Reflections on ... Nina Hagen in Ekstasy (1985)

 

“Nina Hagen is at once the most outlandish of rock clowns and the most intensely committed and flaked-out female pop visionary since Patti Smith herself.” From Tim Holmes’ review of the album Nina Hagen in Ekstasy (1985) in Rolling Stone. 

Released forty years ago this month (February 1985) by CBS records: Nina Hagen in Ekstasy, the berserk German punk diva’s third solo studio album. Don’t compare it to Hagen’s earlier futuristic avant-garde science fiction tour de force Nunsexmonkrock (1982) and Ekstasy is a blast on its own terms (and it’s been a perennial favourite of mine since I was a teenager). 

/ Nina Hagen photographed by Paul Natkin in 1985 / 

The cover depicts Hagen as a punk rock Jayne Mansfield complete with shocking fuchsia hair extensions. The music inside more than lives up to this persona (aptly described by The Village Voice’s Evelyn McDonnell as “extraterrestrial demon-child”): it’s an anything goes explosion of lurid maximalist bad taste, gleefully throwing heavy metal, punk, psychedelia (she covers “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum), hip hop, reggae and dance music into the mix. As ever, Hagen’s lyrics offer her crackpot ruminations on religion ("Gott im Himmel”), spirituality, UFOs and politics (especially Russian politics). Never one for false modesty, on “Prima Nina in Ekstasy" Hagen declares, “I love myself and I know who I am / Don't you be afraid, doc / I'm the queen of punk rock …” “Universal Radio” is one of the catchiest things she ever did. Her version of “My Way” matches Sid Vicious’ rendition for ferocity. Growling “Go down on your knees and pray for peace …” on “The Lord’s Prayer”, Hagen seemingly channels Linda Blair in The Exorcist. The freaky “Atomic Flash Deluxe” (which ends with her chanting / warning “Babylon will fall”) could be an off-cut from Nunsexmonkrock. And her repeated references to “ekstasy” perhaps hint at what she was dabbling in at the time. 

To be fair, CBS gave the album a major promotional push: did they think Hagen could be their equivalent to Cyndi Lauper or Madonna? But of course, she was never destined for that kind of pop stardom. As Trouser Press’ critic concluded, “Hagen’s rampant individuality almost precludes mass comprehension, let alone full-scale popularity.” And in retrospect, Ekstasy represents Hagen’s artistic last gasp. After this, aside from a fun, trashy heavy metal cover of Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas” in ’89, she well and truly abandoned quality control and pretty much never recorded a decent note of music again!

Listen to Nina Hagen in Ekstasy below. 

Reflections on ... Faye (2024)

 

/ Pictured: portrait of Faye Dunaway by Helmut Newton for Vanity Fair magazine, 1987 /

Recently watched: Faye (2024), Laurent Bouzereau’s bittersweet HBO documentary about volcanic screen icon Faye Dunaway. 

It immediately disarms by emphasizing Dunaway’s scary diva reputation. Before we see her, we hear Dunaway imperiously snapping “Can we shoot? We need to shoot. I’m here now. C’mon. I really would like to shoot” then fretting “This is the worst seat in the world. I’m not happy with anything here … I need a glass of water, not a bottle.” This is followed by the notorious Johnny Carson clip of a desiccated and cantankerous Bette Davis raging she wouldn’t work with Dunaway again for a million dollars. And the revelation that co-star Jack Nicholson nicknamed her “Dread” (as in: “the dreaded Dunaway”).

From there, Faye provides context. Ambitious Southern farm girl Dorothy Faye Dunaway dragged herself up from humble beginnings through grit, talent and beauty (via old family photo albums we chart the emergence of her sensational cheekbones and hooded eyes), diligently studying her craft and toiling onstage until catching Hollywood’s attention. In her 1967 film debut The Happening, Dunaway is already weird and edgy (she was never a conventional ingénue). Faye scrutinizes Dunaway’s triumphs in New Hollywood classics like Bonnie & Clyde, Chinatown and Network but also her career disappointments (like Mommie Dearest – a previously verboten subject – and the aborted Maria Callas biopic, her passion project), personal tribulations (her father’s alcoholism, the death of her younger brother, her divorces, the adoption of her son Liam, the confession that Marcello Mastroianni was the love of her life. And – unexpectedly – her fixation with Blistex lip balm). 

