1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything (2021) s01e08 Episode Script

The dream's over.
- In 1971
- Music said something.
The world was changing.
We were creating the
21st century in 1971.
In England back then,
no one spoke when they got stoned.
You could sit in a room with 12 people
for three hours, listen to music.
They'd all leave, and you would have had
no idea who any of them were.
I remember I went to
a flat in Battersea,
and one of them had
a friend of his over,
and it was a guy in long hair
who looked like Lauren Bacall,
who rolled the most perfect five-paper
hash joints I've ever seen in my life.
I tell you this story
because this was Bowie, okay
and I didn't know who he was.
In 1971 in London,
I don't think Bowie was Bowie yet.
I didn't really feel like a rock singer
or a rock star or whatever.
There was a real feeling of inadequacy
in that era.
But I was so single-minded
about doing what I wanted to do,
and it really was looking
for something new.
What do I wanna see on a stage
that would really make me excited?
And it just seemed to be interesting,
at that time,
to try and devise
something radically different.
Because there was a kind of
hardening of the arteries in England.
I want to love this country,
because this is my husband's country
and I think
it is a very interesting country.
But you're so nostalgic, you know, and
you are always talking about the past,
but we have to live in the present,
and you can burn the past.
Excuse me, sir, the West German
economics minister has said that
- Oh, I'm sorry, no.
- You're a bit rushed, are you?
Excuse me, sir.
The West German economics minister
has said that British businessmen
who wear bowlers
tend to be rather too traditional in
their business method. Would you agree?
I don't think so, no.
Do you think that if we do
go to the common market,
we would have to drop
our bowler hat image?
No, I don't think so at all.
He said that British businessmen
who wore bowler hats are
What the hell is it to do with you?
Get out!
Can I put something
to both of you about this creative phase
that you're both going
through at present?
I think you've got to accept,
especially you, John,
that it's alienated you from the people
who originally loved you in this country.
- A lot of them?
- Yes.
I think they don't
understand you anymore.
John and Yoko
were just considered weirdos.
People were deeply suspicious of them.
It was part of that feeling that the whole
counterculture was being put on trial.
What I feared was that the establishment
was gonna claw back youth culture
to where it had been pre-Beatles.
And that we'd go back to everything being
nice and safe and middle-of-the-road.
I had to encourage people not to feel
nostalgic and wistful about the '60s.
That's not good at all.
You've got to make now happen.
At that time I was 15 years old.
I was just trying to work out
where do I fit in, you know?
This is the National Front.
The party that says, "Put Britain
and the British people first."
I was a first-generation
British-born Black youth.
And the graffiti back then would be,
like, six-foot white letters:
"Keep Britain white."
And you'd walk past
this stuff every day.
I'd grown up with civil
rights in America.
But we obviously weren't American.
I was of the age, you know, when music
and style was really important.
So we're looking for our own version
through the music we had access to.
And we looked to the
land of our parents.
One good thing about music
- When it hits you
- You feel no pain
I say
One good thing about music
When it hits you
You feel no pain
Hit me with music, yeah
Hit me with music now
- This is
- Trench town rock
Don't watch that
Trench town rock
Big fish or sprat now
- Trench town rock
- You reap what you sow
- Trench town rock
- And only Jah, Jah know
- Trench town rock
- I'd never turn my back
- Trench town rock
- I'd give the slum a try
It is a music
born of intense human suffering,
in another land, among a people
with revolution on their side.
- Groovin'
- It's Kingston 12
- Groovin'
- It's Kingston 12
Music is good, you know?
Music is soothing, but
we're dealing with now,
reggae music, Rasta music.
This music is a dangerous music.
You want come cold I up
I don't see which music get
the type of fight that reggae music get.
Why they don't like to play it is because
it educating the people to be themself.
Reggae is a music that fight
for the oppressed people
anywhere upon the earth.
It show them freedom.
You feel no pain
Hit me with music now, oh, now
Hit me with music now
In the late '60s, early '70s, there wasn't
a lot of Jamaican music on the radio.
You realized the establishment was trying
to squash these alternative voices.
People always
talk about how difficult it is
to get reggae records
played on the radio,
but did you find there is definitely
a sort of a hostility against the music?
