By Robin Carmody, who saw the film last month at the BFI:
The obvious thing the dynamics raised by this film – the Old Left meeting the rapidly shifting tectonic plates of the mid-1980s – called to mind was the TPL piece on Make It Big, one of those which left such a big emotional mark on me that I never even wanted to revisit it, which sought to reclaim the album as an attack on the very values and ideas that a globally-successful pop group would have been expected to incarnate and stand for at that point (and in particular that the track “Credit Card Baby” is in fact a subversion of what would have been implied by its title in the context of the miners’ last stand and the forces stacked against them, being an attack on the whole idea of unbridled greed and instant gratification). It also called to mind the sadness and melancholy of the things George Michael discussed in his June 1986 NME interview (all the more so when you consider that his interviewer on that occasion, Mat Snow, would be going to the soon-to-launch Q, without whose existence you cannot imagine the Rock Right becoming the power in the land that it is today; shame on all those who chose, out of desire to maintain their delusionary self-image, that the man who with luck will not be Foreign Secretary for much longer would have been reading The Gramophone instead in the late 1980s).
It is also relevant both to what I am listening to now and to the music of 20 years before which enjoyed renewed fashionability in my teens, when George Michael was lucky to enjoy the comeback he did given the (delusional) unfashionability at that point of the era in which he first came to fame; just as the acceptance of the Beatles as a genuine working-class cultural expression was the litmus test for Hoggartists back when they were still a dominant force, and just as their utter failure to accept Central Cee, finally on the American charts this week after huge success around Europe and in both the “old” and the Black-majority Commonwealth even if he had to work with Lil Baby to do it, as a genuine working-class cultural expression has exposed the Maconies and John Harrises as the equivalents of those people, then so did the acceptance of George Michael as a genuine socialist challenge to the limits the conception of socialism adhered to by Hoggartists who were obviously on the rack by that point, about to be utterly drowned out from both ends.
And it is also, of course, massively relevant to what he had to hide and conceal (especially considering that Queen, who had led the way into live performances in many non-Anglosphere territories, led the way into Communist Europe on their last tour in 1986 and undoubtedly would have led the way further into those places had they been able to do a 1989 tour, were also considered to perform in China at this point but Freddie Mercury was considered too blatantly provocative for such sensibilities); he must have been wholly aware that the whole Old Left concept of “community” which part of him longed for could never have included someone of his sexuality who was open about it, and as I said on Facebook when he died, the pain of that ambiguity, that sense of being caught between two worlds, must have hurt him to the core and may even have been a factor shortening his life. But at the same time, of course, miners who had previously held deeply conservative views on race and sexuality were having their lives changed by British South Asian and gay & lesbian support, and considering that Wham! played miners’ benefits (probably the only other act who was confused to the same extent with the new, much more pop-culture-orientated Right to take such a stance openly was AduSade, who donated money to striking miners’ families) the latter must have pleased George Michael privately, made him feel that the circle could be squared after all.
Where China fits into all this is a whole other question. Clearly, it was not defensible in the way that the democratic socialist British inheritance that George Michael loved in a sort of unrequited way, knowing that pop had pushed him somewhere else that could never truly fit with it, was. Obviously, as with the Soviet Union and its satellite states, defence of China (unacceptable for those who came through post-68 because of their collective suppression of pop and rock music) was one of the central factors distinguishing those who would never have accepted George Michael as socialist from those who came later. Certainly, Lindsay Anderson’s presumption of superiority to George Michael, his hierarchical, top-down, pre-68 assumption that the latter excelled only in a “very narrow field”, would have been enraging to the latter, and it is easy to understand why George Michael’s opposition to it would have been mistaken as Thatcherite, rather than born out of a desire to broaden and redefine “Left” before it was so broken and defeated that it could only achieve success on the other side’s terms. It is, alas, all too easy to understand more generally why the partnership broke down. The divisions between the two worlds, the two senses of “Left”, were too great, and it was that divide which opened the way to Thatcherism’s triumph.
I must admit at this point that I am not very good at describing the essence of film, or a film, on its own rather than in the broader social context that surrounds it, so what follows must necessarily be mere impressions. One moment that struck me was when there was, inevitably today, considerable laughter from the audience at the archaically plummy accent of the then British Ambassador to China, and just as I had wondered whether the audience in the neighbouring Purcell Room who, shortly before her death, tribalistically booed as one Thatcher’s appearance in the Unthanks’ Songs from the Shipyards film over a decade earlier would have been as welcoming towards UK rap as their self-image made out, I wondered at that point whether the new-style, Rock Right ambassadors actually are any better, simply because they have embalmed and given new levels of privilege to what most of the audience had grown up with.
