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Cooking The Books with Gilly Smith
The Whistler’s food editor is bringing her award-winning podcast Cooking The Books with Gilly Smith to Rockwater on Hove beach. We sent our podcast correspondent Ceri Barnes Thompson to find out more
“What podcasts are you listening to?” Have you noticed we seem to be saying this more and more. It’s the new box set conversation. I love the excellent journalism and shared stories I hear on my dog walks and right now the top of my ‘Spotify’s most listened to’ list is “Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith”. It’s been my companion every Thursday morning for the past two years and not only has it changed the way I shop, cook, eat and understand the world of food production, it’s ignited my connection to the taste memories that have been part of my life. No other podcast has had such a profound effect on me as this.
This summer “Cooking The Books” comes to Rockwater in Hove as Gilly will be hosting Yasmin Fahr, Rachel Roddy and Melissa Hemsley, three of the most exciting food writers around throughout July who’ll all talk about life, food and their latest books.
Gilly is a Sussex based writer and journalist, but her reputation in the food world is international. Immersed in a lifetime of food journalism she started podcasting at Delicious magazine before striking out on her own.
“Podcasting is the ultimate in democratising women, people of colour, gender, sexuality and age. We take our subjects and we prise them open to find so much more than the traditional media would ever commission. It’s powered by passion rather than sales meetings. We do what we love and it’s catching!” So powerful is her belief in the format that she has also written a book “How To Start And Grow A Successful Podcast” and has made online courses on the subject too.
“Cooking the Books” won The Guild of Food Writers Award for best pod last year and this year only missed out to the BBC production team at the Food Programme at The Fortum and Mason Awards. Not bad for someone who’s the consummate solo producer – every episode of “Cooking The Books” she researches, books, records and edits herself. There are no adverts, no sponsors.
Melissa Hemsley describes Gilly as “hugely respected by the old guard of the food world, but also massively loved by the up-and-coming due to her boundless energy for encouragement, mentoring and change-bringing”. Hemsley says that “Cooking the Books” is the podcast she’d choose first out of any list to appear on. She calls it “genius” because it honours the author by taking the listener on a deep dive into the stories, recipes and writing often reading segments back the authors they’d almost forgotten, the refreshing excitement of hearing your own words being read out loud for listeners to enjoy.
Along with Hemsley on the roster will be the Guardian food journalist and author Rachel Roddy and New York Times food writer Yasmin Fahr, who recently relocated from New York to Menorca, attracted by the slower pace of life.
Yasmin thinks it’s Gilly’s authenticity and insight that make the podcast is so enjoyable. “These conversations can give people a ‘head start’, bringing people into their confidence around food and cooking. Gilly uses stories of personal experience because she knows that the most effective way to get people to change is through stories.”
And that’s very much Gilly’s mission – to change the world. She’s concerned about climate change, the food industry’s broken industrial systems, child food poverty and our lack of connection to the soil and to each other. A good cook book will always be the antidote to ultra processed food. A good recipe will always have you handling the ingredients rather than popping a silver processed tray in the oven. And that’s what she wants us to do as a result of listening to the podcast. Shop locally, think about how the animals have been treated, share a meal and a story with family and friends as often as possible.
Away from “Cooking The Books” Gilly works with the Food Foundation to help bring awareness of food poverty especially of our children living in scarcity. Melissa Hemsley is one of the voices that Gilly’s encouraged to come on board and Melissa credits Gilly with encouraging her to flex her energy in the more important parts of the food world like being part of this kind of campaigning work.
I asked Yasmin what she is hoping for from the live shows. “Food people tend to be good-hearted people and I’m really looking forward to hearing what questions come up. If there’s a chance of one thing landing that gives someone the ability to try something new, it’s all worthwhile”.
“I hope there’ll be a real hobby club atmosphere” says Gilly, “people coming with all kinds of different takes on a subject, it always surprises and delights me”.
l Rockwater, Western Esplanade, BN3 4FA 01273 091166
Tuesday July 2 6.30-8pm Yasmin Fahr
Tuesday July 16 6.30-8pm: Rachel Roddy
Tuesday July 23 6.30-8pm: Melissa Hemsley
Tickets £15 from CookBookBake, Hove’s indie specialist cookbook shop and include £5 off the author’s book.
