Smashing Time, Revolt Into Style and Swinging Sixties London

PART TWO

Direct from the market - restocking Too Much

The Too Much boutique is owned by Charlotte Brillig, wonderfully played by Anna Quayle, who played characters of a similarly comical loftiness in A Hard Days Night, King of the Castle and Grange Hill (she was Mrs Monroe). She epitomises the aristocratic dabblers of swinging sixties London, dilettantishly dipping their toes in the latest thing. She rather wistfully points out to Brenda that she is ‘only an honourable’, indicating that petty class distinctions persist within the ranks of the aristocracy. She exhibits mild curiosity when Brenda gives her name, musing ‘I don’t think I’ve met anyone called Brenda before’ in a tone which suggests that she’s really saying that she’s never met anyone from up North. Charlotte exudes the breezy intimacy and easy charm of her class, but it is fickle and shallow bonhomie with an underlying assumption that her whims are to be followed without question. As Brenda angrily declares, addressing the gathered Too Much crowd and standing up for herself for once (before immediately capitulating), ‘you people take it for granted that folk’ll do just what you say’. Charlotte’s shop is a place for the in-crowd to gather rather than a business designed to earn her a living. She is rather put out when she discovers that Brenda has been obliging her friends and fashionable acquaintances to actually purchase some of the objects decorating the shop in which they hang out, and points out that she will now have to but them back. As Paul Danquah’s dandy complains with a hurt Jamaican-accented simper, ‘she made us all buy something before we were allowed to park our botties’.

Striking a bargain - Brillig and Gimble

Elements of the aristocracy drifted towards the epicentre of swinging London, sensing where good times were to be had, and also alert to the rise of a new affluent elite. They were full of the inborn certainty that they would be welcomed wherever they chose to flutter and momentarily settle. Dominic Sandbrook, in White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties, mentions ‘old Etonian art dealer Robert Fraser, the old antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs and the Guiness heir Tara Browne’. There were also the Ormsby-Gore children, Alice (who ended up with Eric Clapton), Jane (married at the time to Michael Rainey, owner of the Hung On You boutique), Victoria and Julian, offspring of Lord Harlech (or 5th Baron Harlech). Fraser (or ‘Groovy Bob’) was famously photographed handcuffed to Mick Jagger after they were both arrested for possession of drugs (Jagger amphetamine pills , Fraser heroin) as a result of the infamous police raid of Keith Richards’ Redlands manor house, a picture which pop artist Richard Hamilton later transformed into a series of paintings. Whilst Jagger and Richards (who had also been charged) were released on bail after spending only one night in jail, Fraser ended up in Wormwood Scrubs for four months. Marianne Faithfull, in her autobiography, describes Gibbs, another member of the Stones’ inner circle, as being ‘a Wildean aesthete come to life, plucked straight from the opening lines of The Picture of Dorian Gray’. The same could be said of many of these wealthy young socialites. Tara Browne was another who hooked up with the world of the new pop aristocracy. Faithfull rather cattily remarks that he was ‘pure courtier’ since ‘the Stones were the true aristocracy here and Tara faded in comparison’. So, distinctions were made in the new aristocratic ranks, too, and Browne, for all his limitless wealth, didn’t cut it.

Following fashion - Shooting on the streets

The new pop aristocracy showed a reciprocal fascination for the wealthy and titled, and seemed to aspire to a similar lifestyle. They sought to emulate its fey, childlike obliviousness to the workaday world, its enchanted round of endless play beneath the protecting veil of wealth. Of course, it was also very useful to have antiques dealers and art experts on hand to help decorate newly acquired country houses. Marianne Faithfull credits Anita Pallenberg with bringing together many elements of these two seemingly disparate social groups. ‘The jeunesse doree were in awe of this pop kingdom where young girls threw themselves at the feet of yobbish dandies with guitars’, she wrote. ‘Rock stars who were already parodying the decadent nobility of the past in their foppish clothing and manners were equally impressed by these young hip aristos. A union of the two later seemed inevitable, but no one had the foggiest idea of how to go about it. Except for our Anita’. Some of these aristocrats would find that their wealth did not offer any magical immunity from the darker side of the swinging sixties, the long morning after of the bright pop party. Tara Browne is now best known for inspiring John Lennon’s verse in A Day In The Life about the man who ‘blew his mind out in a car’ after he drove his Lotus at speed through a red light and crashed straight into a parked van. According to Faithfull, he was tripping on acid at the time, and from the song’s lyric, it seems Lennon thought so too. Julian Ormsby-Gore shot himself in 1974 and his sister Alice, who discovered the body, died in a run-down bedsit in Bournemouth after taking a massive overdose of heroin, a habit she had picked up whilst living with Eric Clapton in his country mansion.

George Melly portrays the pop world of swinging 60s London as a skewed Lewis Carroll Wonderland, with its own language and logic, seemingly nonsensical and self-referential but in fact offering an absurdist reflection of the familiar world. In Revolt Into Style, he used a Carroll quote from Alice Through the Looking Glass as a prefatory epigraph: ‘When I make a word mean a lot, I always pay it extra’. He later paraphrased Carroll’s nonsense poem about a quest for something which in the end proves not even to exist, The Hunting of the Snark, in order to portray pop’s period of psychedelic searching: ‘They sought it with day-glo, they sought it with love,/They pursued it with light-shows and bells,/They threatened its life with a nine till five job/They charmed it with smokes and smells’. Melly continued the theme of Carrollian nonsense in Smashing Time, naming the characters whom Yvonne and Brenda (like Alice, thoroughly normal travellers in a strange land) meet after the suggestive neologisms from the first verse of Jabberwocky. ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:/All mimsy were the borogroves,/And the mome raths outgrabe’. So, we get Charlotte Brillig, Jeremy Tove, Mrs Gimble, Tom Wabe and Bobby Mome-Rath, not to mention the gurning psych-pop group The Snarks. This band name fits perfectly with the blown up picture of them, sneering and sarky, which papers an entire wall behind pop manager Tove’s desk. There’s also Clive Sword, with his audience-assaulting robots, who is presumably analogous to the Jabberwock-slayer, although whether or not his blade is vorpal is not established. Carroll’s brand of strangely insightful nonsense evidently chimed with the counter-culture across the Atlantic, too, forming the basis for Jefferson Airplane’s hit White Rabbit, and providing a suitably far out name for a lesser known San Francisco band, Frumious Bandersnatch.