Let's be honest, I mean, it's difficult
getting any record played on the BBC,
let alone whether it be reggae
or anything else.
Every other form of music
has their own program,
whereas reggae doesn't have
its own program on the radio.
You don't get that three or four plays
that would let the people decide
whether they want it or not.
If our music had an open door,
like, let's say, a freeway, we could
be wide in any part of the world.
Because we are class,
we have class music.
Sun is shining
The weather is sweet, yeah
Make you want to move
Your dancing feet
Reggae was in the fringes,
but it started to give us
a kind of equity with our white mates.
Kind of showed us a way forward.
Want you to know ya
I grew up with this
kind of weird duality.
Growing up in a Black community as I
did, you don't listen to rock music.
But I never really thought about
why it was that I liked certain music.
All I know is it resonated with me.
So at home I had reggae
coming in one ear,
but going to school I was listening to
the Stones, the Kinks and the Beatles.
And in 1971, 15 years old,
I saw the Who.
This is a very different sonic experiment
to what I'm used to. You gotta dig it.
I'm, like, 15 feet from the stage.
I'm seeing this thing explode in
front of me, and it was life-changing.
Who are the Who? Well, the Who
are the Who, that's who they are.
The Who stood for the young generation.
They stood for rebellion, for noise,
and also for a seriousness about what
they themselves took seriously: rock.
Pete Townshend.
He writes the songs. He wrote Tommy.
Tommy was incredibly
difficult to follow, you know?
It was huge.
It changed us, but it left us
with another big job, you know?
Which was, "What do we do next?"
Have you done anything very special
with the money
that you've now accumulated?
The only thing
that I've done of merit really
is to build myself a studio.
Which is, like, absolutely
the biggest single thing in my life
next to the group, you know?
It enables me to channel
all the best of my individual ideas.
It's the same with any creative soul
who has huge success.
Once you've achieved that,
it's, "How the hell do I go on?
What do I do now?"
The changes that were going on
in the recording process in 1971
gave you more flexibility
in the manner in which you recorded.
And Pete exploited it.
I've always felt
that maybe I took rock too seriously,
but it's hard to really figure out
why I feel so strongly,
why I feel so involved.
And committed to rock
as a sort of a, if you'd like,
a society changer. You know?
I'd heard about synthesizers.
I'd heard about music computers.
And I could see
this new revolution coming.
You've written about
the world of electronic all-at-onceness.
The global village in which everybody
is gathered together
by means of television
or the new electronic media.
The way this machine works is
you set up these little switches
to a pattern, and then you turn it on.
And it plays a tune according
to whatever pattern you set up.
Every home is going to have a computer,
and you'll have access to all
the films, and all the entertainment
and all the information that ever was.
Electronics is the most appropriate
technological material
of the 20th century.
And there's no reason
why musicians of the 20th century
shouldn't utilize
electronic instruments.
I believe that electronic treatment
by the improvising musicians
is the wave of the future,
most probably the music of the '70s.
At the time I was working
on a very, very ambitious piece
called Lifehouse,
which was gonna be a movie.
It was a dystopian idea about the way
that media, electronics
and technology would change society.
I imagined this world in which
there was incredible pollution,
incredible difficulty
with living in the outside world.
And so what the government did
is it stuck us in our houses,
and then fed us entertainment
to keep us happy
while they cleaned up the air.
I start watching television
at 4:30 until about 12 o'clock.
And then I go to bed.
That's all my entertainment really.
That's the only thing I've got.
I called it "the grid."
This global communication system where
everybody would be fed similar stuff
The human brain is an
electrical machine.
that would be surreptitiously policed
and censored.
The data bank that's got
your complete medical history,
your complete financial history,
your parking tickets, everything in it.
This is a pretty appalling thing
to contemplate.
Once they got us in
and they were feeding us the programs,
we would imagine that we had access
to everything
because of its richness,
and its persuasiveness and its beauty.
The whole Western world
is taking an inner trip,
only this time wide awake.
We're all technologically stoned.
It was an anticipation of the idea
that everything would go wrong,
but that music would prevail.
He'd sent me a bunch of demos
and a script
for a film that he wanted to make
called Lifehouse.
