A nice review of When the Night Comes Down was posted this weekend at Shroud Magazine’s website. I finished reading the other stories in the collection this weekend. It’s an interesting mix, with some fascinating crossovers of theme or concept from one writer to the other. For example, two stories (one of them mine, one Bob Weinberg’s) deal with purgatory, though in very different ways. Purely coincidental, because each author submitted independently of the others and there was no selection process by the editor.
This was our weekend for tormented musician movies. Last night we watched Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, the Ian Dury biopic, starring Andy Serkis, who is most famous for his digitized performances as Gollum and King Kong. I was never a fan, but was aware of him during my university days in the early eighties, along side the Sex Pistols. I knew so little about him that I thought his last name was “Drury.” I also wasn’t aware that he had polio as a child and was virtually immobile on one side, wearing metal braces all his life.
The movie is a part Fellini, part Brecht and part All that Jazz. It’s not an entirely linear retelling of his life, and one wouldn’t be surprised to discover that a lot of it was made up or exaggerated for dramatic effect. Today’s subject line comes straight from the movie as testimony to that supposition. For part of the film, Dury himself narrates or expounds on his life while on stage, addressing an unseen audience. Serkis is fantastic–he is transformed into the punk rocker, a tormented soul who suffered horrors in a hospital school for disabled children. The “headmaster” of this institution was straight out of Dickens, played with abject cruelty by Toby Jones (The Mist). When Dury revists the institution as an adult, one of the teachers tells him that the man commited suicide by hanging himself in one of the upper offices. She watches for his reaction. “You made my day,” he mumbles. Also appearing in the film is the guy who played Mickey in Doctor Who–Rose Tyler’s boyfriend. He’s a studio engineer or producer who criticizes Dury for being “out of pitch,” setting off one of Dury’s famous tirades which ends with Dury pouring liquids all over the mixing board before getting himself arrested. A major character in the film is Baxter, his son, who idolizes his mostly absentee father. He is the young boy pictured beside Dury on the cover of the album New Boots and Panties!! The movie certainly doesn’t idolize Dury–he is shown to be volatile, irrational, hateful, demented and, worst of all, neglectful. He does have a certain charm, though, that makes the movie fascinating. It’s something of a train wreck in slow motion, but the guy flung himself at life (in much the same way his roadies once famously flung him onto the stage) with gusto. He always found himself apologizing to those around him (as his son observes), and he didn’t want Baxter to be like him, but by the end of the movie I’m not sure that he regretted very much.
