Heart of a Punk Soul of a Rasta

Derek Jarman's Jubilee

When things got diabolically shitty music wise during the late eighties early nineties, the amount of gigs I went to started to recede, like my hair, and my new found idleness was filled by film & alcohol. Between '86 and '91 the inside of a cinema or pub was a safer place to be; far away from the vast dearth of Indie nothingness. Music was treading water whilst film was on the upturn. Midway through the eighties the British Cinema exploded (not literally obviously); mainly due to the birth of Channel 4 and a clutch of new British film companies. It felt a bit like the punk explosion; all of a sudden the funding, the film makers/directors, the companies; the actors and the audience had all arrived at the same time. And just like with the PUNK thing; as well as the new film makers there were also a load of old turns like Nick Roeg, Ken Russell & Derek Jarman who all of a sudden found it easy to get gigs.

Between '86 to '91 Derek Jarman output was in full flow - "Caravaggio", "Edward II", "War Requiem", a segment in the film "Aria" and "The Last of England". All these films flickered and refracted into my corneas as I sat in my personal seat at Triangle Cinema on the University of Aston Campus. For me Jarman and the Triangle are inseperable; and in my nostagia soaked brain they remain so.

Sometimes (just sometimes) during the eighties film, music and booze fused together in a majestic symbiosis; on the 2nd of October '86 a late afternoon screening of Alex Cox's "Sid and Nancy" was followed by "New Order" "The Happy Mondays" and "The Wonder Stuff" at The Tower Ballroom Edgbaston. On other occasions the massive in-balance of merging the mediums was more manifest than majestic; in November '88 I spent an afternoon watching "Drowning by Numbers" by Peter Greenaway and an evening at the Irish Centre Digbeth watching "The Sun and the Moon" (nee The Chameleons). Get what I mean? No? Well let's put it this way. Whilst images from "Drowning by Numbers" are still redolent in my old brain box, can I whistle a "Sun and Moon" track? Can I f**k! And also, I had to do a lot of drinking back in '88 before going to see the "The Sun and the Moon", and a great deal during, but even though I tried my best I just couldn't get them to sound like The Smiths. Ho hum.

But wait a minute how did I get here, I thought I was going to say something about the film Jubilee which was released in '77 so what am I doing in the eighties? Oh yes The Triangle Cinema. I didn't get to see Jubilee at the time of its release; it was in the early eighties when I got to see it on the LARGE screen for the first time; and then it was at the Triangle. But as usual I'm not going to bang on here about what "Jubilee" meant at time, historical context and all that shit, there's plenty of prattle out there about that. And I'm not going to argue the toss whether "Jubilee" was the FIRST PUNK film or not. Yawn bloody yawn. No! All that shit has been trawled over before what interests me is what Jubilee looks like thirty three years on and what it means if anything today viewed through a fresh pair of eye balls. So I got myself a copy of the video from the Salvation Army Charity Shop in Stourbridge for .50p; got myself a very strong cup of tea and reintroduced myself to Derek Jarmen's Jubilee.

According to the video synopsis the story of Jubilee goes like this: "in 1578 Queen Elizabeth asks her court magician to give her a vision of the shadow of her time". In this English futuretime we follow the lives of a handful of nihilistic female comic book style anti hero characters. Bod "the leader", Mad "the Toyah", Amyl Nitrate "the historian?", Crabs "the nympho" etc. Jubilee has'nt a well thought out storyline its all cause and effect - anarchy? The characters simply dance around their world shagging, killing, singing, reasoning and M pill popping - then stuff happens.

So what did I find out watching Jubilee a fresh? Well first and foremost Jarmen's images are still face punchingly strong; his eye for the singular image hasn't been surpassed, not in British cinema anyway. Once the opening Elizabethan scene is done (cleverly shot as if at twilight) and we are transported from a genteel imagined past into dysfunctional futuretime, Jarman opens up with both barrels painting reality and fiction as one. Shot like a late 70's news report from Belfast a group of Punks are giving some poor sod a kicking against a giant wall of grey corrugated iron, while a baby's pram burns with an unnatural ferocity in the fore ground. Flip forward ten minutes or so we get a whole scene shot in Super 8. A bomb site, a book burning bonefire, a naked bloke with a Boy David's head, Amyl Nitrate ballet dancing through the cinders and sparks, a geezer with a bag on his head (a la the cover of NEAT NEAT NEAT by the Damned) and a hippy cutting off long blonde locks with a pair of blunt scissors. (See Clip)

OK so these images in Jubilee were intended to be as OUTRAGEOUS as possible. They aren't so OUTRAGEOUS today, but they are as vibrant. Jarman's unique eye captures some of the images of '77 and arranges them into the fictional world of Jubilee. Are they PUNK images or just images of the time?