Carrollian name-calling - Bobby Mome-Rath

The names are entirely apposite for the characters who bear them, and the poem’s accompanying adjectives also serve as apt descriptions. Jeremy Tove is a slick record producer, played with unctuous charm by Jeremy Lloyd. Humpty Dumpty, in Alice Through the Looking Glass, explains that the word ‘tove’ describes ‘something like badgers – they’re something like lizards – and they’re something like corkscrews’. A creature which is hard to define or pin down, then – different things to different people. As for ‘slithy’, Humpty says that it means ‘lithe and slimy…you see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’. A suitable description for the tall, wiry, duplicitous and dangerously smooth Tove. Brillig means ‘four o’clock in the afternoon – the time when you begin broiling things for dinner’. Carroll had earlier interpreted it in one of his privately produced periodicals, Misch-Masch, in which Jabberwocky’s first stanza appeared in 1855, 16 years before it finally found full form in Through The Looking Glass. He simply defined it as meaning ‘the close of the afternoon’. The time when Charlotte’s day would start in earnest, when she might finish breakfast or wander into work, should the mood take her. To gimble is ‘to make holes like a gimlet’, conjuring images of Mrs G painstakingly repairing her moth-eaten clothes. Alice herself provides an initial interpretation of wabe, it being ‘the grass plot round a sun-dial’, so called ‘because it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it…and a long way beyond it on each side’. Carroll earlier gave a variant definition, claiming it derived from the verb to swab or soak, and simply meant ‘the side of a hill (from its being soaked by the rain). Neither says much about the character of the archetypal swinging sixties photographer Tom Wabe, unless it is to suggest that he self-consciously looks back to his roots and exaggeratedly soaks his persona in working-class cockney mannerisms in order to conform to the current vogue. Wabe is a good no-nonsense name for a character from such a background, whether real or invented; short and abrupt and nothing fancy. Mome-Rath, on the other hand, is an excellent, slightly ridiculous double-barrelled monicker for Ian Carmichael’s aristocratic playboy, a Bertie Wooster gone to seed. Humpty has trouble with his definitions here. He knows that ‘a rath is a sort of green pig: but mome I’m not certain about. I think it’s short for “from home” – meaning that they’d lost their way, you know’. Carroll, in his earlier set of interpretations, defined it as meaning grave, as in solemn, and classified the rath as ‘a species of land turtle. Head erect: mouth like a shark: forelegs curved out so that the animal walked on its knees: smooth green body: lived on swallows and oysters’. On balance, Humpty’s version seems more appropriate to Carmichael’s character.

Trog in Camden

Melly’s influence and tastes can be detected in several other aspects of the film. The cartoon title cards, depicting caricatured scenes from the movie, are drawn by Trog, otherwise known as Wally Fawkes. Like Melly, Fawkes had been active on the trad jazz circuit, playing with his band Wally Fawkes and the Troglodytes, from whence his nom de plume derived. Trog drew a cartoon strip called Flook, which ran in the Daily Mail between 1949 and 1984. The title character, initially the imaginary friend of a boy called Rufus, was a small bear-like creature with an odd tubular nose. He was an innocent outsider who wandered through the contemporary world viewing events from a perspective of puzzled bewilderment. The scripts were written at various times by Barry Took, Humphrey Lyttleton, Barry Norman and Melly himself. Under Melly’s pen, the stories took a mildly satirical turn, whilst still retaining a childlike air. Melly also took the opportunity to introduce elements of the dada and surrealism which he loved. As you can discover here (in the comments section), this included Flook encountering the concept of pataphysics, a term invented by dada precursor Alfred Jarry in 1893 and incorporated into his absurdist play The Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician. Pataphysics, as he defined it, was ‘the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments’. A theory of advanced nonsense, in other words, returning us to the circular logic of Carroll.

Mad inventor - Bruce Lacey

It was likely Melly who also encouraged the inclusion of ‘Professor’ Bruce Lacey, here playing a character by the name of Clive Sword, and his remarkable menagerie of aggressive automata. Lacey had already made appearances in short films by two of the leading pop directors of the period: in Ken Russell’s The Preservation Man (1962), and alongside The Goons in Richard Lester’s The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film (1960). He was also hymned by Fairport Convention in their rather plodding blues by numbers Mr Lacey from the What We Did On Our Holidays LP, in which song Sandy Denny and Ian Matthews plead with him to ‘let me work your loving machine’, the subsequent mechanical whirring sounds presumably indicating that he has assented. Lacey was part of a theatrical trio called The Alberts, alongside brothers Dougie and Tony Grey, who Melly heralds as one of the few true proponents of pop theatre. He describes their show An Evening of British Rubbish, in which, ‘surrounded by an insane clutter dominated by a penny farthing bicycle’ (shades of The Prisoner) ‘they held a remarkable balance between chaos and order’. Melly singles out Lacey as the central figure who maintains this balance, suggesting that ‘he is barely in control of his hatred for whatever seems to him to be unloving or morally dead. He expresses this hatred through a series of explosive and dangerous machines built largely from the detritus of earlier stages of technology’. Lacey hugely enjoys playing the mad scientist in Smashing Time, gesticulating wildly from behind his elevated ecclesiastical lectern in what looks like it might be The Roundhouse in Camden. His machines are let loose amongst the champagne-sipping art-opening crowd, and cause merry havoc. They are the products of a surreal collision between a giant meccano set and several dismembered shop dummies and anatomical models, with springs, tape reels, roadwork lights, exposed circuitry, spray paint guns, and inflating and deflating balloons grafted on to give each its own particular personality and function. These intimidating automata are collectively referred to in the titles as ‘Jabberwock machine sculpture’; back to Carroll again, with the ambulatory mechanisms echoing the dreaded monster’s hybrid, cabinet of curiosity form.

