14 JULY 1987
A showing of Sammy and Rosie at nine in the morning. Frears and Audsley have been working all weekend, juggling with bits and pieces. It seems complete, except for some music which has been put on over the cellar scene and seems to dissipate the power of Claire’s performance at that point. Otherwise the film works powerfully, with a lot of soul and kick. We talk about how much has gone back in and Frears says how foolish it seems in retrospect to have taken out so much and then put it back. But of course that process of testing was essential, a way of finding out what was necessary to the film and what not.
We stand outside the cutting room in Wardour Street and Frears says: Well, that’s it then, that’s finished, we’ve made the best film we can. I won’t see it again, he adds, or maybe I’ll run it again in five years or something. Let’s just hope people like it.
Introduction to London Kills Me
One day in the summer of 1989 I was followed along the Portobello Road by a boy of about twenty-one. He was selling drugs, as were many people around there, but this kid was an unusual salesman. For a start, he didn’t mumble fearfully or try to intimidate. And he didn’t look strong enough to shove a person in an alley and rob them. He was open-faced, young and direct; and he explained unasked the virtues of the drugs he was selling — hash, acid, Ecstasy — holding them up as illustration. As I vacillated, he explained lyrically about the different moods, settings and amounts appropriate for each drug.
We started to meet regularly. He liked to stand outside pubs, discussing people in the street. He’d think about which drug they’d prefer and wonder whether they’d purchase it from him, perhaps right now. Then he’d follow them.
He relished the game or challenge of selling, the particular use of words and the pleasures of conscious manipulation. He liked to con people too, selling them fake drugs, or promising to deliver the deal to them later. On the whole he was proud of his craft. He reminded me of the salesmen in Barry Levinson’s The Tin Men. He was in a good position, that particular summer of love. He had a regular supply of drugs and there were plenty of customers. The kid knew there was a limitless market for what he had to sell. After all, drug-taking was no longer the sub-cultural preserve of those who knew its arcane language. Thirty years of a worldwide, sophisticated and mass culture, introduced by the Beatles, the Doors, Hendrix, Dylan and others, had spread the drug word, making certain drugs both acceptable and accessible. There was no combating it.
Now, new drugs like Ecstasy were especially in demand. Unlike LSD, for example, these were party drugs, weekend drugs, without noticeable after-effects. More usefully for the end of the 1980s, they were compatible with both holding down a full-time job and dancing in a field at four in the morning.
So most of the time the kid didn’t much care if he made a sale or not. He wasn’t desperate — yet. He moved from squat to squat and wasn’t yet weary of being ejected, often violently, in the middle of the night. Anyhow, if things didn’t go well he’d leave for Ibiza, Ecstasy Island, where many other young people were headed.
He loved to talk about himself, dwelling in vivid and creative detail on the fantastic adventures and tragedies of his life. Along with his drug dealing, these horrific and charming stories were his currency, his means of survival, enabling him to borrow money, ask a favour or stack up an ally for the future. So he told them to anyone who’d listen and to plenty of people who wouldn’t. Again, it was a while before these stories became repetitive and self-pitying.
This kid’s subject, his speciality let us say, or his vocation, was illegal drugs. He’d discuss enthusiastically the marvels and possibilities of Ecstasy, the different varieties of the drug and the shades of feeling each could induce. He looked forward to the new drugs he believed were being produced by hip chemists in San Francisco. This evangelical tone reminded me of the way LSD was talked about in the 1960s. I kept thinking that had the kid known about, say, the Victorian novel in the same detail, he’d have been set up for life by some university.
But a penchant for getting high and dealing to strangers was getting him banned from local pubs. He’d been stabbed, beaten up and slashed across the face. Sometimes he was picked up by the police, who ‘disappeared’ him into a police cell for two or three days, without charging him or informing anyone he was there. He’d been comforted and warned by social workers, probation officers and drug counsellors. Despite his glorious stories, he led a hard and painful life, not helped by the fact he was foolish as well as smart, indiscreet too, and without much foresight.
The intensity of this kid’s life as he ran around the rich city, stealing, begging, hustling, was the starting point for London Kills Me. But his activities were bound up with the new music — hip-hop, house, acid jazz — and the entrepreneurial bustle surrounding it; the bands, record labels, shops, raves and warehouse parties organised in the squats, pubs and flats of Notting Hill. This reliable generational cycle of new music, fashion and attitude amounted to a creative resurgence reminiscent of the mid-1960s, and, of course, of the mid-1970s punk and New Wave, which was DIY music of another kind.
Notting Hill seemed an appropriate setting for the London branch of what had been a mostly provincial and northern music movement. The North Kensington area had always had a large immigrant community: Afro-Caribbean, Portuguese, Irish, Moroccan. Many Spanish people, escaping fascism, had settled there. Its mixture of colours and classes was unique in London and it had a lively focal point, the Portobello Road and its market. Of the other previously ‘happening’ places in London, Chelsea had become a tourist’s bazaar; and Soho had been overrun by the advertising industry. But like both these places, Notting Hill had cultural history. George Orwell was living in the Portobello Road in 1928 when he started to write the first pages of a play (one character of which was called Stone). Colin McInnes was part of the area’s 1950s bohemia. In the late 1960s the seminal Performance was set and filmed there. Not long afterwards Hockney took a studio in Powis Terrace. And in the 1970s the Clash’s first album featured a montage of the 1976 carnival riot on its cover.
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In 1959, after seeing Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, Colin McInnes wrote: ‘As one skips through contemporary novels, or scans the acreage of fish-and-chip dailies and the very square footage of the very predictable weeklies, as one blinks unbelievingly at “British” films, it is amazing — it really is — how very little one can learn about life in England here and now.’
A few years later his wish began to be granted. There developed a tradition, coming out of Brecht and stemming from the Royal Court and the drama corridor of the BBC, of plays, series and films which addressed themselves to particular issues — unemployment, or racism, or housing — usually seen through the inescapable British framework of class. This work was stimulated by the idea of drama having a use or purpose, to facilitate society’s examination of itself and its values, creating argument and debate about the nature of life here and now. Many actors, writers, directors and designers were trained to see their work in this way.