For me the weakest park of Jubilee are the scenes in the squat were the main characters of MAD, CRABS, BOD, CHAOS and Amyl Nitrate are introduced and the reasoning begins (mainly from Amyl Nitrate). We get monologues on Churchill, Myra Hindley, history, sex, that are as silly as they are toe curlingly daft. It sounded pretty lame thirty years ago but at least it of its time. People did used to discuss stuff back then in this stupid way, and when they did if someone knew better they'd usually tell them they were talking cock. Today we've lost the ability to debate "stuff" we simply go straight to blurting out our half baked notions under the full glare of the media. Then it dawned on me, in the middle of these squat scenes exactly what I was watching. Its bloody Big Brother! MAD, CRABS, BOD, CHAOS, Amyl Nitrate and the BOYS are a group of ill educated, hypersensitive, attention seeking Big Brother contestants and THE SQUAT is the BIG BROTHER HOUSE. Jubilee - prophetic! Not many! The only difference of course is that in the real Big Brother (so I'm told) they never actually murdered anyone for cum -ing too soon.

Jubilee I guess was intended to be amusingly salacious with its smattering of sex scenes, drug references, police brutality, despoiling of authoritarian symbols, "bad language" and violence. Some of the violence, for instance when tiny Toyah kills a copper seems laughable now, whereas the Snuff Film killing of Wayne County "Lounge Lizard"; done on a whim and to the slow pace of a metronome is still pretty horrible. As is the Tomato Ketchup killing (murder by Heinz consumer product) in the Café (which is more Ken Russell than a Sam Peckinpah) but is so flippant a murder it still carries some weight.

The other thing I'd forgotten about Jubilee was its down right silly humour. Not something that Jarmen ever went in for again. Max the Bingo caller watering his plastic plants and being gob smacked on finding a live caterpillar in their midst. And then there's the insanely amusing and menacing monologues of the media tycoon Borgia Ginz, rearranging letters and proclaiming amid uncontrollable laughter that (the media) "Its like pornography, better than the real thing, they prefer it in the shadows; the light is too cruel for them". Wonderful stuff! SEE CLIPS

Jack Birkett who played Ginz died earlier this year. He was predominately a dancer (and the Lindsey Kemp dance group do feature in the film). Even with a wealth of film portrayals of unhinged media moguls to choose from, Jack Birkett's performance is still a class act - link to OB

So finally what does Jubilee say about PUNK? Well there's a good deal of PUNK iconography to be found in Jubilee, there are union jacks, black plastic coats, England Glory aprons, God Save the Queen T shirts, PUNK gig posters and Amyl pronounces that there are "No More Heroes". There's clips of Siouxsie & the Banshees doing "Love in a Void" and of Chelsea doing the classic "Right to Work". The Slits are (type) cast as naughty "Deptford wrecking" punks; Adam Ant and Toyah do a couple of musical turns along with a Suzi Pinns rendition of "Rule Britannia" - but let's be frank here, musically this is not punk or even new waves finest hour.

And then there were the Marigolds! I nearly forgot about the Marigolds. Mad and Amyl go off to kill a copper in their paramilitary jump suits with pink Marigold gloves shoved into their epaulets. THE PINK MARIGOLDS OF PUNK! The jump suits caught on with new wavers like Sting and Julian Cope but THE PINK MARIGOLDS OF PUNK? Nah! I can't remember anyone wearing the pink rubber gloves as a fashion accessory - DEVO fans just wore them as, well, gloves. Perhaps it just hasn't happened yet. PINK MARIGOLDS OF PUNK perhaps your time will come. Should I wear a pair when I go and see STEVE IGNORANT - mmm perhaps not.

In Jubilee the PUNK sound comes off second best, being well and truly drowned beneath an abundance of PUNK image - but then that is probably as prophetic and reflective as it gets - because the further we've gotten from '77 the smaller the message and the greater the image has become. As far as Jubilee is concerned though, even today when the outrageousness and historical significance is somewhat diminished, there are still plenty of moments in the film where you have to ask yourself, has there been any thing quite like this since, and are we likely to see anything quite like Jubilee again? THE ANSWER IS NO.