Get those miniature Union flags at the ready, put on your Chinese made Union Jack HQT (High Quality Tat) and get down to the ICA to watch Jubilee… Oh wait, it’s not that sort of thing. It’s the 1978 film by Derek Jarman about time-travel and punk, set in 1970’s London, with Adam Ant, The Slits and Siouxsie And The Banshees making appearances and Brian Eno doing the score.
• After playing Mad in Jubilee in 1977 Derek Jarman wanted Toyah to play Joan of Arc in a new film he was planning to make. This isn’t just a rumour, Toyah talked about it when she guested at ‘Derek Jarman: A Celebration’ at The Tate in October 2001. Unfortunately Joan of Arc didn’t go past the planning stages but they worked together on The Tempest instead. View a larger version of our “Toyah of Arc” photo.
• Return to Falling To Earth soon for some screen caps from yesterday’s Saturday Cookbook.
• An interview with Phil Davis at the Mirror. This includes that iconic Quadrophenia photo!
• More new blog posts on Jubilee, from In The Dark, Film Fan and Random Ramblings, Thoughts and Fiction, The film is also showing this evening at 7pm at The Cube in Bristol.
• Toyah at BBC iPlayer: Hole In The Wall, with Toyah guesting, from November 2009, is available to watch online at iPlayer until Monday evening.
To all of Falling To Earth‘s visitors… Have a great holiday weekend…
It’s the Diamond Jubilee Bank Holiday Weekend…
• Toyah guests on Saturday Cookbook on ITV1 tomorrow morning in a special edition celebrating the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee:
Saturday Cookbook: ITV1: Saturday 2nd June: 8.25am
Nadia Sawalha and Mark Sargeant are joined by chef Phil Vickery and Toyah Willcox to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
• On Sunday Toyah plays Birmingham Pride, the UK’s largest LGBT two-day festival, being held on Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd June, or as the Brum Pride website says “The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Bank Holiday Weekend”. Toyah appears at Bar Eden on Sunday.
• No doubt Derek Jarman’s Jubilee will be aired and watched in numerous places over the next few days: The two confirmed showings in the UK are at The ICA (6th June) and Nottingham Contemporary Arts Centre (5th June).
• Capital Celluloid 2012 – Day 158: Wed June 6: Jubilee (Jarman, 1978): ICA Cinema, 8.30pm: No more appropriate film could screen in Diamond Jubilee week.
• Gay Times: Derek Jarman’s Jubilee: With the Queen’s Jubilee bank holiday creeping closer and close and your schedules are getting tighter and tighter, we thought that now would be an opportune time to remind you of another Jubilee. In 1977 influential gay director Derek Jarman filmed a little punk gem of a film.
• Topman Generation: With the Golden Jubilee around the corner we recall Derek Jarman’s classic punk film. (Membership required)
• To Do List: To Jubilee Or Not To Jubilee? That Is The Question: A guide to ignoring/enjoying the Jubilee: Watch Derek Jarman’s cult punk classic Jubilee at the ICA | Wednesday 6th June at 2030.
• Whats on TV: Include a clip from Jubilee (“My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose”) in their latest “Whats on You Tube” feature.
Jubilee will show at The ICA next week, in their “Artists’ Film Club”, coinciding with the Diamond Jubilee…
Derek Jarman’s 1978 feature-length classic Jubilee is the focus of the special Artists’ Film Club. A 35mm print of Jubilee will be screened alongside a new transfer of the 8mm Jordan’s Dance (1977), a short which would later be incorporated, in part, in Jubilee. Coinciding with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the screening will also be accompanied by a panel discussion including actress Jenny Runacre (Jubilee’s Queen Elizabeth I and Bod), producer and long-time collaborator James Mackay and others.
Jubilee is a dystopian tale of time-travel and punk, set in 1970s London. Queen Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre) travels forward in time to find Queen Elizabeth II dead and London in disarray; she encounters a cast of numerous characters including Amyl Nitrite (Jordan), Bod (Jenny Runacre), Chaos (Hermine Demoriane), Crabs (Nell Campbell), and Mad (Toyah Willcox).
Institute Of Contemporary Arts: Wed 6th June 2012, 8.30pm | £5/Free to ICA Members.
