In 1979 filmaker Derek Jarman made a series of three music shorts with Marianne Faithfull linked to her album Broken English. The songs were the Ballad of Lucy Jordan, Broken English and The Witches Song. According to Jarman's autobiographical Dancing Ledge (1984)some of the filming took place at Surrey Docks where they 'built a bonfire in the rubble of the old warehouses'.
The Broken English video also has another local connection: 'We used old footage of Stalin and Hitler, cut together so that they smile and wave to each other in a ballet of destruction. There's footage of Mosley, and video material that the Oval Co-op have given me of the police at Lewisham. The film starts with the Bikini H-bomb explosion monitored on a space-invaders machine; and ends with the destruction in slow motion of the huge concrete swastika that crownded the Nuremburg stadium'. The Lewisham footage is from the 1977 clashes between anti-fascists, the National Front and police in New Cross and Lewisham.
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19 hours ago
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Posted this at my blog, and got asked where the other three vids are. The Lucy Jordan (my favourite song by MF) on YouTube is http://tinyurl.com/cr5lzw
Is that Jarman?
And the other?
b
The Lucy Jordan film of MF wandering through Soho was made by Jarman (that's on youtube). I haven't come across The Witches song film, which is frustrating as by a process of elimination that must have been the one filmed with people dressing up in Surrey Docks.
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