.

They were now being filmed breaking the water’s surface in sequence. ‘Buzz’, with his bushy turtle brows and the shadow of stubble blue against his pallid skin, was yelling at them through a conical bullhorn. “You go under the water and come up SMILING. Y’hear! Start smiling while you’re still UNDER the water. Now, snap snap snap – right on cue, before the mas-carra starts to run!”
“ROLL ’EM! Aaaand – ACTION!” Under she went, her smile fixed, the peppery sting of the water flooding behind her eyeballs. She could make out the beam of the underwater Klieg light cutting through the increasing murk and thought of the mote-filled projection beam that would flicker into the Corpus Christi Ritz, displaying her smiling, sodden face for her momma and all the locals to see. When she tried to think of how many millions of people would see her face filling the screen, her mind boggled and went blank. Spanish, Argentinean, British and French audiences, China, Morocco . . . Her face would be burned onto people’s retinas. They might see her again in their dreams. People she’d never, ever meet . . . She thought it funny that she’d be seen almost naked by so many. Her momma had probably never been that naked after girlhood, even in private.

The previous day, she and some of the other girls had been treading water between set ups and talking about how they’d come to Hollywood. “Oh, you know, age-old story. Encyclopaedia seller came to my ma’s door, saw me makin’ eyes at him over her shoulder in the hallway and said he had a second cousin in casting, so thought I’d take the chance . . .” They’d laughed. Not joyously, but smirking, wry.

She’d noted arch cynicism was the pose among girls in Hollywood and sometimes adopted it in their company, usually when enjoying a cigarette outside the soundstage - studiedly disinterested, off-hand, slangy (‘That punkola creep – he ain’t got a thing to sell me when he’s not on a dancefloor”). They’d lean back against the heat-soaked soundstage wall, smoking, affecting lassitude. She wasn’t much good at affecting the pose and knew she’d not yet even learned to comfortably inhabit her own skin, now going tough and wrinkly in the water. If she wanted a career getting under the skins of others, she’d need to reverse this. (If she wanted it . . .) Anyway, she could hardly blame them for toughening themselves in a cut-throat town with nothing to break their fall. She was kin with them, like it or not. Cynicism and realism about their chances were the appropriate armour for this battle.

Each day before shooting, they sat around in silky kimonos while ‘Buzz’ drew diagrams of their water ballet, as he called it, on a blackboard, jogging their memories over the finer points of the backbreaking rehearsals. It reminded Elissa of school, and she found herself unconsciously sitting up and straightening her back, as if anticipating Miss Terran’s thin-lipped wrath. Buzz’s zeal and precision in describing how the whole thing would work was militaristic. Maybe a hangover from his fighting days. One of the girls did say he’d been someone, though she didn’t know who, in the war. Elissa’s poppa had been someone in that war, too. She only remembered him in fragments that she’d always hoped would one day solidify into a whole. A memory of a broad, strong man, lifting her up as if she were as weightless as cotton candy and nuzzling her against his warm, stubbly cheek. She didn’t know if that memory was quite real in its details. Still, there was comfort even in a fool’s paradise.



Such were her thoughts that day as she lay on her back in the water, glad of the fleeting chance to catch breath, and relieved, like the other girls, that their faces were unseen in this shot. They were grouped in three decreasing circles and Buzz and his cameraman, high above them on a boom platform, zoomed up and away into the dark recesses of the soundstage ceiling, beyond the lighting rigs, right up through the hole he’d ordered to be cut out of the roof, through which she could see the ever-azure Angelino sky. The overhead Kliegs went off as she joined hands with the girls at either side of her (“ACTION!”) struggling to grasp the fingers of the one to her right and panicking for a second. (“If one girl messes up, the whole thing’s like a house of cards in a hurricane.”) They spread their legs until their toes touched. The girls in dark bathing caps held onto their shoulders began to turn them in concentric circles. She sensed the underwater lights come on beneath her to backlight the tableau. “By a waterfall, I’m calling you-oo-oo-oo!” Damned song. She could hardly distinguish anymore whether it was coming from the Vitaphone speaker or the recesses of her head.

This scene was almost restful. At first, taking a water slide had seemed like the most fun a gal could have on a film set, short of being roughed-up and ravished by Gable. But on the third and fourth descents, she’d bashed her hips against the sides, resulting in plum-coloured bruises. She’d later taken in the 30-strong line of girls waiting to see the on-set medics and instead mentioned it to one of the make-up mistresses who said, “Don’ worry, honey, ain’t nobody gonna see.” What, nobody was going to notice her bruises or nobody was going to notice her? Or nobody was going to notice her bruises because nobody was gonna notice her? She told herself to quit it. Your grandmother was a frontierswoman. In another scene, other girls took their turns on the slides while she ran from behind the cameras and jumped or dived into the foamy water. They were not to pause as they reached the ledge, which meant she might land on another girl’s head, or one on hers. That never happened, but there was so much furious paddling beneath the water, she’d ended up with a latticework of toenail scratches on her ankles from the other girls. It looked like a pack of razor-clawed alleycats had taken her calves for hanging Virginia hams.

The magnificent set of the Deco pool made the soundstage smell like a Turkish bath rather than the usual shellac, which sometimes sent you nice and dizzy. She was second in a line of three on a diving board, arms pointed forward. The raw scratches on her ankle smarted and she bit her lip. They had to reshoot the scene four times that day, owing to two girls on other diving boards who’d bellyflopped in the water. Shivering for the fourth take, the girl behind her cussing out the bellyfloppers, she’d felt a rare flash of temper and vowed to cut the clumsy pair dead for this if they so much as glanced at her in the changing room. The skin of one of the girls looked steak-raw and inflamed beneath the gauze of her bathing suit where her flesh had thwacked the water in place of an elegant dive. The other’s girl’s sore skin was disguised by her modish ruby-red sunburn, but she’d been gritting her teeth, bent double and sobbing as the others tried to comfort her.