Faye also reveals Dunaway’s battles with bipolar disorder and alcoholism. (I remember when Nina Simone was regularly described as “volatile” and “temperamental”. It wasn’t until after her death it was disclosed, she struggled with mental illness). The supportive Liam ponders, “If she wasn’t in so much pain, would she have been that good?” Dunaway is a mesmerizing actress – do we need her to also be "nice", “relatable” and “likeable”? As one of the featured talking heads replies when asked to summarize Dunaway in one word: “She’s complicated.”

Reflections on ... Little Richard: King and Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll (2023)

Just before the new documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything hit UK cinemas, the BBC swooped in with its own feature length effort, Little Richard: King and Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll by James House. (Apparently many of the same talking heads appear in both. Nile Rodgers reportedly recycles the same anecdotes!). The film is streaming on iPlayer now. I watched it last weekend. My thoughts! 

With hideous inevitability, Keith Richards and Ringo Starr are featured, so we get too much emphasis on how the Beatles and the Stones couldn't have existed without Richard. Then Rodgers recalls how when they recorded the awful Let's Dance album together, David Bowie declared he wanted to “sound like Little Richard looked”. I always cringe when boomer cultural gatekeepers imply a Black artist’s greatest contribution is “inspiring” white musicians. (See also: “Tina Turner taught Mick Jagger how to dance!”). 

More happily, one of the more eloquent and knowledgeable talking heads is New Orleans’ fierce Big Freedia - truly a flamboyant androgynous Black performer in Richard's lineage. Then there’s the regal and fascinating pioneering transgender showgirl / comedian Sir Lady Java, who acknowledges an awkward fact: it’s correct and understandable that Richard is being embraced as a queer icon, but as far as we know the great love of his life was a woman - the spectacular stripper Angel Lee, who resembled an escapee from a Russ Meyer movie!   

Prepare to be enraged that Specialty (Richard’s record label) withheld royalties, and that the ultra-square Pat Boone’s white bread cover versions vastly outsold Richard’s originals. (Boone appears and I don’t know whether to admire his guts or marvel at his lack of self-awareness!). At the 1988 Grammy Awards, while presenting Best Newcomer with Buster Poindexter, Richard went gloriously rogue. “And the winner is … me! The winner is – still me!” Then he accurately points out, “Y’all ain’t never given me no Grammy, and I’ve been singing for years!” He plays it mock aggrieved, and the audience laughs, but behind the scenes, a friend reveals this lack of acclaim caused Richard genuine tears. I will never stop being fascinated by this man. 

Further reading: my reflections on Little Richard's obituaries in 2020. 

The Next Lobotomy Room Film Club: Mahogany (1975) on Thursday 16 June 2022

 “There’s only one word to describe rich, dark, beautiful and rare. I’m going to call you … Mahogany!”

Yass, Queen! In honour of Pride Month, the Lobotomy Room film club (our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People), presents Mahogany (1975) starring fierce pop diva Diana Ross! Thursday 16 June downstairs at the fabulous Fontaine’s bar in Dalston! 

Seize this opportunity to celebrate Ross as an unassailable gay icon while she’s actually gracing our shores with her glittering presence this summer (she's performing at the Platinum Jubilee concert, a sold-out stint at the O2 Arena AND the “legends slot” at Glastonbury) with this berserk so-bad-it’s-GREAT camp classic in the tradition of Valley of the Dolls, Mommie Dearest and Showgirls! (Critic Roger Ebert dismissed Mahogany as a “big, lush, messy soap opera” - as if that’s ever a bad thing!). 

In this lurid rags-to-riches melodrama, Ross portrays Tracy Chambers, a poor but determined aspiring fashion designer from the gritty slums of Chicago. Instead, she’s “discovered” by a photographer (played by Tony Psycho Perkins) and winds up transformed into international supermodel Mahogany. But is success - and her decadent Euro-trash existence in La Dolce Vita Rome - all it’s cracked up to be? See the film that inspired everything from Beyonce to RuPaul and generations of drag queens to Paris is Burning! Throw on a chiffon cape, drip candle wax all over yourself and embrace the sequined lunacy of Mahogany on 16 June! 

Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club devoted to the cult, the kitsch and the queer! Third Thursday night of every month downstairs at Fontaine’s bar in Dalston! Two drink minimum. Inquire about the special offer £5 cocktail menu! Numbers are limited, so reserving in advance via Fontaine’s website is essential. Alternatively, phone 07718000546 or email bookings@fontaines.bar to avoid disappointment! The film starts at 8:30 pm. Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8:00 pm. To ensure everyone is seated and cocktails are ordered in time, please arrive by 8:15 pm at the latest. Facebook event page.

Reflections on ... Autumn Leaves (1956)

Friday night (5 October) we watched the gloriously tortured melodrama Autumn Leaves (1956) – an ideal way to conclude the British Film Institute’s Joan Crawford retrospective (Fierce: The Untameable Joan Crawford, August - October 2018). 

I was very disciplined about this Crawford season and only saw two other films: the freaky silent horror movie The Unknown (1927) (all about extreme body modification / amputation and obsessive love, which teamed young starlet Crawford with Lon Chaney as an armless knife thrower!) and A Woman’s Face (1941) (in which Crawford portrays an embittered facially-disfigured criminal who changes her ways once she undergoes plastic surgery and finds love). 

In the fifties, cinema’s bitch goddess extraordinaire Crawford made a whole cycle of middle-aged women-in peril-films that found her in love with dangerous younger men (see also Sudden Fear (1952) and Female on the Beach (1955)) - all of them great. In Autumn Leaves Crawford is Millicent Wetherby, a prim, lonely and quietly desperate forty-something spinster who finds herself unexpectedly romantically entangled with dishy, significantly younger man Burt Hanson (Cliff Robertson). They impulsively marry, and Millicent soon discovers – too late! – that she knows almost nothing about her profoundly troubled, weirdly childlike and secretive new husband. 

Millicent is meant to be a frumpy and sexually repressed typist, thus Crawford’s onscreen wardrobe is mostly restricted to high-necked, ultra-modest blouses and full skirts, with cardigans draped around her shoulders – but that “mousy” wardrobe is by Hollywood costume designer deluxe Jean Louis! Think haute couture librarian. (Crawford also wears a seriously pointy and gravity-defying underwired bullet bra throughout).

(An aside: Crawford was the original choice to play the role of Karen Holmes in the film From Here to Eternity (1953). Deborah Kerr was ultimately cast instead when the producers balked at Crawford’s demand that she bring her own cameraman. The single most famous image from From Here to Eternity is of Kerr and leading man Burt Lancaster kissing passionately on the beach while the surf crashes and foams around them. Interestingly, Autumn Leaves painstakingly recreates this scene!).

If – like me – you love watching Crawford undergo heavy emotional anguish, this is the film for you! In a mesmerizing, almost operatic performance Crawford’s face gradually becomes a taut, tense mask of suffering. (No one does eyes-glistening-with-tears quite like Crawford). Cliff Robertson is impressively tormented as Burt (a study of 1950s masculinity in crisis to compare with Robert Stack in Written on the Wind or James Mason in Bigger Than Life) and is fit as fuck (especially when wearing a white t-shirt so tight the outlines of his nipples are visible!). Stir into the mix Nat King Cole crooning the lushly romantic title track, Lorne Green and Vera Miles as a pair of genuinely sleazy villains, a  shocking scene of domestic violence and brutal close-ups of electric shock therapy and you get a vividly memorable and exemplary atomic-era “woman’s picture”. 

Perhaps the zenith of Crawford’s performance is when she encounters Green and Miles on the street and tears into them with a vengeful rant. "Where's your decency?” Millicent demands. “ In what garbage dump, Mr Hanson? And where's yours, you tramp? You his loving, doting fraud of a father and you, you slut! You're both consumed with evil so rotten your filthy souls are too evil for hell itself!" 

Autumn Leaves was directed by the hard-boiled Robert Aldrich (who makes some virtuoso, jarring stylistic choices. I especially love Aldrich's strange, dream-like flashback to Millicent's life as a younger woman). As viewers of Feud: Bette and Joan already know, Crawford and Aldrich would triumphantly reunite in 1962 for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?