Tickets from https://www.gillysmith.com/event-list
The Charleston Festival: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Bee Wilson
The Charleston Festival was packed with food book fans last week as the current culinary kings and queens teamed up with the world of art and literature to discuss all of life through the prism of food. Composer/musician Nitin Sawhney chewed over the symbiotic relationship between art, politics and society with food writer, chef and restaurateur Ravinder Bhogal, while food royalty Bee Wilson and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall explored the moral, ethical and health choices we’re forced to make about food every day.
There was even a surprise visit from Queen Camilla who opened the event with poet laureate Joseph Coelho, presenter and comedian Lenny Henry, children’s authors Jacqueline Wilson and Francesca Simon, and actor Jenny Agutter. Shame she didn’t hang on for the Bee and Hugh session; I think she’d have had a lot to chat about with Charles had she stayed on to learn how to eat 30 plants a week
But it was why we need to eat 30 plants a week that was the subject of the afternoon. The impact of factory farmed animals on climate change and the immorality of eating industrially fast-grown caged birds who can barely move, let alone exhibit their natural behaviour was high on the list for Hugh. And as host, the Food Programme presenter, Leyla Kazim asked how the average shopper can choose between the many and various ethical signposting, thank the Lord that Hugh put paid to any suggestion that Red Tractor has anything to do with compassion in farming.
Deliberately confusing the messaging is what retailers do best, and Hugh and Bee suggested that we simply side step the ultra-processed aisles in the supermarket. ‘It’s a mind bomb that sets you free,’ said Bee, as she urged us to think about real ingredients – vegetables, fruit, meat and fish – instead of the ultra processed foods that have cast a spell over an increasingly robotic shopper.
For Hugh, eating more vegetables to improve the health of the nation and the planet is about storytelling. ‘It’s about elevating the way we eat, rather than being banging on about being virtuous’, he said. And he reminded us that our ancestors were obsessed with storytelling about food. They would spend the whole day hunting and gathering, he told us, and as the community gathered to cook and eat together at the end of the day, they’d chat about what they’d been up to. And that was food. Instagram’s obsession with food has nothing on the Hunter Gatherers.
Be more hunter gatherer, was the take out of the afternoon. Forage for nettles with the kids, pick blackberries with the grandchildren, taste and tell in schools, and a whole new generation will grow up not in the shadow of their food wasting, UPF addicted, climate changing community, but of their deer stalking, herb picking ancestors.
Gilly Smith
Film: The Killing
By Ruby Ephstein
RECEIVED WISDOM, seldom the most reliable or durable of guides, has it that Paths of Glory kicked off Stanley Kubrick’s freakish streak of groundbreaking movies. Fortunately, we here at Cinerama know better.
That honour, we insist, belongs to The Killing, arguably the greatest of all heist movies and certainly the most intricate and imaginative. Spoilers R Not Us, as you know, so let’s just say the climax is as profoundly unexpected and shocking as the end of the first half of Full Metal Jacket.
Yet while Kubrick’s own “My way or the highway” story is as celebrated as any in Hollywood history, his determination to march to the beat of his own drum had nothing on the actor around whom The Killing revolves, Sterling Hayden, a name all-but erased from widespread awareness. Such was the price one had to pay in paranoid post-WW2 America for being outed as a pinko Commie traitor. Not that Hayden gave a damn. Never has Tinseltown harboured a more radical or reluctant star.
The Library of Congress testifies to Hayden’s talent. The US National Film Registry housed there lists no fewer than five of his films as “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant: The Asphalt Jungle, Johnny Guitar, Dr Strangelove (Or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Bomb), The Godfather and The Long Goodbye.
Yet Hayden was disdainful of his craft, which he pursued primarily to finance whichever new boat took his fancy. “Bastards,” was how he described most of his celluloid appearances, “conceived in contempt of life and spewn out onto screens across the world with noxious ballyhoo; saying nothing, contemptuous of the truth, sullen and lecherous.”
Born Sterling Relyea Walter and poor, Hayden was adopted by his stepfather, James Hayden, and, after a nomadic childhood, ran away to sea at 17, rising rapidly to renowned ship’s captain. Encouraged by friends, he approached producer Edward Griffith and came away clutching a Paramount contract. Needless to add, his looks didn’t hurt his reinvention.