Elissa gotten an eyeful of second-billed star that same day, the one who kicked off the water ballet. When she heard some of the other gals bitching about this actress, she’d just smiled and shook her head in mock disapproval, not wishing to join them on that plane. But she’d had to admit they’d a point when she saw the girl in action, up close. If the girl had been beautiful or talented in a discernible way. . .  But she’d married that ultra-famous blackface ham and her bean-counting bottom-billed days were behind her. Elissa’s rare ire rose again and again when she saw the girl, who looked like a wan, startled rabbit, helped from the water between set-ups and wrapped in a massive towelling robe from which her tiny head protruded, making her look like she were enclosed in a vapour bath. All the while, Elissa and the other 100 or so gals had to perch on the side, displaying legs blotched with red giraffe-prints from constant immersion. If they couldn’t find room on the edge of the pool, they’d hold on to the sides or paddle around in their primordial girl soup, now full of dust and underfoot silt and maybe even . . . She’d heard some of the girls giggling about getting time-out for the bathroom being no such worry on this job. One said a Kotex had been seen floating in the pool.

They’d shot the biggest scene - on the tiered wedding-cake-cum-fountain structure - earlier last week. She’d been on the bottom tier, legs outstretched. They’d began to ache and stiffen and she’d been woken in the small hours several times since by an agonizing cramp in her left thigh, as if her bones were being used in a tug o’ war. When it hit, she’d laid on her back and grabbed the bedposts behind, gritting her teeth. A few gasps and groans had escaped through her clamped teeth, waking Fritzi, who looked over and muttered, “Jeez, Lis. Thought you’d slipped a guy in.”




The sensation of the mechanically spinning ziggurat had been cause for whooping giddiness at first, but it had palled after many an hour. She remembered one of the girls directly below her, clinging to the edge of the bottom tier, back to camera. In an accent thick as treacle she’d said, “A thawt a was being clevuh, giving ma burth year as naaneen fowteen, so now they think ahm on’y naaneen, but ahm twenny-wun! They’ve sturk me down heuh ‘cos th’think I’m a minuh! A should try and git thum . . .” A jet of water from above had blindsided her, cutting off her words as if it was scalding. “Ah, for Chrissake!” spluttered another girl through her fixed grin.

The jet had missed Elissa, luckily. Was she a lucky girl, as her momma never tired of telling her in her wearying, lengthy letters? Perhaps. She’d occasionally had to live on dimpled old oranges and soda crackers now and then, but never had to, say, cut out streetcars for weeks on end to afford stockings and cigarettes. She often lay awake at night because of the reedy buzz of the cicadas, not because of overdue rent. She had never stood in a breadline, nor had to grift, wear down her last pair of heels on the corner Hollywood & Vine nor put in repeated phone calls to Central Casting. But nothing had much changed in two years. That monotony lived well in Dreamland was a bleak awakening. It was odd, the Depression seemed barely visible in LA, as if the whole city had decided to eliminate the problem by pretending it didn’t exist, by ignoring it. Or maybe because this city had been full of desperadoes since the movies took off that the disappointed and near-destitute were part of its landscape. New additions to their ranks went unnoticed.

Thinking of the city . . . the seedy glow of Downtown Hollywood made her heart race and her stomach churn. The dizzying Egyptian Deco of Pantages theatre, the riot of neon tube signs that gave the air around them a fuzzed aureole (‘COCKTAILS 15C’), the unbelievable amount of automobiles and the miasma of smog they were said to create. Downtown LA had fascinated and repelled her, with its tamale stalls, burlesque shows and surly-faced, sloe-eyed Filipino girls coming out of the dance halls in their second-skin taffeta frocks, reeking of cigarettes, talc and nasty scent. They hung with lassitude from the arms of their lanky boyfriends, their cheap, Brilliantined permanents like melting, oiled asphalt. Here, dark seemed to come earlier than elsewhere in the city and she’d never been down that way since.

She’d responded more to individual places: a diner fashioned after a jailhouse with waitresses in arrow-print uniforms and long-linked handcuffs. The booths were set in barred spaces, like cells. She’d adored the custard-coloured sands of Malibu Beach which felt like slow-burning coals underfoot and although the enormity and jazzy bustle of the Cocoanut Grove club had at first terrified her (every movie star alive, drinking, dancing, laughing, some looking dismayingly plain in reality), she’d loved it in the end. She’d been escorted by a garrulous boy of Apollonian handsomeness who indulged his effeminacy when they were alone. He was a friend of Fritzi’s, one of what she called “the fairy chorus” and they’d drank rum cocktails with gardenias floating in them. Elissa later once bumped into this boy outside the drug store on Sunset Boulevard where she’d been idling after a cancelled casting at the old Warner studios and he’d taken her for coffee and shirred eggs. Sat at the counter on chromium stools, the boy’s black hair was combed and oiled so sleekly it looked like a bolt of jet silk. He’d joked about wanting to “jump on the running board of that divine Richard Arlen!” which had embarrassed her to blushing (an actual running board, or pansy slang for something else?) She’d switched subjects and felt like a hayseed for the rest of the day. 

