11 APRIL 1987
In a tiny studio off the Harrow Road we film the interior scenes set in Danny’s caravan. Outside the caravan, a row of gas jets reproduce the waste ground fires. The props man and the assistant art director wearily dance behind the gas jets to reproduce the celebration of the ‘fuck’ night as Frances and Roland roll around naked. Frears sinks down in a chair next to me. ‘I’ve become completely paranoid,’ he says. ‘I’ve had it. Is this any good or not?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘What’s it about anyway?’ he says. ‘Fuck knows,’ I reply. He needs support and for no one to speak in too loud a voice. Anything above a whisper is interpreted as hatred. ‘We should have had more time,’ he says, after a while. ‘About two more weeks would have done it. But it would have cost £300,000 and we didn’t have it.’
I leave early and go to a book publishing party. On the way I see the police have stopped a black man and woman and are questioning them. It’s odd going to the party: the world going on as normal. Later, I see someone I recognise coming towards me, black hair sticking up, face white, a week’s growth on his face. I try and work out who it is. At last I know: Stephen Frears.
Later, I run into a friend who drags me away from the restaurant and tells me to sit in her car. She says there’s something I have to see that I’ve never seen before. Well, she drives me to an Arts Centre in west London. I take one look at the scene and try to leave. It looks as if she’s brought me to an Asian wedding. Women and kids of all ages are sitting on rows of chairs around the walls, not talking. The men, mostly Sikhs, stand together at the bar, talking. The women have gone to a lot of trouble tonight, really dressing up for this one in much jewellery, in salwar kamiz threaded with silver and gold. By ten o’clock the hall is packed with Asian families, with babies and children and old men and women. I’ve no idea what to expect. The stage is full of rock ’n’ roll gear.
The band comes on: eight men in red and white costumes. They look like assistants in a fast-food joint. One of them announces the singers: ‘Welcome the greatest Bhangra singers in the world!’ Two men bounce on stage in spangled T-shirts and tight white pants.
The music starts. The music is extraordinary. After years of colonialism and immigration and Asian life in Britain; after years of black American and reggae music in Britain comes this weird fusion. A cocktail of blues and r ’n’ b shaken with Indian film songs in Hindi, cut with heavy guitar solos and electric violin runs and African drumming, a result of all the music in the world being available in an affluent Asian area, Southall, near Heathrow Airport — it is Bhangra music! Detroit and Delhi, in London!
For a few seconds no one moves. The dance floor is a forbidden zone with everyone perched like tense runners around it. Then no one can hold themselves back. Men fly on to the floor. They dance together, thrusting their arms into the air and jerking their hips and thighs, tight-buttocked. Sometimes the men climb on each other’s shoulders or wrap their legs around others’ waists to be swept in dizzy circles inches from the floor. Women and girls dance with each other; women dance with tiny babies. An old Indian colonel with a fine moustache and military importance weaves amongst it all, taking photographs.
And they all know each other, these people. They were at school together and now they live in the same streets and do business with each other and marry amongst themselves. This gig, such a celebration, is unlike any other I’ve been to for years: it’s not to do with boys and girls trying to pick each other up; it’s not aggressive. Makes you aware of the violence and hostility you expect of public occasions in Britain.
12 APRIL 1987
Now we’ve almost finished filming, in the morning I sit down and try to write something new.
I’ve enjoyed being out of the house every day and the intense involvement of film-making. The cliché of film-making which talks of the set as being a family is inaccurate, though the set is hierarchical and strictly stratified in the family way. But unlike with a family the relationships are finite, everyone knows what they’re doing and there’s strong sense of purpose. The particular pleasure of a film set is in being with a group of people who work well and happily together.
Now, back at the desk, I immediately feel that writing is something of a dingy business. Why this unhealthy attempt to catch life, to trap it, rearrange it, pass it on, when it should be lived and forgotten? Why this re-creation in isolation of something that had blood and real life in it? The writer’s pretence and self-flattery that what is written is even realer than the real when it’s nothing of the kind.
16 APRIL 1987
To Frears’s house. He’s being photographed with his kids to coincide with the opening of Prick Up Your Ears. David Byrne comes by in a green and black tartan jacket, jeans, with a little pigtail. He has a luminous round face, and bright clear skin. It’s the first time I’ve met him, though his band, the Talking Heads, are heroes of mine. We walk round the corner to the Gate Diner where the waiter inadvertently sits us under a poster for Stop Making Sense. Various people in the street recognise him and a woman comes over to our table and gives him a note with her phone number on it, thanking him for his contribution to music and films.
Byrne is shy and clever and unpretentious. The disconcerting thing about him is that he listens to what you say and thinks it over before replying seriously. The only other person I’ve met who has done this is Peter Brook. A most unusual experience.
Byrne was given the script of Sammy and Rosie in New York by the great fixer David Gothard, and wants to do some music for it. Byrne has picked up some African music in Paris, composed by street musicians, which Frears thinks is superb. Byrne talks about using similar rhythms in the music he might do for Sammy and Rosie. We’ll show Byrne a cut of the movie as soon as possible and he can put music over the parts that interest him. The problem is time, as Byrne is composing the music for the new Bertolucci film, The Last Emperor, as well as writing the songs for the new Talking Heads record.
In the street waiting for a cab with Byrne I see the cops have stopped another car with black people in it. The black people are being very patient. What the hell is going on in this city?
18 APRIL 1987
Big day. First rough assembly of the film. I meet the editor, Mick Audsley, who is pulling the film on a trolley in its numerous silver cans through the streets. It’s 110 minutes long, he says. As it’s a rough-cut the film is a little like a home movie, with the sound coming and going; and of course there’s no music.
We watch it in a small viewing theatre off Tottenham Court Road. The first forty minutes are encouraging and absorbing and we laugh a lot. Shashi is excellent: both menacing and comic, though his performance seems to lack subtlety. I am elated all the same. Then it begins to fall apart. My mind wanders. I can’t follow the story. Entire scenes, which seemed good in themselves at the time of shooting, pass without registering. They bear no relation to each other. It is the centre of the film I’m referring to: the party, the ‘fuck’ night, the morning after, the breakfasts. Towards the end the film picks up again and is rather moving.
Each of us, cameraman, editor, director, me, can see the faults of the thing from our own point of view. I can see the character of Danny fading out; can see that the character of Anna is not sufficiently rounded; that the riots are not developed in any significant way.
But there are pluses: Shashi of course. And Frances, who portrays a strong, complex person very clearly. Roland too, especially as I’d worried that he might have been a little wooden.