History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs by Greil Marcus Read Free Book Online

make his final, defiant statement, his final, pathetic plea. The words he speaks are not that different from what Greene’s or Attenborough’s Pinkie says, but as speech they are in a different language. As Attenborough played him, Pinkie carried a patina of urbanity and an air of confidence. Riley catches all the years of privation since the economic ruin of the 1930s, the bombing of England in the 1940s, the postwar rationing of Pinkie’s childhood, a school class system that divides the worthy from the worthless except for those in places where no one is ever judged worthy, a coarsening of affect that has spread through the whole of British life, a longing for style that was just about to explode with the Beatles, Brian Epstein, Julie Christie, Peter Blake, Joe Meek, Lindsay Anderson, the Rolling Stones, RobertFraser, Joe Orton, the Who, Carnaby Street, Tom Stoppard, Ray Davies, Terence Stamp, Peter Sellers, David Bailey, Michael Caine, Mary Quant, Joseph Losey, Twiggy, Tom Courtenay, Dirk Bogarde, Susannah York, Marianne Faithfull, or for that matter Christine Keeler, Johnny Edge, and the nightclub gangsters the Kray twins, who at one point plotted to blackmail Brian Epstein into surrendering the Beatles—an explosion that for this Pinkie would come just too late. * Even in the 1960s, the ’30s are breathing through his pores.
    “You asked me to make a record of my voice,” Riley says. “Well, here it is.”
    There is the faint, gravelly spindle sound of the record turning.
    “What you want me to say is”—and Riley’s voice turns like the record with disgust—“I love you. Well, I don’t. I hate you”—and his voice burrs through hate with its own wind.
    Outside the booth, Rose might be sensing what is happening; she looks alarmed.
    “I hate the way you look,” Pinkie says, bearing down. “I hate the way you talk—I hate everything about you.” Rose smiles again. “You make me sick.”
    Riley’s Pinkie stares at the spinning 45 as if it’s a mirror. He’s becoming aware of himself as an artist; this is now a performance, an art statement that will live on outside of him. He is making a record.
    “Goddamn you little bitch, why don’t you go back to where you came from and leave me alone forever?”
    It comes off the screen as the first punk single. That Riley has already played Ian Curtis, that anyone watching Brighton Rock in 2010 has likely already seen Riley embrace punk and take it past itself, is part of this: though in ordinary time Brighton Rock comes three years after Control, in the historical time of the two films, Brighton Rock is taking place some twelve, thirteen, fourteen years earlier. But a more swirling time is at play: time made by the dictum that, asthe singer David Thomas puts it, the ballad gets what the ballad wants. It is a curving time made by the way actors carry roles with them through their careers, each role, if the actors can burn at the core, bleeding into every other; it’s pop time, the time made by the way songs and movies cannibalize history and rewrite it according to a logic of their own. In this time, where what Sam Riley learned singing Ian Curtis’s songs informs every syllable coming out of his Pinkie’s mouth, with the disgust of Curtis’s “Dance, dance, dance” thudding against Pinkie’s I hate, I hate, I hate, Sam Riley’s Pinkie is his own father. That is, he is Ian Curtis’s father, and Rose his mother, playing that record for him all through his childhood, saying, “Listen, this is your father’s voice.”
    in 1964 in Brighton Rock, Pinkie is killed. Rose, in a home for unwed or abandoned expectant mothers, is at her bed in an ugly dormitory. Another girl has a birthday; she gets a little portable record player. When everyone is asleep, Rose brings the record player to her bed, plugs it in, and, cradling it in her arms, plays her own record for the first time. “You’ve asked me to make a record of my voice,” she hears. “Well, here