Never Too Young To Rock (1976)

Never Too Young To Rock is the glam rock loving bastard child of The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, its also an example of that rare beast...the British road movie, and inadvertently might also be the closest anyone has ever come to making a live action version of The Beano. Ignore everything negative that has ever been written about this film, all clearly penned by people whose arteries have gotten clogged up by 21st century cynicism, have an unhealthy allegiance to brass band music, and have long since lost the ability to connect with their 12 year old selves.

Whatever else can be said about the folks who made Never Too Young To Rock, they sure knew how to make a movie for 12 year old boys. NTYTR is a film filled with food fights, joke shop gags, a Scooby Doo level visit to a haunted house, glam rock musical numbers, the lampooning of adult authority figures, and no girls allowed...well not many of them anyway. TV presenter Sally James really being the only female considered cool enough to cut it in this boy’s own environment. Admittedly, you have to be in a certain mindset to enjoy a film like this...personally I’ve found it works best as a New Year’s Eve party movie, NTYTR’s combo of good time music, merriment and its inbuilt nostalgia value, tending to be at its most infectious at that time of year.

NTYTR ain’t got time for anything as sophisticated as back-story, impatiently establishing its totalitarian future/sci-fi movie premise with the opening proclamation of “In the late 1970s, Rock n Roll was to be banned from television. One young man, our hero, led the battle against this TV ban. He searched the country for the biggest rock groups to perform at a concert in support of his cause. But the enemies of rock n roll had other plans”, before throwing you straight into the madhouse. NTYTR often has the appearance of a Children’s Film Foundation production that had accidently forgot to cast any child actors, and had to make do with a couple of glam rock bands (Mud, The Rubettes, The Glitter Band) behaving like big kids instead, as well as calling in a few showbiz favours. The film being populated by cameos from the likes of Shelia Steafel, Peter Noone, John Clive and Nosher Powell. NTYTR’s leading man Peter Denyer was no stranger to behaving like a big kid either, having come to prominence with just that shtick on TV’s Please Sir and The Fenn Street Gang, so was a natural shoo-in for NTYTR’s dim-witted hero- who is literally called Hero.

NTYTR’s simplistic, could have been written on the back of a beer mat plot finds Hero taking to the road in his ‘Group Detector Van’ (a parody of the era’s TV Detector Vans) in order to track down pop bands and bring them together for a televised pop concert in the hope that this will persuade the authorities to rethink their TV ban on pop music. Having been outlawed from TV, The Rubettes have been reduced to performing out of the back of a truck, Mud have been farmed out to a motorway cafe, while The Glitter Band have lucked out the most and are starring in their own movie.



British pop music films love a curmudgeon, such characters are usually played by name actors or TV personalities, who spend these films moaning and grumbling about the music, only to be won over by it in the final reel. Gonks Go Beat had Kenneth Connor, The Ghost Goes Gear had Nicholas Parsons, and following in their footsteps here is Freddie Jones as Hero’s reluctant sidekick, the chronically complaining Mr Rockbottom. My pet theory about British pop films and their love affairs with curmudgeons is that such characters existed to give the dads -who’d been reluctantly dragged to the cinema by their kids- someone to relate to. Rockbottom is seemingly their mouthpiece, with his miserable mutterings about “long haired kids” who “sound like a load of cats”. On the sly, Rockbottom would like nothing better than for all this long haired music to go away, so that we can all go back to listening to Rockbottom’s beloved brass band music. NTYTR really, really has it in for brass band music. A type of music that in the eyes of this film represents all things old fashioned, conformist and worth rebelling against. The villains of NTYTR being a brass band, headed by Carry On alumni John Clive, who follow Hero and Rockbottom around in a steam engine.