There were other nightclubs and speakeasies that stayed open until the purple dawn, ones that featured floor shows with convincing female impersonators and others decorated with tribal masks where you could dance to juddering drums and race music. She liked a drink and a swell time, but not pick-ups. Just the once. Once more than back home. Some of her girlfriends had no such moral quandaries, especially Fritzi, but they’d never embarrassed her by going into detail. They’d teased her about her shyness, and once, she’d responded with a dismissive handwave and a Mae West smirk that she was “Slowly learning to unbuckle my Bible Belt. Y’all… You’ll all be the first to know when I manage it.”

The assistant director’s voice swelled through the megaphone and broke her reverie. “Number ones – DIVE DIVE DIVE!” She plunged into the wash again, now-familiar sensory deprivation and writhing shapes surrounding her as she pushed churning, dirty water aside and behind and swam with all that her dwindling strength allowed toward the hulking, blurred bulk of the underwater camera, sealed in its waterproof straitjacket.



Copyright Christopher Raymond 2018

Saturday 28 March 2015

I HEART REPLACEMENT BUS SERVICES: Death Line (1972)

There are all kinds of marriages and all kinds of families. We’re used to seeing depictions of recrimination and hate between ‘normal’ families (whatever the fuck they are) – but love between members of flesh-feasting families? Hmm. Gary Sherman's Death Line (AKA Raw Meat), a truly brilliant and gritty British horror film of the 1970s as there ever was, is the missing link between tenderness and brutality, between affection and entrails.


Alex and Patricia: Hairy Moments


In 1892, during the construction of a new tunnel between Holborn and Russell Square tube stations, there was, we’re told, a cave-in, trapping both female and male workers underground. Cannibalism was the logical conclusion for these unfortunate souls and over the decades, successive generations of Vitamin D-deficient, scurvy-ridden cannibals have survived and thrived, forging their own subterranean life and establishing their own rites and rituals, including a ‘cemetery’ where generations of dead cannibals are laid out with keepsakes taken from their snatched victims: strings of pearls, brooches, wallets etc. 


Into the depths


By 1972, their population has dwindled to one couple. When the female half finally dies, the ‘husband’ is left alone to surmount to the salty mountain of churned earth that hides their lair and emerge into the upper depths, as it were, to continue the family tradition of abducting passengers from Russell Square tube platform for sustenance.


No more port & prozzies for YOU!


Death Line has very little in common with the other horror films flickering into the fleapits of Britain in 1972. Essentially, it lacks three particular things and is all the better for it: that gift of failed seriousness (probably the best working definition of camp there is), gaudiness of design and embarrassing, dated references to the Permissive Society. All are notable for their absence. The latter one is particularly worth noting, as few genres date worse than horror. Though the film is grotesque and nihilistic in heavy measure, it is low-key and blackly comic where it matters, and as a result, leaves the majority of early seventies Brit horrors in the dust.


Warts and all


The pathos of the cannibal’s plight is brought home early in the film via a one-take, snail’s-pace, tracking shot round the dank, fetid underground lair he inhabits: rats, blood, gore, ragged limbs, maggots and hanging from rusty hooks, rotting human carcasses with inky, infinite hollows where their eyes once were, teeth protruding and exposed, lips torn off. Accompanied by the sound of a thumping electronic heartbeat and water dripping on bone-chillingly cold, stony floors, this scene does not build pressure or suspense, but rather keeps you in a prolonged and conscious state of fear.


Raw deal


The sobbing, keening and wailing is finally revealed to be the cannibal, bent over his (pregnant!) ‘wife’ as she breathes her last. When we see his warty, palsied and diseased hand gently clasp hers, this couple look like some hideous, plague-ridden version of Rodolfo and Mimi. As the shot tracks away through the seemingly endless tunnels, the Cannibal’s sobs echo through. It’s unbearably poignant.


Love is love is love


It’s an odd feeling that this film generates, sympathy for the ‘monster’: “Oh, the poor cannibal! Snatching a Tory MP from a tube platform and feeding the pink flesh and port-laced blood to his beloved, dying, semi-corpse of a companion!” But there you go. Eliciting sympathy for the monstrous is no mean feat, especially when you’ve witnessed his various quick-as-flame forays into ultra-violence, like impaling one LU maintenance worker with a broom handle and burying a shovel in the head of another.


Doug


When he snatches sensitive, shag-haired student Patricia (Sharon Gurney), she is spared on account of the fact she reminds him of his wife as she lies whimpering and gasping on the same makeshift bed as he raises a blunt weapon above her. He waivers, and after a scuffle, Patricia beats a retreat and when he finally finds her huddled against the mildewed bricks of a pitch-black corner, he tries to appeal to her by repeating over and over, barely intelligible: ‘Mind the doors! Mind the doors! Mind the doors? Mind. The. Doors!” Probably the only three words he’s ever heard during his beleaguered existence. 

He’s like someone born after the Bomb, growing up in a sunless world where there is no radio, TV, cinema, music or written word. Only the most basic modes of communication have ever been necessary to him and the platform guard’s mantra is implanted so deeply in his consciousness it must be like a node on his brain. Shortly after, when Patricia’s chilly and humourless boyfriend, Alex (David Ladd – son of Alan, no less) finds her, he becomes the villain, stomping on the head of the feeble cannibal as though it were a rancid melon.


Struggle to the death: Pat and 'the man'


As the man presiding over the strange case of all these disappearances, Donald Pleasance gives the oddest and most memorable performance of his career as Inspector Calhoun. When he’s not fighting with anglepoise lamps and being dry, loquacious and sarcastic, he’s on an endless quest for tea, often served up to him by a stoic and weary WPC (he also barks at her to fetch his pools coupons at one point).

He’s ably assisted by Norman Rossington’s Detective Sergeant Rogers, an unflappable and cultured straight man to Calhoun’s goofball. Christopher Lee has a very brief cameo as a supercilious MI5 operative called Strauss-Villiers (“Oh I know him,” says Calhoun, “Big shit . . . sorry, shot, down the MOD”) who wants the disappearance of the kerb-crawling MP covered up.


