Shaun de Waal Movie of the week
In the beginning, rock’n’roll was young people’s music. No one thought it would last long enough to get old; probably, they never thought they would get old. Mick Jagger, for instance, when he was about 22, said contemptuously that he couldn’t see himself doing “this” (wiggling around on stage singing) when he was 35. The idea that he might still be doing “this” when he was 55 was probably entirely beyond conception. Of course, he’s since changed his tune, and there he is, still doing it; and there they are, the audiences, still lapping it up.
So this decade’s series of reunions of bands who broke up in the Sixties, Seventies or Eighties is not surprising. Even The Velvet Underground, dissolved in acrimony in the late Sixties, gave it a try before dissolving in acrimony once more. The Sex Pistols, for heaven’s sake, got back together after 25 years for the bluntly named Filthy Lucre Tour.
This is the arena, so to speak, of British comedy Still Crazy, directed by Brian Gibson from a script by sitcom writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. Strange Fruit, we are told, in the voice-over of roadie Hughie (a very funny Billy Connolly), and in wobbly flashbacks, were a Seventies band who suffered a certain amount of dementia and death before being, literally, blasted into oblivion. The theory is that God didn’t like Seventies music, in this case an apparent glam/prog blend that sounds very credibly dated.
But now it’s the Nineties, and former keyboardist Tony (Stephen Rea), reduced to servicing condom machines in Ibiza, and onetime groupie Karen (Juliet Aubrey), have an offer to get the band back together. The other members have to be convinced: sour bassist Les (Jimmy Nail), uncouth drummer Beano (Timothy Spall), and, most of all, haughty, insecure lead singer Ray, brilliantly portrayed by Bill Nighy as a kind of decayed Jimmy Page with hints of many another rock star; he is entirely convincing, down to the last gesture.
Once the Herculean task of reforming the band is accomplished, and a new young guitarist has been found to replace the missing-in-action Brian, there’s the matter of going on tour to small (and I mean small) venues in Europe. Can they get the band’s mojo working once more? Can they overcome personal rivalries and bitter baggage? Can they agree on what key their biggest hit is in?
Still Crazy positions itself somewhere between Rob Reiner’s classic, hilarious faux-rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap and the feel-good factor of The Full Monty. It lacks a driving central performance of the calibre of Robert Carlyle’s in The Full Monty, but it progresses enjoyably enough, and one finds oneself cheering along with the festival-goers thrilled to see Strange Fruit on stage once more.