Automaton attack

Melly’s experiences of the capital's homosexual underworld (and it had to be underground, since sex between men was illegal until the passing of the Sexual Offences Act on 27th July 1967) also informs the film’s portrayal of pop London as a gay environment. The blurring of sexual identity, reflected in the relaxation of strictly defined codes for men and women in dress and appearance (short and long hair, for example), was a feature of the swinging 60s scene, although again, this didn’t initially extend beyond a fairly narrow and geographically constricted coterie. Melly describes how ‘the classless (or to be more accurate class-aphrodisiac) acceptance of pre-war homosexual circles, their belief in the self-sufficiency of the chic, the amusing, the new; the love of glitter and danger; the belief in hard work at the service of sensation; these are now acceptable within a heterosexual context’. Funnily enough, Melly ascribes the promotion of such an acceptance to the new breed of fashion photographer, the best known of whom (David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy) were resolutely and red-bloodedly heterosexual. The period was also characterised by the wholesale adoption of a camp sensibility. Susan Sontag, in her essay Notes on Camp, links this sensibility back to Oscar Wilde and the nineteenth century dandy. Noting that camp is characterized by detachment, irony and the aestheticisation of exaggerated artifice and stylisation, she proposes that ‘as the dandy is the nineteenth century’s surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture’.

Crushed velvet camp - Murray Melvin

Of course, once camp becomes all-pervasive, it looses its value as a means of defining your difference. The dandy’s exhibitionism goes unnoticed if everyone is dressed in an equally flamboyant manner. Melly notes that ‘camp is an “in” idea, the property of a minority. Once public property, once everybody is in on the joke it stops being funny. In the middle-60s we all became fetishists at any rate vicariously. We all knew Robin and Batman were pouves. Kinky was a word everybody applied to everything except perhaps brussell sprouts. In the end it palled’. Marianne Faithfull also comments on the gay aspect of the 60s, noting that the ‘blurring of sexual lines was part of the creative mix of the era, but it also had its dark side. The homoerotic subculture had a virulent strain of misogyny to it as a nasty by-product’. The gay characters in Smashing Time, including the waiters at Sweeney Todd’s pie shop and Murray Melvin and Paul Danquah (resplendent in purple crushed velvet and pastel patterned cream suit respectively, and both re-united with Tushingham from A Taste of Honey) all tend towards the campy bitch stereotype, creating a personal bubble of immunity through cruel wit. They are prone to dialogue along the lines of ‘Is it the change of life dear? Most people think you’re just a wicked old queen, but I say no, there must be some kinder explanation’. This fits in rather well with the view of the swinging 60s elite as being cruelly exclusive and prone to treat those outside the magic inner circle with airy contempt or, at best, weary tolerance. Only the elderly antiques dealer, cradling his gilded cherub against his quilt-edged smoking jacket, shows Yvonne and Brenda any kind of respect. An old school dandy of a more chivalrous stripe.

Kindly camp - the old school

The other period stereotype which the film includes is that of the working-class fashion photographer made good. Melly welcomes the advent of the 60s concept of ‘the photographer as pop hero’ and of the photograph as the ideal pop medium. ‘Every idea about pop favours this myth’, he writes. ‘the balance between technical expertise and intellectual indifference, the camera’s amorality, the availability and disposability of the photograph, all those qualities which Richard Hamilton defined as the essence of pop: “popular, transient, exependable, low cost, mass-produced,young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and last, but not least, Big Business’. Here, comparisons with the Austin Power films become inevitable, and Mike Myers was clearly heavily influenced by Smashing Time, not least in his casting of Michael York. York here plays Tom Wabe, modelled on a blend of David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy. From the moment he opens his mouth and says ‘ere, I’m mad about yer boat’, you realise that this is unlikely to be a performance which is very true to life. York sounds like he’s just swallowed his gum, and his attempts at a working class accent make you reassess your judgement of Dick Van Dyke’s much maligned attempts at Cockney cheer. Maybe they weren’t so bad after all. Inexplicably, no-one seems to have pointed this out to York, who carried this strangely strangulated interpretation of an East End accent over into his portrayal of a pop star (opposite Rita Tushingham again) in The Guru a year later. Smashing Time’s producer Carlo Ponti had already made one film centring around a working class photographer, Blow Up, with David Hemming’s as the Bailey-esque character. Hemmings displayed some of the commanding arrogance of the aggressively self-promoting photographers of the time, and at least he offered a few cheap coin tricks to charm the young girls who came to him in search of instant stardom. York’s Tom Wabe just comes across as a gormless berk. Why Brenda should fall for him, after initially seeking him out to give him an earful about exposing her friend Yvonne to public ridicule, is a complete mystery. But one shout of ‘ere Bren, fancy a bit o’ nosh’ and she’s gone.

Protest perfume - Direct Action

Wabe is hired to do some shots of Yvonne for the colour supplements, which were a new and exciting thing at the time, a repository of the material and lifestyle desires at the heart of the swinging sixties. My parents used to have a couple of specially produced binders containing Telegraph colour supplements – these were the sort of things it was considered worth keeping in those days. One of those supplements included a photo shoot from the time of Smashing Time’s release in which Rita and Lynn dress up in a variety of costumes and fool about for the camera. You can find these pictures over here if you scroll down a bit. There is a funny sequence in which the frivolity and pretensions of the swinging sixties photographers are lampooned, with Rita posing for a number of foolish fashion shoots. She appears on a billboard as a chic astronaut, and we see her being photographed in a meat packing plant holding a bone, and in a red evening gown in a hospital operating room. These would seem to be parodying Terence Donovan’s fondness for shooting models in front of factories and similarly unglamorous locales. We also see one of her TV ads, in which shots of street violence, with police wading in with riot gear seem to be injecting a shot of reality into the self-obsessed bubble of this fantasy world (footage from the Sunset Strip riots, perhaps – the lack of black faces would certainly seem to rule out the Watts riots). In fact, it is just the introduction to an advertisement for a new perfume, Direct Action, which Rita holds up for the camera, looking very earnest, studenty and bohemian. The advertising industry’s manipulation of the impulse to consume can be extended to embrace even such an apparently dedicatedly anti-materialistic act as the street protest. Tom also conducts an impromptu shoot with Brenda in the interstices of the canal and railway at the back of Kings Cross station, near where he lives, in impeccably bohemian style, on a very neat and well-appointed barge. This involves Rita in various scenarios: negotiating a storm on a boat, tied to the tracks in silent movie style (and what’s that passing by on its way into Kings Cross? Great Scott, it’s a Deltic!) and taking tea by a workman’s tent. It’s a sequence which embodies the 60s photographer’s very personal relationship with their favoured model.

