The last of England: rewatching Jarman's Jubilee as Britain burns

As a tribute to Elizabethan rule (#2), I went to a screening of Derek Jarman's Jubilee (1978) over the jubilee weekend and breathed in its heady mix of punk pantomime, gratuitous violence, sex and rock & roll. This blog, dedicated to Her Majesty and all of the royal family, is what I thought of the film. Having not seen Jubilee for decades, my memory of it was cloudy. Er, it's got Toyah Wilcox in it. And Adam Ant. It's a sort of pastiche of punk anarchy in a London wasteland. It's patchy. All true, I guess, but seeing it half a lifetime later I thoroughly enjoyed it as a sustained piece of camp film-making. It's not a film "about" punk but it's probably ten times more punk than one that is (take a bow Pistol). Anyway, here are a few observations about Jubilee:

*The framing device of Elizabeth I being transported through time to 1977 accompanied by the alchemist John Dee and a black-eyed angel called Ariel is very pleasing. We get Elizabethan verse delivered with theatrical seriousness and a sense of the occult and something extra-dimensional. 

*While the violence and general anti-social behaviour of the quasi-punk girl gang (Jordan's Amyl Nitrate, Toyah Wilcox's Mad, Jenny Runacre's Bod, Little Nell's Crabs and Hermine Demoriane's Chaos) is sometimes slightly tiring to watch, it's clearly a key motif. The gang's revenge killing of two swaggering motorcycle cops is part of Jubilee's general anti-authority theme. But also, pointless violence seems to be the point - it's Clockwork Orange but for punks.

*The story - such as it is - of Adam Ant's character (the Kid) trying to break into the music industry fits with the times. Listless, fascinated by pop fame (he stares at a TV screen showing punk bands: the Banshees, er Adam & The Ants), The Kid rejects the advice of two punk brothers from the wider gang who warn him not to hook up with a wildly decadent pop mogul called Borgia Ginz (yes, those music industry types are Renaissance despots). What will happen to the Kid now? Nothing good, probably. 

What else? Well, the acting is what film critics normally call "uneven". It ranges from the blank woodeness of Jordan and Ant (they're the blank generation) through to Runacre's self-possession and Orlando/Jack Birkett's fantastically excessive cartoon villianry as Borgia, all lunatic laughter and lasciviously camp speech. And what about the music? The punk rock? Slightly surprisingly, this works well. Normally films make a complete mess of this (tinny sound, parodic performances), but Jubilee cleverly shifts most of the punk onto a screen (snatches seen on a small black-and-white TV set) or other at-one-remove locations (Jayne County singing along to one of her own songs shortly before getting bumped off by the punk-droog gang). Meanwhile, when the Kid auditions for Borgia, his Adam & The Ants-style band don't look massively authentic on a huge theatre stage but they do sound pretty loud. Staying with music, the slightly spooked synth sounds provided by Brian Eno create the film's best moods. They underpin the strangeness of the Elizabeth/Dee/Ariel scenes and score some of the best visuals in the film - derelict dockside housing and south-east London's pre-gentrification wilderness terrain. My favourite scene in the film is an early one where Jordan ballet dances amid noxious black smoke from bonfires in a desolate street as masked figures (including a naked man) look on. It's virtually a Crass cover brought to life. Like Crass, Jarman's polemical anger about a run-down yet arrogantly superior country trading on former glories (royalty, the empire, the confident "sex appeal" of an old-fashioned uniformed man) is central to the film. It's not subtle, but Jarman never was. It's proudly polemical, out and proud.

Jordan: dancing as Britain burns

OK, time to bring up the credits on this dashed-off jubilee weekend Jubilee blog. It was fun to see the Slits appear in the credits to a contemporary film about the '77 London punk scene and, my fellow republicans, it was fun to see Jarman's excellent film on the very evening that Britain in 2022 treated its loyal subjects to a stunningly terrible night of Queen, Duran Duran, Rod Stewart and Alicia Keys. Looking back now, 1977 was actually a time of hope and possibility. Punk fetishised boredom and aestheticised WW2 bomb-sites, but union membership was high and FE colleges teemed with people on full grants. Fast forward to the Platinum Jubilee and we're a broken country of zero-hours contracts and student debt. Is it the last of England? Maybe.