Fiona Richmond soundtrack CD

Vocalion, a company that specialises in historic recordings re-issued on CD, has recently released a Fiona Richmond CD consisting of the entire score to the 1977 Richmond film ‘Hardcore’, plus selected music from the two other Richmond vehicles ‘Expose’ (1975) and ‘Lets Get Laid!’ (1977). The CD contains 34 tracks in all, 6 from Expose, 3 from Lets Get Laid and 25 from Hardcore (3 of which never made the finished film).

A selection that would no doubt find favour with Miss R herself, who once claimed to Cinema Blue magazine that Hardcore was her favourite of her films on account that it featured “no rubber glove murders, blood and gore” and that “I am the star”.

Anonymously financed by Richmond’s ‘enabler’ Paul Raymond, the Richmond films were for that reason the more lavish and stylish examples of their genre, and the soundtracks are similarly classy, piano-led affairs. Chronologically first is Steve Gray’s score for Expose, the initial Richmond film (and the one with the “rubber glove murders, blood and gore”) while the films director James Kenelm Clarke took over composer duties for Hardcore (which featured Herbie Flowers on bass guitar) and the final Richmond film Lets Get Laid, whose budget stretched to a 1940s setting, was described by one critic as “not unlike a George Formby movie with tits”, and whose nostalgic soundtrack is mainly represented on the CD by Clarke’s Ivor Novello inspired “You Turn My Legs to Water”.

The CD’s accompanying booklet includes an essay by Clarke on the making of the films and their soundtracks, as well as a piece by Vocalion’s Oliver Lomax which effectively serves as a bio of Clarke and the recently deceased Steve Gray. Both Clarke and Lomax speak highly of Gray, whose haunting soundtrack for Expose was, astonishingly, recorded in just one day at a studio in Denmark Street. While Clarke’s directing career has been reasonably well documented over the years, this is the first time his work as a composer has been written up, and reveals him to have been quite prolific in the library music field, composing for such library music companies as KPM and Amphonic music, and as a result subsequently seeing his work turn up in TV shows as diverse as The Sweeney and On the Buses. Clarke is refreshing candid about his career in his essay, admitting he lost a fortune on his first film “Got It Made” in 1973, and was eager to sail into more commercial waters with the three Fiona Richmond sexploitation films, becoming aware of the genre’s commercial possibilities after directing a documentary on the British sex film industry for the BBC’s Man Alive programme in 1975. “These three films represent” writes Clarke “a certain rather oddball example of the British film production in the 1970s; under-financed, little recognised but doggedly triumphant in terms of their overall success. The music represents, in turn, some of the best studio playing of that period”.

Never before commercially released, the CD has been mastered from the original analogue stereo tapes, and is available directly from Vocalion’s own website

http://www.duttonvocalion.co.uk/proddetail.asp?prod=CDSML8450

Cliff Twemlow - New book

A new book about Cliff Twemlow, the bouncer, actor, library music composer, and horror paperback writer is due out at the end of the year. Since Twemlow already wrote his autobiography in 1980, the new book intends to focus mostly on his subsequent film career in the likes of GBH, The Eye of Satan and Firestar: First Contact. The book's authors have tracked down an extensive collection of very rare films and Twemlow’s friends and family for the book, its looking very impressive.

There is also some interesting Twemlow related memorabilia and info at their website, including newspaper cuttings from around the time of GBH’s video release.
http://www.itsahotun.com/Cliff_Twemlow.htm

Harrison Marks 1973 interview

GHM

inter

viewed by Verve magazine in October 1973, he tends to distance himself from pornography in the interview, yet there are a number of his h/c productions from this period that have since resurfaced so he clearly was making them and his official website mentions that he was filming more explicit material as early as 1967 “for a German businessman”. To put this interview into historical context though, it was hardly socially acceptable to be making blue films back in the 70s, and given Marks had been prosecuted for sending ‘obscene material’ through the post in 1971 and the same year this interview took place he would be kicked out of his studio after the landlord objected to 8mm sex films being made on the premises, it would have been inviting trouble to admit to shooting more explicit material.

Interestingly the magazine’s editorial claims that Marks had recently been approached by a ‘very large company’ (which he wouldn’t name) to shoot material on videotape, a format in its infancy in 73. Its quite funny to hear the magazine’s editor describe video like a hi-tech futuristic device “the system would work like this.. You buy an attachment that fits onto the back of your television, plug in a cassette and wham! Instant films of your choice.”