Trainspotting - blimey, it's a Deltic!

The song which accompanies this scene, Sunshine Day, is a nice bit of psych-pop, but the music in the film as a whole is very disappointing. It harks back to music hall singalong and stage musical numbers rather than the reflecting the pop music which defined the era. The songs are seldom more than inconsequential ditties which appear to have been made up more or less on the spot to accompany the action. Sample lyrics include lines such as ‘it’s nice to know you’re really trendy/make and mendy’. Hardly Cole Porter, or more to the point, Lennon and McCartney. A pop group of the time do feature in the cast, but their music is not used. This is a shame, because Tomorrow (for it is they) could have offered some perfect songs. Their self-titled 1968 LP contains some fine psychedelic pop, all phasing and reversed guitars, alongside plenty of Syd Barrett style whimsy. Auntie Mary’s Dress Shop would have been particularly appropriate. Where Barrett had his Bike, Tomorrow have My White Bicycle, Corporal Clegg is promoted to Colonel Brown (I know, Corporal Clegg is written by Roger Waters, but he’s trying his best to imitate Barrett), and The Gnome splits off into Three Jolly Little Dwarfs. All of which would have conjured the tenor of the times to a tee. You can see three of the members of Tomorrow, John Pearce, Keith West and future Yes guitarist Steve Howe, in several scenes, and in the Sweeney Todd restaurant, they are joined by the young (and uncredited) David Essex, who looks very dapper and youthful in a 30s two-tone gangster suit.

Hippie pie fusillade - Tomorrow with Howe plus Essex

Tomorrow participate in a giant pie fight in the pie shop, in which 3,480 pies were apparently thrown. It is a lengthy and tedious scene which shows no feeling for the pacing and choreography required for effective slapstick. This unfortunately sets the tone for much of the humour in the film, which betrays its pop nature by resorting to low farce at every turn, usually accompanied by ‘silent movie’ comedy music. A pie fight, a gunfight with sauce bottles, a prolonged series of contrived interventions to thwart Ian Carmichael’s caddishly lustful intentions; it’s all terribly old-fashioned and embarrassingly lame. Lynn Redgrave and Rita Tushingham seem to have been left pretty much to their own devices in many of these scenes, with the result that there is much rather aimless and exaggerated comic mugging. I am naturally predisposed to like Rita Tushingham in whatever she does, but it has to be said, these scenes are far from her finest hour.

Shambolic session - creating the perfect pop product

Yvonne finally achieves her dreams of pop stardom, having bought her way into the system with the proceeds of a chance windfall. The scene in which she is primed for stardom by Jeremy Lloyd’s music business insider Jeremy Tove is an enjoyably cynical dissection of the pop process, the manufacturing of trends. Tove tells Yvonne that they have to buy into the charts, sweeten the disc jockeys, manufacture the image and then sell that image. He then tells her to broaden her northern accent and pretend that she worked in a mill. It’s all rather akin to the stages which Malcolm McLaren outlines in The Great Rock Swindle, which is structured as a lesson in how to manufacture a band and sell it. The session in which Yvonne records her banal, self-aggrandising song is an amusing parody of the productions of the time. As she screeches the lines ‘I can’t sing but I’m young/Can’t do a thing but I’m young’, she’s is accompanied by a rather overbearing harp, bass oboes blatting flatulently, a trio of old ladies wearily repeating a baaa ba ba ba backing vocal, a sitar striking a flurry of notes which have nothing to do with the tune proceeding alongside it, and a trio of sullen guitarists who arrythmically chop away at one chord, producing a hollow and unpleasantly rasping sound. Tove calls the session to a halt, presses the playback button, and the song is instantly transformed into a polished and sparky performance. Instant pop product.

Future Hammer stars 1: Valerie Leon, Jeremy Lloyd and the 'Snarks'

Tove himself is an example of what Michael Moorcock describes, in his polemical pamplet The Retreat From Liberty, as the ‘hip capitalist’, who ‘tried to look as much like Mick Jagger or Jean Shrimpton as possible’ and who ‘modified his language to suit the mood of the times, smoked dope, filled his Porsche with Liberty’s fabrics and quadraphonic 8-track’. He speaks in a cant almost entirely comprised of carefully learned hip language, an attempt to get with it which displays rather to much effort. Tove is set apart from the others by his tailoring, which gives him a slight distance from the pop world which he seeks to manipulate. Melly talks of the need for a new sort of clothing which would suit those who were not of the new pop aristocracy, but whose position demanded some sort of gesture towards its tastes in order to fit in. John Michael’s shops, he suggests, offered a more toned-down display of flamboyence: ‘A kind of discreet-hip: quiet suits but with brilliant silk linings, pink shirts, but with small button-down collars…the Italian style was grafted on to the central tradition of posh tailoring and at traditional prices too’. Jeremy Lloyd, who played Tove, was no stranger to the swinging sixties scene, and turns up dancing with Ringo Starr in the nightclub sequence of A Hard Day’s Night. After a brief marriage to Joanna Lumley, he would rise to new heights in the 70s and 80s as co-author of the sitcoms Are You Being Served and Allo-Allo. Tove’s secretary, by the way, is played by Valerie Leon, who looks fabulous in a pink and yellow striped dress. Leon would go on to star in the 1971 Hammer film Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb, which is a creditable effort despite the problems with which the production was beset (director Seth Holt died in the latter stages of shooting). She also appears in several Carry On films, and her cool poise as the shop assistant in Carry On Camping makes even Sid James sputter and find himself at a loss for a line of leering innuendo.