Towering over co-stars at an intimidating 6ft 5in, unsmiling, granite-jawed and Nordic-featured, he was dubbed “The Most Beautiful Man in the Movies” and “The Beautiful Blond Viking God” (as well as the somewhat less macho “Shirley”). “Incredible, really, how I got away with it,” he would reflect, “parlaying nine years at sea into two decades of posturing.”
But beneath the beauty lay plenty of beastly. Francis Coppola knew what he was doing when he lured Hayden from the wilderness to play the corrupt cop in The Godfather. Nobody else could have punched Al Pacino’s clean-cut face with such convincingly vicious power and ferocity that he transformed Michael Corleone from a clean-cut war hero into a savage mobster. One who, the next time they met, would blow his brains out.
Imperishable as those scenes were, Hayden only had a cameo in The Godfather, but that stubborn minimalism was centre stage in the other four of his movies preserved by the Library of Congress. He was Dix Handley, a loyal henchman, in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), another hypnotic heist movie as well as one of the most gripping of noirs, In the title role of Johnny Guitar (1954) he’s a reformed gunslinger neck-deep in a love-hate tryst with Joan Crawford’s titanium-tough bar-owner Vienna.
In The Long Goodbye (1973), he steals the show as Roger Wade, a spouse-beating alcoholic author castrated by writer’s block. Most unforgettably of all, in Dr. Strangelove (1964) he’s General Jack D. Ripper, the blackly comic gung-ho part that bore closest resemblance to his public persona while subverting it: General Ripper blames his sexual impotence on “the Russkis” and issues irreversible orders to bomb Moscow.
Hayden’s journey from blond bombshell to Red renegade was as typical of a man allergic to standing still as the fact that he wed one of his four wives three times. If the title of Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing, represents one extreme of the aptness spectrum, Hayden’s choice, The Wanderer, marks the opposite.
Quitting Paramount before the Japanese blitzed Pearl Harbour (and just after the studio bought him the boat used in Captains Courageous), he shrewdly signed up for the Marines as “John Hamilton” to eliminate the prospect of being teased as a Hollywood pretty boy, and soon joined the Office of Strategy Services, the forerunner of the CIA. The OSS had been founded by his chum “Wild Bill” Donovan, the barely-disguised model for Robert De Niro’s character Bill Sullivan in his grossly underrated self-directed epic The Good Shepherd.
Hayden thus had a busier war than most. The only American selected to receive commando training in Scotland, he parachuted into Croatia and ran guns and supplies to Yugoslav partisans behind German lines. He also befriended Yugoslavia’s growing band of Communists; the partisans’ leader, the future President Tito, pinned a medal on his chest.
Hayden was not only a vocal anti-capitalist; he supported the Hollywood Ten, the writers and directors banished by the studios after refusing to testify to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee over their Communist links. In stark contrast to Elia Kazan, he was ashamed for “ratting” to HUAC, with whom he co-operated in naming names during Joe McCarthy’s communist witch-hunts. No regret haunted him more.
IF HAYDEN WAS a “posturer”, he fooled an awful lot of clever people, including the stellar directors of that quintessential quintet of movies: Robert Altman, Francis Coppola, John Huston, Stanley Kubrick and Nicholas Ray. In fact, Jack D. Ripper was Hayden’s second plum role for Kubrick; the first was Johnny Clay in The Killing.
Released six years after The Asphalt Jungle and another masterly exercise in sunless noir, The Killing, according to Kubrick, was his first “mature” feature. Like all his best screenplays, this one was adapted from a novel, in this instance Lionel White’s Clean Break. Clay is the stick-up man and conductor of a meticulously orchestrated racetrack robbery that we see unfold in episodic, overlapping and, most daringly for the era, non-linear fashion.
“Seeing it without his credit, would you guess it was by Kubrick?” wondered Roger Ebert rhetorically. As the esteemed critic asserted, every Kubrick movie stands alone, a gem of unique hue and gleam even when the subject is war, as it was on three occasions. Narrated by Art Gilmore, a well-known if uncredited radio announcer, The Killing is less about guns and hitmen than precise timings, chess and the domino effect.