The Naked Quotes of Harrison Marks

Quotes from interviews with Harrison Marks from the 1980s and 1990s, several of these have been worked into the umpteenth update of the Naked World of Harrison Marks article http://gavcrimson.blogspot.com/2008/08/naked-world-of-harrison-marks.html
but I thought I should include them here in isolation as well for people who don’t want to scan through that epic again. I’ve also been able to unearth some pictures of the second Mrs. Harrison Marks- Vivienne Warren.


Early glamour photography:

“Up until that time there were two or three very well known photographers who specialized in nude work. One was a bloke called Roy, then there was John Everard and Walter Bird. All their stuff was like love-locked-out through a mist. I photographed these girls as I saw them, with flesh and goose pimples- the lot.”

Making 8mm films:

“Somebody suggested it to me, and I thought it was a good idea, which of course it was. The market was vast because all photographic shops stocked these things- Dixons were my main customer. We started off making 50 foot shorts, then I decided to do 70s, 100s, and 200s, which were 20 minutes long. Originally they were black and white, then we went big and went into colour. It was a big thing in those days.”

Pattern of Evil (1967):

“Halfway through the filming, in walked a guy in a loud blue checked suit. He looked to me like a music hall comic. I asked my agent ‘Is he in showbiz?, he looks like a comic’ He said ‘Yea, he’s a really funny guy he’s got a gun in his pocket and he’s with the mob’.”

Mary Millington:
“She was a sweet girl, a lovely kid”

Janus and his initiation into the spanking business:

“All the characters in the book game used this pub and I got quite friendly with the lads who published a very popular spanking magazine called Janus. One day they asked me to do some films for them- this was before video, incidentally.”
“The chap who founded the Janus magazine was an old fella called Van Ocker. He was getting on a bit- in his 70s- and he was ill. The fellas that owned the magazine had no idea how to put a magazine together and didn’t particularly care. As long as it made money that was it. Anyway one day Van Ocker snuffed it. And I was in the pub listening to these guys say ‘what are we going to do’, then they said ‘hang on, George was in the publishing game for years’.”

Making Come Play With Me:

“I suppose I bit off more than I could chew. I wrote it, directed it, acted in it. I crawled off the set the last day so drained. I said to myself ‘if this is what its all about forget it’. But once a ham, always a ham.”

The unmade “The Reluctant Pornographer”

“its about a top glamour photographer who gets involved in shooting a sex film. Its autobiographical- I’ve taken all the outrageously funny things that have happened in 25 years and its going to blow the porn cinema sky high. Very funny script. ”

Typecasting:
“I suppose I regretted being typecast a bit, I had a screenplay I wrote, a heavily dramatic feature, but no one would take Harrison Marks seriously with a dramatic feature. They’d say ‘go and do one like the last one with lots of girls and laughs’. I thought fuck it that’s what they want, that’s what they get.”

Childhood:
“I was brought up at a time of the most frightening anti-Semitism, Black Shirts everywhere and that fucking man Mosley holding meetings outside Hackney Town Hall of a Saturday night. We used to go to the Hackney Empire and my mother had to walk three-quarters of a mile round to avoid that fucking mob and she wasn’t even Jewish. ”

Wealth:
“you know I used to have three Rolls-Royces in the garage I must have been a cunt of the first order. What did I want with three?”

Spanking Videos:

“I started to get letters from readers asking if videos were available. I thought I had better get into this as well. I’m doing this in a way I’ve done everything else. Giving people what they want with a bit of humour. They’re tongue in cheek, theres always a touch of comedy”.

Would you trade in a 38-foot Cruiser to make a British Sex Film?

Derren Nesbitt did….

Robin Askwith : the Eastender (and film director) that never was

From a redtop in 2005, and Photoplay August 1977

Greg Smith RIP

Simon Sheridan is reporting the death of ‘Confessions’ series producer Greg Smith at the age of 69.

http://www.cultmovieforums.com/forum/showpost.php?p=253625&postcount=1

Very sad news, surprising as well, in that recent-ish interview he did for the Robin Askwith fansite, he still looked quite young and I’d never have guessed he was in his sixties. Outside of sex comedies Smith’s other diverse film work included the film version of Dad’s Army, the glam rock weirdness of Never Too Young Too Rock and a remake of The 39 Steps, plus further successes on Television and the West End. And of course he was also a one time Mr. Lynda Bellingham as well.

RIP Greg

Might watch one of the Confessions films, or even Never Too Young To Rock, tonight as a tribute.