Future Hammer stars 2: Veronica Carlson

Everything ends up in that symbol of Wilson’s white heat optimism for a technologised future, the Post Office Tower. Tove arranges for Yvonne, whose popularity is already slipping, to throw a party for ‘the whole of turned on London’. He promises ‘PROs, telly producers, gangsters, pop stars, paperback writers, MBEs – it’ll be the spadest freak out of all time’. There is a media scrum on the stairs outside and we get to see a parade of swinging sixties archetypes. The Hollywood starlet who turns up in an open topped car and immediately sets about striking expert poses for the waiting cameras is played by Veronica Carlson, who would make several Hammer films in the following years, ranging from the excellent (Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed) through the middling (Dracula Has Risen From the Grave) through to the execrable (The Horror of Frankenstein). A later British horror, The Ghoul (1975) was a pale shadow of the films of Hammer’s heyday (it was actually a Tyburn production), although at least it gave her the opportunity to work with Peter Cushing again. We also see a pale and thin girl on a scooter with a short, bleached mod haircut, looking a bit like Warhol ‘star’ Edie Sedgwick, or perhaps Mia Farrow; a John Lennon-a-like in beads, kaftan and rose-tinted grannie specs; an Indian guru carried in on a sofa by his rock star acolytes; a gangster with his henchman; and, curiously, an archbishop. Inevitably, it all ends in mayhem, with Brenda taking pity on Yvonne, who suffers further humiliations, setting the revolving restaurant to overdrive and blowing the grid of the entire city. It’s a silly end to a silly film, but one with so many incidental pleasures that it’s well worth seeking out.

Hampstead mornings - a quiet moment

Smashing Time, Revolt Into Style and Swinging Sixties London

PART ONE


Smashing Time was a musical comedy made in 1967 which re-united Lynn Redgrave and Rita Tushingham, who’d appeared together in director Desmond Davis’s 1964 film (his cinematic debut as director) The Girl With Green Eyes, an Irish-set drama adapted from Edna O’Brien’s novel. Redgrave had definitely played second fiddle in that film, which focussed on Tushingham’s character and her relationship with an older man, a well-off but disillusioned writer played by Peter Finch. She takes a much more prominent role in Smashing Time, whilst essentially replicating her role as the brassy, loud friend, overly certain of her worldliness. Rita, too, is little different, portraying her usual wide-eyed (and eye-linered) innocent, inexperienced but far from naïve, and certainly not prepared to be anyone’s fool. Only the accents have changed, Irish morphing into Corrie-land Northern. Lynn is now Yvonne and Rita Brenda. The two travel down to London in order to fulfil Yvonne’s fantasies of instant fame in the swinging heart of the capital. As she puts it in language which betrays the fact that her perceptions have been wholly formed by teen pop magazines, they are ‘young girls coming down from the North with their hearts full of dreams’.

Trog titles - arriving at St Pancras

The film was written by George Melly, who had already been surveying the 60s pop scene and whose observations (written between 1966 and 1969) would be gathered in his book Revolt Into Style, published in 1970. This looks at pop in all its forms - not just music but the visual arts, cinema, theatre, fashion and literature. Melly was largely sympathetic to the pop art movement and its pervasive influence on the emergent youth culture. He makes a clear distinction between pop and popular culture, the latter identified as the long standing traditions which have their roots in the entertainments offered in music halls and theatres, pubs and clubs. Pop was likely to be disseminated and absorbed through more material (and therefore more disposable) media: records, clothes, magazines, advertising, films and television. ‘The principal difference’, Melly writes, ‘is that popular culture was unconscious, or perhaps unselfconscious would be more exact, whereas pop culture came about as the result of a deliberate search for objects, clothes, music, heroes and attitudes which could help to define a stance. From this it can be said that, whereas the older popular culture stood for the spirit of acceptance, pop culture represented a form of protest’. Melly had an affinity with the dada and surrealist movements, which he had discovered whilst a pupil at Stowe School (as detailed in the first volume of his autobiography, Scouse Mouse), and which had helped to define his sense of difference (he was bisexual, although most of his youthful sexual experiences were with men). If surrealism aimed to make deep and startling connections with the subconscious, then pop just aimed straight for the id. Its shallowness was its virtue; it didn’t seek to make deep connections, merely to skim across the bright, reflective surfaces of instant gratification.

Dark City - St Pancras noir

Pop art was not necessarily a new form allowing for mass expression, however. Its market value relied on the creation and maintenance of a fairly narrow elite. As Robert Hughes points out in The Shock of the New, ‘pop art, far from being “popular” art, was made “by highly professional trained experts for a mass audience” (here Hughes quotes English pop artist Richard Hamilton, whose 1956 collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing was the first to use the word, prominently displayed on an oversized lollipop). It was done to the people. It grew by analogy to what it admired, advertising and the media through which advertisements were replicated. And it grew dandyistically, casting itself in the role of the detached, amused, lenient, but inflexibly ironic spectator at the vast theatre of desire and illusion which the mass media of the twentieth century had erected’. Hughes’ point can be extended beyond the fine art context within which he writes. The idea of art as product manufactured from the matter of commercial culture by a small, knowing group and marketed to a mass audience using the very means which form its subject is at the heart of Melly’s script for Smashing Time. The film, for all its surface frivolity and apparent participation in the voguish fascination with all things pop, is a great deal more cynical about the colourful world of swinging sixties London than Revolt Into Style. Melly seems to have been aiming for a caustic satire along the lines of Hogarth’s series of prints which told the sorry tale of A Harlot’s Progress. He created a series of exaggerated caricatures for his two deluded protagonists to encounter in order to highlight the moral pitfalls awaiting the unwary provincial arriving in the capital, full of unreal expectations. What bite his script might have had is rather lost in the film’s determination (or the determination of its director, perhaps) to project the kind of self-conscious zaniness which had come to characterise pop films of the time, however.

