(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
I caught Shaun Jefford’s stylish film when it was first shown at Cambridge Film Festival (England) in 2010 – an impromptu adjournment to the bar before the screen was ready both gave everyone who still wanted one the chance to buy a drink to take in (a wonderful feature of the Arts Picturehouse cinema), and allowed informal contact with the director. That opportunity was extended by a Q&A, both after the screening, and back in the bar, so this review is informed by what he had to say.
[Through what must be some obscure weighting and / or averaging, and despite having topped the audience top 10 during and immediately after the close of the festival, Beijing Punk finished
Although this is a creditable placing, it is not immediately apparent how one can understand its not having been higher still, when it had twenty audience reviews (including a 500-word one, on which this is based) on the festival web-site. By contrast with those of the top film, none of them had been written by those on the festival staff or its student reviewers, and all but one gave it five stars (the other being four stars).]
The enthusiastic first festival reviews alone made clear that Beijing Punk – the title neatly tells one everything to expect! – deserves a wider audience than many art-house documentaries, and, with the increasing identification of and also with its merits that it is gaining, it is likely to reach one. (That recognition is by no means just because, at one point, Shaun daily downed two bottles of Madame Pearl’s codeine-laden cough-medicine to get it made – although that obviously wins respect! – and I must return later to what has been called his ‘immersion’ in the totality of the life of the bands whom he features here!).
I call Shaun’s film ‘stylish’, because I see it as in the nature of punk rock that it has its own, specifically anti-establishment, style. It was Siouxsie’s distinctive sound, look and eye make-up, for example, that made me such an adherent (acolyte?) of The Banshees from the early days, along with her inescapably hip way of doing just about everything. Of course, her image was a unity with that of the whole band’s provocative lyrics, moody and suitably jolting harmonies (including edgy multiple-tracking), a strong drummer, and evocative lighting, both on stage and heightening atmosphere in videos. All those, amongst other things, were part and parcel of what made the songs’ delivery so effective, whether the doomed ‘Christine, the strawberry girl’, or the not-so-happy ‘Happy House’.
(For the benefit of those who might think that this review has simply gone off the rails, please try to trust, and without doubting, that there was more than a little echo of Siouxsie’s spirit – for want of a better word – in the girl drummer of featured band Hedgehog.)
Others would, responding to what ‘punk’ means to them, more naturally go to the more clearly raw and untamed (or even often untuned) sounds of punk, but this truly is ‘a broad movement’. For me, Don Letts is clearly right, in his documentary about this scene called Punk: Attitude, to home in on this question of the bands’ stance towards life, which is established by quoting key players talking about what punk is.
For this reason, I would argue that two-tone had just as much the attitude or spirit of this era as more aggressive or maybe threatening bands such as The Pistols or The Clash, and the times could, happily and largely without strain, embrace (or, more likely, those bands could) music as diverse as that of Madness, Blondie, Ian Dury and The Blockheads, and The Jam.
This apparent diversion from directly talking about Shaun’s achievement is actually to allow commentary on how it is that ?, Demerit and Hedehog are all a completely recognizable part of punk and yet still quite different from each other. What the bands, as groups and as their members, share is an attitude to the world that might loosely be called that of non-acceptance of the status quo and even of rebellion.
This is truly what brings a skinhead whose consumption of substances is phenomenal into the same arena as a hard-hitting female drummer, because the images of her with boxing-gloves and a furious look that is disquietingly hard to characterize further are in the same juxtaposition to the norm as his lifestyle. And where that comes out is in the protesting tone and lyrics of these bands’ music, whether they are high on life or on a mix of chemicals.
That means that you can, after all, be so much on the edge that you’re in the real centre, as there’s really an Einsteinian continuum that loops around on itself (not any sort of discworld). Saying that may, itself, seem literally eccentric (in its true sense of ‘out of the centre’), but I do believe that it’s just as much relevant to punk as to art and anti-art under the Dadaists or Surrealists: the essence of punk is not far from those origins in the post-war time of 1918 on, with the linking theme being not satisfied with the world as it is, and, more importantly, dissatisfied with everyone else for putting up with it.
After all, if it wasn’t André Bretton, poet and unchallenged spokesman of Surrealism, who said that the true surreal act is to take a loaded gun and go out into the street, shooting at random, it’s thereabouts. In that statement, there’s very much the feel of Lee, the lead-singer of one of the three bands with whom Shaun came into close contact - self-destructive and chaotic though he is, and despite what Lee puts into his body and ‘helps’ others to put into theirs whilst seeking to live as a skinhead in China, he’s obviously really just a pussy-cat. (After all, even cats fight, scrap, but eventually sleep.)
What matters most, though, about this film is not the bands’ lifestyles, or Shaun the worse for wear, or his often indisposed camera-man, but the music, which is so much in the punk idiom that one wonders that it was first caught so fully by trawling the Internet. For example, the drummer of Hedgehog is compelling in her playing, and though justly described as hitting really hard, is so truly in punk fashion.
Unlike the explosion of punk in the UK and US, though, there is no one to latch on, making money out of bondage-trousers or whatever, and, as far as I could see, no other media manipulators in the mode of those behind the Pistols would have scope for
doing that in China. The excellent music is what counts, and, despite underground sales of recordings, there’s no hope of a wider home audience.
Thanks for showing us, Shaun - if they want, maybe those bands can find unleashed fans elsewhere...
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