As the whole world knows, Michael Jackson died in Los Angeles last weekend, aged 50. Not old, and no longer young. In fact everything about the King of pop was in between.
Not visibly black any more, he had become extremely white.
Not overtly masculine, his sexuality was ambivalent.
He was never adult but he was no longer a child. He never had a childhood.
He was worth a fortune but had no money.
Jackson although always surrounded by people, was alone.
Michael Jackson was the great in-betweener.
Jackson was a terrific dancer who perfected the spin, the moon walk and the groin clutch. His was a perfect pop voice. On stage no one was more electric. But it was the combination of these gifts that made him a genius. No one else could reach the same levels of performance across this spectrum of ability.
His was a life that reminded me of an old folk saying that my grand parents often repeated, “you can’t have it all!’ Blessed with extraordinary talent to entertain, Michael Jackson was clearly miserable except when he was on stage. His life and memory are soiled by his dangerous addictions and many problems, both physical and mental. He was a prescription drug addict, and he couldn’t leave little boys alone. I am not in a position to know what he did or wanted to do with those boys, and now isn’t the time to further sully his reputation when he isn’t here to defend himself.
Last night there was a black music award ceremony in Los Angeles at which his sister, Janet paid Michael a moving tribute. Prior to the show, which turned into a tribute to the life of Michael, there was a revealing interview with Joe Jackson, Michael’s father. It was more like a gimlet eyed strategic business opportunity review. Although he mentioned his grief and was clearly stunned, he talked more about his son as a huge commercial proposition than how he loved him. For, above all, Michael Jackson was a meal ticket and has been so since he was a tiny boy and remains so now that he’s dead. I will remember him not for his genius, although he was a truly great entertainer, but as a poor lost boy.
I now, without the benefit of a safety net, shall attempt the impossible feat of reviewing my own book, Twilight of the Gods, which was published today.
I took the decision to do so, after carefully considering the alternatives. I could wait for others to review my book, but then I have no way of knowing what they might write as I don’t know them, nor do I know if they’ve even bothered to read the book. I have the advantage of knowing the material and the author with great intimacy.
First the obvious blurb which reads as follows;
The Who were at their peak in the 1970s. Few other bands in the world could touch them. But time was running out for the classic line-up and by 1979 drummer Keith Moon was dead of a prescription drug overdose. The documentary film The Kids Are Alright captured the band in their glory and producer Tony Klinger followed them in their last days of that amazing first line-up and recorded every moment in his diary. Now he tells the dramatic story in The Twilight of the Gods.
The movie showed the band as they had never been seen before, uncovering archive footage and live performances that many had thought lost. The band also played exclusively for the movie, but Keith Moon didn’t even live to see the completion of the project. Tony Klinger recounts the gripping story of filming the last ever concert the band played with Moon, plus the realities of making a film with the most unpredictable and incendiary live act on the planet.
The Who redefined rock music and have continued to inspire their fans right up to the present day. Yet these last, dramatic days with Keith Moon remain a fascinating focus to understand exactly what made the band so powerful and Tony Klinger was there for each incredible shot.
About the Author
Tony was born in London. At school he won prizes for his writing and with some friends ran a successful underground school magazine. By 18 Tony was making films that received wide public distribution. Tony lectures at universities, makes films and writes. Over a distinguished career Tony headed several media companies both in the UK and USA. He has made more than 500 media productions of all types. He ran film production courses at the Northern and Bournemouth Film Schools and was director of the Media Production Centre at the University of East London.
Perhaps I should simply leave it at that but that wouldn’t add anything much to what this book feels like nor why I wrote it.
So, some questions and answers.
Q. Why write this book now?
A. I wrote the first draft pretty much straight after it happened but I didn’t want it to feel like it was written in anger or to seek a quick profit. So I waited an entire generation so that the story would be objective as well as rich with anecdotes and laughs and sober reflection.
Q. Why did you publish with John Blake Publishing?
A. They were the only people I showed the book to. John was familiar with the background and the Who. He was a journalist who knew about rock and roll. He also knew my film and, of course, he publishes some great titles in this kind of area.
