The Mature Pop Music Film: Bombs, Beatlemania and Boorman

Abstract

The primitive British pop music film was conditioned under a Conservative government. The Labour Party, out of power since 1951 and long divided over nationalisation and the H-Bomb, found new hope with the election of a new leader in 1963. Harold Wilson knew how to drag the party away from its internecine quarrels and simultaneously rid it of its old-fashioned cloth-cap image. In his first speech as leader to the party conference he spoke passionately of his belief in a New Britain forged in ‘the white heat of a technological revolution’ and hitched his scientific promise to the country’s extant youthful energy and swagger, claiming that ‘we want the youth of Britain to storm the new frontiers of knowledge, to bring back to Britain that surging adventurous self-confidence and sturdy self-respect’.¹ While governments changed, the British pop music film continued to ‘re-present’ the preoccupations of the society it sought to entertain. From Gene Vincent’s hankering after a ‘Spaceship to Mars’ in It’s Trad, Dad! and past NASA naming such a vessel after Herman’s Hermits in Hold On! (Arthur Lubin, 1965) — without stopping at the sci-fi/pop film hybrid Gonks Go Beat (Robert Hartford-Davis, 1965), skilfully ‘cult’ marketed on its 2007 DVD release as ‘the Plan 9 From Outer Space of film musicals’ — the pop films of the period tapped into the new energetic and scientific Zeitgeist. Divisions remained, though, and concerns over a nuclear (non-)future increasingly ‘contaminated’ any proffered ‘gospel of happiness’.