David Bowie - a Southern Exploration

I have often wondered, perhaps somewhat morbidly, where I'd be when Bowie died. Implicit in this is the fact that I'd outlive him, which seemed a given when younger, but when someone dies aged 69 and you're 54, those 15 years don't feel like such a gap.

I didn't think I'd be unemployed, that's for sure, so when I heard the news this morning, my time was my own. My first instinct was to play all of my favourite (should be 'fave' I think?) records at mourning banishing volume. But then I dusted off Kevin Cann's book 'Any Day Now' - the exhaustive, almost day by day account of Bowie's formative years in the UK - picked up the car keys, and went for a little drive.

Everyone who was a fan (was? That sounds odd) has their own David Bowie, dependent on the age and the point in his career when they 'turned on' to his music. My own David Bowie was created in 1969, hearing 'Space Oddity' over the school Tannoy as part of an educational programme on space travel. Three years later, soon after the carrot topped, blue guitar swagger of Bowie performing 'Starman' on TV's LIFT OFF WITH AYESHA hit me for six - forcing me to rush out and buy the 7" with its dangerous and perhaps even more mercurial B-side 'Suffragette City' - I brought my copy of the single along to our primary school final year picnic, where the teachers had thoughtfully rigged up a record player to enhance the event. 'Starman' effectively cleared the picnic area - it obviously wasn't for everyone. My father, whose own version of David Bowie conjured him as a kind of Tommy Steele for the next generation, faithfully bought me all his albums when they came out, right up to the point where I asked Dad what 'lobotomy' and 'libido' meant because I'd heard Bowie sing the words. It didn't help that I asked him rather loudly in the middle of a party that my decidedly strait-laced parents were throwing.

40 Stansfield Rd

But back to this morning. So I've posted up a few songs (including possibly my all time favourite 'Conversation Piece') on social media like many other friends, and I'm still in shock. My David Bowie was the early version: 'She's Got Medals'; 'The London Boys'; 'Silly Boy Blue'. There's a shameless nostalgia operating alongside the grief, so I decide to take a drive around South London, Kent and Surrey to see if I can connect with my 'early years' Bowie, using Cann's book as my guide.

Stockwell Infants School

40 Stansfield Road, SW9, Bowie's birthplace, although he'd only live there for about six years, but the growing packs of media lurking in Brixton have decided that his beginnings must remain as urban as possible. When I arrive in the road, it's just me and a few photographers. Two streets along there's a bank of TV News outfits congregating, disgorging young teams all wearing regulatory puffa jackets - I wonder what their Bowie looks like?

106 Canon Rd

Round the corner is Stockwell Infants' school, where young David went to school for a few years. Luckily no-one (apart from me) is hanging around taking photographs. The school have put up garden centre screening to stop anyone poking their lenses through the bars. Back in Brixton the official mourning has begun - the Ritzy cinema changes its front of house to continue the SW9 reclamation of Mr Bowie. It's time to move on.

23 Clarence Road

It's difficult to gauge what it must have been like to move out of London into Kent in the 1950s. Nowadays the areas of the county bordering the capital are fairly built up, but even now as I drive away from SW9 there is a palpable change in the architecture and the density of housing which must have been much more acute 60 years previously. But these London hinterlands are where Bowie would grow up and make his first forays onto the live scene. His first house after Brixton was 106 Canon Road, Bickley, a rather sweet little town which, like so many places in the area, clusters around its railway station. This was his home for about a year. It's small, little more than a cottage, and quite a difference from the Stansfield Road address. So in 1954 the family moved up the road to a larger home, 23 Clarence Road, still in Bickley, but in a much wider street surrounded by detached 

4 Plaistow Grove

dwellings and an overall feeling of the private estate. This is absolute suburbia, and although the trains connect to central London stations, my guess is that the average inhabitant doesn't (or didn't). Bowie would remain here for just over a year, before moving to a slightly more connected address, immediately behind Sundridge Park railway station - 4 Plaistow Grove. This would be the home at which he moved on from junior school, securing a place at the all boys Bromley Tech in Keston (still in existence but now called Ravenswood, although it's a school still proud of its Bowie links including being the location for THAT fight resulting in David's permanently dilated pupil). It's also where he was living when he joined his first group - the Konrads - initially playing saxophone, but gradually moving to take over vocals.