Q. Are you happy with the way Twilight of the Gods turned out?
A. Thrilled!
Q. No reservations?
A. Well nothing is perfect and no amount of drafting and re-drafting will ever get it to that state. I have told the truth and where I thought a fact was too hurtful I have edited myself. Maybe I have been a bit too kind with some of that, but then again, I want to be a human being and if that means not taking the easy shot at a vulnerable target I’ll live with that.
Q. Are you a fan of the Who?
A. Of their music, yes.
Q. Not the people themselves?
A. Well, like everyone else, they have good and not so good parts to them. Overall I am so grateful to have made the film and worked with them, but I can’t pretend that everything was wonderful all the time between us.
Q. Like what?
A. You’ll have to read the book.
I decided to take the unusual step of electronically publishing a version of a Paper I presented to an academic conference recently. I have done so as I meet so many people who have misconceptions about the purpose of Further and Higher Education in relation to the Creative Industries that it seems like a good moment.
Prior to the recent economic collapse the UK’s creative sector was growing at twice the pace of the rest of the economy. Most likely, certain sections of this part of the economy, both in the UK and USA will continue to enjoy disproportionate success. The reason for this long held belief is simple, when we, as a people are miserable we turn to entertainment to keep us happy.
The creative sector is no longer a poor relation of bigger, more responsible, senior sectors of industry. We are it! We have arrived. We are bigger than cars, steel and almost any other sector. We are now the big boys of future growth in the UK.
In London, one of the world cities, we are over 10% of the entire economic scene, with a worth measured in billions, and employ several hundred thousand people. Even companies like BT consider themselves part of this phenomenon. I met their Chief Executive and he told me that he feels he is the head of an entertainment company and that communications were what he would one day soon have to provide for free.
It’s only natural that young people want to join this vibrant sector, want to learn about it, and then inhabit it for the rest of their careers. Culture informs our lives, and feeds into every aspect of them. Virtually every young person in the developed economies owns a mobile phone, an MP3 player, a games console, a TV a DVD player and, of course, a computer. Through all of them pours interactive creative output in an unending stream. Today’s task is not to discuss the reason for this personalized electronic infusion but to understand the young consumers.
I am a passionate devotee of the creative arts. We are all the better for the creation, viewing and appreciation of them in all their forms. I am of the view that people blessed with creative abilities, drive, appreciation and instinct are a force for good in our world. I have spent my life writing and making films of all types and teaching others how best to do so themselves.
I want to debate how we can best share the creative instinct within an academic context reinforced within a religious or moral construct. Of course all rules are best exemplified by a story to demonstrate the point, and it is said that Adolf Hitler was appreciative of the arts. As the zany Nazi German New York character in Mel Brooks “The Producers” describes the difference between Hitler and Churchill and their artistic abilities thus, “Churchill, you call him a painter, Hitler he was a painter, he could paint an entire room, two coats, one afternoon!”
Two years ago I was walking through the campus of an FE College, which I then served as a part time lecturer. My academic background to that point was exclusively within Higher Education. I have also been a film- maker and writer and toiled in the corporate world. I have worked occasionally with the OUVS (Open University Validation Service) in various guises and traveled the world extensively as a filmmaker, writer and educator.
I was now going to lecture to various FE (Further Education) media classes. I had just agreed to do some work with the OCR (Oxford and Cambridge Review Board) and I thought it would benefit me to learn from teaching at younger levels, between Year 11 GCSE groups on through BTEC’s, National Awards, National Diplomas and Foundation Degrees.
I also thought it might be fun but I soon realized that previously I had been spoiled, having led the film production courses at the Bournemouth and Northern Film Schools. There we had our pick of the best and the brightest, amongst the most motivated and able film and media production students in the world. Thereafter I directed the behemoth Media Production Centre at the University of East London, servicing the media needs of thousands from within my beautiful air conditioned office where I could muse on the finer points of media and creative teaching whilst looking on the changing moods of the River Thames. Now I trudged across a very different vista, the mud-splattered college, more of a building site than a cloistered hall of academe.
The FE students looked more bovine than eager. They dripped social worker from their knuckles, which dragged alarmingly close to the floor. They smoked even though this was prohibited, they swore, even though this was not permitted, they spat on the floor, despite this being both foul and a health hazard. They had very little to recommend them. To paraphrase a Winston Churchill quote, “They have all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”
There is a difference between right and wrong. One of the places these values must now be taught is our place of learning. This is considered controversial, but one wonders why. I imagine it wouldn’t even be a subject for discussion if families had succeeded in inculcating a responsible attitude into the young.