Dry as a vat of Martinis: Inspector Calhoun on the blower


Bleak and nihilistic Death Line may be, but it’s leavened with a surfeit of clever humour. The instances of Grand Guignol-style aggression seem like touches of ironic black comedy after we’ve heard Alex asking Patricia if she wants to see The French Connection and she replies with a shudder: “Oh, no! Too violent.” Probably not too violent for a dead-hearted, self-interested Statesider like Alex who charmingly responds to Patricia’s concern over the slumped MP by shrugging, “We’d just walk over people like this in New York!”



One man's pleasure


The score by Wil Malone, latterly a heavy metal producer, jumps between spiralling Hammond organ notes and those mad, trilling, weighty pre-80s synths, a sound predating, but now automatically associated with, John Carpenter’s scores. The opening sequence sets this sonic hopscotch against the seedy neon glow of Soho (as was) and its various clip joints (“Exciting! Erotic!”). But the sound that remains in the head long after the credits roll is the death cry of the cannibal. It’s the end of the film, the cannibal’s existence (you couldn't call it a life) and the family line.



The light at the very, very, very end of the tunnel...








Monday 11 August 2014

In Memorium One Year On: Karen Black WAS the Seventies




In early 1970s, there was a surplus of straight-haired slap-free studiedly nonchalant actresses in Hollywood – Katherine Ross, Jennifer O’ Neill, Candice Bergen, Ali McGraw - all supposedly embodying the fruits of freedom as borne by the stinking sixties. In truth though, the New Hollywood was Testosterone Town, and Ross’s appearance in The Stepford Wives in 1975 would seem to be the logical conclusion of the half-decade.

This was also the late Karen Black’s time, but she’d be forever an outsider in said sorority. Her ripe-lipped rapaciousness and blazing sapphire eyes marked her out as too bizarre for romantic leads and too sexy for character roles. She looked - always - as though she’d dine on leading men, so it was a constant source of amazement to me that Tarantino never snapped her up from the cult straight-to-home-viewing treadmill she was on for the last 25 years of her career, in order to play a no-restraint-brooking leather-clad motorcycle mama, or something.



The former Karen Blanche Zeigler was born in Illinois in 1939 and paid her dues on the Great White Way before her pal Jack Nicholson cast her as an acid-tripping whore in 1969’s Easy Rider. The following year she turned in an Oscar-nominated performance as Nicholson’s trashily endearing girlfriend Rayette, in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. Probably her most revered role, it’s a mercy in some ways that her character’s persona wasn’t an indication of things to come. For Rayette is needy, clammy and passive. It hardly seems accidental that she’s got ‘Stand by Your Man’ blaring from her Dansette when we first see her. But she’s also warm, loyal, romantic and real.


As Rayette in Five Easy Pieces (1970)


As a wannabe country singer and an unselfconscious, coral-haired diner waitress (America’s equivalent of the warm-hearted barmaid), Rayette was the start of something in the sense that she’s the first in a line of Black’s carnal prole gals who cannot escape the gravitational pull of their backgrounds. Nicholson’s class-tourist treats her like the shit on his shoes for the bulk of this film, until he perceives his Patrician family are judging her and does a volte-face, a rare display of gallantry on his character’s part which seems to make Rayette’s heart burst.


With Kris Kristofferson in Cisco Pike (1972)

From here, Black switched between cult credibility (opposite Kris Kristofferson and several bricks of hash in Cisco Pike, as a smack-addicted hooker in The Pyx) and blockbuster corn (the stewardess called upon to fly a cast of ageing legends to safety in Airport 75).


In Nashville (1975)

But it was in Hollywood’s partially faithful versions of the cream of American literature that she truly shone, playing two working-class girls who meet premature ends before their respective bitterness curdles their beauty, which may be the only power they have. (In some ways, she was continuing a tradition previously served so well by Gloria Grahame.)


Jazz Age Jezebel: As Myrtle in The Great Gatsby (1974)


Her Myrtle in The Great Gatsby was a million miles away, physically, from the fleshy slattern that F. Scott Fitzgerald described, but, moving languidly across the screen, her hair the colour of dried blood, Black’s Myrtle is bursting with sensuality and frustration, bringing a desperate pathos to the shimmering soft focus of what’s ultimately an interesting failure.

In John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust, adapted from Nathaniel West’s savage, nihilistic novel about Hollywood’s Depression-era desperados, she was wannabe starlet Faye Greener, cruel and sexy in a solarised, platinumed bob, lashing out like a burned cat at the kind acts of Donald’s Sutherland’s tragic simpleton. Her portrayal of that vile, talentless, narcissistic, spite-ridden girl was a study in soft-focus sadness; in short, she was the rotten heart of a movie dealing with (in West's partisan view) a rotten town.


Hollywood Gothic: Day of the Locust (1974)

 She took the lead in all three sections of Trilogy of Terror, almost upstaged in the exoticism stakes by a Zuni doll, which chases her around her apartment with hilarious, murderous intent, and even stood out amid the constellation of stars in Robert Altman’s Nashville, where she’s disturbingly convincing as a dumb, arrogant broad. The following year, 1976, she was bewigged, ruthless and cool as a julep in Hitchcock’s pitiful swansong, Family Plot.


It's got TEETH! Trilogy of Terror (1975)


Only in Hollywood could a woman of prodigious intelligence (Black entered higher education at 15) and singular looks be thought unlucky. But starting at the top, she seems to have managed to exploit said qualities handsomely: her filmography suggests a work ethic of Leviathan proportions and a total lack of cultural snobbery (e.g. House of 1000 Corpses and Stuck! Steve Balderson’s 2009 homage to ‘70s babes-in-the-slammer flicks in which Black co-starred with Mink Stole, would struggle to claim even cult status.)


