THE NAME Peter Whitehead may not trip off the tongue these days, but the Mirrorball section of this month’s Edinburgh International Film Festival should help to remind us of the work of a man who can rightly be considered the godfather of the modern music video.
The 66-year-old film-maker, novelist and sometime falconer is not usually associated with music videos. This white-haired, one-time dandy of 1960s London is best known for some era-defining documentaries, which include Wholly Communion, his take on the 1965 beat poetry convention at the Albert Hall, and Tonite Let’s All Make Love In London, a collage of interviews with Zeitgeist personalities of the late 1960s from Mick Jagger to Julie Christie.
Nevertheless, between 1965 and 1969, Whitehead created a body of work, with bands including the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, that marks the birth of the music video in this country. It was the BBC show Top of the Pops that commissioned most of these films, for artists including Nico and the Animals, to be broadcast when bands could not appear live.
“Such a thing did not exist until me and a couple of other people started to shoot them for Top of the Pops,” White-head explains. “Then it occurred to managers and record companies that you could reprint them and send them everywhere as a promotional tool.” Whitehead recalls one particular phone call from the Top of the Pops producer Stanley Dorfman on a Tuesday morning in 1967. Dorfman wanted him to fly to Dublin and make a film for the Dubliners’ new single Seven Drunken Nights. The finished film would be shown on Top of the Pops that same Thursday. As usual, White-head would receive £200 for his troubles.
“I fly into Ireland and meet the Dubliners in a pub,” Whitehead explains. “We go out drinking and filming, and somewhere along the line we pick up a really bright funny girl in a pub and, to cut a long story short, I wake up the next morning in her flat. No camera, no film and no memory of anything but this drunken crawl. I got on an aeroplane, got back to London and called my assistant, who said he had all the film and had already put it into a lab. I had actually shot a lot of film that night. Out of an hour and a half, about eight minutes were usable. So I bunged it all together, saying to the BBC, ‘If you don’t like it, sorry.’ Anyway, they loved it, and it had such a response that they showed it again the next week, and again the week after that. I got my £200 three times.”
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Whitehead’s approach does sound haphazard; but his casual manner was also his method. The New York Times described him in November 1967 as having “the casually with-it attitude of a mod émigré from a Chelsea pub”.
The veiled ingenuity of Whitehead’s short film for the Dubliners was not lost on at least one viewer either. In a 1967 edition of the New Statesman, the magazine’s television critic, Dennis Potter, wrote that “Top of the Pops . . . often surprises with filmed inserts of considerable skill and inventiveness: last week’s programme came up with a brilliant piece of footage to illustrate Seven Drunken Nights by the Dubliners. Pop records do not have to be surrounded by inane superlatives, it seems.”
Potter’s review was a nod to the emerging art of the music video; an art then known only as “filmed inserts”. At the time, Whitehead was not the only person doing such work, but his were particularly inventive. Most similar films depicted a band playing live with no authorial stamp whatsoever or presented only very crude ideas. Take the 1967 film for Smokey Robinson’s Tears of a Clown single. It showed a miserable clown running around a TV studio wiping tears from his eyes.
Many of Whitehead’s music promos were simple documentary films that, in one instance, captured Jimi Hendrix playing Hey Joe live in London or followed Nico wandering around London’s East India docks. But his work with the Rolling Stones stands out. On the strength of Wholly Communion (which won the gold medal at the Mannheim documentary film festival), the Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, invited Whitehead to make a documentary of the band as they toured Ireland in 1966. The resulting film, Charlie is My Darling, was so frank that it was quickly shelved by Oldham.
Whitehead also made three promos with the Stones, including one for the single We Love You, shot in 1967 a day before the band’s court appearance to appeal against drug convictions. Whitehead took Oscar Wilde’s obscenity trial as a starting point.
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“Mick rang me up,” Whitehead explains, “and said: ‘Look, we’ve got this song coming out, we’ve got our trial appeal on Monday and we’re going to prison. Have you any ideas?’ I said: ‘As far as I’m concerned this case is as corrupt, scandalous, illegal and historically relevant as the case of Oscar Wilde.’ I filmed them on Sunday imagining they were going to prison on Monday. The film dealt with their predicament. It transformed them all into actors in a drama.”
Keith Richards is seen wearing a fake judge’s wig; Jagger stands in the dock as Wilde; and Marianne Faithfull, is dressed as Bosie. With the We Love You film, Whitehead imbued the nascent music video genre with social and political relevance. The music promo was throwaway; but White-head proved it had a potential greater than light entertainment. It certainly wasn’t trash.
Through both his documentary films and music promos, all made in a short period between 1965 and 1969 (after which he gave up film-making almost entirely), he stands as an early example of the cross-over between art house cinema and the music video. A number of today’s masters of the music promo, from Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) to Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), are celebrated for making the crossover into feature films, for bringing music video techniques into the cinema. Whitehead proves that this cross-pollination is nothing new.
For Whitehead himself, though, music promos are nothing but a short, relatively minor footnote in a life that has taken many, often bizarre, turns. In Northamptonshire, where Whitehead lives with his wife Dido Goldsmith (the niece of the late James) and their four daughters, local myth has confused the finer details of a life that has so far notched up the management of a royal falcon-breeding centre in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, and, most recently, the writing of 15 novels in the past ten years, five of which have been published so far.
Sitting in his garden, beneath a home-made temple to the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris (he has been a fanatical Egyptologist since he studied at Cambridge), Whitehead is remembering the films and the music promos — and remembering why, in the end, he gave the whole thing up to pursue a deeper love: falconry.
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“The film-maker, especially the documentary film-maker, is essentially an outsider, a voyeur,” Whitehead reasons. “I didn’t cotton on until too late that the camera doesn’t necessarily make you part of things. It was the exact opposite; it separated me. So I sold the camera and went into falcons. When you’re hanging off a cliff, 300ft above the sea, and trying to put falcon eggs on your stomach and bring them back to England — then you are real!”