Rockbottom’s attempts to sabotage Hero’s quest- by among other things starting a riot between rival football supporters- inevitably backfires on him in a Wile E. Coyote fashion, with the added insult that the hopelessly trusting Hero mistakes Rockbottom’s actions as over-eager dedication to their cause “you shouldn’t be so keen Mr Rockbottom”. It would have been easy for Freddie Jones to merely phone it in and view appearing in a kid’s pop movie as being beneath him, but to his credit Jones throws himself into the role of NTYTR’s chief figure of fun with almost superhuman dedication, doing comedy pratfalls, falling over, being constantly run around, and at one point finding himself on an army assault course. That’s no way to treat a Shakespearian actor, but Freddie Jones takes whatever this film can throw at him. Jones’ beyond the call of duty dedication to the role is even more endearing, once you discover that it may have partly been motivated by the insistence of his young, pop music loving son –future actor Toby Jones- in the same way that Frank Langella taking on the role of Skeletor in the Masters of the Universe movie, and Kenneth Cranham playing Dr Channard in Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 was born out of begging from their younger family members.

Many of this film’s pop movie forefathers like Just for Fun, The Ghost Goes Gear and Sweet Beat are so square that they could have been directed by the former headmaster of one of their acts...not so with Never Too Young To Rock, which leaves you with the impression that the people behind the camera were as crazy, if not crazier, than the pop bands being showcased. Never Too Young To Rock is a joyful master class in undisciplined, anarchic filmmaking. Handheld camerawork, the use of fishbowl lenses and the random throwing of chickens into scenes are the norm here. A running gag in the film has the narrative being interrupted by stock footage of cannons being fired, or flash-forwards to other parts of the film, all of which are met with the confused response of “what was that?” by whoever happens to be on the screen. The film’s unofficial catchphrase, and one that your average viewer is sure to adopt as their own, and find themselves saying out loud multiple times during the film. “What was that?” moments include Hero and Mr Rockbottom stopping off at a service station, and finding it being manned by Merlin the Magician. An encounter with a Russian guard who patrols the border of Surrey, and Rockbottom leaving the Group Detector Van on rail tracks, only for the oncoming vehicle, a rail cart operated by ghosts, to magically pass through the van. Further spooky goings on await Hero and Mr Rockbottom during a visit to a haunted house.

All of NTYTR is reliably bonkers, but the film really, really loses its mind during the haunted house sequence. Eight glorious minutes of being brutally beaten by the silly stick, which includes Hero and Mr Rockbottom encountering a troupe of female ghosts who appear to have modelled themselves on Angel Blake, eyes peering through a cobwebbed portrait of Donny Osmond, Larry Grayson references, a cameo by DJ Peter Powell, natch’ lots of chickens being thrown about, and a ghost carrying its head under its arm, which makes a joke that must have inspired the film’s target audience to later ask their parents the awkward question “what’s a hysterectomy?”. These ghostly shenanigans culminate in a performance by Bob Kerr’s Whoopee Band, a Frankenstein group created from parts of the Bonzo Dog and New Vaudeville Bands, complete with Queen Victoria cosplaying drummer, who pull off the herculean task of raising the film’s level of eccentricity even higher.



If I do have a slight grievance with Never Too Young To Rock, it’s that it always leaves you wanting more of bona fide weirdos The Whoopee Band and less of the more commercial pretty boys The Rubettes. ‘Jukebox Jive’ aside I will admit to using The Rubettes numbers in this film as an excuse to go make a cup of tea or check up on what’s a haps on Twitter. The film’s slightly more mature companion piece ‘Side by Side’ (1975) is equally guilty of sidelining the band ‘Fox’ in favour of Stephanie ‘I was born with a smile on my face’ De Sykes. Somewhere out there in a parallel universe is a 1970s pop film that is entirely centred around Bob Kerr’s Whoopee Band and Noosha Fox, such a creation could never exist in this world however. Its awesomeness would just be beyond the capacity of your average human being, and likely have resulted in numerous heads exploding in cinemas, necessitating hours and hours of overtime for cinema staff in order to clean up all of the brain matter and skull.