Giving Jennifer Coolidge sleepless nights in House of 1000 Corpses (2003)


Black sang too – and even did so once with L7, of all people. She also sang in Nashville and Gypsy 83 (2001), in which she was touching as a sad-eyed, never-was lounge-pop crooner, chuffing on cigarillos and flicking her marabou stole. But her standing in the musical world is arguably stronger in terms of her name than her (good) voice, all thanks to schlock-horror performance-art metallers and underground legends, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. They’ve never been known to make their audiences comfortable, much like their strangely beautiful and beautifully strange namesake.


Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Being  all '70s, like

the 1970s version of the 1930s at its zenith, in Day of the Locust (1974)

Smokin'

"Hey Honey - don't call ME Mac!" Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Fay takes a break from spite. Day of the Locust (1974)

In Killer Fish (1979)

With Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider (1969)

Eternal Summertime Sadness: With William Atherton in Day of the Locust (1974)


Karen Blanche Ziegler 1939-2013









                                                                                                                                           




Thursday 15 May 2014

FOUR CAN PLAY: Mo-dettes

Hangin' high: the Mo-dettes in London 1979

My introduction to the Mo-dettes came in the form of a badge I found in a vintage clothes shop in Greenwich, south London, in 1999. It featured a drawing of a reclining, lantern-jawed, be-suited man - an ebony-haired hero straight out of an illustrated Jackie romance. His smirk suggested thoughts of a carnal nature, as well it might, since the thought bubble coming from his slick head read ‘Mmm… Mo-dettes!’ I was intrigued by the name. Was it a misprint? Surely they were called the Modettes? Or maybe the hyphen had run amok and it was supposed to be Mod-ettes? My confusion was further compounded a few months later when browsing through the paper mountains at VinMag in Soho, I came across a copy of The Face from September 1980 emblazoned with the tagline ‘Modettes a la Mode’ and featuring as the cover star Jane, the bassist, looking mischievously elfin. Surely such a clanging misprint wouldn’t have made it on to the cover - they must’ve been a mod revival band. And they must have been well fucked off about the badge…

But then I heard ‘White Mice’. All became clear, and a fan was born.

I later discovered the group had been fond of the word ‘mode’ and  added the latter half as an homage to the girl groups of the pre-swinging sixties (The Marvelettes, et al). Yet the three-decade-old misconception of them as a mod group hasn’t died out (they frequently appear on mod compilations) and in the 21st century, the Mo-dettes remain a cult.

Thoughts of an impure nature

They say too much is made of punk and the way it democratised creativity, that those who run today’s media were so in thrall to in their youth that its cultural value is overstated. Nonsense - not enough is made of it. For one thing, it’s easily forgotten today how minimal the presence of female musicians was prior to punk. Before Patti Smith made her Shamanic assault on rock ‘n’ roll in 1975 (concurrent with The Runaways – who were a different beast altogether), many a young gal had fronted a band on the strength of her tits ‘n’ teeth appeal alone, but known female musicians that you couldn’t take home to your mother could until then be counted on one hand: Sparkle Moore had herself a slide guitar and a hot line in rockabilly hip-slinging but gave it up to be a housewife; the Velvets had Mo Tucker pounding the drums; Joan and Joni had their acoustics and Suzi had her electric. (And Janis? Janis pretty much preferred to be seen as one of the boys.) Jane Crockford, the Mo-dettes’ gifted bassist, complained to Kris Needs in 1979, “When I was a little girl I used to look at bands like The Beatles and go, ‘It’s not fair! They’re all boys! Girls can’t grow up and be in a pop group!’ I was really pissed off about it. It turned out alright though.”

"Small fish and large chips please, mate" Brighton 1979

The Mo-dettes formed in April 1979, when punk had succumbed to headline hype and become the ultimate phoney rebel stance. It had also regressed to a level of thuggery fuelled by Colt 45 and conventionality fuelled by careerism. Alas, this didn’t stop the lemmings-on-the-lam march from all points north to Chelsea, and ramalama three-chord thrash just kept on coming. But the music the Mo-dettes ultimately produced – rough-edged urban pop-punk – suggests that unlike scores of their contemporaries, they’d woken up and smelt the '80s. This is not to say their music contained the baby cries of hair metal, synthpop or richly syllabled new romantic horrors, but they clearly realised that punk’s first noxious wave had long since crashed on the shore and ebbed away. This was something different. They were not as angular and aggressive as the Slits, not as earthy and experimental as The Raincoats, but all three bands were progeny of punk’s first wave, which allowed anyone to throw off the shackles and discover the strange, delicious things that came with such freedom.

Vixens amid Vitrolite
Their 1979-1982 lifespan coincided with the post-punk era, and though the Mo-dettes were not ‘post-punk’ in the accepted definition of the term (i.e. complex, experimental, cerebral, avant-garde) with their melding of harmony, speed, pop, punk attitude, humour, sass, and “female chauvinism” they were at the very least, members of a halfway sorority house between the first wave of punk and its progeny. The dubby basslines and sixties girl-group sensibility was arguably an example of post-punk’s black/white fusion creeping into their sound, but ultimately, they bristled with too much energy and sarky-snarky humour to truly fit post-punk’s dry, sometimes po-faced model.

