Jonathan Romney on Velvet Goldmine, the film about a time when men were men – who borrowed their sisters’ mascara
They’re so swishy in their satin and tat … Somewhere in the crowd there may even be the odd frock coat or bippety-boppety hat that David Bowie referred to. Boys and girls stand around looking exquisitely bored, sucking in cheeks and practising pouts, adjusting feather-cut hairdos and feather boas, swaying perilously on stack heels. On stage, a band called the Flaming Creatures mime gamely to their backing track, guitars grinding over a cod-Germanic stomp. To paraphrase the ineffably arch sleeve-notes of Roxy Music’s first LP, “The mind loses its bearings. What’s the date again? 1972? or 27 years on?”
Nothing so exotic – it’s a murky spring day in 1997, in a working men’s club on a godforsaken Willesden railway depot. But glam rock always was a game of make-believe. If they don’t quite look convincing, these young things on the set of Velvet Goldmine, then that’s all part and parcel of the film’s thesis. Todd Haynes’s new film is a celebration of Seventies glam as a golden age of pretence and inauthenticity, when rock and roll was anything but “for real”, but appearances were only blusher-deep.
As officially recorded in pop history, glam is remembered as being as camply jolly, and as faintly embarrassing, as many other Seventies phenomena — rock’s equivalent to the Carry On series, perhaps. It was certainly pop’s richest era for intense imagery – Marc Bolan’s electrified frizz quivering through Twentieth Century Boy; Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust alter ego swaggering around with shrieking orange hair, kitted out in assorted variants of Kabuki drag; Roxy Music awash in feathers, leopard print and synthesiser wires.
But in a tentative and short-lived way, glam was a genuine stab at sexual revolution. Prompted by Bowie’s reinvention of himself – from fey English folkster to squawking pink money-bird from Mars – British youth turned from greatcoats and denim to embrace androgyny and Weimar-style decadence, the girls dressing like louche Thirties vamps, the boys timidly, and sometimes not so timidly, diving for big sister’s blusher, swathing themselves in boas, and even the straightest- acting jocks following Bowie’s lead in pronouncing that everyone was really bisexual. As the acute newsreel pastiches in Velvet Goldmine point out, much of it was pretend, good parent-shocking strategy.
In theory only, Velvet Goldmine is a thinly- disguised version of David Bowie’s rise to fame. In reality, it’s the story of an imaginary English pop star called Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who reinvents himself as an androgynous space-god, becomes hugely successful, and then enjoys a temptestuous amour fou with a manic United States garage rocker who bears more than superficial similarity to Iggy Pop (although Ewan McGregor looks closer to Kurt Cobain). Observers of the period will notice other figures’ resemblance to Bowie’s wife Angie or his Svengali manager Tony de Fries. But Todd Haynes is cautious about his film’s roman clef factor.
“I want the film to have a fictional freedom about it – I don’t want it to be locked into the weight of what really happened. It’s not a naturalistic experience, and shouldn’t be – it’s glam rock. A lot of the film is extremely hysterical and delirious and stylised.” In its staging of a torrid romance between the Bowie and Iggy figures, the film comes across as a glam version of “slash fiction”, that underground genre of fan fantasies written by erotically-inclined Trekkies, which imagine Spock and Captain Kirk sharing hot clinches. As to whether anything of the kind actually happened – “Not that I know of,” says Haynes circumspectly.
Anyone hoping for an unproblematic glimpse of The Way We Were may be confounded by the film, which begins in 1854 with a UFO delivering the infant Oscar Wilde to a Dublin doorstep. As well as being a pop musical, Velvet Goldmine is also the latest inquiry into gay identity by a director who, in the early Nineties, spearheaded what was briefly termed the New Queer Cinema. As pop bio- fantasy, Velvet Goldmine revisits Haynes’s first film Superstar (1987), an account of the life and anorexic demise of Karen Carpenter, acted out entirely by Barbie dolls.