Revelling in pulp novelist Jim Thompson’s quickfire contributions to the diamond-hard dialogue, Hayden moulds Clay into a canny cookie with a keen eye for the tiniest details. He enlists specialist “pros” while refusing to reveal the identities of their accomplices, let alone any broader elements of his audacious plan to plunder $2m – the killing in question – from the Lansdowne racetrack in San Francisco. The horses are shot thrillingly by Sam Peckinpah’s favourite cinematographer, Lucien Ballard, though the actual venue was Bay Meadows, then the most venerable track in California.
Art steals more blatantly from life in an early scene where Clay hires Maurice, a pro wrestler, to create a distraction by instigating a bar brawl. Not only do they meet at the same chess club Hayden frequented as a boy; Kubrick himself was a chess junkie who played zealously between scenes.
Not that the chess connection is solely worth pointing out as tasty trivia. Clay plots the heist as Kubrick plotted a chess game. Every rook, bishop and pawn has their job to do and place to be at a synchronised juncture. Everything depends on making the right move at the right time and in the right order. Even the slightest mis-step could cause the dominos to fall. Even in the dying moments, when he has every excuse to rip off that mask of stoical cool, Hayden, like any experienced chess player, remains poker-faced. It is impossible to imagine anyone else as Clay. Perhaps all that posturing was simply Sterling playing Sterling.
The Killing is about as romantic as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but the heart still weeps and snaps, especially as we spy on Sherry and George, a cruelly ill-wed couple. Marie Windsor, who made Marlene Dietrich look innocent, is at her ruthless best as the faithless femme fatale, every contemptuous quip a dagger in the chest of the mousey husband she looks down on literally as well as figuratively. As the sexless cashier desperate to win back her unblind faith, Elisha Cook regales us with the most vividly pathetic of all the fall guys he’d portrayed in noir classics such as The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. All Clay has to do to make Sherry behave is threaten to beat her duplicitous face into “hamburger meat”.
Cook is such a brilliant sap, in fact, that it’s hard to stifle a guilty giggle upon re-glimpsing that grim, hope-drained face. And yes, given the extensive pleasures we derive from the tragedies that fuel noir, we viewers, of course, are sadistically complicit.
The last line is right up there with “Nobody’s perfect” and “Shut up and deal”: urged to run from the law by his childhood sweetheart, Clay replies, “What’s the point?”. That could so easily have been the sign-off to every noir.
To reveal any more truly would be an unforgiveable crime.
Film: The satanic majesty of Gimme Shelter
By Ruby Ephstein
THERE ARE FEW THINGS in life truly worth loathing, but received wisdom is undeniably this column’s noirest bête noir. Take “The Best Concert Movies of All Time” (Rolling Stone and Rotten Tomatoes) or variations such as “20 Greatest Concert Films” (The Guardian).
For one thing, the words “Pop” and/or “Rock” so implicit in those titles are missing, never mind “Soul”, “Jazz” and “Reggae”, much less any other musical genre. To these eyes and sensibilities, the two most uplifting concert scenes on screen could hardly offer a starker sonic or visual contrast: Bruce Springsteen and The E St Band’s 20-minute re-bonding on Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out from their 2000 NYC reunion (a gift from HBO that never stops giving) and, in Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s imperious impersonation of Lenny Bernstein electrifying Ely Cathedral in 1973, wringing out every ounce of his vast if not always pious passions conducting Mahler’s 2nd.
It feels safe to presume, nonetheless, that a classical music gig will never be a) called a gig, or b) qualify for one of the aforementioned Guardian or Rotten Tomatoes charts. The sticking-point, box-office-wise, is that orchestras are essentially dress-alike covers acts whose idea of stagecraft is leaning forward. So why not clarify matters? Why not bill the ones that do dominate said charts as “Gig Movies”? If nothing else, Mahler fans won’t get miffed.
For another thing, even now, in what may turn out to be their heyday, gig movies are far from 10 a penny. As a genre, unlike musicals, westerns, horror and noir, they’ve barely reached middle-age. Commemorating the inaugural pop/rock festival, Monterey Pop (1968) was the first member of the litter, though aside from Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar alight and Pete Townshend bashing his to bits, its impact was but a pinprick next to Woodstock (1970), the three-hour, multiscreen epic on which Martin Scorsese cut his teeth.