Defiant dabs of colour - standing out against drabness

Brenda and Yvonne (Rita and Lynn) come into London via St Pancras station. It offers a complete contrast to the bright and dazzling world which they (or at least Yvonne) are seeking. As they walk along the platform, only the women’s dresses and the toys which spill out of the salesman’s suitcase (the first example of the film’s clumsy slapstick) distinguish the environment from the drab grey and brown tones of post war austerity. An elevated perspective shot as they emerge from the station’s exit reveals the façade of St Pancras to be shockingly black, coated with the grimy pollutants of the city to the extent that its red brickwork is entirely invisible. British Rail’s plans to demolish the whole building suddenly seem a little less sacrilegious. The tiny figures of the travellers spilling out into the Euston Road provide the only spots of colour against this dingy and depressing backdrop, and serve to illustrate Melly’s point about pop as protest, the bright yellows and reds appearing assertively defiant – a revolt into style, in fact. From beneath the arch of St Pancras’ exit, we also get to glimpse the other side of the Euston Road. The concrete council offices and library have yet to be built, and there seems to be a theatre off to the left where now there are only fast food outlets. The film continuously contrasts the colourful pop world with the dilapidated and grungy reality from which it is trying to break free. Melly makes it clear that the world of swinging London didn’t have a wide geographical reach. Yvonne and Brenda initially make their clueless way to Camden, after some confusion, their requests for directions to Carnaby Street having been met by a ‘comic’ Irish drunk. This is still the area as depicted by Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group, a place of dark interiors and shabby, poverty-worn housing. It’s the Camden which James Mason shows us around in The London Nobody Knows, also released in 1967 and similarly looking at the capital beyond the chic clubs and boutiques, its nature still displaying a continuity with the Victorian era. The road in which Yvonne finds a room for rent, Grudge Street (no longer in existence, if it ever was), could come out of a Dickens novel, or indeed George Gissing’s London-set novel New Grub Street (1891), which also reflects the impact of new mass media on the capital’s culture.

Carnaby epiphany - Yvonne enters the street of her dreams

Yvonne does make it to Carnaby Street, and their follows an archetypally swinging sixties scene as she dances joyfully past its boutiques, alongside which various trendy types are decorously posed, snapped by young photographers with cameras permanently attached to their faces. This scene, with its screechingly grating accompanying song, is contrasted with Brenda’s labours in the greasy spoon café in which they had failed to pay for their everything-included fry-up, up to her elbows in baked-bean encrusted plates. This environment, in which dirty browns predominate, is presided over by Arthur Mullard, about as far from a swinging sixties character as you could imagine. He was a character actor who unfailingly played comic embodiments of a lumpen proletarian, dim and incapable of articulating a sentence of more than a handful of words, but essentially decent nonetheless. The swift intercutting between Yvonne and Brenda’s experiences of the capital underlines the divisions evident at the time. Dominic Sandbrook, in his book White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties, portrays Swinging London as a ‘small social network’ and points out that ‘far from being open and classless, the swinging scene was essentially the province of a self-satisfied elite…it is hard to deny that the swinging elite had simply replaced one form of snobbery with another’. Julie Christie, in Very Heaven: Looking Back at the 1960s, a collection of reminiscences edited by Sara Maitland, articulates the atmosphere of cliquishness pervading at the time. She talks of ‘the peer pressure – the whole business of being as freaky as possible and if you weren’t you were labelled “straight” or “square”. There was definitely status within that apparently no-status, “classless” society. There was enormous status and it hung on how much drugs you took or how you dressed of just how freaky you were. I know I always felt I was on the outside looking in. I think the majority of people did…I felt like a country bumpkin who had for some reason found herself in this elevated society and had no idea how to handle it’. If even Julie Christie felt like an outsider, immortalised in one of the era’s defining songs, Waterloo Sunset, it must really have been an exclusive scene. Those few who gained access and made a success of themselves swiftly formed a new class – a pop aristocracy who took their place alongside the scions of the old guard.

Girl With the Green Eyes - Rita comes South

Brenda and Yvonne represent two faces of the working class in the sixties. Brenda, in her brown twinset, and with her wary suspicion of the new, stands for the traditional values and sense of belonging to a particular background. Yvonne, with her red and white ziz-zag patterned mini-skirt and op-art PVC coat, and her whole-hearted belief in the ‘switched-on’ world of pop stands for the desire to break away from that background, from the replication of the lives which your parents had led. It’s a difference which also marks the faultline between the films of the kitchen-sink generation and the more whimsical, madcap fare of the pop era. It’s a division which can be emblematically marked by two films: Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life, which came out in 1963, and which has been seen by many both as the apotheosis of the kitchen-sink movement and as the film which heralded its end; and A Hard Days Night, which displayed both a pop subject and, in Dick Lester’s innovative, new-wave influenced directing and editing style, a new pop technique. George Melly (again, in Revolt into Style), writing about A Hard Days Night and Lester’s work in general, suggests that ‘what he’s after is to make the maximum impact now, to hold the moment, freeze it, show it, and let it melt’. The intercutting between the Carnaby Street scenes and Brenda’s washing-up drudgery acts as a stroboscopic juxtaposition pastiching these two styles. Kitchen-sink films tended to be set up North and to feature working class lives set against industrial backdrops, and to focus on the trials and tribulations of their characters. They were also, by and large, black and white. Pop movies were generally London-based and were more escapist, generally eschewing social comment in favour of celebrating the moment, and were increasingly filmed in eye-catching colour. Rita Tushingham had emerged from the former world, having made her initial impact playing in Jo in one of the classics of kitchen-sink realism, the Salford-set A Taste of Honey. Lynn Redgrave’s first starring role was in the London-set Georgy Girl, which was a pop film with one foot in the kitchen-sink (if that’s physically possible), its protagonist at a remove from the pop world, and ultimately fixated on more traditional values. The film in which both Tushingham and Redgrave starred, The Girl With the Green Eyes, was also transitional. It shifted the kitchen-sink locale from the North to Ireland but was otherwise fairly true to form. But it did end with Tushingham’s character leaving Dublin for London, leaving her narrow horizons behind in the hope of discovering a new and more exciting life.

Contrasts - Brenda experiences the other side of the sixties

Rita’s Brenda is very much the put-upon, downtrodden drudge, always subject to Yvonne’s brashly assertive manner and aggressively self-centred fancies. Her pussycat outfit, worn in the grubby nightclub in which she works with Yvonne, and in which she ends up serving her friend as she is picked up by Ian Carmichael’s soused old roué, may as well be that of a mouse. Her friendship amounts to an abusive relationship in which she is constantly belittled and blamed, no matter what lengths she goes to in order to rescue Yvonne from the many disastrous escapades she blunders into. Lynn Redgrave has an unenviable task in playing a someone so wholly lacking in sympathetic character. Her attempts at singing are also deliberately strident and grating. When she finally makes it for a fleeting moment in the pop music business, her image could perhaps be seen as aspiring to emulate someone like Cilla Black, whom George Melly refers to as ‘the Gracie Fields of our day, the Queen of the Common Touch, the Toast of the Golden Mile’. She proves unworthy of such soubriquets, however. She represents the grasping, acquisitive aspect of the new youthful consumer, eager to define themselves through novel fashions and tastes and in opposition to the conservatism and sobriety of the older generation, who sought to be a part of the crowd and not to stand out. She is rudely dismissive of Brenda partly because she sees her as remaining attached to these values – and partly, of course, because the abusive partner in a relationship always bolsters their own self-image by diminishing that of their other half.