I read the script,
and I didn't really understand it.
And it turns out that no one else
in the room did either.
A few too many people went,
"This is bollocks, and he's mad."
I couldn't sell this idea to the band.
The music that he'd written
was extremely innovative,
using a synthesizer in that manner.
I thought that we should make
an album anyway.
There was some difficultly in translating
what Pete had captured on his demos
and the Who making it the Who.
People in the band,
particularly Keith and Roger,
always wanted to write the way
that other bands wrote, you know.
"We sit round, man, and we jam."
I took the 8-track tape and stole
his synthesizer recording off of it.
And then I cut it up
and started to turn it into a song.
You know, with scissors
I cut it into something.
And then Glyn Johns cut it again,
and then we added drums and guitars,
and then I wrote this lyric.
And we got it closer and closer
to something
that started to feel like
a four-minute rock song.
I played it in to the band
on the earphones,
and the band played along with the
synthesizer that had been prerecorded.
Out here in the fields
I fight for my meals
I get my back into my living
I don't need to fight
To prove I'm right
I don't need to be forgiven
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Don't cry
Don't raise your eye
It's only teenage wasteland
It was becoming increasingly difficult
to make something original
with guitar, bass and drums.
Traditional instruments.
The people who had the vision
and technology
were the people who were going to become
the creative pioneers of that time.
You could be making sounds
that nobody had heard before.
You're listening to BBC Radio London
on this Tuesday, 29th of June,
and it's 20 minutes to six.
There's a trial going on where
people are actually being threatened
with a prison sentence for allowing a
number of children to express themselves.
This is the swing of the pendulum,
isn't it?
It's the Victorian age
after the Regency age.
We have probably reached
the end of the swing of the pendulum.
Because you pushed things
just a little bit too far,
the free atmosphere
is beginning to feel the pinch.
The Oz trial was the trial of the '60s.
All those dreadful things that happened.
The dope, rock 'n' roll
and fucking in the streets was the
the claim of the prosecution
that Oz was the standard-bearer for.
Attempt to debauch the morals
of young persons within the realm.
It was a very serious charge.
Oz took an innocent, sweet English
tradition and made it pernicious.
They took Rupert the Bear and they
made him into a sexual predator.
And for this, they had to be punished.
It was quite a production
to go to the Old Bailey every day.
It was incredibly dignified,
and, of course, they're wearing wigs.
Everybody speaking was so highborn
that whatever they said sounded like
an invitation for afternoon tea.
We would all arrive at the court,
and Louise and I would sit in the back.
There'd be the public gallery,
always packed.
And it was actually very tense
and very strained a lot of the time.
And then there were times
when it was just hilarious.
There were these odd things happening.
Quite a lot of attention was paid
to a tiny, small ad
that I'd never even noticed
for a newspaper called Suck.
It had a description of cunnilingus.
A woman saying she enjoyed it.
Our expert on sociology
was asked actually by Judge Argyle,
"What did you mean
by this word 'cunnilinctus'?"
He was pronouncing it
as though it was a cough medicine.
And he said, "Sucking, my Lord,
or 'blowing' or 'going down.'
Or in my naval days, my Lord, we used
the phrase, 'yodeling in the canyon.'"
The trial wore on and on and on and on.
Everybody had talked themselves
to a standstill, I think.
And so it came to an end
with the concluding speeches.
And from the moment the judge began,
he treated our witnesses with contempt.
Didn't relay to the jury accurately
the evidence that they'd given.
It just went on and on.
It was apparent to everybody
who sat in the courtroom
that that judge, he just hated them.
There was a fundamentalist kind
of movement
to bring back traditional values
in purity and cleanliness
and get rid of Oz magazine.
And he was railroading them into jail
any way he could.
The end of this five-week trial,
the longest obscenity hearing in British
legal history, came just before lunchtime.
The establishment hails the verdict
as a long-overdue victory
for the forces of good.
To the young, it is a catastrophe,
and they express their anger
and frustration
in a pagan ritual of noise and fire.
I'd never for a moment thought
that we would go to jail
for what we had done.
And Judge Argyle
had instructed the jailers
that our hair would be cut off.
And there was outrage.