Everything about Never Too Young To Rock smacks of 1960s casualties making a movie for the kids...only to realise that they had no idea how to make a movie, and instead palmed off on the audience some surreal malarkey featuring their favourite pop stars goofing around. In that sense NTYTR is a close blood brother of Ringo Starr’s Born to Boogie (1973), and the Starr/Harry Nilsson atrocity Son of Dracula (1974), two films that could collectively be known as ‘The Beatles sure knew how to piss away that Apple money’. Both Born to Boogie and Son of Dracula look like the leftovers from the booziest, rowdiest rave ups in town. Take a look at the cast list of Son of Dracula...Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, John Bonham, Keith Moon, Freddie Jones and Dennis Price...and wonder how London wasn’t drank dry that month. You’re in little doubt that their casts were having the debauched time of their lives behind the scenes, but the end results just fail to bottle that experience. Son of Dracula in particular is a difficult one to sit through. This is why I’d place NTYTR in the higher echelons of 1970s pop film relics, simply because the party atmosphere bleeds on over into the film itself. Whereas Born to Boogie and Son of Dracula are experiences akin to stumbling upon the greatest party in town, only to discover that no one will let you in, with Never Too Young To Rock not only do you get invited in, but everyone behaves like they’ve known you for years.



Of the bands, Mud –whose name was allegedly an acronym for ‘Maniacs Under Demolition’- are a bunch of natural born jokers. A band as unpretentious as an all day breakfast at a motorway cafe, headed by the impossible to dislike, soul of Elvis trapped in the body of a dart’s player figure that was Les Gray. Mud take to their roles as the film’s class clowns like a duck to water, relishing the chance to double as movie stars and comedians. Mud are one of the few bands to play an active role in what passes for a narrative here, aiding and abetting Hero by blowing away his adversaries with bazookas, or shooting them in the head (with, it should be pointed out, toy guns, keeping in mind this is a ‘U’ certificate film).



Founded by music biz mover and shaker Laurence Myers in the early 1970s, GTO films pretty much had the glam rock era all to itself as far as the big screen was concerned. GTO’s glam era movie output including this film, its aforementioned older brother ‘Side by Side’ (1975) and the now black sheep of this family ‘Remember Me This Way’ (1974) an entire movie all about the evil one. Aside from their in-house pop music themed productions, GTO also handled a surprisingly diverse array of movies. Distributing everything from The Groove Tube, to Lina Wertmuller arthouse fare to Alan Clarke’s Scum and horror hits like Fade to Black, Don’t Go In The House and Phantasm. On account of Phantasm’s legendary ‘If this one doesn’t scare you...you’re already dead’ tag-line, it is tempting to suggest GTO should have advertised Never Too Young To Rock with ‘If this one doesn’t get your feet tapping...you’re already dead’.

Myers co-produced Never Too Young To Rock with Greg Smith, who was in-between ‘Confessions of a’ films and towards the end of his marriage to Lynda Bellingham...in short, if ever there was a man in need of a diversion, it was Greg Smith in 1976. Smith is something of the forgotten man of this film, he is a no show in the behind the scenes footage unearthed for the DVD release, and doesn’t even warrant a mention on the DVD’s yak track. Then again, Greg Smith is something of a forgotten hero of the British film industry in general. Maybe this is the way Smith would have wanted it, he was by all accounts an intensely private individual, one who masterminded many a crowd pleaser but preferred the role of the man behind the curtain...it doesn’t make it right though. When he passed away, I vividly remember some prick on the internet dismissing him as “the poor man’s Peter Rogers”. A comment that has bugged me for years, and doesn’t at all do Smith justice. Don’t get me wrong I’ve spent many a happy bank holiday monday vegging out to Carry On films, but post 1979 was there really all that much to Peter Rogers’ career other than living on former glories. Greg Smith on the other hand remained a vital force within the industry, who enjoyed success on TV with the Shillingbury Tales and in the West End with the Buddy Holly musical ‘Buddy’. Even within the film industry there was always more to Greg Smith than the Confessions series, what with excursions into glam rock here and sit-com spin-offs with the Dad’s Army movie. Towards the end of his life Smith even had plans for an ambitious reboot of his 1977 tragi-comedy ‘Stand Up Virgin Soldiers’ updated to a modern day, Middle Eastern setting. An idea that the similar themed Hollywood film The Hurt Locker (2008) would later enjoy success with. And yes, he did also make The Boys in Blue, but c’mon we all have our off days, and as far as their final decades are concerned to me it was Peter Rogers who was the poor man’s Greg Smith.