The gig list at this time shows that the Konrads really worked the provinces. A few of the venues that were regularly used were Shirley Parish Hall, Wickham Hall and Justin Hall, part of St David's college - these venues were interspersed between Croydon and Beckenham. Presumably because of the distance from centrally connected transport, Bowie would be playing to a largely local Kent/Surrey crowd. Until 1964, when David would progress from the Konrads to the more R&B based The King Bees, this small and very quiet part of the south east would be his playground.

Justin Hall, West Wickham

Shirley Parish Hall, Shirley

Wickham Hall, West Wickham

Moving away from the provinces and back towards Brixton, I also move forward in time. I stopped first at the The Three Tuns pub in Beckenham. Now a chain restaurant, this was the site of the infamous Beckenham Arts Lab started in 1969, where Bowie developed some of his artistic tendencies. A young woman is standing outside with a microphone trying to get a sense of what Beckenham's Bowie is like.

The Three Tuns - site of the Beckenham Arts Lab

A few hundred yards away from this venue is the Croydon Road Recreation ground, an unassuming public space which was the location for the Beckenham Free Festival, held in August 1969 (and namechecked in the Bowie song). As I made my way to the bandstand, from where a permed newly blissed out Bowie once performed - a long way from the Konrads yet geographically just down the road - I saw that a few bunches of flowers had already been laid at its steps. An older woman was talking to a couple of local people as I approached through the mud; she also had a microphone and was clearly attempting to record some local memories of the man. I mentioned to them that Brixton was being seen as Bowie central today. She became annoyed: "But Bowie only lived there for a few years. He belongs to Bromley and Beckenham, not Brixton," she remonstrated.

Croydon Rd Recreation Ground - site of the Beckenham Free Festival

I walked away back to the car, thinking that everyone creates their own David Bowie, and that he'd be quite happy with that.

The Martian (US 2015: Dir Ridley Scott)

Mark Watney, one of a team of astronauts exploring the surface of Mars, is left for dead following a freak storm on the planet from which the rest of his crew manage to escape. Coming to after the storm, Watney realises he is alone on the planet, and after Mission Control back on Earth learn of his existence, they strategise to bring him back.

That's the fairly simple premise of The Martian, and to be honest 'simple' remains the watchword of this uneven but nevertheless reasonably entertaining sci-fi flick. Scott focuses much of the film on Watney, played by a slightly more animated than usual Matt Damon (who in the latter phases of his isolation - where the actor looks a lot older than his 45 years - reminded me of the unravelled Tom Hanks at the end of Paul Greengrass's 2013 movie Captain Phillips). Watney's Robinson Crusoe approach to his survival, rigging up a hothouse to grow his own food and using his scientific resources to work out how to overcome the tricky issue of communicating with Earth, is perhaps the most satisfying part of the film, although Damon's limited acting palette fails to fully capture the pathos and futility of his situation. It's when Scott adds in the other only very sketchily drawn characters - the occupants of the ship that abandoned him and the stressed Mission Control personnel - that the drama becomes rather fractured.

The last half of the film plays like an old fashioned disaster movie, but where movies of that genre would have delighted in showing off the hardware, Scott refuses to detail the mechanics, so we're left with all the tension being created by the actors - but this has neither the personal drama of Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity (2013) or the ensemble tension of, say, Ron Howard's Apollo 13 (1995). The Martian is shot through with humour - some of it broad, some more subtle (even the title is not without levity) but this only serves to confuse - is this an action movie, a serious drama, or a film that shows that humour can be found in the strangest of situations?

Ultimately I wasn't convinced by The Martian, although I can't deny that it does look good. The depiction of Mars - actually Jordan - is particularly impressive (although I'm old enough to remember being wowed by a similar use of Death Valley in Byron Haskin's Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) - a film to which The Martian is also heavily indebted but so far unmentioned by the critics) and the detail of the scenes on board ship depict a crew at home in their surroundings and with their hardware - but then Scott's a past master at this. But thinking about the film afterwards, the confusion of styles and general messiness militate against it remaining in the memory for very long, and one is left thinking just how much of a return to form this is for Scott, who has, we should remember, only recently served up the dubious thrills of Prometheus (2013).

