'Rock of Ages' is an exemplification of the excesses that made the 1980s such a dark period in history, says Russell Brand, while Mary J Blige reckons it's an accurate portrayal of the cut-throat nature of the music business. DONALD CLARKEtries to keep up with the pair
WE ARE LIVING in the era of the perpetual recycle. No musical form, however frightful, seems immune from reinvention, reconstitution or revivification. Total abandonment to the backward glance arrived about 15 years ago when, to the disgust of brave rock-war veterans, style gurus finally decided that even the lounge sounds of Andy Williams and Bert Kaempfert were now acceptable. Is there any form so horrible that it can resist the inclination to repackage?
You could make a case for 1980s poodle-rock. The overblown ballads of REO Speedwagon, Journey and Foreigner never really constituted a movement. It was more of a spontaneous psychological breakdown: a reflex response to the awareness that rock was facing middle age.
Once we were shot of those guys, we were never going to invite them back to the tent. Right? You already know how this goes. After featuring prominently in The Sopranos, Family Guy and Glee, the song Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey somehow became the most unavoidable song of the current century. Meanwhile, a strange jukebox musical named Rock of Ages was progressing from Los Angeles to off-Broadway and onwards to the Great White Way itself. Conceived in 2006 by one Chris D’Arienzo, the show shoehorned an array of bombastic rock atrocities into a story concerning threats to a Sunset Strip club named The Bourbon Room. Now the piece has become a bizarre film starring Tom Cruise, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Russell Brand.
That last, hairy comic has touched down in London to evangelise the revival of the power ballad. It has to be said that Brand does look the part. That combination of teased hair and skinny jeans – a pastiche of the rock style worthy of Mötley Crüe – allows him to slip comfortably into the part of a wasted hanger-on with a passion for guitar noodling. But Russell has not been playing the game. A few days earlier, appearing on Sky News, he admitted that he was never a great fan of vulgar 1980s rock. He was more of a Smiths fan, apparently.
“Oh I wouldn’t say I was sniffy about it,” he tells me with a camp bellow of mock outrage. “But I didn’t care for all that when I was a kid – where everyone had that hair. I thought them people was all a bit daft. Twenty years later, just look at my own attire. It’s not that I was making judgments. But I did like The Cure, The Smiths and all that stuff.”
The very presence of Brand in the film confirms how difficult it is to address 1980s pop rock without drifting into irony. The accidental wave was pitched at such a heightened intensity that it always seemed to be offering its own irresistible parody. It is probably just as well that, arriving in 1983, This is Spinal Tap was too early to catch the phenomenon. Even the makers of that peerless film would struggle to surpass the excesses on display. Some of the music slipped into the heavy metal Venn diagram: Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar on Me, for example. Bands such as Foreigner, which featured bits of the famously difficult King Crimson, had connections with progressive rock. The likes of Wasp and Mötley Crüe came across as unhinged comedy acts. What linked them all was a taste for over-production, an enthusiasm for semi-operatic screeching and – thumbing their nose at punk – an undiluted passion for showy guitar solos.
Towards the end of Rock of Ages, one character is ridiculed for being lured into a pop band that looks very like New Kids on the Block. The implication is that this music is inauthentic, manufactured and trivial. Yet few sane observers, gifted the power of hindsight, will find anything gritty, spontaneous or rebellious (not that these things matter all that much) in the absurd posturing of bands such as REO Speedwagon or Europe. Everyone is playing the same compromised game.
It is not stretching the argument to see the phenomenon as a reflection of certain unlovely political and social trends of the time. This was the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The post-war consensus had broken down and accumulating conspicuous wealth was suddenly fashionable.
“I was asked if this music exemplified the excesses that made this decade such a dark period in history,” Brand muses. “I think it’s precisely that. It shows the hedonistic celebration of indulgence while lacking the integrity of 1960s music, which was such an emblem of the counter-culture.”
Well, yes. It is, however, easy to overstate the “integrity” exhibited by the pioneers of rock. Reports of the Rolling Stones’ activities often call to mind goings on in the court of the Borgias. Brand remains, however, positive about that earlier era.
“True rock’n’roll music, as I understand it, is the representation of freedom and anti-establishment feeling as presented through music,” he says. “As I said before, it was a powerful counter-cultural emblem. Whether it is Elvis Presley with his untelevisable sexuality or the Beatles with their jaunts into mysticism or the Rolling Stones with their bad-boy arrogance, it seemed to hint at the possibility of change and showed youth in itself as being representative of the possibility of change.”
So, was the 1980s wave really a corruption of those supposed ideals? “Having experienced the music of the film through being in it, I think it’s fantastic. It’s perfect for the medium of a show. It’s joyous and ebullient and fun. Why not?”
He is right in suggesting that Rock of Ages, despite all the decadence on display, sells the perm-rock dawn as an innocent and charming period. Tom Cruise turns up as an addled, messianic rock star with Axl Rose’s bandana and Jim Morrison’s taste for florid, quasi-romantic bad poetry. But most of the musicians come across as naive, charming, bumptious teenagers. Managers are the only truly evil people. Paul Giamatti, huge mobile phone in one hand, wad of illicit cash in the other, plays a stereotypical example of the breed.
Mary J Blige, the admirable, raunchy RB singer, has a better understanding than most of how management can extort naive young musicians. Looking absolutely fabulous – huge spectacles, a neat red blazer, immaculately coiffed hair – Blige is also at the junket to discuss her role as the owner of a disconcertingly unthreatening strip club.
“The story the film paints is pretty accurate,” she tells me. “If you don’t know your business they will rob you. And if you don’t know who you are they will rob you of your identity and what you want to be.”
So how did she set about protecting that identity? “You fight for your identity. You might not get all your money if you don’t know your business. I didn’t know my business. So, I got robbed pretty bad. I could have been way, way more successful if I had gone to college and got an education in accounting or law or business psychology.”
Then there are the lures of drugs and booze. “To speak for myself, I was already into that before I was in the music business because the environment I lived in was horrible. A lot of things happened to me when I was a little girl. It snowballed out of control.”
Blige’s sobering comments noted, it is probably a waste of time to over-analyse the sociological and political meanings of Rock of Ages. All eras of pop music had their outbreaks of excess and vulgarity. Are we better off with the current wave of primped, granny-friendly boy-bands? Who would wish to return to the prog-rock madness of the early 1970s? Still, the 1980s now seem, in pop-cultural terms, as distant as the Jacobean era.
Somewhat predictably, Russell Brand claims to remember little of the period. When asked to reminisce, he drags up a bizarre anecdote concerning his adventures in a disused garage near the family home. “I got my own padlock and kept some mice in there. But then I did start weeing in there. So, I ruined it as an environment. That is my great memory of the 1980s.” Didn’t he like the fashion? “Just the mice. That’s all I remember.” Make of that what you will.
Rock of Ages is on general release
