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Give my Regards to Broad Street

Started by famethrowa, February 17, 2019, 01:01:53 AM

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famethrowa

While we're all salivating at the prospect of more boring Let it Be rehearsal footage, GMRTBS seems to have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Maybe deservedly, but it was a big part of my growing up, we had the VHS and soundtrack cassette at home and I always enjoyed seeing Macca larking about pretending to be an actor. There's only 3 good bits I can think of, one being Dave Gilmour's solo in No More Lonely Nights, Louis Johnson slapping the hell out of Silly Love Songs, and then Macca imagining himself playing a comedy busker version of Yesterday down the tube station when it looks like he won't be able to be a millionaire anymore (gasp!). Any good memories? Or crap ones?


a duncandisorderly

it came out & had its premiere in liverpool when I'd just moved there, so I trotted along to see it on the night after the premiere. me & about five other people. had to sit through a rupert-the-bear short before it, & I had no idea why this was at the time (I think macca owns the rights or summat). I thought it was dreadful, & a real waste of talent.

famethrowa


the science eel

Quote from: a duncandisorderly on February 17, 2019, 05:36:01 AM
it came out & had its premiere in liverpool when I'd just moved there, so I trotted along to see it on the night after the premiere. me & about five other people. had to sit through a rupert-the-bear short before it, & I had no idea why this was at the time (I think macca owns the rights or summat). I thought it was dreadful, & a real waste of talent.

It is absolutely appalling.

And then 'oo! oo! whaddaya do?' Spies Like Us the year after. It's amazing the old goon has managed to salvage so much of his reputation.

DrGreggles

Quote from: famethrowa on February 17, 2019, 01:01:53 AM
While we're all salivating at the prospect of more boring Let it Be rehearsal footage, GMRTBS seems to have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Maybe deservedly, but it was a big part of my growing up

DEFINITELY deservedly.

kalowski


SteveDave

Quote from: the science eel on February 17, 2019, 08:25:25 AM
And then 'oo! oo! whaddaya do?' Spies Like Us the year after. It's amazing the old goon has managed to salvage so much of his reputation.

Spies Like Us is a banger. I've heard John Landis bad mouthing it somewhere. That man knows as much about music as he does helicopter safety.

a duncandisorderly



I'm surprised Landis was ever allowed to work again. Two dead kids as well as Morrow.

biggytitbo

No more likely nights is a damn good song though.

Nowhere Man

Landis should be forced to only direct movies starring Matthew Broderick alone

grassbath

It is a monumentally crap and deservedly panned film that gathers up in spades all the qualities he's been slated for down the years - directionless whimsy, slushy ballads, lack of self-awareness, defensiveness over his legacy and a general inability to, er, let it be.

But as biggy pointed out, 'No More Lonely Nights' is towering. There's one bit in it - 'and I won't go away, until you tell me so' - that can put a lump in my throat. He sometimes manages to achieve so much with so little. And I quite like 'Not Such a Bad Boy,' which was almost definitely written in 5 minutes cos the film sorely needed a rocker, but is still absolutely fat with hooks.

Nowhere Man

Crap though it may be, Lennon could easily have made an equally shit film in the 80s too. Lordy know's even George released and starred in the godawful Shanghai Surprise, a film so horrible it (along with a few other box office bombs) caused his production company to go bankrupt.

DrGreggles

Quote from: Nowhere Man on February 19, 2019, 10:33:53 PM
Crap though it may be, Lennon could easily have made an equally shit film in the 80s too. Lordy know's even George released and starred in the godawful Shanghai Surprise, a film so horrible it (along with a few other box office bombs) caused his production company to go bankrupt.

Handmade Films gives George a massive pass in general though.

Nowhere Man

Yeah, George deserves a million brownie points just for funding Life of Brian really

TheMonk

No More Lonely Nights is indeed a cracker, but the disco mix. Fuck me.
https://youtu.be/OrYowHa27jQ

(Also, that Landis video is even more disturbing than the Tommy Cooper death video).

kalowski

Quote from: TheMonk on February 20, 2019, 11:14:13 AM
(Also, that Landis video is even more disturbing than the Tommy Cooper death video).
I hate them. They haunt my thoughts for a while afterwards. The Cooper one was ever present in my brain for weeks. This was awful too and I wish I hadn't watched it, but as usual, I couldn't look away.

biggytitbo

It's kind of overproduced a bit though, which heralds a pretty thin time in the 80s for him where he s struggling to stay relevant with glossy modern sounds but in the process burying a lot of the melody and slightly wonky homemade charm that his best stuff has - presumably because he thought that's how you stay in the charts.

pigamus

Quote from: Nowhere Man on February 19, 2019, 11:12:08 PM
Yeah, George deserves a million brownie points just for funding Life of Brian really

And Withnail.

PinkNoise

I don't think I've ever seen "Broad Street" all the way through. The opening scene where he's daydreaming about driving around in ZZ Top's car stopped me from watching any further. It's a mid-life crisis on celluloid.

It's also peak "post-Lennon-death-Shout!-by-Phillip-Norman" Macca, where he felt like he had to reassert his Fabness in the 80s. Did you like George Martin's production on the Beatles albums? I've got him back for "Tug Of War", it'll be like the old days! Do you like the song "Yesterday"? Here it is again, just to remind you that I wrote it!

I recall Macca's brother Mike being interviewed on Granada TV's Friday night show Weekend where he gave "Broad Street" a proper pasting. Must have made Christmas at the McCartneys' a bit awkward that year.

biggytitbo

Although nothing he released in the 80s and early 90s had no merit at all - there's good stuff on all of it (especially Flowers in the Dirt), I don't think he really shakes off that nagging period where he felt increasingly threatened and obsolete and was struggling to keep up with contemporary acts until Flaming Pie in 1997. That feels like the first album in a long time where he feels comfortable just being Macca and doing his own thing again, and it's a lot better for it. It kicks off a really strong run of late period work - Driving Rain, Chaos and Creation, Memory Almost Full - the latter of which I think is his best solo album since the end of Wings.