Anderson’s return to documentary inevitably brings on thoughts of Britain in the immediate post-war years, and there are definitely signs in this film that he saw parallels between China as it began to open up to the world and the Britain of about 30 years before; caught, like Wham! themselves, between two worlds, trying to balance out the tensions between the security of the past and nervous excitement about the future (for the Cultural Revolution, while setting out to destroy the country’s earlier feudal mythology, actually kept out what would have decisively emerged by the end of the 1980s as the real revolutionary changes in the world, so – as writers as unlike each other as Eric Hobsbawm and Michael “Peter Simple” Wharton recognised of Communism in Europe, as Hitchens Minor has also conceded of those regimes and as some Trumpists also celebrate in their own perverted way – as a shield, a captive armour, it can in some ways be compared to the British Empire, the throwing off of whose protective garb Anderson had chronicled over a decade from the crowds in an area of Thanet prolier than that preferred by my parents, to club singers doing “Walking Back to Happiness”).
It should also be noted – and even the fonts gave this away, as they so often do in any place or time – that this film was made shortly before British Transport Films’ recently commercially-released double sign-off, the last gasp of the post-war documentary Channel Tunnel: Tomorrow’s Way, trying to bridge the gap into a new world that never did really exist in the sense it hopefully sets out, and then the final piercing VT entry to a new world they’d never see, King of the Road, in which multiple pop songs (the one its very title comes from having been sung a decade earlier by a lost aristocrat, now finding the tide swimming his way again) give way to each other throughout and, suddenly, mobile phones exist. Something of that ambiguity is caught in Anderson’s observations of China as well, especially given that both represent an echo of the post-war world attempting to meet pop halfway, get to grips with what was tearing their world apart.
The downside of Anderson’s inability to apologise or explain is, of course, shown in the way he spoke of, and to, George Michael – a man every bit as determined not to be messed around with as the Beatles a generation before, for all that that comparison point might have offended many of the latter band’s admirers at the time, unaware of how their offshore radio stations had pioneered and fed into the politics they were wrongly associating Wham! with – but the upside is shown in his confidence as a director, and as so often you wonder, just as you wonder what a final Michael Powell film made at this point might have been like, what he might have done had he been given more freedom more often in his last years, how he might have commented on the end of the division of Europe if let loose in the places transformed by it.
And yes, the juxtaposition of “Everything She Wants” – and how Charles Moore’s use of that title for his second volume of Thatcher biography, as obscenely provocative as the third volume’s allusion to the English translation of Sinn Fein’s name, reveals a lack of understanding of what George Michael meant by it, a song he always recognised and which was more broadly recognised as an outstanding piece of work even at the height of Britpop’s “80s stigma”; he reclaimed it, analogous perhaps to the acoustic versions of “Born in the USA” and “Let’s Dance” performed live by Springsteen & Bowie in the same era, in his 1996 BBC live performance, and the remix from the Christmas 1997 best-of was played like a single – with the imagery of China’s first tastes of Western capitalism, so similar in some ways to the novelty of supermarkets here when he had made This Sporting Life – is central and key; for all that the music was beyond his full understanding, he was able to stretch himself here and make it seem as though it were, depicting the economic tides of the 1980s from a position all the stronger for its uncertainty, its awareness that both ways had good and bad aspects – that neither was perfect, that there is no idyll. And the sax ambling (let’s not say “noodling”: this isn’t ELP or Rick Wakeman) over scenes of “morning in the streets”, suddenly to become recognisable as “Careless Whisper” to a moment of clearly emotional audience recognition, is, like those remnants-of-BTF dying works which soon followed, an attempt to bring into another era the use of wartime popular songs in the works of Humphrey Jennings which had so captivated Anderson as a young man, convinced him so strongly – even if, over time, like so many other post-war socialists he had curdled, turned crabby – that a war won with the old world simply recreated would be no victory at all.
Alas, the sadness of it all is that the circle couldn’t be squared, and George Michael – like Lindsay Anderson himself – never made as much to be remembered by as he should have done, and died considerably younger, ruined by the world he was partially repulsed by but could not keep away from because he knew the old world, in a different way, was just as bad. China, unlike Russia, never even really attempted democracy and now drifts back into the sort of quasi-monarchical autocracy which has just, at least, been partially pegged back in the neighbouring country which has recently overtaken it as the world’s most populous. When pop became the established culture in Britain, a quarter of a century later, it helped an Etonian into power and destroyed the sort of self-made man George Michael, you’d hope, did admire, as distinct from the sort of self-made man that outward resemblances had him confused with. But at least this film, in its true form, remains as an attempt to square many circles, even if, in the end, maybe nobody could have brought out the best in all of them and created the ideal conclusion.
Was the point that there was no point? Does “Nothing Looks the Same in the Light” – the real candidate for Wham!’s “real heads know the deal” masterpiece, and not heard in this film – perfectly sum up how it seems and feels at this distance? Maybe. I think of The Stone Carriers, reaching out and not quite touching “Young Guns (Go for It!”). And I think of my own adolescence, once again … Dance into the Light, Mercury Falling, Slang, Wild Mood Swings utterly flopping, utterly irrelevant, but Older catching a mood, catching a feeling just right. And then the feeling that he had said too much, or hadn’t said enough. But whatever pop, or Westernisation, promised and failed to achieve, this film – full of ambiguity, just like the end of If … – at least stands up on its own, and should be available for broader and more open viewing as soon as possible.
Shiraz Socialist (Second Run) 