Adam Ant was interviewed by BBC News today…
Goddard also appeared alongside a then unknown Toyah Willcox in Derek Jarman’s 1978 punk film Jubilee – but said it had been “surreal” rather than an anti-royal statement. The apocalyptic fantasy focuses on the activities of a wild girl gang in 1977.
He added: “I think Jubilee was really a piece of film, a surreal kind of journey that just happened to land slap bang into the middle of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. I wasn’t doing it to make a statement about the Royal Family or anything like that. I left that to people like The Clash, certain bands that love to be political, which I’m not.”
• Continue reading at BBC News.
To mark what would have been director Derek Jarman’s 70th birthday, Nottingham Contemporary Arts Centre are showing Jubilee on 5th June at The Space.
Derek Jarman Jubilee (1978): Honouring the name behind the Jarman Award in what would have been his 70th year we are screening a film that many regard as Derek Jarman’s first masterpiece. In Jubilee, Queen Elizabeth I is transported to a bleak, broken Britain – where violence and anarchy reign and Buckingham Palace is a recording studio for punk musicians. Serving to upset and unnerve the conventional cinemagoer, Jubilee defines the confrontational abandon of punk cinema.
• Prosceneium: Calamity Jane: This set for Calamity Jane was originally built for the highly acclaimed professional tour starring Toyah Willcox.
• A new ‘Blackpool Pride 2012’ flyer has been released, with Toyah included. View it here.
• Time Out London: Time Out Says: Last year she celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of her most successful album ‘Anthem’ and tonight she’ll be celebrating 30 years since the release of her second best-selling LP, ‘The Changeling’. Wilcox will be performing prime cuts from the 1982 record, as well as other material.
• A random, but funny, reminiscence about the 12″ picture disc of ‘Thunder In The Mountains’ is included the latest blog by ‘Married To The Moz’. View here.
• Let’s Get Better Terms: It’s Jubilee Time Again: Jarman knows what he is doing visually, and enjoyed gardens (with or without plastic flowers), wastelands, and also had an eye for the beauty of people like Toyah, Jordan, Jack Birkett, Helen the dwarf and many others.
Jubilee, Toyah’s first film. She played Mad, a pyromaniac. Directed by Derek Jarman, it premiered on 22nd February 1978 at Bloomsbury Square Odeon, aka Gate 2, London. The film was derided in its first few years but has become something of a cult movie over the last decade and is regularly written about in online blogs and articles. Jubilee also featured Adam Ant in his first role, as well as Richard O’Brien and Little Nell of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The, just revealed, artwork for The Derek Jarman Collection 5 disc DVD set. This includes Jubilee and The Tempest and will be released in Australia (but available to everyone thanks to the internet) on 2nd May 2012.
A collection of five astonishing films from a visionary British filmmaker:
Jubilee (1978) Queen Elizabeth I travels to late twentieth-century Britain to discover a tawdry and depressing landscape where life mostly seems aimless and is anyway held cheap. Three post-punk girls while away their vacuous existence as best they can, from time-to-time straying into murder to relieve the boredom.
The Tempest (1979) Jarman’s Tempest is the story of Miranda’s growth from girlhood to woman; Prospero has retreated to a world of ideas but it is cold and loveless, he condemns Caliban as a monster but all Jarman’s Caliban is guilty of is possessing carnal appetites, the same appetites which Miranda is starting to discover for herself.
• The ‘Moon In The Gutter’ blog uploaded a collection of screen shots from Jubilee on Tuesday: Operation Screenshot (Films of the Seventies): Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978). The “revival” of all things Jubilee continues… View here.
• Evening Times: Heaven is a place on Glasgow Green… Toyah is mentioned in this article today. View here. (NB. Toyah isn’t officially confirmed as playing this concert)
• Heard of Ghost Loft? Described as having “a heavy dash of the Cocteau Twins and a little bit of early Toyah”.
• Toyah’s ‘Warrior Rock: Toyah On Tour’ album was mentioned in Tuesday night’s Alex Lester Show on BBC Radio 2. (Thanks to Luke)
• Toyah received a namecheck in the, brilliantly titled, ‘Life Like Butter Sculptures’ blog yesterday: “This morning, the random music selector fed me Toyah Willcox’s “Mein Herr”. It was exactly what I needed. I’ll go find some Joan Jett next, I think.”