I come from an interventionist, muscular Judeo Christian left of centre background. I use my heart and brain to combat ignorance since otherwise it grows and morphs into hate, prejudice and victimization.
In education you must seek to teach the whole person, not just the subject on the curriculum. You should try and create a moral geography for them to explore. We might well not always do what’s right, the Lord alone knows how very weak I am, but at least we should try and understand the differences between right and wrong. This belief system dictates that you don’t walk past the unacceptable but make your objection known. I stopped a young man who spat on the ground and told him that this was a disgusting and unacceptable way to behave, as it was both unhealthy to others and made him look silly. There was a moment when he considered doing something nasty to me but then he relented, smiled and apologized, his friends took note. A very small victory, but nevertheless I was reinforced in the view that you stop aberrant behavior immediately or not at all.
I was not shocked, or even moderately surprised that the attendance at my first lecture was low, and many students rolled in late, listening to their MP3 players, talking on their mobile phones or to each other. I was disappointed, and frankly quite insulted. In the armed services you salute the badge, not the man. Your position as a teacher warrants common courtesy. But how do you set about achieving this?
I formed the view that before one can coherently teach such a group you have to create a moral topography, setting out the parameters, the borders of acceptable behavior. I talked to my peers. Most of them were bowed by the weight of trying and failing over a long period, to work within systems that creaked with inadequacies.
I come from a film making background where punctuality, attendance, honesty and top performance are demanded all the time. These would be my building blocks. My message being that if you didn’t meet these simple media demands you were not worthy to study these subjects. Luckily for me, there were two other lecturers with similar views, one a born again Christian; although our observances were different our values are similar. The other person who joined our informal, ad hoc group of like-minded souls was a Moslem young woman. A strange team indeed, heard the one about the Jewish middle-aged man, the young Greek Cypriot born again Christian woman and the Islamic girl whose family came from Sri Lanka. But we shared a desire for “old fashioned” or core values.
We shared some similar rules, and these were simple and straightforward. No lateness would be tolerated, no swearing, no MP3’s or mobile phones and no gossiping in class. Non-attendance without an accepted reason had to end. Work not handed in on time would fail that unit. We all felt that we needed to weed out those students who were simply in the wrong place studying the wrong course and remove others from the student number who saw media study as a soft option, and this was quickly achieved. The results for the vast bulk that remained with us were astonishing and positive. I shall cite some of these a bit later. Most interesting and rewarding for me was the fact that the 20% or so of my students who wanted media jobs when I started to teach them had grown to more than 80% by the time I left the college.
There are many ways in which we pass on knowledge. The British convention is that we generally break this down into two main areas, theory and practice, we label the latter, vocational, and there is a definite diminutive contained in the word, vocational. It is as if those who go on to practice are somehow the intellectual inferior of those that study and theorise on that practice; but we are left asking how there will be something to deconstruct if no one is there to facilitate the construct. There has also long been a separation of these so that they now form a divide, more like a chasm within our academic institutions. These are characterised by many as follows, if we are from the Russell Group or its devotees, we are more pure than the driven academic snow, and we, naturally assume the languid air of Oxbridge and try to turn the study of the arts into a purely theoretical, deconstructive construct. If we have our origins within the old Polytechnics the likelihood is that we are supposed to have swallowed the opposite view, we only teach button pushers so that they can go and get a job in media.
My contention is that we should be striving to do the exact opposite. We must seek to use the teaching of the creative arts to help students explore the possibilities and thinking this space allows them to study and understand, morally and within a social context, the complexities of humanity.
Those six months saw me striving to do this within the local FE College. I had, with some success, explored similar ideas at HE, in institutions known more for their practical abilities to teach the best young talent how to produce media rather than how to read that media.
I believe it is of even more importance to explore at all available levels, our place within the universal issues, such as racism and morality. It is not enough to teach how students can best produce creative media unless they have some understanding of why they should do so other than to purely entertain and how such creative output can be used to affect themselves and the society they inhabit.