Charlotte Street mornings - rediscovering friendship

The contrasts embodied in the two protagonists are replicated throughout the film, with locales and characters mirroring each other. This serves to portray the co-existence of entirely separate worlds in the London of the time, worlds which are, however, not so far apart as they might initially seem (or as they might wish themselves to be). So, Carnaby Street is contrasted with the second hand clothes shops and street markets of Camden, Mrs Gimble’s dingy and disordered shop with the painfully chic Too Much boutique, Arthur’s café with the Sweeney Todd pie shop, the squalid bedsit in which Brenda and Yvonne first find digs with the ultra-mod high-rise apartment they end up in, the reality TV show You’ve Got To Laugh, with its mockery of the aspirations of the poor, with the absurd consumer fantasies of the TV ads Brenda makes, and the in-crowd party at the top of the Post Office Tower with the seedy and senescent pick up joint of the old Soho club where the friends find work shortly after arriving in the city. Ultimately, both Yvonne Brenda are outsiders, and will always remain so. They have no real place in this uber-cool world, even if they manage to gain access for a brief 15 minutes. They are inevitably going to be shown the door at some stage. Their rejection is made apparent from the start, as Yvonne is photographed in Carnaby Street by Michael York’s David Bailey-esque Tom Wabe specifically so that she can be made a mockery of in the papers. Lynn Redgrave was tall and full of figure and face – the very opposite of the boyish Twiggy or Shrimpton gamin figure fashionable at the time (and pretty much ever since). Rita was accustomed to playing the overlooked outsider with the plucky character, and no journalist of the time seemed capable of writing an article about her without at some point using the phrase ‘ugly duckling’. It’s a shame that Melly didn’t give them a bit more pluck and allow them to join together to kick back against the hip orthodoxy who treat them with such disdain and contempt. But they remain fixed in their attitudes and behaviours throughout, Yvonne aspiring to chisel out her own place in the pop aristocracy, with Brenda as her permanently submissive lady in waiting. Even Brenda leaps at the chance to become a part of the glittering pop world when it offers itself, rather than telling them where they can stick it. Only at the end, as they wander aimlessly through a Fitzrovian Charlotte Street dawn, does a genuine flicker of friendship, of two compadres facing the world together, surface, Yvonne asking ‘what the hell are we going to do now, Bren?’ As they dance wearily up the empty, rubbish strewn road, we get a glimpse of how these two characters could have been played in a more sympathetic and companionable tenor, a portrayal which would have made us care a little bit more about their ups and downs.

Fashion parade - outside John Stephen's Tre Camp

We do get to see Carnaby Street in its heyday (or at least only a little past it) as Yvonne prances along in an ecstatic daze. This was at the time when John Stephen (not to be confused with John Stephens, the free jazz drummer and convenor, at about this time, of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble), the ‘king of Carnaby Street’, was at the height of his success and helping to define the look of the moment. Stephen was a Glaswegian who ventured down to London at the age of 19 and, having worked initially as a tailor’s clerk, opened his first shop in 1957. Ten years later, when Smashing Time was filmed, he owned ten boutiques along Carnaby Street. Stephen’s shops provided young men with a cheap alternative to the more exclusive (and expensive) Kings Road tailors such as Cecil Gee and John Michael, and introduced a new expressiveness to men’s fashion. His clothes were colourful and flamboyant, flying in the face of the accepted sobriety and conservative formality of menswear. Although principally known for his male fashions, by the mid 60s he had added boutiques for girls to his Carnaby Street collection (although the first, Lady Jane, had been opened in 1966 by Harry Fox and Henry Moss) and the area became a magnet for the general populace wanting to keep up with the latest look, or journalists and tv reporters wanting to feature it in a colour supplement article or news item. We get to see three of Stephen’s shops: Tre Camp, His Clothes and Male West One, alongside others called Mates and Doris. There’s an interior view through the window of Cranks, a pioneering vegetarian restaurant which opened on Carnaby Street in 1961, and which has now migrated Westward, currently baking in the Cider Press Centre at Dartington in Devon. Through another boutique window (complete with mannequin sporting a union jack dress) we also get a glimpse of Gear, a shop run by Tom Salter which sold voguish old clothes, antiques and general odds and sods, and which was also the locale for the film’s launch party (pictures from which you can see over here).

Daylight robbery - clothes for the Essex girl

Stephen’s clothes were intended to be disposable, in line with the throwaway commercialism of pop, and as such they were generally cheap and not always of the finest quality. They were meant to be swiftly replaced by the next trend, the latest cut or pattern. The very accessibility (and affordability) of Stephen’s shops and their contents, the fact that they offered modern fashion for the masses, left them open to the scorn of the new pop elite, for whom exclusivity was a virtue. As Melly says in Revolt Into Style, ‘the “in” group wouldn’t have been seen dead in Carnaby Street by 1966. Chelsea, after a period of decline, reasserted its role on the stage of fashion, and so it has remained ever since’. Being out with the in crowd, Carnaby Street is thus the perfect locus for the fantasies of a provincial dreamer like Yvonne, fed on a diet of second hand impressions of swinging London from pop magazines and cliché-ridden newspaper reports and pictures. As the camera goes out and about on the streets, nouvelle-vague style, we see two other sights which give an insight into the tenor of the times. There’s a display of a book entitled Birds of Britain in one shop, not an ornithological study but a series of portraits by photographer John D Green of the women who were prominent fixtures of the swinging sixties scene. It features the likes of Cathy McGowan, Sarah Miles, Marianne Faithfull, Julie Christie, Charlotte Rampling, Jane and Victoria Ormsby-Gore and various other double barrelled debs. Its publication and foregrounded display is an indication of the extent to which the swinging sixties had filtered through to the wider public consciousness, and the fascination which its glamour exerted. It’s title and some of its content is also a sign that feminism was not to make an impact on this self-contained world until well into the 70s. If you’ve got a copy of this book in reasonably good condition now, you can probably get a good hundred quid or so for it. Another shop window displays a poster proclaiming ‘we’ve got Sandie Shaw’s clothes’ (well give them back then), a sign of the close association between pop music and fashions. Shaw was on the verge of trashing her mod credibility with her Eurovision Song Contest entry Puppet on a String in 1967, but her style would still appeal to the likes of Yvonne, who would also identify with her humble origins as an Essex girl from Dagenham. Shaw would go on to marry the fashion designer Jeff Banks, who owned the London boutique Clobber, and would launch her own fashion label, Sandie Shaw, selling clothes and, ironically, given her fondness for going barefoot, shoes.

