Last week two of Julian Temple’s films on Seventies alt.cult Britain, Oil City Confidential and The Filth & the Fury, were broadcast on BBC4 and FilmFour respectively. Both films clearly demonstrate Temple’s innate sensitivity and understanding to this era and a striking knack for bringing these events to life in vivid, electrifying detail. Raw footage, often previously unseen, is deftly spliced with reflective talking heads from the period and film sample interludes to carry the narrative along (although on Oil City Confidential this does become an aggravating intrusion towards the end).
Out of the two films, Oil City Confidential is the strongest and most fascinating due, in part, to the largely uncommented upon Dr. Feelgood and the alluring strangeness of the Canvey Island landscape. Wilko Johnson, Dr. Feelgood’s charismatic guitarist, is part unhinged eccentric, part erudite thinker and wholly, immensely engaging. Curiously enough, although Oil City Confidential and The Filth & the Fury overlap historically, with Glen Matlock praising Dr. Feelgood in Oil City Confidential, the historical lens here could be decades apart. Whereas Feelgood’s Britain is all communal bonds, joyous knees ups in Canvey Island pubs and the freedom of the open road, Punk Britain hones in on the sheer absurdities of Seventies Britain (inexplicable fashion, cosy TV, socialised into accepting stupidity) and its resolute solutions: pent-up aggression, destroying generational deference and transgressing the postwar consensus of genteel Britannia all round.
Arguably, both sides of Britain existed side by side but Temple is astute enough to highlight the joyful – rather than downbeat – rawness of Seventies Britain in Oil City as a way of revealing just how sanitised and hemmed in British society is today. The life-affirming spirit and pint throwing pub chaos in both films suggests that the taming of public life today is almost complete. Could you imagine a smoking or drinking ban even being suggested in 1975, let alone enforced by law?
Watching the Filth & the Fury again, though, John Lydon comes across as contradictory rather than merely contrary. On the one hand he extols the virtues of being obnoxious, dangerous and ammoral, the next he denounces the late Nancy Spungen for being…. obnoxious, dangerous and ammoral. Likewise, his angry criticism of Virgin records for commercially exploiting Sid Vicious’ death is denounced, Catholic style, as ‘evil and immoral’. And while he expresses the righteous class anger common to 1970s kids, he’s quick to denounce ordinary people as royalist sheep and conformists in the same breath too.
Still, Lydon throughout is unsurprisingly thoughtful, compassionate, human and damming, while Cook, Jones and Matlock retain an honesty and integrity throughout the film. The punk story has been flogged and resold many times, but not as humane or as insightful as this. Even if Temple never makes another film again, his reputation is forever sealed by these two stone cold classics (although his Pandemonium from 2001 is an underrated peach.
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