Haynes’s Poison (1981) included a section inspired by Jean Genet, the French writer whose radical philosophy of self-invention fed into pop culture via Bowie’s espousal of him on the punning Jean Genie. Velvet Goldmine’s other presiding influence is Wilde, whose bons mots are liberally threaded through the film’s dialogue.
“I was reading Oscar Wilde and reading about glam rock at the same time,” says Haynes, “and became aware of the evolution of a set of very similar ideas, coming very self- consciously from the pose inward – starting from the hair and the clothes and working in. It was the way Wilde constructed his career, and Bowie did the same. It was such a self- fictionalisation – Bowie was not only constructing this persona, but also his own stardom at the same time, literally performing it, in a way that the world at that particular moment was susceptible to. “
Haynes has pretty much followed Bowie’s lead in his own metamorphosis – from the clean-cut college boy who presented Poison at the start of the decade, he’s transformed himself into the peacock auteur of the US indie-film jungle. He started wearing his version of glam gear, he says -clumpy platforms, house-wide lapels – as a Method writing exercise for Velvet Goldmine. “You just experience wearing tight clothes and teetering footwear and walking round the streets and feeling the wind rustle up your back. It did give me some insight.”
Glam was a critical period for US/UK pop- cultural exchange. British performers were as much in love with Americana as ever, but also pushed European influences to the fore – Genet and Jacques Brel for Bowie, the British art school tradition for Roxy Music. Bowie helped introduce Britain to Iggy and Lou Reed, while in America, Britishness itself acquired a fetishistic connotation unequalled since the Beatles-generation invasion. There were a few authentic US glam acts – notably, the New York Dolls, with their thrift-store slut-thug look, and the now-forgotten Jobriath, a hugely-hyped and openly gay Bowie emulator, whose claims to fame included dressing as an artichoke.
“For the most part,” says Haynes, “it went right over American heads. Roxy completely failed in America, and Bowie and T Rex only clicked in a couple of cities. That’s why the film had to be set in Britain.”
Velvet Goldmine is also a lament for glam’s overnight burn-out and its figureheads’ withdrawal from the radical implications of what they spawned. “They swung so far away from it in the 10 years that followed,” says Haynes, regretfully. “A lot of it was the Eighties alarm and the political climate that changed. It wasn’t just Bowie doing Let’s Dance, it was Lou Reed moving back to the suburbs and getting married.”
What has endured from the period is some extraordinary music, and not just the Top 10 stuff. Haynes has unearthed much that has been almost forgotten from the time – the musical and lyrical extravagance of Brian Eno’s first solo album. Here Come the Warm Jets, even the post-Dylan swank of the much- maligned Steve Harley. All Velvet Goldmine has of Bowie’s catalogue, however, is its title, from a B-side. “I love the name,” says Haynes, “it’s tactile and colourful and evocative, and it has the mystery and seductiveness I want the film to have.”
Bowie refused use of his songs, keeping them aside for the Ziggy revival project (film, album and possibly stage show) he is currently planning. Instead the film features some adept period pastiche, written and played by the likes of Grant Lee Buffalo, Stooges veteran Ron Asheton, Bernard Butler and assorted Radiohead and Sonic Youth alumni. But Haynes’s own musical favourite from that time is early Roxy Music. “Their songs are so full of mourning for something lost. Roxy were into thirties Hollywood, music hall vaudeville and space futurism – the present was the least interesting.”
On set, the somewhat piecemeal look of the crowd bears testimony to a time before style magazines gave teenagers a ready-made clothes code for counter-culture orthodoxy. In 1972, you had to invent your own look based on whatever you could find at Oxfam.
Between takes, the Flaming Creatures – including Nineties neo-glam acolytes Anthony Langdon of Spacehog and Placebo singer Brian Molko – marvel at their wardrobe. Molko, flawlessly androgynous in floppy funeral weeds, is clearly revelling in his look. “It does, by the nature of putting them on, make you feel very tarty.”
At a time when mainstream rock is as dowdy as it’s ever been, he’s in his element as part of Velvet Goldmine’s crash course for the ravers – a memory of, as Molko puts it, “the last musical time when hedonism was a necessity as well as a virtue”.