And because gig movies were only ever intended to be a secondhand experience, at best, and thus lacked box-office appeal, it has taken this century’s documentary boom, and the recent advent of simultaneous live Odeon transmissions, to thicken the best-of-breed contenders to any significant degree.
The latest nauseating spot of consensus has it that the best gig movie is Stop Making Sense. David Byrne’s baggy suit, an irresistible electro-funk stew and Jonathan Demme’s imaginative staging are all tremendous fun, granted, but ambition was limited. As Geoffrey Cheshire’s stirring essay for The Criterion Collection put it, this column’s choice, Gimme Shelter (1970), gave the Rolling Stones “what no one had bargained for: a terrifying snapshot of the sudden collapse of the sixties”.
Having only just seen the latter on a big screen for the first time, as part of a European re-release (you can stream it on Amazon), I can only concur wholesouledly with the view that, when it comes to cinema verité, the Maysles brothers’ sickening documentary of the anti-Woodstock, held on the West Coast at Altamont, struck the motherlode.
Sure, the cameras miss Marty Balin, the Jefferson Airplane vocalist, being knocked out by Hell’s Angels, foolishly hired as security (in exchange for a barrel of beer) and brandishing pool cues in a way even Ronnie O’Sullivan might never have countenanced. As it is, we get more than enough of the prelude (Balin mouthing off at the abusive leatherjackets) and the aftermath (Balin’s battered face). And those peace and love vibes at Hyde Park just a few months earlier, where Mick Jagger bid farewell to Brian Jones by releasing a fleet of doves and reading a poem by Shelley? Gone for good.
No scene in the annals of gig movies, nevertheless, is more chilling than when those beer-pumped Angels seize the mile-high, gun-toting Meredith Hunter as he advances towards the stage, then knife and bludgeon him to death.
There had been good reason to fear such a grisly outcome. Not only had Jagger been subjected to death threats, hence the insistence that no audience member be allowed to invade the stage; as he stepped off the helicopter on arrival, he was punched by someone he might reasonably have assumed to be a fan.
Watching him watch Hunter’s murder unfold on a monitor backstage is like surfing an emotional pendulum. No matter how you feel about rock’s first and foremost frontman, it would take an act of astonishing anatomic control not to gulp or shudder at the way his face slides from preening pride – in a terrific band performance, in the way the filming was going – to grim, guilty stupefaction. And the song he happened to be singing as Hunter was savaged? Sympathy for the Devil, what else?
In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, by no means a rock chick, derided it all as wish-fulfilment and a sham, alleging – wrongly, according to the Mayleses – that the show was designed and lit for the cameras. The ingredients, though, were all in place: a free festival headlined by their satanic majesties for 300,000 drugged-up if not loved-up fans at a San Francisco speedway track in the final month of the most radical yet delusional of decades.
“I think it affected all of us very profoundly,” guitarist Mick Taylor reflected on recordings released only last year. “The only thing we were very upset about was being accused and held responsible for what happened. You can’t really blame anybody in that kind of mass hysteria.”
Nonetheless, Don McLean’s dream that drums and wires could “save your mortal soul” was in tatters. On American Pie, there was nothing ambivalent about his allusions to Jagger (“Jack Flash”): “I saw Satan dancing with delight the day the music died.”
Well, it didn’t die, did it? And Jagger, who has done more than most to keep it alive and rocking, certainly didn’t deserve crucifixion. Understandably, forgivably, he still shies clear of the topic with religious fervour. Even so, one can only imagine how many times his nights have been ruptured by those visual scars.
On the infinitely brighter side, the Stones were in marvellous nick for the Maylses, majestic as well as satanic. MC Mick struts like a coked-up peacock, the consummate rabble-rouser; Bill Wyman cuddles his bass and plucks it with infinitely more dexterity than you ever remembered; from the opening chords of Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Richards and Taylor’s complementary twin guitars – so much more diverse and fascinating than the riff-heavy Keef-Ronnie combo – lock into a funky fusion of flying fingers. Needless to add, Charlie was bloody good that night too.
