'Stranded at the Drive-In / Branded a Fool /
What Will They Say / Monday at School?’
So sobbed poor Danny
Zuko, the horny high school himbo played by a be-quiffed and seriously over-age
John Travolta in Grease, the smash-hit 1978 big-screen adaptation of Jim Jacobs
and Warren Casey’s stage musical. Danny’s wailings came after Olivia Newton
John’s goody-two-shoes Sandy walks out on him after wriggling free from his
uninvited advances in the open-topped jalopy at the drive-in where they go on
their date. “Sandy!”, Danny calls
after she frees herself from his clutches in what she damningly calls his ‘sin
wagon’ before storming off into the night. “You
just can’t walk out of a drive-in …”
These are words that
those behind plans for the forthcoming Sound & Vision Drive-In event might
wish to pay some heed. A collaboration between Glasgow Film Festival and the
Electric Frog electronic music festival, this large-scale in-car experience
looks set to take place at the Riverside Museum in Glasgow this coming July. While
the event’s full programme of music-based and classic films, live performances
and DJs has yet to be announced, whatever phase of lockdown we’re in by then,
as both its name and Danny Zuko suggest, walking out probably won’t be an
option in the way we’re used to.
Sound & Vision
Drive-In is nevertheless one of the first stirrings of pandemic-contained cultural
life that doesn’t involve a laptop camera and social media livestreams. Arriving
in the wake of successful drive-in events in Germany, it looks set to be part
of a trend. In London, plans are underway for The Drive-In Club, which will
host a series of contact-free, big-screen multi-genre events featuring a host
of comedy stars in venues working under strict social distancing guidelines. As
well as comedy shows, film nights, live music, DJs and live podcasts are
planned.
Elsewhere in London, an already
successful immersive staging of The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald’s era-defining
novel about party-going monied types, plans to reopen in October. This will be with
a reduced capacity and inherent features which the show’s producers said in
londontheatre.co.uk ‘make it safer than a trip to the supermarket’.
Despite the necessary
restrictions, The Great Gatsby is attempting the sort of social interaction
people are currently craving in an imaginative and genuinely creative way. As
with Sound & Vision Drive-In and The Drive-In Club, however, whether it
will be enough to satisfy audiences beyond novelty value remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, relaxation of
social restrictions in England has seen horse racing meetings take place, golf
courses are available to play a round in once again, while zoos and safari
parks look set to open next week. Drive-in only branches of McDonald’s, Nando’s,
KFC and other fast food emporiums are already open for business. Pub chain
Wetherspoon also aim to be flogging cheap pints before summer’s out. Closer to
home, tourism chiefs and tartan tat chain owners are quoted endlessly about
getting the city open. Circuses, bread and burgers are all that’s on offer, it
seems. Being stranded at the drive-in for real has never sounded so appealing.
A year before Grease, John
Travolta made his name in Saturday Night Fever as Tony Manero, a working-class Italian-American
Brooklynite who lives for the weekend. Through Tony, the John Badham directed film
– produced, like Grease, by theatre impresario and rock band manager Robert
Stigwood - highlighted the transformative pulling power of sweaty neon-lit
dives, where busting some co-ordinated moves can liberate you enough to
potentially change your life.
Saturday Night Fever was
inspired by Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night, a 1976 article by pop
culture writer Nik Cohen, whose seemingly inside take on America’s blue-collar disco
sub-culture appeared in New York magazine. Cohn later ‘fessed up to his piece
being a work of fiction, with the Manero figure based on an old London mod mate
he knew in the ‘60s.
The film nevertheless
became iconic, defined both by its Bee Gees led soundtrack and its much-satirised
poster image of a wide-collared and white-suited Travolta. Arm raised aloft, finger
pointing heavenwards and hip thrust lasciviously to one side, Travolta looked cheesily
and unreconstructedly heroic. Here was the promise of having a real good time
together writ large.
Saturday Night Fever had
a whole lot more going on than this image suggests, however. The film’s at
times bleak study of dead-end kids at work, rest and play evokes a spirit of working-class
aspiration and the sort of life-and-death club-land community that can only
ever happen in the flesh rather than bumper to bumper.