Likewise, they seemed to have little time for the often humourless, partisan feminist politics of the day. They appeared in NME’s “Women in Rock” issue on 29 March 1980 under extreme sufferance. Despite the journalist, Deanne Pearson, explaining to the girls that she was writing about women in rock, not feminists in rock, the interview went from bad to worse, with questioner and questioned almost coming to blows. While Jane Crockford conceded that they anticipated potential trouble with record labels who regarded all-girls bands as novelties, she insisted that being girls had, on the whole, been a help, not a hindrance. She added (possibly as a wind-up, given the fractious tone between the band and Pearson) that exploiting their sexuality might bring them a wider audience still, which was fine with her. Ultimately, Ramona, the singer, decided that she personally was a feminist if feminism meant equal rights and abortion on demand, but when it came to the band, much as they couldn’t deny their gender, they were in it for the music alone.

Poseurs
So the Mo-dettes were not fond of the “women in rock” tag, but they weren’t an anti-feminist band as such: they simply wanted to be judged up top, not down below, as it were. Later that same year, guitarist Kate told Mike Laye in a Sounds interview that she believed such compartmentalising defeated the progress of women in society by making them into “…a women’s army”, separating them from the mass of humanity and further cementing the idea of women as Other – surely the opposite of the ideology’s tenets. Simply, the Mo-dettes didn’t believe they were automatically or anatomically entitled to respect simply because of a combination of gender and the ability to play. As Jane said, “We don’t demand respect, we’re going to earn it, mate… as musicians, as ourselves.”

The original line up was Ramona Carlier (vox), Jane Crockford (bass), Kate Korris (guitar) and June Miles-Kingston (drums). Jane was unhappily playing bass in a band called Bank of Dresden. The lone female of the group, she craved her own set-up. She met Ramona at a gig and impressed by her sixties kitchen-sink heroine appearance, asked her if she could sing. Ramona shrugged and said yeah, sure. (“That’s what you did”, Ramona later said of the era’s “Anyone can, man” ethos.)

Meanwhile, Kate and June met on the set of The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle while working as production assistants and subsequently tried to make music with boys, an idea scrapped following not-wholly unexpected “You’re not a bad drummer/guitarist for a girl” quips. They saw countless potential bassists and singers, mainly male, all either “unreliable or afraid” according to Kate. Fortuitously, she then met Jane in the grim environs of the Lisson Grove dole queue. They ran their ideas by each other, and an outfit was born.


Ramona had been raised in Geneva, Switzerland and had studied ballet. From bourgeois beginnings, she gravitated toward the seedier side of life, producing a punk fanzine called Lolos De Lola, hanging out on the minuscule local scene and occasionally singing backing vocals for bands (but never for Kleenex, as is often said). But she saw little evidence of anger being turned into art, and yearning for the Real Thing, aged 21, emptied her savings account and flew to London. Looking like both a raven-haired Vogue-cover beauty and a cartoonish Betty Boop-alike with eyes you could swim with dolphins in, the alarmingly cheekboned Ramona sang with an accent as broad as the Champs Elysees (“Ah zee zoze gels go by tressed in dare zum-air closs!”) which left one critic with oeuf on his face after sneering at her “O level French” in an early review. Onstage, she’d favour synthetic-to-the-touch vintage A-line mod dresses, in spite of such attire possibly compounding confusion over their name.

Hittin' them notes: Ramona in 1980

Jane’s background was worthy of a Richard Allen novel. A native of west London, she was a restless adopted child who became a runaway and street kid, immersed in the capital’s subcultures and demimonde from the tender age of 13. Years of squats, violence and drugs could have led who knows where, but punk kicked the door wide for her, opportunity wise. Arming herself with a vintage Hofner violin bass, she proved to be a mistress of rich, dubby basslines that would make her the rock of the band. Her appearance took the biscuit: a Lahndan doll with a fetching and fierce vanilla-pale peroxide flat-top offsetting her razor-sharp cheekbones, a nice line in skinhead/rockabilly fusion style courtesy of Kensington Market and an astonishing pair of replacement eyebrows (she’d shaved hers off) which looked as though they’d been fashioned from hot tar and applied via cunning use of a Gloy-stick.

June don't play musical statues. The Modes in 1980

Kate, the guitarist, had moved from New York to London in 1974. She’d founded The Slits in the searing summer of ’76, played at their debut at Harlesden Coliseum with the Clash in March 1977 and for two subsequent gigs before taking her leave, claiming in 1979 that she felt “…the whole thing with The Slits was to get as famous as possible as fast as you could [but] I enjoyed it in a way.” Strong-featured, leggy and looking haughty as a heron, with a platinum skunk-stripe in her barnet, her minimal, glass-shower guitar sound complimented Jane’s heavy bass perfectly.

June was a drop-out art student and, as it turned out, a girl for whom rhythm came as naturally as breathing, having taught herself to drum on a ramshackle £40 kit she’d bought off the Pistols’ Paul Cook. A native of Essex and a musical family (her loftily quiffed brother Robert twanged for Tenpole Tudor), making her own sounds must have been a case of when, not if. She looked like a member of a girl gang: a surly mix of biker leathers (she did indeed ride) and slightly swollen-looking lips set in a mean pout. Looking as cool as a julep whether behind the kit or no, she favoured Spartan onstage outfits of shorts and singlet and kept her make-up in a toolbox. Her power-drumming was equal parts cataclysmic and clipped; it cut, said one elegant scribe “like a goods train passing through the room.”