And, as you watch them, you can’t help but be reminded why the other act you’ve known for all these years has now been going more than half a century longer than Sgt Pepper’s squabbling slackers. Love ’em or merely tolerate them (how can you possibly loathe an octogenarian-led band that can still persuade tens of thousands of Brazilians to stump up a week’s wages to see them?), the Stones remain England’s hardiest Sixties tribute act.
Within five years of Altamont, they would be in freefall recording-wise, yet even now, the sellouts (literal, never spiritual) persist. Mick and Keef have pretty much always known that sticking to the same seat in the same carriage on the same track could pay considerable dividends. Happily, Gimme Shelter, which showcases the chemistry responsible, works as celebration as well as damnation.
Top 10 Gig Movies
- Gimme Shelter (Rolling Stones)
- Live In New York City (Bruce Springsteen & The E St Band)
- The Last Waltz (The Band, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters et al)
- Summer of Soul (Stevie Wonder, Sly & The Family Stone, Nina Simone, Staple Singers et al)
- Stop Making Sense (Talking Heads)
- Get Back (The Beatles)
- Sign O’ The Times (Prince)
- Monterey Pop (Jimi Hendrix, Mamas & Papas, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar et al)
- Live At Pompeii (Pink Floyd)
- Woodstock (Janis Joplin, The Who, Santana, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joan Baez et al)
The satanic majesty of Gimme Shelter
By Ruby Ephstein
THERE ARE FEW THINGS in life truly worth loathing, but received wisdom is undeniably this column’s noirest bête noir. Take “The Best Concert Movies of All Time” (Rolling Stone and Rotten Tomatoes) or variations such as “20 Greatest Concert Films” (The Guardian).
For one thing, the words “Pop” and/or “Rock” so implicit in those titles are missing, never mind “Soul”, “Jazz” and “Reggae”, much less any other musical genre. To these eyes and sensibilities, the two most uplifting concert scenes on screen could hardly offer a starker sonic or visual contrast: Bruce Springsteen and The E St Band’s 20-minute re-bonding on Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out from their 2000 NYC reunion (a gift from HBO that never stops giving) and, in Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s imperious impersonation of Lenny Bernstein electrifying Ely Cathedral in 1973, wringing out every ounce of his vast if not always pious passions conducting Mahler’s 2nd.
It feels safe to presume, nonetheless, that a classical music gig will never be a) called a gig, or b) qualify for one of the aforementioned Guardian or Rotten Tomatoes charts. The sticking-point, box-office-wise, is that orchestras are essentially dress-alike covers acts whose idea of stagecraft is leaning forward. So why not clarify matters? Why not bill the ones that do dominate said charts as “Gig Movies”? If nothing else, Mahler fans won’t get miffed.
For another thing, even now, in what may turn out to be their heyday, gig movies are far from 10 a penny. As a genre, unlike musicals, westerns, horror and noir, they’ve barely reached middle-age. Commemorating the inaugural pop/rock festival, Monterey Pop (1968) was the first member of the litter, though aside from Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar alight and Pete Townshend bashing his to bits, its impact was but a pinprick next to Woodstock (1970), the three-hour, multiscreen epic on which Martin Scorsese cut his teeth.
And because gig movies were only ever intended to be a secondhand experience, at best, and thus lacked box-office appeal, it has taken this century’s documentary boom, and the recent advent of simultaneous live Odeon transmissions, to thicken the best-of-breed contenders to any significant degree.
The latest nauseating spot of consensus has it that the best gig movie is Stop Making Sense. David Byrne’s baggy suit, an irresistible electro-funk stew and Jonathan Demme’s imaginative staging are all tremendous fun, granted, but ambition was limited. As Geoffrey Cheshire’s stirring essay for The Criterion Collection put it, this column’s choice, Gimme Shelter (1970), gave the Rolling Stones “what no one had bargained for: a terrifying snapshot of the sudden collapse of the sixties”.
Having only just seen the latter on a big screen for the first time, as part of a European re-release (you can stream it on Amazon), I can only concur wholesouledly with the view that, when it comes to cinema verité, the Maysles brothers’ sickening documentary of the anti-Woodstock, held on the West Coast at Altamont, struck the motherlode.