This supposed divide between the how and the why has its equivalence in Germany. I had just returned from Berlin where one of my hosts from the Ministry of Culture was of mixed German and Jewish parentage. I asked her if she therefore had a terrific ability to tell jokes from her Jewish side but an inability to understand them being half German? I felt enabled to make this statement as my family is Jewish and had spent a great many years in Germany.
What does all traditional religion or reasonable humanist code of behaviour tell us? That there have to be moral parameters, there is a difference between right and wrong, and some form of deity or group ideology to judge our actions.
At the college these articles of faith had, or were all breaking down. It was accepted, for the sake of a quiet life, when a student swore in class, or spat on the floor outside, or smoked in a non-smoking area, or was not punctual, or simply did what they wanted to do. I had never seen anything like it and, I suspect, this is the underbelly that we all want to disappear, or sweep under the collective carpet.
There is a contradiction in the British FE and HE systems and how the funding systems work. The UK had not suffered from a lack of general funding for more than a decade. In fact it has been awash with certain types of money. It’s what kind of money, applied how, that has been, and remains the problem. I have visited, worked at or examined at many institutions in this country and there are new buildings going up, or recently constructed everywhere. These capital projects cost billions of pounds. We have seen waves of expenditure follow the growth of the HE sector from an historic 4% of the requisite population when I was a youth, to a figure more than ten times that number now. What doesn’t track is the revenue spending to go along with it. Therefore we have built a great many new buildings, fill them with fantastic hardware but are hard pushed to staff it strategically as we would like or use the correct software. This was exacerbated by rather too much focus on and value of Research and arcane, systems of evaluation that have not, sometimes delivered as they might.
This resulted in strange anomalies. My department in UEL was top rated for research. It also had a stellar publication record. Nevertheless many of its students were not vocationally taught to a sufficient level. We constructed a magnificent Docklands campus where we were great in certain disciplines, but lacked such excellence alarmingly in others. We could recruit from around the world but our retention rates were alarmingly poor. Of course, this is part of a bigger picture of many such institutions with similar problems and we’re not here to deal with those here other than to state that there is an obvious, urgent and long term need for universities to be dealing with these problems at a local and not national area.
The English higher education system in general rewards form filling, target achievement, throughput and exit velocity more than it does excellence. Some beacons of old fashioned teaching are still getting it right, about twenty of our universities is my estimate. These exemplify how the system could work in general for this country, if there were the will and standards. These institutions make certain that rigorous academic standards are maintained. I am convinced that their doing so has largely ensured that they continue to secure large amounts of additional funding, and the maintenance of this gold standard of quality has meant they all recruit well. That is at the macro level, whereas most of us spend the majority of our time working daily within the micro level.
We can only expect to overcome the bigger problems by starting at the ground floor and building on those foundations. The one thing the failed central command economies of the past century have taught us is that top down philosophies in big institutions like education simply does not work. An example of how wrong this is all going is that the system is simply dysfunctional. What is required is either not possible or cannot be achieved.
For example at the FE College the college expected me, like all their lecturers, to prepare a lesson plan broken down into twenty-minute sections, even if the lesson was three hours long, and this had to be validated, in detail for every student. There also had to be an Assignment Brief and this had to be validated, in detail. This had to fit within a Scheme of Work, and this had to be validated, in detail. I could go on but I think you get the picture. Added to this was when I was faced with a student with any learning difficulties I was to give up to half my lesson time to that student exclusively. I asked whether, if I had two such students I would then have no time for anyone else.
I will never forget my first lessons at the college. I set about trying to find out more about the students, their levels of knowledge and interests. I discovered a great divide between their ideas of what creative arts are, and what their place within them could be. There was an appreciation, an enjoyment of movies, music and some television, but not for much more than sheer visceral pleasure. There was no understanding of why they liked something, no deeper grasp of what an artist might be trying to say, or why. No inkling that they were participating in an ongoing creative interaction that affected every aspects of their lifestyles.