Mrs Gimble and 'Gaylord' - or Mrs Cornelius?

Brenda, meanwhile, has found herself in the rather more musty surrounds of Mrs Gimble’s old clothes shop. Mrs Gimble is played by Irene Handl, who is absolutely hilarious. Michael Moorcock, in the introduction to his novella Gold Diggers of 1977 (included in his collection Casablanca), his free adaptation of the Sex Pistols’ Great Rock and Roll Swindle film, observes that ‘I’d always seen Irene Handl as Mrs Cornelius’ (she played a cinema usherette in the movie). Mrs Gimble could certainly be the matriarch of the Cornelius pantheon caught in a mellow mood. Robed in fur coat and hat, her Chihuahua Gaylord clutched to her bosom like a living stole, and with densely populated racks and shelves of age-dusted clothes as a theatrical backdrop, she is the queen of her closed, shadowy and timeless realm. At first suspecting her of being a mod, out to stow animal paws up her skirt to stick on the back of a scooter, she soon recognises Brenda as a genuine hapless innocent. She picks out a velvet Victorian cape for her (‘fabless’) and a nightie of similar vintage to serve as a dress. Seeking to win Brenda over from her initial scepticism, she invites her to ‘look at the work on it – blinded theirselves’. Further to that, she gives an intimation of its elevated origins in a conspiratorial aside – ‘titled’, and perhaps even ‘better than that – yerss’. Brenda is sold.

Rita in wonderland

She may indeed have got a bargain. Fashion was moving on from the kind of openly artificial fabrics and materials from which the kind of mod and pop clothing Yvonne considers to be in were made. The most exclusive boutiques were now places such as Granny Takes A Trip and Hung On You (run by Michael Rainey, who married It girl Jane Ormsby-Gore) in the Kings Road and I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet in Portobello Road. The style they promulgated would eventually be opened up to the masses by Biba, which opened a new art nouveau styled shop in Kensington High Street in 1969, and which was already offering a mail order catalogue in 1968. Granny Takes a Trip was of sufficient renown to be used as the title for a song by The Purple Gang. This was an innocuous little ditty, accompanied by rinky-dink piano, kazoo and washboard, but it still managed to fall foul of the BBC, who promptly banned it. These shops raided the past for their fashions, and Mrs Gimble’s emporium was exactly the sort of place which they might go to get ideas, or indeed clothes. It’s in this way that Brenda meets Charlotte, the owner of the Too Much boutique. The appropriation of styles and accessories from the past would appear to betray pop’s dedication to the moment, evincing a recognition of a cultural heritage which had a part to play in its current configuration. George Melly addresses this seeming paradox, having asserted that for pop’s eternal yet ephemeral present to sustain itself ‘it is essential to conceal a past’. Although the pop culture of 1967 seems ‘to be permeated through and through with eclectic nostalgia…this is a subtle method of rejecting the past’. As English pop turned away from its American inspirations, it began to plunder its own cultural artefacts. Given that ‘it is impossible to think of England as having no past’, Melly writes, ‘this is dealt with by treating history as a vast boutique full of military uniforms, grannie shoes and spectacles, 30s suits and George Formby records. By wrenching these objects out of their historical context they are rendered harmless’.

Too Much, daahling - desecrating the bowler

The Too Much boutique which Brenda stumbles into overseeing for an afternoon is very much in the mould of a place such as Granny Takes A Trip. Dominic Sandbrook quotes Granny’s owner Nigel Waymouth recalling that ‘the shop definitely had an intimidating quality, a mystique. It was not a friendly shop’. It exuded a deliberately cultivated exclusivity designed to repel those outside the hip inner circle. It was full of a cluttered jumble of ‘Victorian bustles, Boer War helmets, Ottoman fezzes, Charleston dresses and Chicago gangster suits’, alongside photos of Edwardian chorus girls, antique swords, glass walking sticks, Victorian feather boas and an early gramaphone. A catch-all assemblage of dash and dandyism through the ages. Smashing Time’s Too Much echoes the exclusivity of Granny Takes A Trip, and whilst it is more neat and sparsely stocked, it harbours a similarly eclectic bricolage of cultural artefacts: red Imperial military jackets, Tiffany lamps, exotic stuffed birds mounted and housed beneath bell jars, nickelodeons, ceramic heads with drooping handlebar moustaches, two tone ‘gangster’ shoes, Edwardian nude photos, a gramaphone and a tram conductor’s peaked hat. This exquisitely arranged emporium, a perfect embodiment of a moment in time, was no doubt the work of the film’s art director, Ken Bridgeman, who was working at about the same time on the sets for The Prisoner. Too Much is a swinging sixties wonderland with swirling art nouveau patterns on the windows serving to veil the outside world from this magical interior. Primary coloured bowler hats are displayed with circular holes cut out of the crown, as if they’ve been munched by fastidiously geometric moths. It’s a desecration of a sartorial signifier of establishment status. Shop owners in Carnaby Street had made a similar gesture in 1965 by forming a ‘ban the bowler brigade’. The bowler stood for all they were rebelling against in their style revolt; it might just be a hat, but it represented conformity, an acceptance of and indeed an eagerness to be a part of the status quo.