Although drive-in movie
shows never really took off in the UK, they’ve been around in America since
1915. Their appeal reached a peak between the late 1950s and the 1960s, enabled
by increased car ownership and suburban living. Families could take their kids
and not have to shell out for a baby-sitter, while for the new generation of teenagers,
what were labelled by some as ‘passion pits’ were ideal for cheap dates and
heavy petting. Despite this, the depiction of drive-ins in films like Grease has
made them a somewhat revisionist symbol of a seemingly more innocent America.
As home entertainment
improved, the appeal of drive-ins declined. Over the last few years, however, a
revival of sorts has tapped into nostalgia-based retro-chic hipsterdom. In the
current climate, the rise of Sound & Vision Drive-In and The Drive-In Club
may yet become part of the much vaunted new normal.
Given Sound & Vision
Drive-In’s David Bowie inspired name, as well as checking out the wit and
wisdom of Danny Zuko, Glasgow Film Festival and Electric Frog might also want
to have a listen to Drive-In Saturday, Bowie’s doo-wop based 1973 single taken
from his Aladdin Sane album. Set in a post-apocalyptic age, Drive-In Saturday tells
the story of how, following what Bowie called a “catastrophe of some kind”,
people have forgotten how to make love, as Bowie somewhat gingerly puts it, and
must resort to watching old porn films to see how it’s done.
That such a sexually
charged piece of dystopian speculative-fiction
set to an art-glam beat could reach number 3 in the 1973 UK singles chart was
itself a major piece of pop subversion. 47 years on, listening to the song during
lockdown, and with socially distanced in-car entertainment seemingly the only fun
in town, what was originally an ennui-laden if oddly anthemic scarf-waver has
become fused with a new resonance. Where it was once nostalgia for an age yet
to come, Drive-In Saturday now sounds like prophecy of what happens when people
are forced to self-isolate for so long that they forget how to get physical.
As online theatre and
music shows run on apace, Netflix and Amazon Prime are likely to be earning
more than all of them combined with work that was made specifically for the
small screen. Meanwhile, an estimated 70 per cent of theatres and music venues are
at risk of closing for good. Both the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh and
Pitlochry Festival Theatre have announced redundancies are likely at their
respective institutions. A petition launched by Lyceum staff members opposing
job losses has to date attracted more than 5,000 signatories, and is supported by
actors Brian Cox and Alan Cumming, who both appeared on the Lyceum stage prior
to making it big in Hollywood.
Another graduate of the
Lyceum is David Tennant, who appeared there in 2005 in a production of John
Osborne’s play, Look Back in Anger. Tennant is currently appearing alongside
Michael Sheen in Staged, a new BBC series that makes for one of the most
inventive uses of lockdown thus far. In Staged, Tennant, Sheen and their
respective acting spouses, Georgia Moffett and Anna Lundberg, play a group of
furloughed thesps attempting to rehearse a play on Zoom. The play they’re
rehearsing is Pirandello’s absurdist classic, Six Characters in Search of an
Author, in which a group of fictional characters attempt to find themselves.
This knowingly adds to the grand meta-ness of what is one of the first real
attempts to use lockdown as a dramatic form of itself.
In an interview with
Radio Times, Tennant called for government intervention to help save theatres
across the UK. As with Sound & Vision Drive-In, Staged is an attempt,
however temporary, to salvage something from the wreckage, and, by taking
something bad, turn it into something good. Edinburgh International Book
Festival’s just announced plans to host a programme of more than 100 free
online events should be able to adapt the live chat show style format of much
of what normally happens in a way that other artforms have made play with in
their own image.
See the joys of Sophie
Ellis-Bextor’s Kitchen Disco, in which for 20 minutes every Friday tea-time,
post-modern pop star Ellis-Bextor sang her greatest hits to a lap-top backing
track while her five kids ran riot. See too this week’s performance by The
Flaming Lips on America’s late-night talk-fest, The Late Show. Playing their already euphoric 1999 hit, Race
for the Prize, the band translated their extravagant stage show for the
socially distanced age by having both performers and audience contained within
individual plastic bubbles that gave the air of a gigantic play-pen.
One possible solution to
try and ensure the live arts has some kind of future has come from director Sam
Mendes, whose career began in theatre before moving into film. Mendes has called
on Netflix and Amazon Prime to support the performing arts with the extra
revenue they’ve generated during lockdown. In an article in the Financial
Times, Mendes pointed out how live theatre fed into film and TV. It would be
deeply ironic,” he said, “if the streaming services – Netflix, Amazon Prime et
al – should be making lockdown millions from our finest acting, producing,
writing and directing talent, while the very arts culture that nurtured that
talent pool is allowed to die.”