I set about my bridge building by giving the students a few simple tests on the subjects at hand and their scores averaged well below 40%, which was simply not an acceptable base level. I also asked them about themselves and what they thought was the purpose of the creative industries, most specifically with regards to TV, newspapers, radio and advertising. Their responses indicated that they had never been asked to seriously consider such subjects although all of these issues should have been at the core of their courses. Most disturbing to me, when I asked them about their take on conspiracy theories there was a general consensus that 9/11 was an American fabrication and the moon landings were faked. Conversely the same students believed there had been Alien abductions and UFO sightings were definitely real. I asked all of them for any proof of any of these statements and all pointed to me to the “net”. What they meant was that their had been videos posted on You Tube etc. which made such claims, and this being their source, it was believed. Not only was there no rigor, there was little self-discipline, no understanding of gathering evidence to support any argument. When I asked one of the students why she believed in the crop circles and not the existence of man’s landings on the moon she told me that her dad had told her about the former, and he knew about these things, and she’d seen a part of documentary on You Tube which said that the Americans fakes the landings, and you could tell by the fact that their flag was “mistakenly” taut, when, in fact there was no air to blow it in that direction on the moon. I pointed out that this was not a mistake and that NASA had prepared the flag to look good in zero atmospheres. Why would students of any level ignore the evidence provided by regular media but accept unknown sources, or electronic gossip, buzz marketing and simple anonymous malice. The reason is that people are unable to differentiate between the sheer proliferations of sources pouring toward them in an unending torrent. What looks good, panders to baser instincts, looks cool and entertains is often given greater credence than formal, forensic evidence, if the latter is perceived as boring.
My recent direct experience touches on various FE levels of study I was teaching. Elements in which these students were particularly weak were Key Skills, particularly writing ability, research and anything theoretical. Therefore whatever else we did regarding the moral questions had to include communication in writing that I would reinforce by creating a vigorous verbal debating group. It was essential that we used popular language rather than the language of film, media or communication, the subjects I was covering, to enable this process. We wanted to make complex thought processes as accessible as possible, as easily as we could.
Apart from all the reasons I have touched upon earlier I was very disturbed to witness various forms of overt and covert racism between the students. Therefore there were reasons beyond the theoretical for me to address these issues. I used very simple systems to explore these ideas in class and they centered on our classes watching films, which we then debated and they then wrote about. I picked films that examined important social issues and did so dramatically. The films were, “This is England” and “La Haine” about racism in England and France, “Pierpont” regarding capital punishment and “We Were Soldiers” touching on heroism of different types and patriotism. All touched on the human condition and dispensed with stereotypes. As each film was playing I would write headings for them to include in their essays. The idea being to stimulate thought regarding issues that touch all our lives and to make the students aware of themselves within the larger society. By picking films from three countries we were immediately able to dispense with racial stereotypes about the French, Americans, Arabs, Jews, Vietnamese and others. It opened the student eyes regarding violence, capital punishment, sexual politics and the differences between people being less important than that which they have in common.
Although I cannot claim to have created or discovered forensic evidence with regards to the impact that this and other initiatives had on these students we can at a base level inform you that the students themselves believe it has changed their perceptions. Our attendance, punctuality and achievement results all became exemplars. After shaking out some students, who perhaps, in retrospect should not have been there in the first place, we achieved near 100% attendance and punctuality and delivery of on-time work. The results were about 20% higher than those previously achieved. The students told me they had never been happier, and this, for me, was perhaps the biggest reward. They now clearly understood the purpose of their course of study and what they should be gaining from it.
It is past time for our educational authorities to realize that their responsibilities stretch beyond successful recruitment.
Last week the film composer Maurice Jarre died. He was 84 when he passed away, and it was many years since I worked with him. I can’t pretend to an intimate knowledge of the man, but I well remember his sparkling ability and Gallic charm.
The major film compositions of his career were the David Lean films he created the music for. Amongst his master works was the wonderful Lawrence of Arabia the poignant and unforgettable Doctor Zhivago, who can forget the haunting “Lara’s Theme?” and Passage to India. He went on to score films, such as “Ghost”, “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”, “Fatal Attraction”, “The Longest Day” and many others.
He also wrote the music for more than 150 films, and included amongst these was a film I Line Produced, Shout at the Devil, which starred Lee Marvin and Roger Moore.
I remember the first days of the recording sessions at De Lane Lea studios in Wembley, London, for several good reasons. First amongst these was the strange behavior of the film director, the late Peter Hunt. As was customary on the first day of a new major film music recording the studio boss invited the film and music honchos to a set lunch in his very luxurious boardroom. Peter told me that he had a previous appointment and wouldn’t be able to attend and asked me to forward his apologies to the studio boss. I did so. It would be nearly 25 years before I saw Peter Hunt again. I later found out that he had gone to Rome to interview for a directing job for Carlo Ponti, the Italian producer husband of the wonderful Sophia Loren, and decided to never return.
