Saturday, April 17, 2021
April 17 is the birthdays of Lindsay Anderson, Billy Fury, and Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks fame. All three are essential figures in my cultural life, reminding everyone of the only life I have. Anderson’s film If…. had an emotional and intellectual hold on me when I first saw the movie in 1968. I was 14 and at Parkman Junior High School. I was miserable at that school because there was a lot of hostility in the school to people from Topanga Canyon. The gym teachers had it in for me and taunted me whenever I was alone with them. As I was leaving the showers one day, one of the teachers in the P.E. department kept calling me a fag. It was odd because he didn’t call me a fag in front of the other students or teachers, but only when I was in a room or hallway by myself that he would call me out as a fag. Soon after that, I was called into the P.E.office where all the gym teachers were there when I entered the room. All three Physical Education teachers were there, and basically like a trio of barbershop crooners, they called me a fag in unison. Afterward, they marched me into the shower and requested that I take a shower. I did so, and as I started to leave, one said, “get your hair wet.” So I had to go back in and get my hair wet, which was long, of course.
If…. is about a group of rebellious students in a school in England. At the end of the film, they are on the roof with machine guns shooting the parents and teachers. Now, that is a common occurrence, I’m afraid, but in 1968 it was unthinkable something like that can happen in real life. But the fantasy of seeing the teachers shot up gave me such an emotional release that I never forgot that feeling in the dark theater. I, of course, imagined that it was the P.E. Teachers in that shot, and I’m on the roof and shooting down towards them. There were other aspects of the film I liked, but the slow pace to revenge really appealed to my emotional state at the time. Lindsay Anderson, I feel, had a fundamental understanding of youth and their limitations. Years later, I saw Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite, a masterpiece, and Anderson based his film on Vigo’s work.
Billy Fury was from Liverpool, and he is one of my favorite British singers. It’s not like he had the most magnificent voice. Still, it was tinged with tragedy, sensuality, and a sense of awkwardness that appealed to me. Early in his career, he wrote his songs, but he used other people’s music as time went on. In 1967, he actually did a recording of David Bowie’s Silly Boy Blue. It is a magnificent song and a strange one for Billy to sing with respect; it’s about spirituality and reincarnation. A cloak of despair was always lurking in the very essence of Billy Fury, perhaps due to his bad heart. One felt he wasn’t meant to last for a long time. He died when he was 42.
Pete Shelley is one of my favorite songwriters. His brilliance was writing super-catchy songs but with heartfelt lyrics. Or he wrote these songs that if you make a drawing of the tune, it would be a full circle—Mantra-like, spiritual yet very what I imagine as Manchester. Whenever I was down, I would put on a Buzzcocks album or even a solo album by Pete. It would bathe me with waves of happiness in that there is another soul out there that feels the same as me. He died in 2018 at the age of 63.