Thus grouped, they set about making their impact on the world. Jane’s friend and mentor, the artist Neal Brown, was frontman of the Vincent Units and had a side project called The Tesco Bombers, with a rolling line-up. Jane had the idea that one such incarnation should be all-female, with Brown only participating if he’d drag up: The Tesco Bomberettes! In the end, they played it as the Mo-dettes, at Ladbroke Grove bootboy haunt, the Acklam Hall. A run of backroom gigs soon followed at The Chippenham, an insalubrious gin palace in Maida Hill. Word got out, and a combination of scene solidarity and credible connections soon led to support slots with Madness at the Electric Ballroom, the Clash at Notre Dame Hall and Siouxsie and the Banshees at Hammersmith Odeon. 

June (left) and Jane on stage in Dallas, 1980

Their debut single ‘White Mice’ (B-side ‘Masochistic Opposite’) was released in late 1979 on their own Mode label and distributed by Rough Trade. A thing of jangly joy and beauty forever, John Peel succinctly described this perfectly crafted, catchy, post-punk pop-punk gem as sounding “… like the musical equivalent of the Battersea Power Station made out of eggboxes.” It was that charming and that unique – but far less fragile. Opening with a sharp reggae-like snare roll from June, the melody spirals away perfectly as Ramona’s Fronsh vocals lay waste to the egos of several Roxy Romeos with a bunch of come-hither-fuck-off lyrics (“Your arse is tight your moves are right, your eyes are big and blue, and if I was a homely girl I’d like to marry you. But I’m too naughty, bold and haughty, forward with it too, so come and visit, then I’d kiss it like other lovers do… don’t be stupid, don’t be limp. No girl likes to love a wimp.”) Clearly aware that all the best pop songs feature handclaps and “ooh-woahs”, they meld them with Kate’s ultra-minimal, choppy, abrasive melodies, June’s military-style fills and Jane’s yo-yo-staccato basslines. The single spent six weeks at number one in the then-new indie chart and it was often at the top of my stash whenever I used to flex my shonky DJ’ing prowess in exchange for a few light ales (typically, I found my original copy lurking between a Purple Hearts’ and a Specials’ single in the Two-Tone & Mod Revival section of the otherwise excellent Brighton emporium, Wax Factor, which for some reason I always want to call ‘Vinyl Sassoon’).

NYC 1981

In 1980 they were signed to Deram, an imprint of failing sixties’ stalwarts Decca. In June that year they released their second single, a cover of the Stones’ 1966 hit ‘Paint it Black’. Their take was stark, minimal and spiky, with just enough heft and sparseness to the rhythms to suggest a hint of dub (giving it, as Nicholas Rombes says in his Cultural Dictionary of Punk “its blackness”). It made Single of the Week in Sounds, the write-up revealing they were then John Lydon’s current favourites, rare praise from a man never known to have doffed his cap lightly. However, the single didn’t do what they expected commercially and nor did the subsequent release, ‘Dark Park Creeping’, a jagged and murky song that pumps along at a 4/4 beat while Ramona’s vocals soar and echo as she wails about drunken, inadequate men staggering around pitch-black parks after closing time looking for someone to right-hook with their sovereign. (The brassy bounce of the B-side, ‘Two Can Play’ seems to be about the constant struggle for autonomy in relationships.)

Loony Toons
Their album The Story So Far was recorded in Coventry in summer 1980 and released in autumn that year, with the girls’ likenesses rendered in candy-coloured Manga-style ‘toons on the cover. It received poor reviews largely centred on the production, described in one quarter as “weak and uninspired”. The band themselves conceded, with June, in bluff-stickswoman mode, describing it in the sleeve notes of the 2008 reissue as “shit” and Kate puzzling over what went wrong between the studio and the pressing plant. But this blight is easy to ignore simply because of the album’s sheer, ballooning fun. It featured ten originals plus a joyous and bouncy cover of Piaf’s ‘Milord’ and the aforementioned Stones cover. ‘Satisfy’ is a sunny, smutty slice of power-pop – a Girl’s Own ‘Orgasm Addict’ – which revels in harmony and owes some debt to Blondie. The cheery whirl of ‘Foolish Girl’ explains their aversion to the rigid and joyless feminist ideals of the day (“She was once a feminist, sharp and deadly was her kiss…”) with a spiralling outro bass line that suggests the Mo-dettes were well attuned to ‘old-fart’ notions of making people want to dance. While humour seemed to be their forte, it’s counterbalanced by the chilly dawn fade-in of ‘Bedtime Stories’ and the melancholy prĂ©cis of Piaf’s life in ‘Sparrow’.

It may well be an imperfect album (the sped-up, charmless version of ‘White Mice’ (‘White Mouse Disco’) that they were forced to include didn’t help matters), but for those of us who were still unable to read our own names in 1980, it’s one of the few artefacts of their sound we have. They did record three Peel Sessions, one of which can be heard here and includes ‘Norman (He’s No Rebel)’, ‘Dark Park Creeping’, ‘Kray Twins’ and ‘Bitter Truth’. This session undoubtedly produced more cocksure recordings (and is truly representative of their sound, according to Jane and June) and there’s a clarity in the production that’s lacking on the album, but then, the producers and engineers at BBC Maida Vale were probably more used to dealing with bands not solely comprising hirsute men, unlike Roger Lomas at the Coventry studio who, according to June, seemed to think female musicians were mythical creatures and treated them accordingly. 

There’s also a live 7’ of ‘Kray Twins’ recorded at The Marquee in 1981. As it fades in, we hear Jane telling the restless audience in her broadest west-Londonese, “That one’s about amateur violence [‘Dark Park Creeping’] – now let’s have some professional violence”. The song, a downbeat blues narrative, is a snapshot of the rise and fall of the East End ne’er-do-wells and was written by Jane in early 1979 when she was still in Bank of Dresden. She said, “I was the only female in the band and they actually asked me not to write any songs, despite my enthusiasm. They only wanted a dumb blonde bass player.”  Their loss: the smart blonde added a loafing bass line and raspy half-spoken, half-scatted vocals, and with Ramona’s eerie backing wails, produced a song transcending both its era and any popular genre then or now.