The Diabolical (US 2015: Dir Alistair Legrand)

You've got to be pretty confident when giving your movie a title like The Diabolical that it's not the word that's going to be used to describe it. In first time director Alistair Legrand's case I'm afraid it's just one of a lexicon of similar adjectives that will be trotted out to sum up this terrible genre mash up 'fright' flick.

Ali (Heroes (2006-10)) Larter plays Madison, a single mum struggling to make ends meet after separating from her violent husband, and being threatened with eviction by the company to whom her house is mortgaged. Her woes are added to by a series of threatening apparitions that pop up (and disappear) with almost nightly regularity. Baffled and frightened, Madison enlists the help of local scientist Nikolai, with whom she's been having a thing. After Nikolai witnesses the haunting he rigs up the house to film the goings on, which leads to Madison understanding that the apparitions are linked to the company wishing to repossess the house.

The fact that The Diabolical is being advertised as a blend of genres says a lot about the formulaic nature of many of today's horror films, and Legrand should be at least credited with trying something different. But the unevenness of tone and its shift from very un-scary spook movie to 'what the...did that just happen?' sci fi about two thirds of the way through is frankly embarrassing. I can't give too much away, but think The Terminator (1984), Millennium (1989) or The Frighteners (1996) and you're on the right track. Ali Larter is probably the best thing in this, eliciting genuine sympathy as a woman battling against bankruptcy while living in a haunted house, and convincingly portraying the protective mother role with the equally effective Chloe Perrin and Thomas Kuc as her young daughter and son. The rest of the cast are merely supporting players in a story which would probably have been better realised as an episode of The X Files (1993-2002). The audience response at the end of the showing I attended, running for the exits rather than sitting through a post movie Q&A with the inexperienced and obviously deluded director, says a lot.

Eden (France 2014: Dir Mia Hansen-Løve)

I'm old enough to admit that I never really 'got' the concept of DJing. To me the idea of somebody with a good taste in music, playing a load of their favourite records on a couple of turntables in front of hundreds of adoring fans, was always just a bit bizarre. EDEN does a lot both to change that view and, perversely, reinforce it.

EDEN is the story of Paul, a cool (or detached) teenager in Paris who abandons his creative writing studies in favour of his real passion - house music. It's also the story of youth, friendship and its fickleness, and how different souls navigate the path to adulthood - or not.

We see Paul gradually ascending to superstar DJ status, but never without money worries. The whole concept of DJing is shown as something which can induce euphoria - and these scenes are truly exciting - but has the same downside as more mainstream 'musicians' - the grind of setting up, the hangers on, seedy clubs and promoter disappointments. Paul is a complex soul whose interactions give us different perspectives: seen through the eyes of his mother (who constantly helps him financially) he's a bit of a loser; seen through the eyes of his girlfriends he's cut off and inconstant; but to the audience in his clubs he's an exciting route to a great evening.

EDEN takes place over a period of nearly twenty years, and in an interesting and bold move, the director chooses not to age Paul over this time, analogising his total commitment to his music despite it falling out of fashion and at the expense of other parts of his life. It also highlights Paul as a Peter Pan persona, remaining fixed in his own world while those around him grow up, have families and, in one very moving scene, take their own life. Around him the world also changes and moves on - decks get smaller and door security staff trade clipboards for tablets. When is commitment to a dream no longer a virtue to be admired but simply foolhardy? In one of his darker moments, a drunken Paul is helped home, and an elderly woman passing by mutters "Kids today..." to which Paul responds "I'm 34!" Does he want to be seen as young and mature at the same time?

Without giving too much away, this dichotomy eventually leads to a crisis of the soul. As a DJ is Paul really a relevant musician? The question is answered in two scenes; in one he witnesses a singer - all diva excesses and bling - PAing at a club night, demonstrating a vibrant vocal talent that shows up the relative inertia of Paul's art; and in another, towards the end of the movie, he observes the future of DJing - a woman with a single laptop playing a Daft Punk track to a swaying but otherwise immobile club audience (Daft Punk feature in the movie via a running gag in which, because of their anonymity, they always fail to make it onto clubs' VIP lists despite being ultra successful in their own right).

This isn't a perfect film by any means - it takes a while to find its groove, and the use of real artists sometimes gives the movie a rather flat feel - but ultimately it's very clever, generally extremely well paced, and the constantly roving camera perfectly captures the restlessness of youth. And my goodness it spoke to me about the challenges of getting older and leaving childish things behind.