Only an idiot-dunce would praise Never Too Young To Rock for its ‘realism’. Any basis in reality here gets shown an open window early on, presumably sent on its way by a head butt from Nosher Powell, yet its version of Britain couldn’t have been all that removed from what life on the road must have been like for bands back then. The film’s landscape is one of greasy spoon cafes, ungodly digs, samey council estates and lengthy, rain soaked journeys into the back of the beyond. Cheery and hypoactive as the film is, NTYTR is perversely hell bent on emphasizing its miserable locations, rather than downplaying them, with even the chipper Hero acknowledging at one point “this depressing, dismal dampness”. There is nothing glamorous about the Britain of NTYTR, apart from that is the musicians themselves. The colour coordinated Mud and the cape wearing Les Gray, the futuristic apparel of The Glitter Band and the doo-wop throwback look of The Rubettes all suggesting men with superpowers, men from another planet and men from rock n’ roll’s past have assembled to save us from the bleakness of 1976’s Britain.

For a film made in the oft-maligned 1970s, and concerned with the especially tarnished area of glam rock, Never Too Young To Rock manages to dodge all the entertainment killing aspects that have since brought that period into disrepute. The film lucked out by choosing one of the ‘nice’ DJs, Peter Powell, to cameo in the film, rather than a groper like Dave Lee Travis or –heaven forbid- Jimmy ‘DJs Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things’ Savile. All that glitters in the film is fortunately not Gary, the film capturing The Glitter Band after Gary Glitter had split from the group. NTYTR is free of the kind of associations that now obviously mar GTO’s Remember Me This Way, and to a lesser extent Side by Side, which has an S&M striptease scene scored to Gary Glitter’s ‘I Love You Love Me Love’.

The whole ‘we have to prevent the parents from banning Rock n’ Roll for the kids’ plot never quite rings true though. Granted, the punk era would later provoke a censorious backlash from the older generation, but did anyone really regard the acts here as a threat to British society. Mud come across as the types who’d be more likely to be knocking back pints with the dads, rather than being run out of town by them, and as for The Rubettes well...they weren’t exactly The Baader-Meinhof gang were they? Many of the bands here had already peeked commercially, and if truth be told NTYTR feels more like a ‘let’s get the band(s) back together again’ type of movie, with pop groups who were fading into obscurity being rounded up and put back on television to remind the British public of their greatness.



As chart success was beginning to dry up for these bands, the film effectively serves as a greatest hits package, with Mud working their way through ‘The Cat Crept In’, ‘Tiger Feet’, ‘Rocket’ and ‘Dynamite’, The Glitter Band ‘Angel Face’, ‘Shout it Out’, ‘Let’s Get Together Again’, ‘Just for You’, and The Rubettes ‘Tonight’, ‘Sugar Baby Love’ and ‘Jukebox Jive’. The legacy of Never Too Young To Rock is littered with sad stories, all of the bands here were destined to play out the rest of their careers on the 1970s nostalgia circuit, The Glitter Band remain tarnished by their long ago association with Gary Glitter, writer Ron Inkpen died young in 1977 having never fulfilled his dream to make a blasphemous X-rated animated film called ‘The Big G’. Greg Smith, Peter Denyer, Mud’s Les Gray and Dave Mount have also since passed away, and 2019 saw us lose Freddie Jones as well. 

We’ll always have the big finish of Never Too Young To Rock though....glam rock going out in a final blaze of glory, as Mud, The Glitter Band and The Rubettes combine to belt out the title track. Ten singers, four drummers and six guitarists, joined by Merlin the Magician, the Angel Blake dancers, football hooligans, Hero, Rockbottom and a few chickens, all there to pay tribute to the forever young, rebellious spirit of Rock n Roll “bless my soul, this is rock n roll, you can’t keep the bedroom locked, hey ma, you’re never too young to rock”. Remember them this way.