June in 1980

No longer existing on snouts, wits and grubby pound notes, the Mo-dettes toured Europe and America twice. According to Ramona in Hot Love: Swiss Punk & New Wave 1976-1980, highlights of their travels included being run out of Orange County by local rednecks, wowing lesbian fans in the deep southern states, guzzling LSD-laced blue punch by the turquoise waters of the Tropicana’s pool in LA and endless nights at squat parties in Amsterdam. A contemporary American fanzine said that live, the Mo-dettes looked like they were “fighting with their instruments – and determined to win!” 

Kate in 1980

While in New York, they found time to sing backing vocals on John Cale’s ‘Fighter Pilot’ single from his album Honi Soit. But the fun couldn’t last forever and in mid-1981, their record company decided their coffers needed replenishing and put a gag order on the band’s individual sound, demanding a bit of sugar-coated candy pop to sweeten an increasingly bitter deal. Their next (and as it turned out, final) single was ‘Tonight’ released in July 1981. Much loathed by the band, the high-pitched girly harmonising and forgettable safe melody of the song is the antithesis of their earlier work: the difference between it and the mature froideur of ‘Sparrow’ and the angular nastiness of ‘Dark Park Creeping’ is the difference between chiffon velvet and the Rocky Mountains. The same might be said of the band’s appearance on the single’s cover – a far cry from the cool-as-fuck satin ‘n’ tat-clad dandettes of old, they lounge on a mountain of plush, got up in velour, puffballs, spangled woollens and half a ton of blusher each. Even Jane, as stylish as the decade was young, appears to have been forcibly permed. According to June, they considered the single and accompanying shoot nothing more than a joke. 

Kate clearly worn out by the glamour of it all . . .
Two months later, in August 1981, Melissa Ritter joined on rhythm guitar, Decca having demanded the Mo-dettes add more flesh to their agile sound. The group’s dynamic was now askew, and the first cracks appeared. In a Sounds cover story back on 28 June 1980, Ramona and Kate had both expressed reservations about their signing to a major, a situation June and Jane, conversely, couldn’t have seemed happier about. Ramona had said she didn’t like knowing exactly how the following two years of her life were going to pan out. So it was perhaps no surprise that she was the first to decamp, in the winter of 1982, citing Deram’s wilful neglect of them as her reason and leaving June to sing from behind her toms until one Sue Slack took over vocal duties. Kate was next to go, her initial worries about being manipulated by the strings of a major (also aired in the aforementioned interview) seemingly confirmed. With only half the original line-up now at the helm, the good ship Mode ran aground in late '82.

A grass-roots revolution of the like we surely won’t see again had offered these girls (and many more) previously undreamt of opportunities – for making a living out of gut creativity, travelling the world and treating others to the fruits of said ideas. The Mo-dettes were, by their own account, out for a lark and would give it up when the fun ceased – but to live the lark required a certain amount of capital and their signing with a major seemed less a career move than a chance to extend the fun. They cared about the music though, and wanted to be heard: they didn’t, as Kate said to ZigZag magazine in 1979, want to be a cult, and so they set about moving into the slipstream of the mainstream. Despite this, their lack of careerism was ultimately borne out by the fact that they stuck to their agreement to chuck it all in when it stopped being a hoot.

Sun und fun

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons behind their obscurity. It was the right time and they had a real cool one - but their ardour for hedonism burned brighter than their ambition, unlike many of their contemporaries, such as the Slits. Another reason for the Mo-dettes’ continuing obscurity may be the ongoing erroneous belief in their relation to modernists. For unlike Two-Tone’s still much-loved exuberant brand of ska, new mod’s practitioners (Merton Parkas, Lambrettas), with their reputation for po-faced fastidiousness, have not been looked upon with any such favour (Paul Weller excepted) and are rarely played by all but their sharply-clad devotees. Of course, being remembered may well be enough for the former Mo-dettes. After all, by 1983, they’d already done what they’d set out to do, have proof of the accomplishment and may feel no need to revisit the graffiti-covered, booze-filled, fag-fugged rooms of their past.

The group’s ultimate contribution to the world is a singular sound: they simply don’t sound like anyone else. Dark and abrasive edges somehow sit happily alongside their bold and rough ‘n’ cheery punky melodies. That they’re only ever compared (lazily) to their stateside contemporaries The Go-Gos, whose twisted take on Californian surf-pop had as many dark and abrasive edges as a multi-coloured beachball, is basic proof for my money that they were a rare bunch. And the intervening decades have been kind: their songs could be placed in almost any year since the ones they were recorded. And while it’s less important, the same is true of their appearance: their young selves could take to a stage in the gentrified badlands of Dalston tonight and no one would peg them as time travellers from the early years of Thatcher’s reign of terror. They never looked ‘seventies’ or indeed, ‘eighties’ in any way (save for the slapstick shoot for ‘Tonight’).

Faggin' around in London tahn: 1979

Though their legacy can undoubtedly be heard in the pure indie fuzz-pop of C86 groups like The Shop Assistants and The Darling Buds, it’s difficult – not least because of their obscurity - to make a case for the Mo-dettes as influential. If they were, there’d be far more good bands on the underground circuit today than there are. But if their legacy seems to have reached an impasse in the mid-to-late eighties, it may be all the better for preserving their uniqueness.

Of her band’s place quiet but sure place in the pop-cult pantheon, Jane : “Along with The Slits, to have been a genuine part of London culture – of British culture – whether it’s high or low, is mind-blowing.”