We realized that we were
into something very serious,
and we had very little money,
so the connection with John Lennon
was made use of.
He suggested he would write something
for Oz, write a song.
We think it's just disgusting fascism.
And "God Save Us"
will help pay for their costs
or whatever kind of bread they need.
I think we could get a few thousand
pounds out of that record.
So buy it, folks, just to help Oz.
And give it to your kid sister
or something,
or keep it for a
souvenir of an old trick.
Do the oz
Do the oz
Do the oz, babe
Do the oz
Why do you think
they should have been sentenced?
Well, I think it's an example
to everybody else.
Everything is becoming far too
permissive, there's no privacy.
What's your reaction to the verdict?
I think they asked for it.
My reaction is that they should've been
put in prison and kept there.
The shit really had hit the fan.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono
were demonstrating against the verdict.
Nobody had ever been sent to prison
for such small offenses.
We appealed immediately.
It definitely was a
road mark for England.
You could've disapproved of what they
did, but you wanted to imprison them.
You are trying to suppress something
that you have no control over.
This is a cultural revolution.
You're not aware of what's going on.
And it keeps going, see?
Once Pandora's box has been opened,
you can't put the lid back on.
When you live in Berlin, you have
to get used to all unnormal situations.
Standing here at the wall
is a good example.
Every week somebody in East Germany
is trying to escape.
Some people are shot.
But if you live here in West Berlin,
you have to get used to it
just to make your living here.
In Germany there was this
desperate need for a calm life.
To keep everything under control
and, yeah, just don't take any risks.
Don't change anything. Just be secure.
In West Berlin now,
more than a quarter of the population
is over 65.
It's a quieter, more provincial city
than it was even ten years ago.
I understand that
from a psychological perspective,
many of these people
had connections to the Nazi past.
The guilt, I mean,
it was, of course, beyond belief.
But then there's always the eyes
of a new generation,
and I was looking for my own identity.
In 1971, a guitar player
who was invited to a session
asked me whether I wanted to come along.
And because I hadn't heard of the band,
I first considered,
"Should I go home with my girlfriend?"
And luckily I joined him
because it was the band Kraftwerk.
It was astonishing for me.
I was totally surprised
because their approach to music
was to sound different from anything
that had been done before.
A few weeks later,
they invited me to play with the band.
We are another generation.
We are a more industrial generation.
Music is always in relation to its time.
And now we're living
in a completely different time.
American and British bands
introduced new lyrics,
new sounds to the music.
But it still stayed in that tradition
of American popular music.
Rock music.
We wanted to be totally different.
I don't think you'll really,
really have a new thing
until you've gotten new music.
I mean, you know
while you're still basing yourself
on a sort of Chuck Berry, you know,
you're still the same, unfortunately.
I want something else, I mean
don't want Chuck Berry until we die.
We got to have something else, man.
It was an exciting half a year
playing with Kraftwerk.
We played some TV shows,
some very exciting concerts.
Some not so great concerts.
But when we tried to record
the second Kraftwerk album,
the music we had in our minds
didn't work in the studio.
And there was constant tension between
Klaus Dinger and Florian Schneider.
The biggest problem
we always had was with drummers.
Because they were very much into
the whole physical thing.
And they wouldn't stay with us because
we asked them to electrify
to get into electrical sound.
They wouldn't do it, so one day we
found ourselves standing there
on our own, just the two of us
and I just happened to have
an old rhythm box machine.
So we started recording
with that in 1971
and from that day on,
there was no turning back.
It makes no difference if you turn
a knob or turn a switch
or if you pluck a string.
I mean, what is the difference?
There is no difference.
Who can say what music is?
He came to New York in September.
With the manager, the wife,
and they wanted to sign to RCA Records.
So that week,
I spent a lot of time with them.
The older folk at RCA had no clue,
but they relied on
their young A&R people
to tell us what is new and exciting
'cause we don't know.
They knew that if they didn't get Bowie,
they would lose a major opportunity.
For David,
it was a massive sense of freedom.
Suddenly he has the possibility
to do whatever he wants.
The idea was to create
a new set of possibilities.
I took them to the Factory to meet Andy.
Like to take a cement fix
Be a standing cinema
Now you have to remember
this is not David Bowie yet.
