Essential media about the arts

Like many others, I was sad today to learn of the death of Ken Russell. There are already tributes aplenty online, including Derek Malcolm’s Guardian obituary, a Telegraph obituary, some excellent short interviews with those who worked with him, and an artsdesk Q&A with Jasper Rees about his photography and early films. Film Studies for Free has a great page of links titled ‘Pity we aren’t madder’ (it’s from Women in Love) to academic engagements with the films. My thought here is simply to record the place that Russell had in my life. I’m sure a similar storycould be told by ten or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. But perhaps its particularity gives it an interest. In any case, it’s one very small way of saying ‘Thank you’.

Ken’s part in my life begins in 1970. I was a pupil at a minor public school in Canterbury to which I had won what was called in those days a ‘direct grant scholarship’. There were lessons on Saturday mornings, after which there was also often compulsory attendance on the rugby or hockey touchline. But on the blissful days when one was not forced to watch the school First XV, two or three friends and I would go to the cinema to watch ‘adult’ films. Not porn, of course, but a mix of X-rated Hollywood arthouse like Klute and the tail-end of Hammer.

One Saturday, perhaps attracted by the already notorious scene in which a naked Glenda Jackson rolls around on the floor of a train carriage, we took ourselves off to the Odeon to see The Music Lovers (1970). And, reader, it changed my life. I had never seen anything so thrilling and so frightening and so visceral as Ken Russell’s absurdly over-the-top biopic of Tchaikovsky. Here was joy and laughter and intense involving drama of a quite new kind (I was only fifteen, and had lived a sheltered cultural life). As I recall it (and I recognise that nostalgia may play a part here) I there and then determined that I would work in cinema or television.

The fateful screening was probably in November. Before Christmas I had been up to London to see The Music Lovers twice more – at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly Circus, as I remember, where it was by then playing in a double bill with Women in Love (1969). Russell, Oliver Reed and D. H. Lawrence, not to mention Glenda again, was another pretty potent mix. And from then on, for the next decade or so, I saw every Russell movie as soon as it came out – and if possible on the first day of release.

I had to wait until The Devils (1971) came to the Arts Cinema in Cambridge, but I was in the front row for the first public screening of Savage Messiah (1972; the Empire, Leicester Square, I think) and at the front of the balcony for Tommy (1975; Leicester Square Theatre). I still have original posters for both of these later films neatly folded up in a drawer, along with ones for Mahler (1974) and Lisztomania (1975, which was perhaps when either my tastes or Ken’s filmmaking started to change).

I quickly learned that Ken had also made films for television, and the schedules were scanned for repeats (no videos or YouTube then, of course). Song of Summer (1968), about the aged Delius, came around again, and my fanboy infatuation only deepened as I recognised what the master could do in a more restrained key. Only much later, after I had come to London to work, did I haunt the BFI viewing rooms, still then in Dean Street, to watch the available copies of early masterpieces like The Debussy Film (1965) and Isadora (1966). (Michael Brooke’s excellent articles for BFI Screenonline, to which the links in this paragraph connect, are a wonderful resource about Ken and the small screen.)

Before then, I had been proud during my time running the Oxford University Film Society to feature in the programme Russell’s first feature, French Dressing (1964). More or less the only point in doing all the admin for OUFS was so that you could get to see 16mm prints of films that were otherwise unavailable. And pretty good French Dressing turned out to be, especially as some of it had been shot on Herne Bay pier just down the road from where I had grown up.

In my final term, I applied for just one advertised job, which was to be Television Editor of Time Out. My submission included pages from what I perhaps suggested was a rather more substantial manuscript of an encyclopaedia of British television. In fact, the sheets – including a detailed discussion of the television work of Ken Russell – had been knocked up one afternoon in the Bodleian with the help of some back copies of Radio Times.

Once at Time Out (and that felt pretty close to being in the film and television industry), my continuing enthusiasm for the Russell oeuvre was regarded as, at best, curious. I have a vivid memory of a conversation with Chris Petit and Tony Rayns, film critic gods who knew everything about New German Cinema and kung fu classics, in which I tried to persuade them of Russell’s merits. I only hope neither of them today has any memory of the exchange.

Then, thrillingly, there was the chance to meet my idol. He directed two films for Granada, which were scripted by Melyvn Bragg, about Wordsworth and Coleridge. Would I, the press officer asked, like to interview Mr Russell? Would I? Off I went on the train to Manchester to have lunch with him in a rather dingy Chinese restaurant just near to where he was dubbing. He was charming and thoughtful and immensely entertaining – and I’m afraid I have no tale to tell  of excessive bahaviour (although many others have). When my feature appeared I had achieved my aim of putting both of my heroes on the cover of the magazine (the other, inevitably, was Dennis Potter).

Soon after, I was working for City Limits and then off writing a book about the making of the mammoth Wagner biopic. The director was Tony Palmer, a Russell protegé-cum-wannabee (or was it the other way round?), and working on set were costume designer Shirley Russell, Ken’s first wife, and assistant editor Xavier, their son. By now, The Music Lovers had more or less done its job, although there was one more step actually to be working in the industry. But by then my heroes were rather different (Ken, meet Jean-Luc and Ingmar) and I can’t now think of any further connection between Ken and the start of Illuminations.

I remain, however, very very grateful. Thank you for the music – and the images, Ken. Have fun, as I have no doubt you will, wherever you are.