Low Culture Podcast: Performance

In this month’s edition of the Low Culture Podcast, John Doran and Luke Turner discuss the cult classic of blurred identity and the failing 60s counterculture

“You’re the lone ranger!”, “I like a bit of a cavort!”, “It was Mad Cyril”, “Comical little geezer – you’ll look funny when you’re 50”, “Too much vitamin B12 has never hurt anybody”. The countercultural gangster film Performance (1970) might be so endlessly quotable it ended up in songs by The Happy Mondays and Big Audio Dynamite, but there’s much more to it than that, as John Doran and Luke Turner discuss in the latest edition of the Low Culture Podcast. Shot in 1968 but only premiered in 1970, Performance is a riot of firsts – Mick Jagger’s debut starring role, James Fox breaking type (and in the process nearly breaking himself), Anita Pallenberg’s only major English-speaking film role, and screenwriter Donald Cammell’s first outing as a director. That’s without mentioning debutantes in their own ways Nic Roeg, producer Sandy Lieberson, young French actor Michèle Breton and London boxer Johnny Shannon. Everything banked on the magnetic draw of the Rolling Stones, yet the glamour brought by the casting of Jagger acted as a Trojan horse for one of the weirdest, darkest and most authentically magical examples of British cinema.

 John and Luke discuss how Performance is concerned with visual representations of the psychology of sex and violence in an age when the censor still ruled with an iron fist, alongside literary allusions to Yeats, Burroughs, Artaud and Borges scattered across the script. To some, this visionary study of the ‘performance’ of masculinity (and femininity, and class, and nationality, and sexual orientation) might sound pompous, but as John and Luke discover, such claims say more about the accuser than the film makers. Performance might have scandalised and outraged cinema goers and critics alike, but the real violence was efflorescing off-screen with the film’s dank and occulted conduits to the magic of Aleister Crowley, the violently hungover quart-monde of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, the death of Brian Jones and the fatal stabbing of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Speedway, the Kray Twins and the Manson family. Alongside Withnail & I, it is an essential reflection of the end of the short 60s.

Thanks to Alannah Chance for producing the pod, and all of you for subscribing to keep tQ on the road.