He wasn't a star, he's just this guy,
and it was a little awkward.
'Cause then he went into
this long mime thing
which is about as uncool as you can get.
Two new pence to have a go
I'd like to be a gallery
Put you all inside my show
Andy Warhol looks a scream
Hang him on my wall
Andy always liked to be entertained,
so he reacted more to very outrageous
or flamboyant people.
David may have worn this outfit,
or worn a little makeup,
but he was not flamboyant at all.
I mean, he was very charming,
but he wasn't the kind of person
that walked into a room
and suddenly took over.
Sometimes we're recording, I try to
I sing, actually,
and we say to him you know.
He's a designer and he spends
a lot of time being taken to Italy.
And bringing back ideas and fashions.
I thought you might know.
But it was okay.
They didn't throw us out.
And he got into the epicenter
of where he wanted to go.
Warhol and his followers
do not think or live
in a conventional way.
Some people may find his work or his
lifestyle unsympathetic or offensive.
It is sometimes difficult to discover
where reality ends and fantasy begins.
I'm up on the eleventh floor
And I'm watching the cruisers below
He's down on the street
And he's trying hard to pull sister Flo
It was this other world, you know?
And for me, of course,
wanting this other world,
I mean, I just fell into it completely.
Here was this alternative world
that I'd been talking about.
And it had all the violence, and all
the strangeness and the bizarreness.
And it was really happening.
She's so swishy in her satin and tat
In her frock coat and
Bipperty-bopperty hat
Oh, God, I could do better than that
There was all kinds of avant-garde
theater happening in New York
because everyone
was trying to create new forms.
And a lot of it was outrageous,
it was just queer.
It didn't fit into the mainstream
society, let's put it that way.
There was a danger that David
was attracted to.
Being a sexual outlaw.
The first time that I met Lou Reed,
it was at Max's Kansas City,
in the back room.
Not only was Lou Reed at the table,
but Iggy at the same time.
So it was Iggy and Lou.
They represented the wild side
of existentialist America.
It was this sort of mixture
of rock and avant-garde.
That was everything that I thought
we should have in England,
and I didn't know if
we had it in England.
He definitely studied Iggy and Lou
and absorbed certain qualities
that they had.
A certain kind of stage performance.
A kind of asexual ambiguity, an edge.
I think there was a missing ingredient
in what he had been doing.
And this was it. This was the path.
The interesting thing about David
is that he wasn't a natural talent,
but David was an actor.
He did have the ability to play roles,
and he worked at it
and worked at it and worked at it.
You know, there was a buzz around Dave.
Something was percolating.
Reckon we can cope with this one?
In England,
David started deconstructing himself.
Like now, man.
We needed new, strong songs
from a new, strong, different Bowie.
Just belt it out like that again
and we're home and dry.
For David to become a performer
that people were desperate to see,
he had to create a new entity.
It's fun time, fun time.
A brand-new rock star.
One, two, three, four.
I would blame, probably,
all of it on Kubrick.
Because what I wanted to do
was create a culture
around the music that I was writing.
It was something fascinating
about this future nihilistic negativity,
which was the culture
of Clockwork Orange.
There's never been a gang film
or a youth film like it.
Whether it's a spin on style,
or that dynamic
between the system
and the working-class youth,
it preempts so many things
that happened in its wake.
'Cause you have to understand
that the big subcultural youth movement
by then was skinheads.
Skinheads like the Scotswood Aggro Boys
with their uniform styles
and checked shirts,
big polished boots,
and close cropped hairstyles.
Many proud of their
headline reputation for violence.
It's an almost puritanical outlook,
and they strongly disapprove of drugs,
beads, and other hippie-style adornments.
But they do have their
own type of music.
Do they come to rock concerts at all,
the skinheads?
No, no.
I think the thing is the skinheads
really feel that they should have
their own music.
What about reggae?
And they should have their say.
Well, this is Jamaican stuff.
They've adopted it,
but it's not really come from within.
You know what I mean?
How do you get on with the West Indians?
The West Indians? Great.
As if they were English.
Why do the young white toughs
never have a go at the West Indians?
'Cause they get a right, tasty beatin'.
And another thing, like
They like the music,
but reggae, that is pure Jamaican music.