Ponti then telephoned me for a private reference for Mister Hunt, and I refused to make any comment, to which Carlo said, “You have told me everything I need to know!” He never employed Peter.
Back to Maurice and that first day of our sessions. As usual our music fixer was the extremely experienced and knowledgeable Jack Fishman, and present was an entire symphony orchestra of British session musicians, amongst the best in the world. I looked from our glass booth down onto the hundred or so musicians and noticed that there were five grand pianos lined up next to one another. I couldn’t understand the need for any more than the normal complement of the single grand piano so asked Jack Fishman why there was a need, on this occasion, for more. He shrugged his expressive and world weary shoulders and told me; “Maurice feels he needs five, believe me, I had to talk him down from seven or eight!”
I had expressed what others were thinking, as I could see others nodding their heads in agreement. Taking my producer duties seriously I presumed there had to be some kind of mistake and went down to the studio to question the maestro himself. The scene the first piece of music was being recorded for was the approach of the mighty German First World War battleship, the Blucher. Maurice Jarre smiled at my approach, as he interrupted his preparation to conduct the huge orchestra. “There is a problem?” he asked, I told him of my concerns. He shrugged and explained to me that he needed all these pianos to play together, tightly synchronized with the action. He showed us all what he meant as the first music cue appeared on screen. All the pianists hit the same few notes in perfect time with one another. It did sound wonderful, but as I pointed out gently to Maurice, the same effect could easily, and much less expensively, have been achieved by our recording the notes on one piano and duplicating this as many times as he liked thereafter. “But” Maurice insisted, “It certainly would not have the same quality!”
Some times we producers just have to shake our head and withdraw, making sure we learn the lessons, and make sure they don’t happen again.
I hope Maurice has as big an orchestra as he wants, wherever he now resides.
This week I was interviewed for a book about Ted Lewis, the author who wrote the novel “Jack’s Return Home”, which was the basis for the film “Get Carter” starring Michael Caine, directed by Mike Hodges, which my late father, Michael Klinger, produced.
The interviewer / author for the book about Ted is a young journalist from the North of the UK called Laurie Harvey. A charming fellow who asked all the right questions, Laurie made me think about some of those long gone days in Newcastle when that film was made.
I was supposedly passing though the town, at the invite of my dad, whilst making my own film, “Extremes”, with my then business and filmmaking partner, Mike Lytton. We decided we were having way too much fun in Newcastle to bother continuing to our original destination of Glasgow.
Ted Lewis was a very talented novelist, but I remember him as being a bit of a social black hole. He struck me at the time as more than a bit too aggressive, drunk and depressed. I was then a 19 year old and very cocky filmmaker, and was not known for my perception.
Ted seemed an accident waiting to happen. Strangely similar to Keith Moon, the rock band, The Who’s drummer, who I worked with on my later film, “The Kids are Alright”.
On the surface both men appeared to be funny, jolly even, but underneath the veneer were deeply sad and unfulfilled. Laurie Harvey told me that at the very peak of Jack’s success, when he attended the film premiere of “Get Carter” in Newcastle having banked his very large payment for the rights, he had the feeling that life would be downhill from that point onwards. Sadly this proved to be the case. Within just a few years Ted lost his home, family and financial security. By the time he was in his mid thirties he had to return home to live with his mother, bankrupt.
Relatively soon he found another partner and wrote some television scripts for the famous “Z Cars” series but his drinking haunted him and for the last couple of years of his short life he played the piano in pubs in exchange for free drinks.
How many people, rich in talent but poor in luck, have died in poverty or obscurity because of their demons be they drink, drugs or some other addiction most likely born from some insecurity. What a pity when we see so much less of these potentially towering talents.
Ted had that kind of ability and I well remember reading his other books and outlines in the hope that we might find other gems to make more films from, but it was not to be. Perhaps Ted’s best epitaph is the fact that there are two books currently being written about him and the title of the film I am making about my father, has as its working title, “The Man Who Got Carter.”