Hard to be a God (Russia 2013: Dir Aleksey German)

When is science fiction not science fiction? The 1964 novel 'Hard To Be a God' - on which Aleksey German's extraordinary and frustrating film is based - was SF almost by association. Set some time in the future, a group of observers from Earth are posted to a distant planet, also containing human life, which it is assumed has evolved in the same way as our world. At the point of the occupation the planet is roughly at the medieval stage of development. The observers are there to learn and study, but not to intervene in the race's progress, but this proves increasingly difficult in the face of a totalitarian takeover which sees an army of thugs - the Grays - killing all of the planet's intellectuals and artists. Do the alien observers stand by and watch as the massacre continues, intervene and alter the course of the planet's history, or just leave? While the book made some references to the technology deployed by the Earth observers, and was written from a perspective of the central character - Rumata, a man gradually losing his civilised Earth persona as he disappears into his adopted guise as a wealthy Don - it is entirely set within its medieval environment and thus is only marginally a science fiction novel. The book can be read as a treatise on statecraft and a savage attack on power and hierarchy, but is also disturbing, claustrophobic and surprisingly funny.

German's film retains the claustrophobia but similarly abandons almost all of the science fiction elements, apart from one brief shot showing a transportation device which could only have come from future Earth, and the final scenes which also demonstrate that the handkerchief has finally been invented. of which more later. Instead it concentrates over the course of its 177 minutes in totally immersing the audience in a medieval world. The closest cinematic comparisons are probably Tarkovsky's equally lengthy Andrei Rublev (1966) combined with the grotesquerie of Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) or maybe Annaud's The Name of the Rose (1986). But, and believe me, nothing will have prepared you for this. From the breathtaking opening scenes depicting the panoply of village life, like a Breugel painting made real, the camera restlessly and incessantly patrols and roams this world, itself an active participant and material presence in the cares, intrigues and double dealings of its people - no static Tarkovsky lens here. And these people live in filth. They cough, spit, defecate, void the contents of their noses, urinate publicly, eat pretty much anything, smear themselves with excreta, and show their bottoms regularly. Over the course of nearly three hours the viewer longs for the sight of some clean cutlery or even a handkerchief to provide a glint of civilisation, but those luxuries are clearly some centuries from development. Instead the mundanity and sheer relentlessness of the grim life on display rendered this viewer amazed, bored and aghast in roughly equal measures.

Unfortunately much of the source novel's plot, about the attempts of Don Ramata to intervene in the massacre and his exposure as an alien visitor, are totally lost. German's concern is the creation of a world rather than telling a story, and this ultimately renders Hard To Be a God a frustrating and rather soporific viewing experience. Arguably, how successful can a film be if it offers no real chance for the viewer to understand what's happening? However, a couple of days after seeing it, it's a difficult movie to shake off. This is a film that is far easier to write about than to experience. As I type this I'm aware of the need to categorise and understand the film to help describe and make sense of it. Yet, and rather like life itself, scenes from Hard To Be a God replay in my head making me realise that I haven't really understood anything. So maybe German, who sadly is no longer with us, has succeeded in his intentions.

The Dirties (Canada 2013: Dir Matt Johnson)

We truly live in meta times. Canadian movie The Dirties is the product of director/producer/co-writer Matt Johnson (who also plays the 'lead' in the film), whose inspiration seems not only to be the real life high school shooting incidents of recent times, but equally importantly cinema itself (or more precisely the process of making film, where scenes can be cued and reviewed at will for endless and isolated exploration, and key lines of dialogue can be played again and again until they assume some kind of truth). The Dirties is constructed, not seamlessly, but with the various parts knocking together, tethered by movie references, memories of Columbine style reportage, slacker comedy set scenes, and an almost random indie band soundtrack. It's a film that, like its lead character, is created and defined while we watch it being pieced together, and where the underlying truth of what we're seeing is only fully realised in the film's final few minutes.