‘Second Sight’, classic film and tv on DVD, has great pages dedicated to the DVD releases of Jubilee and The Tempest. Both of these. now iconic, films were reissued on Region 2 DVD in the mid-2000s.
Both are also just about to be reissued again, as part of The Derek Jarman Collection: A 5DVD box set of Derek Jarman films released by Umbrella Entertainment, in Australia, on 2nd May 2012.
An interesting article on punk in ‘The Independent’ yesterday. It includes a gallery of great photos, featuring rare shots of Adam Ant, Jordan, Billy idol, Little Nell, Siouxsie etc, plus Derek Jarman at the premiere of Jubilee.
Anarchy in the UK: The Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 was also the year that punk hit
Photographer Simon Barker was there to capture it. Michael Bracewell opens his archive.
Punk lasted in the UK for little more than 14 months, between 1976 and the Jubilee Summer of 1977. Thirty-five years later, in another Jubilee year, how might we regard the intense, chaotic, moody, surreal, futuristic-yet-Victorian aesthetics of the movement? In answer to this question, photographs taken at the time by Simon Barker, also known as Six, go a long way to articulating the ways in which a phase of youth culture attained the impact of a manifesto – while never quite losing the cool allure and faintly slapstick temperament of its confrontational amateurism.
• Continue reading, at ‘The Independent’, here.
Another recent, and interesting, article on Jubilee, the film that becomes more celebrated by the month. This one by ‘Network Awesome’.
After the release of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee in 1978, Vivienne Westwood, outraged at what she saw as a misrepresentation of punk, took to her then preferred medium, the t-shirt, to express her displeasure. The “Open T-Shirt to Derek Jarman,” with its wordy scrawl, is a rather confusing cultural artifact in that it now seems rather counterproductive. For starters, punk certainly had more important enemies in 1978 than a queer experimental filmmaker and visual artist, a fellow member of the counterculture whether she liked it or not…
It’s a Mad world: The trailer for Jubilee has just been uploaded to ‘You Tube’. View here and click below for larger screen caps. The movie, Toyah’s first, premiered in 1978 and just celebrated its 34th anniversary.
A 5DVD box set of Derek Jarman films is released, by Umbrella Entertainment (who just uploaded the trailer for Jubilee to ‘You Tube’), in Australia on 2nd May 2012. The set includes both films Toyah starred in, Jubilee and The Tempest.
The Derek Jarman Collection: DVD A collection of five astonishing films from a visionary British filmmaker: Actors: Tilda Swinton, Laurence Olivier, Sean Bean, Toyah Willcox, Adam Ant.
The Tempest (1979): The tale of a potent magician, banished by his brother and the King to live on a desolate isle with his daughter. Last Of England (1988): A dark meditation on London under Thatcher. Jubilee (1978): Queen Elizabeth I visits late twentieth century Britain to discover a confronting civilisation. Sebastiane (1976): In Rome, 300 A.D, a man is exiled to a remote outpost populated exclusively by men. War Requiem (1989): A stirring visual representation of Benjamin Brittens famed work.
30 Women Photographers and the Women Photographers Who Inspired Them: A Blog Series in Honor of Women’s History Month, March 1 – 31
Caroline Coon is a multi-talented artist born and based in Britain. She is a painter, designer and photographer whose work has been exhibited at major London galleries, including the Saatchi Gallery and the Tate. Her photographs are in the National Portrait Gallery, and currently on display at the Strand Gallery in She-Bop-a-Lula, an exhibit celebrating female singers captured by women photographers.
In the 1970’s and 80’s, Coon wrote about, designed for, and photographed a number of Punk Rock bands, including The Slits and The Clash. Her New Wave Punk Rock Explosion is an inside, “as it happened” story of punk, with iconic images, and commentary by musicians and fans. (Photo: Jenny Runacre and Toyah Willcox 1977 © Caroline Coon/Camera Press)
Jubilee inspires at least one new article a week. The latest is by ‘Ikono’.
Numerous punk icons appear in the film including Jordan (a Malcolm McLaren protégé), Toyah Willcox, Nell Campbell, Adam Ant (born, Stuart Leslie Goddard), Demoriane and Wayne County. It features performances by Wayne County and Adam and the Ants. There are also cameo appearances by The Slits and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The film was scored by Brian Eno.
