London Calling (50 page)

With a cast of characters who were, for the most part, playing themselves – Jagger really was a rock star, the gangsters,
except James Fox, were real, there were real drug addicts and a real seductress – filming began on 22 July 1968. In order
to give greater authenticity to the drug scenes Jagger and Fox smoked DMT in their dressing room, which only made their relationship
more tempestuous. Cammell loved it. The more Jagger got into the role of Turner, the more arrogant, mocking and contemptuous
he became of James Fox. Describing the role of Turner, Jagger said later: ‘He’s completely immersed in himself, he’s a horrible
person really.’
²⁶
Donald Cammell told Carey Schofield: ‘Mick was constantly trying to do James Fox in, because that’s the only way Mick can
operate.’ The relationship between Jagger and Fox grew very tense; Jagger was continually rude and dismissive of the actor
so that if Fox wanted to do a scene again he would have to plead with Jagger, usually ineffectually. Jagger would simply sneer
‘Fuck off, Jimmy’ and slam his dressing room door in Fox’s face. Jagger:

It isn’t me really. You just get into the part – that’s acting isn’t it? You just get into the feeling of that person and
I got into feeling like that… After a while you really get into thinking like that and driving everyone crazy. I drove everyone
a bit crazy, I think, during that time. It was all taken for granted that I would do anything!
²⁷

By shooting the film in the correct sequence of scenes, Cammell was able to change the script as he went along. In fact, halfway
through the film he was still not sure how it would end. He rewrote the script every night, based on what had happened in
front of the cameras that day and what he thought they might do next. This made life very difficult for both actors. Fox,
as a trained actor, stuck word for word to the script, finding ways to make it his own. It was incredibly hard for Fox to
work like this; he was going through a tremendous change of identity. He was also under pressure from his agent, his father
Robin Fox, who didn’t think it was right that he should be dressing up in wigs and makeup. James did not want to argue with
his father about it because his father was ill with cancer at the time and in fact died shortly after the film was made.

Jagger had no preconceived ideas about acting or how a film set should be and treated it a bit like a rock performance, preening
himself, sometimes improvising wonderful lines. Jagger:

You had to know what you were doing before you got on camera, it wasn’t just a question of improvising for hours and hours.
We had to work it all out before otherwise you just got in a mess. We’d suddenly stop shooting one day because I’d say I wasn’t
going to say those lines. There were all kinds of situations like that and the regular technicians would go ‘Blimey! I’ve
never seen anything like it!’ and all that. Donald’s whole thing is casting people for what they are and how they fit into
the part, to make them work out and create the part, to work on things that were already in their own minds.
²⁸

There were several sex scenes involving Jagger, Pallenberg and Breton. Stills from the bathtub threesome are the most reproduced
but Jagger didn’t think the scene was particularly convincing:

I don’t think there’s many people like that individual. I found his intellectual posturing very ridiculous – that’s what sort
of fucked him up. Too much intellectual posturing in the bath when you’re with two women is not a good thing; that’s not to
be taken too seriously! It made me skin go all funny.

The most authentic was the bed scene, filmed as soon as Anita arrived on set, which begins with Anita sticking her tongue
up Mick’s nose and continuing with him, Anita and Michèle Breton having a threesome. There has been much teasing debate about
whether it was the real thing or not, but as it took seven days to shoot, it is obviously mostly simulated even if Jagger
and Anita did sometimes get carried away. Much of it was filmed under the sheets, with the light filtered through a blanket,
giving a warm sensual light. As the Stones’ pianist and roadie Ian Stewart saw it, it was real enough. He told Victor Bockris:
‘When the big sex scene of the movie was filmed, instead of simulating sex, they really got into each other… There was a lot
of very explicit footage of Mick and Anita really screwing, steamy, lusty stuff.’
²⁹

Though
Performance
itself won no awards, ten minutes of out-takes from the scene called
Performance Trims
, mostly close-ups of Jagger’s cock and various parts of Anita’s anatomy, won the Hung Jury Award at the 1970 Wet Dreams Festival
in Amsterdam. This was not stolen footage; it was given to them by Sandy Lieberson.
Performance Trims
went on to win the Golden Phallus Award at a Frankfurt porn festival. When Keith got hold of a copy he was very angry and
for a while things were strained between him and Mick, and of course things were pretty rough with Anita.
³⁰