Sure, the cameras miss Marty Balin, the Jefferson Airplane vocalist, being knocked out by Hell’s Angels, foolishly hired as security (in exchange for a barrel of beer) and brandishing pool cues in a way even Ronnie O’Sullivan might never have countenanced. As it is, we get more than enough of the prelude (Balin mouthing off at the abusive leatherjackets) and the aftermath (Balin’s battered face). And those peace and love vibes at Hyde Park just a few months earlier, where Mick Jagger bid farewell to Brian Jones by releasing a fleet of doves and reading a poem by Shelley? Gone for good.
No scene in the annals of gig movies, nevertheless, is more chilling than when those beer-pumped Angels seize the mile-high, gun-toting Meredith Hunter as he advances towards the stage, then knife and bludgeon him to death.
There had been good reason to fear such a grisly outcome. Not only had Jagger been subjected to death threats, hence the insistence that no audience member be allowed to invade the stage; as he stepped off the helicopter on arrival, he was punched by someone he might reasonably have assumed to be a fan.
Watching him watch Hunter’s murder unfold on a monitor backstage is like surfing an emotional pendulum. No matter how you feel about rock’s first and foremost frontman, it would take an act of astonishing anatomic control not to gulp or shudder at the way his face slides from preening pride – in a terrific band performance, in the way the filming was going – to grim, guilty stupefaction. And the song he happened to be singing as Hunter was savaged? Sympathy for the Devil, what else?
In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, by no means a rock chick, derided it all as wish-fulfilment and a sham, alleging – wrongly, according to the Mayleses – that the show was designed and lit for the cameras. The ingredients, though, were all in place: a free festival headlined by their satanic majesties for 300,000 drugged-up if not loved-up fans at a San Francisco speedway track in the final month of the most radical yet delusional of decades.
“I think it affected all of us very profoundly,” guitarist Mick Taylor reflected on recordings released only last year. “The only thing we were very upset about was being accused and held responsible for what happened. You can’t really blame anybody in that kind of mass hysteria.”
Nonetheless, Don McLean’s dream that drums and wires could “save your mortal soul” was in tatters. On American Pie, there was nothing ambivalent about his allusions to Jagger (“Jack Flash”): “I saw Satan dancing with delight the day the music died.”
Well, it didn’t die, did it? And Jagger, who has done more than most to keep it alive and rocking, certainly didn’t deserve crucifixion. Understandably, forgivably, he still shies clear of the topic with religious fervour. Even so, one can only imagine how many times his nights have been ruptured by those visual scars.
On the infinitely brighter side, the Stones were in marvellous nick for the Maylses, majestic as well as satanic. MC Mick struts like a coked-up peacock, the consummate rabble-rouser; Bill Wyman cuddles his bass and plucks it with infinitely more dexterity than you ever remembered; from the opening chords of Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Richards and Taylor’s complementary twin guitars – so much more diverse and fascinating than the riff-heavy Keef-Ronnie combo – lock into a funky fusion of flying fingers. Needless to add, Charlie was bloody good that night too.
And, as you watch them, you can’t help but be reminded why the other act you’ve known for all these years has now been going more than half a century longer than Sgt Pepper’s squabbling slackers. Love ’em or merely tolerate them (how can you possibly loathe an octogenarian-led band that can still persuade tens of thousands of Brazilians to stump up a week’s wages to see them?), the Stones remain England’s hardiest Sixties tribute act.
Within five years of Altamont, they would be in freefall recording-wise, yet even now, the sellouts (literal, never spiritual) persist. Mick and Keef have pretty much always known that sticking to the same seat in the same carriage on the same track could pay considerable dividends. Happily, Gimme Shelter, which showcases the chemistry responsible, works as celebration as well as damnation.
Top 10 Gig Movies
- Gimme Shelter (Rolling Stones)
- Live In New York City (Bruce Springsteen & The E St Band)
- The Last Waltz (The Band, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters et al)
- Summer of Soul (Stevie Wonder, Sly & The Family Stone, Nina Simone, Staple Singers et al)
- Stop Making Sense (Talking Heads)
- Get Back (The Beatles)
- Sign O’ The Times (Prince)
- Monterey Pop (Jimi Hendrix, Mamas & Papas, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar et al)
- Live At Pompeii (Pink Floyd)
- Woodstock (Janis Joplin, The Who, Santana, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joan Baez et al)
The Whistler 