Rock ’N’ Roll Plays Itself

John Scanlan

REAKTION BOOKS More screen grabs than you can shake a rock star at.

Subtitled ‘A Screen History’, this book begins with Don’t Look Back,

DA Pennebaker’s seminal 1965 Bob Dylan documentary that pioneered the fly-on-the-wall style. From there it’s back to the beginning: Elvis from the waist up on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1955, rocksploitation movies like The Girl Can’t Help It and Expresso Bongo and the Beatles bonanza.

Author John Scanlan traces the increasing use of music in films, such as in The Graduate, Apocalypse Now and Easy Rider,

and the rock-festival films of Monterey and Woodstock and the grisly denouement at Altamont in Gimme Shelter.

Mostly he keeps it chronological, but that gets trickier when you’ve got Pink Floyd playing an empty arena in Pompeii, hippies running around at Glastonbury Fayre, and star-studded events like The Last Waltz. Meanwhile, Bowie is bringing in a whole new theatrical element, there’s a wave of nostalgia movies

(That’ll Be The Day, American Graffiti), and directors are casting rock stars as actors.

Punk brings its own breed of filmmaker – Derek Jarman, Julien Temple, Don Letts – and after an interesting diversion on the failed video disc Scanlan gets stuck into the impact of MTV’s targeted marketing of black artists and the video promo. He then doubles back on himself to The Beatles’ Let It Be

and a couple of Stones concert films, before a dissertation on

Spinal Tap. From the sublime to the ridiculous, he climaxes with Metallica’s Some Kind Of

Monster and The Osbournes.

Fascinating stuff.