Meanwhile, Lyceum
artistic director David Greig’s play, Adventures with the Painted People, was
commissioned by PFT, and was scheduled to open in Pitlochry in July as part of
the Perthshire theatre’s Shades of Tay season. As it is, while Greig’s play
won’t see light of day on stage until 2021, it premiered as part of BBC Radio
3’s Culture in Quarantine strand. It worked as well as any radio play, and
sound-based work has been one of the most creative platforms throughout
lockdown, but it’s a different experience to seeing it live.
As Greig said in an interview
in the Guardian speaking alongside PFT artistic director Elizabeth Newman prior
to the broadcast, “The nature of theatre is being in a room, breathing and
sweating. Laughter generates laughter. Someone else crying gives you permission
to cry.”
The Lyceum and PFT aren’t
the only venues are at risk, and we’re not just talking high end stuff here.
The sort of dives where Tony Manero and co strutted their stuff are likely to
be the first casualties of a socially distanced future, and in the UK at least,
are unlikely to be included in any kind of culture-mapped rescue exercise. Like
the scenes played out in Drive-In Saturday, looking good on the dancefloor may
well become a second-hand memory from long ago.
Keep Music Live is the
name of a campaign launched in the 1960s by the Musicians Union. Back then, Keep
Music Live was in opposition to what the union saw as a threat from recorded
music, be it in dance-halls turned discos, or on the radio. In the ‘70s and
‘80s, the slogan was used as a counterblast to the sort of hi-tech sampling now
taken for granted. ‘Synthesisers – Friend or Foe?’ asked a furrowed-browed
headline on the front of the MU’s magazine at one point.
These days, Keep Music
Live is more associated with campaigns to keep grassroots venues open in the
face of noise complaints and encroaching gentrification. Road-worn Keep Music
Live stickers can still be seen on flight cases carried by musicians of all
stripe. Or they would be if we ever get to hear them play again. Again, as
prophesised in Drive-In Saturday, and as The Flaming Lips have just shown, the
notion of keeping anything live has taken on a whole new meaning.
This was one of the
things raised in a statement put out last week by Vanishing Point theatre
company. While Glasgow-based, under the artistic vision of director Matthew
Lenton, Vanishing Point have forged an international profile, with co-producers
in Italy and other European countries.
The company’s production
of The Metamorphosis, adapted from Franz Kafka’s novella about a young man who
turns into a giant insect, and is locked up alone in his room, was one of the
last theatre productions to make it to the stage before lockdown, albeit just
for a few nights before the plug had to be pulled. At the time of the production’s
enforced cancellation, the company described what they called ‘the strangest
irony: a show that became about the moment we’re living in, cancelled because
of the moment we’re living in.’
That was in March, which
feels a lifetime ago now. Vanishing Point’s new statement, which can be read in
full on the company’s website, is a call to arms for what it called ‘the
importance and uniqueness of the live arts…’
Rather than create
online work, Vanishing Point announced that they were taking a step back and
planning for a still unknown future when ‘we can make live shows again.’
Like Danny Zuko after
Sandy walks out on him, Vanishing Point are keeping their distance. And if
their decision makes you wonder why-yi-yi,
one of the best evocations of the power of a live experience came from Kay
Carroll, the first manager of The Fall, whose death aged 71 was announced last
week.
It was Carroll’s
professional and personal partnership with the late Mark E. Smith that gave the
band much of its uncompromising attitude. Taken from an interview in Dave
Simpson’s 2008 book, The Fallen, Barmcake magazine’s tribute tweet made clear
how much Carroll understood how the incendiary and shamanic force of putting a
few hundred people in a room went way beyond the mere notion of someone playing
a few tunes.
“The Fall are
interesting,” Carroll said, “because it’s not about the music. What was created
was atmosphere and tension. You’d go to a gig and it was like the audience had
all been in a plane crash and ended up in a field.”
In a world where Grease
almost certainly isn’t the word, try experiencing THAT in the back of an open-topped convertible beside the Clyde.
Bella Caledonia, June 2020
ends
Comments