Where you gonna run to?
You're gonna run to the Rock for rescue
There will be no Rock
A lot of my white mates were skinheads.
To me, it was a massive testament
to the power of culture
to bring people together.
You know, music can do that.
- Excuse me.
- Yes?
Can we ask you a few questions?
Oh, certainly. Yes, certainly.
What about reggae
is it your favorite music?
But of course.
- Reggae.
- Yeah, is it your favorite music?
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
First, it was the mods and rockers,
then the trogs and thunderbirds,
and now the skinheads and greasers.
But to the townspeople,
they only have one name: troublemakers.
If the media had written up headlines
like, "Black and white kids unite
through music and style,"
it wouldn't have sold any newspapers,
you know what I'm saying?
They're always looking
for a new folk devil
but every generation needs
its own identity,
a new thing different enough
to totally captivate you.
It all seems so totally contradictory,
sex and death with rock music.
What is it all about?
We are what America
represents right now.
The parts they don't wanna see.
We're just bringing it out in the open
because it's there, you know,
and it's fun for us to do it.
We don't go on just as a rock group,
we go on as a piece of kinetic art.
It's sort of like taking
A Clockwork Orange
and putting it onstage.
David saw Alice at
the Rainbow in London.
I think what caught David's imagination
was, okay,
you can actually play-act onstage
and make music alongside it.
This is just what I wanna be
when I'm onstage.
Alice goes onstage
and just wants to be this.
And so I let Alice do anything
he wants to do.
And that's frightening,
and people like to be frightened.
Parents don't like to be frightened
but kids love to be frightened.
It was still very hard
for anybody to realize
that a rock artist can go onstage
and be a different person
every time he goes onstage.
You don't have to be
the same personality.
And I just trusted in
my own conceptions.
By then Hunky Dory was coming out.
But David had started working
on a new album.
He was really ambitious, and so was
Tony. They wanted world domination.
From the earliest history of mankind,
there's been a great red speck of light
in the night sky.
I was getting nearer
to what I wanted to do.
Hunky Dory was really stepping off
this planet and going somewhere else.
Things were changing before
our very eyes on the Martian surface.
The whole Hunky Dory album
reflected my newfound enthusiasm
for this new continent
that had been opened up to me.
Flash to Westminster
to get the great result.
The majority is 112,
that is quite considerably bigger
than many people expected.
We've not only got something
which we shall gain from Europe,
but I think also,
we've got a great deal to put in.
It really, for me,
felt like the new era had begun then.
Did you really expect
to be let off like this?
Well, you always hope and pray,
I suppose.
All of us are very, very happy that
we'll don't have to go back to jail.
There's been a lot of talk
about how the Oz trial
has been a victory for the establishment
over the freedom of youth.
- Do you see it in those terms?
- Well, not at all. I
I think the first thing I'd like to say
is that the fight is only just beginning.
If there is life on Mars,
then there will be a simply fabulous
expansion of perspective,
because all the organisms on the Earth,
even though they seem to be different,
are fundamentally the same.
Their chemistry is all identical.
And they're just wrapped
in different kinds of wrappings.
As the familiar pattern of Christmas
and the New Year repeats itself,
we may sometimes forget how much
the world about us has been changing
with all the technological wonders
of this age.
It makes me wonder what changes
there may be in the future.
We cannot possibly tell.
how these kids
who care nothing about it at all,
except to greet that New Year
which may mean new hope
and promise for all of us.
Seconds to go, just a few seconds
before the ball hits the bottom.
And there's five, four, three, two, one.
There it is!
1972. Happy New Year to you all.
Oh, yeah
Now Ziggy played guitar
Jamming good with Weird and Gilly
And the Spiders from Mars
He played it left hand
But made it too far
Became the special man
Then we were Ziggy's Band
It just came to me
that what I was doing, in fact,
was what the next stage of things
was all about.
Like some cat from Japan
He could lick 'em by smiling
Christ, what have we done?
Fuck me, we've just killed the '60s.
You know,
it was like it really felt like that.
We are the future.
So where were the spiders
While the fly tried to
Break our balls?
Just the beer light to guide us
So we bitched about his fans
And should we crush his sweet hands?