The Dirties centres around two film obsessed high school students, Matt and Owen, who because of their 'otherness' are subjected to relentless bullying by a gang called The Dirties. Matt and Owen's physical response to the actions of the gang is for the most part completely passive, but they vent their frustration with their predicament by creating a film called 'The Dirties', which shows them seeking violent revenge on the gang, mediated almost entirely via scenes from Hollywood films like The Usual Suspects (1995) and Pulp Fiction (1994). In this there is also a direct comparison to Joshua Oppenheimer's devastating The Act of Killing (2012). That their film is pieced together within the film we're watching, showing an imagined response to bulllying contrasting with their real handling of the issue, is the heart of The Dirties, as Matt grows to realise via the film he's making, that the real way to escape his miserable situation is for life to imitate art.

The film pulls off the cinematic trick of showing the audience the human side of Matt and Owen, eliciting our sympathy with their plight and our anger at their treatment, feelings which remain with us even in the film's closing scenes. Matt in particular is a true oddball and the real bullying target. His obsession with revenge alienates him from Owen while at the same time making him an increasingly fascinating character for viewers. The film they produce and show to their disinterested class is an odd unfocused mess, if amusingly made (there's a nod to the Steve Martin vehicle Bowfinger (1999) in a moment where they surreptitiously film one of their female classmates voicing a line of dialogue that they need for a scene). The ambitions of their film show how far apart they are from the rest of the school in terms of artistic vision, but the inability of both class and teacher to understand what's on screen only seems to exacerbate the bullying.

The increasing darkness and seeming inevitability of the film's final section is brilliantly nuanced in a scene where Matt, viewed rendering the closing credit sequence of his movie (which of course become the end titles of the film we're watching), turns to the camera and explains that, because of what he's about to do, someone else will need to finish the edit - they do by the way, and the closing credits are brilliant. That Matt only finally seems strong with a gun in his hand, walking the corridors of his school with a motivation which only he and the viewing audience understand, is arguably The Dirties most meta and devastating moment.

The Sacrament (US 2013: Dir Ti West)

Oh dear. After the slowburn delights of Ti West's earlier films, The Sacrament, with its bigger budget and more ambitious sweep, is, I must confess, a huge disappointment.

West deploys the done to death 'found footage' approach (although more accurately as a friend of mine calls it the 'first person' filmmaking style) to tell a story of a group of edgy TV documentary makers heading out to a remote jungle location to track down the missing sister of one of their party and (of course) document the whole thing. When they eventually find her she's living as part of a blissed out community called 'Eden Parish', presided over by 'The Father', an enigmatic figurehead who has gathered his flock to him to create a seemingly idlyllic life free of the constraints of capitalism and politics. Sound familiar?

People of a certain age may recognise this setup as sounding rather like the People's Temple which Jim Jones founded in Guyana back in the 1970s, before encouraging all 910 of the community's occupants to kill themselves by drinking cyanide laced Kool-Aid. And they'd be right. Without giving the plot away, The Sacrament pretty much re-tells this story - ok, I probably have. Sorry. 'The Father' even looks a lot like Jones and although the names have been changed, once the community's overweight leader hoves into view (complete with Jones-esque glasses) it's fairly obvious how this is going to turn out.

The presence of Eli Roth in the production of course ensures that any scenes of death are as protracted and exploitative as possible (you want to see a mother slit the throat of her own daughter before being shot at point blank range? Step this way). The performances, as in all of West's films, are very good, particularly Gene Jones as 'The Father' and Amy Seimetz as Caroline, the missing sister (and who was one of the few good things about Upstream Colour). But as the film is set in the present day, why is it retelling a story of events that took place in 1978? Did West think that the majority of his audience wouldn't know about Jim Jones, leaving him free to rip the story off? And why did the (presumably culturally clued up) filmmakers, when they stumble across the community and its leader in the first place, not immediately make a comparison to Jonestown, or indeed other cults they would have been familiar with like the Branch Davidians lead by David Koresh?

One of the film's key limitations, and annoyances, is the first person camera work. West gets around the traditional shaky cam issues by having the footage filmed by a proper documentary crew, hence the cinematic quality of what we're looking at. But in the second half of the movie the audience is left to wonder why the crew haven't abandoned their cameras when they're forced to make a run for it - a standard problem for a film shot in this way, and one that I thought West might solve.

So The Sacrament, while well made, convincingly acted, and never boring, is just a bit pointless, and a massive let down from a film maker who has previously been consistently exciting in his output. Let's hope this is just a blip on his CV.