A female lab technician was so shocked by the graphic sex in the footage that she complained to her boss. He telephoned Nic
Roeg in the middle of the night, saying that it was illegal and he would have to destroy it. Roeg managed to hold him off
until he could get there. The lab’s director was convinced that the material was pornographic and that he could go to jail
for printing it. Roeg tried unsuccessfully to talk him out of destroying the print, but he was adamant and Roeg had to watch
as he cut it up.
³¹
Fortunately Roeg was able to rescue the negative and have the film printed at a less puritan lab.

Anita Pallenberg and Keith Richards were living in Robert Fraser’s flat on Mount Street, for which they were paying him a
huge amount of money. Fraser, recently released from Wormwood Scrubs after his heroin conviction, was supposed to be looking
for a new flat. But Robert didn’t move out. He was enjoying the scene surrounding the film so much. Keith had tried his best
to prevent Anita from being in it, offering to pay her whatever her fee would be, but she insisted. Keith was so jealous of
Jagger, and what he knew must be going on, that he refused to visit the set. Keith knew that if he went to the set there would
be a head-on confrontation with Mick, which would have destroyed the Stones and everything he cared about. Instead he parked
his blue Bentley, known as the Blue Lena, outside in Lowndes Square each day, and fumed. Robert Fraser acted as his spy, running
in and out with messages to Anita, plotting and spreading stories, but eventually Cammell banned Robert from the set because
his scheming was becoming too disruptive.

The flat was filled with tension and, encouraged by Fraser, who had begun to use heroin once again, Keith began to use it
regularly for the first time. Fraser: ‘Basically smack’s a pain killer. It de-inhibits you, desensitizes you and your paranoia.
Keith and I are probably pretty paranoid people.’
³²
Many people think that Keith began using smack to control his jealousy and insecurity caused by Anita and Mick’s affair.
Keith was supposed to be writing a song for the film with Mick but now he refused to finish it. Consumed by jealousy, he submerged
himself in his work, writing much of the Stones’ next album, the brilliant
Beggar
’
s Banquet
.

With the film’s main song, ‘Memo from Turner’, held up, Cammell and Roeg took Mick to a pub in Berwick Street and insisted
that he sort things out and somehow mend his relationship with Keith. Mick’s reaction was to break down in tears at the bar.
‘I’m sorry,’ he told them. ‘I blew it.’ Some of Mick’s friends thought that he was secretly in love with Keith and the tensions
that had arisen between him and his writing partner were more than just jealousy on Keith’s part over Anita’s fling with Mick.
According to Marianne Faithfull, Anita didn’t help because she knew that the two men were more important to
each other than she could ever be so she concentrated on stirring up trouble between them. Anita, for her part, has always
denied that anything ever happened between her and Mick.

Mick called in Jim Capaldi and Steve Winwood from Traffic and after a few days of sessions at Olympic Studios they had completed
the track and delivered it to Jack Nitzsche, the musical director. Though the Beatles’ films to accompany ‘Strawberry Fields’,
‘Penny Lane’ (January 1967), directed by Peter Goldmann, and the earlier ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Rain’ (May 1966), directed
by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, are obviously earlier, the film sequence that goes with ‘Memo from Turner’ must be regarded as ground-breaking,
leading the way to music videos in its brilliant integration of music and imagery.

Warner Bros held a private screening for studio executives and their families just before Thanksgiving for what they still
thought was a Rolling Stones equivalent of a Beatles romp. Shortly after the film began, several uptight mothers ushered their
complaining teenage sons and daughters from the cinema, and one of the women was so upset at the sex scene that she threw
up on a vice-president’s shoulder. One of the things that really concerned them was whether Michèle Breton was a boy or a
girl as she was so flat-chested. Warner Bros hated it; they hated the lack of conventional morals and the casual sex, the
drugs, the violence and the tone of the picture and refused absolutely to release it unless it was recut in a very different
way. Jagger and Cammell telegrammed Warners:

Re: Performance: this film is about the perverted love affair between Homo Sapiens and Lady Violence. In common with its subject,
it is necessarily horrifying, paradoxical and absurd. To make such a film means accepting that the subject is loaded with
every taboo in the book. You seem to want to emasculate (1) the most savage and (2) the most affectionate scenes in our movie.
If Performance does not upset audiences then it is nothing. If this fact upsets you, the alternative is to sell it fast and
no more bullshit. Your misguided censorship will ultimately diminish said audiences both in quality and quantity.
³³

Most of all, Warners wanted to make money. They wanted more of Jagger and they wanted him to appear in the picture early on
instead of halfway through. Donald Cammell found an unused scene of Jagger spray-painting a wall and stuck that in at the
beginning to try to pacify them. Cammell also took trim footage, some of it featuring Jagger, and edited it randomly, using
the Burroughs cut-up technique, and spliced it in at the beginning. William Burroughs is continually referenced and casts
his presence over this film:
Jagger uses the title of his novel
The Soft Machine
in his song ‘Memo from Turner’; when Mick and Anita find how badly injured James Fox is, Anita suggests they call ‘Dr Burroughs
to give him a shot’; Hasan-I-Sabbah’s maxim, ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted’, is used in numerous Burroughs texts,
beginning with
Minutes to Go
(1960), and is quoted in the film along with the story of the Old Man of the Mountain himself.

The other major literary reference is Jorge Luis Borges, whose book
A Personal Anthology,
published in March 1968 and already a cult classic in ‘hip’ circles, is read from aloud by Jagger. Other contemporary markers
include Martin Sharp’s poster of an altered collage by Max Ernst and Bill Butler’s Dylan silhouette poster. The film is filled
with references and in-jokes, for instance Jagger’s ‘Memo from Turner’ emerges from a tape deck supplied by the Muzak Corporation
of America, the makers of elevator music.

Warner Bros finally released it in the U K on 1 January 1971, two years late, with the X rating normally reserved for soft
porn and horror and a category that many newspapers refused to even review.
Performance
was made at great personal cost: Marianne Faithfull suffered a miscarriage and shortly after attempted suicide in Sydney;
Keith Richards got addicted to heroin and remained on it for a decade with adverse effects on the Rolling Stones’ music; Anita
Pallenberg became a heroin addict; James Fox had a nervous breakdown, retired from films, and joined an obscure born-again
Christian sect called ‘The Navigators’; after the film was finished Cammell drove Michèle Breton to Paris and abandoned her
after three days with a drug habit and no money. She now lives in Berlin. Cammell did not make another film for three years
and eventually killed himself in Hollywood.

It’s important to analyse horror imagery; to confront and come to terms with the darkest recesses of ‘human nature,’ if there
is such a thing.

J. G. BALLARD

London in the sixties saw a breakthrough in literature, with authors challenging almost every aspect of what a piece of writing
was. Foremost among them was J. G. Ballard, who believed that an entirely new writing was required to deal with the modern
industrial world. He wrote in his 1974 introduction to the French edition of
Crash
:

Primarily, I wanted to write a fiction about the present day. To do this in the context of the late 1950s, in a world where
the call sign of Sputnik 1 could be heard on one’s radio like the advance beacon of a new universe, required completely different
techniques from those available to the 19th century novelists… Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing
extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
¹

Ballard’s principal vehicle was
New Worlds
magazine, which became one of the most important sources of new writing. Published in London,
New Worlds
began as a science fiction magazine in July 1946 under the editorship of E. J. Carnell. The board meetings took place every
Thursday evening in the White Horse Tavern in Fetter Lane, off Fleet Street. Carnell bought the title in 1948 and he and five
associates set up Nova Publications to publish it. Carnell and his five other directors continued to hold editorial meetings
in the private bar of the White Horse, while the fans and other interested parties met in the crowded saloon bar, hoping to
waylay one of the directors after they had concluded business.
²
Michael Moorcock became editor in May 1964 at issue 142 and in October 1968, after a protracted period of financial
problems, Moorcock took over the magazine and published it himself. Ballard became the fiction editor.