Why pop’s rarely a hit at the pictures

Rock On Film Fred Goodman Running Press £29.99 ★★★★★

Movies can bring dinosaurs back to life, send us to the rings of Saturn, drop us on a beach on D-Day. They do these things brilliantly, precisely because they are so outlandish. Where movies regularly fail is in believably evoking the lively pleasures of normal life: football, sex and pop music, for instance.

This is perhaps the only thing Escape To Victory and Last Tango In Paris have in common. Film director Penelope Spheeris has said that ‘people that make movies generally do not understand music’. The reverse is also true, though, as anyone who has watched Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains The Same or Mariah Carey’s Glitter will confirm.

The contention of this compact,

handsome volume, from which the Spheeris quote comes, is that, at their best, music movies can recreate the spirit and detail of rock, pop and

soul, and it is the best that this book is concerned with.

Effectively this is a primer for the best movies featuring, or spiritually linked to, rock and its culture. Fred Goodman is a former editor at Rolling Stone, and movies about quintessentially English phenomena such as Dr Feelgood and Joe Meek find space alongside the founding fathers of American rock, portrayals such as Gary Busey’s of Buddy in The Buddy Holly Story and Lou Diamond Phillips’s of Ritchie Valens in La Bamba.

All the famous blockbusters are here but Goodman also casts his net wide, sometimes quirkily so. For instance, he devotes a deal of space to praising the unlikely combination of John Boorman and The Dave Clark Five in Catch Us If You Can, which concentrates less on performances of the quintet’s thumpingly troglodytic music than it does on the strangely melancholic romanticism and odd plot involving stuntmen and a meatmarketing campaign.

He makes the good point that Elvis’s movies are largely so bad because, unlike music where he was drawn to the art of the outlier and the oppressed – blues, country and gospel – his films are studies in comfortable banality. The one attempt to deviate from this, Wild In The Country, about a violent and troubled youth, was mangled by the studio and flopped. Cue three more cheesy musicals set in Hawaii and several million dollars in Elvis’s (and Colonel Parker’s) bank account.

Goodman is a decent writer in that American rock-press way. Pink Floyd’s pompous The Wall ‘doesn’t so much know its own mind as ramble around in it’, and Magical Mystery Tour (The Beatles, left) is ‘long on Nehru jackets and short on plot’. He is not averse to fun. Space and kudos are rightly given to the hilarious Rutles movie All You Need Is Cash and the perennial This Is Spinal Tap. As that last classic has it, it’s a fine line between stupid and clever. The best pop movies, like Johnny Cash, walk that line.