Alan Price

Some years ago I put together a little book about the early career of National Treasure Helen Mirren. It sent me back to some of her first appearances on screen, among them O Lucky Man!, directed by Lindsay Anderson. Revisiting the film also brought reminders of a notable score by Alan Price: the soundtrack album is a gem.

 

Generally, the British film industry has made a poor fist of reflecting Britain back to itself. Anderson’s films were an exception. Embodying the contradictions of the director’s personality, they succeeded in marrying his individualistic auteur style with the demands of popular entertainment.   

 

O Lucky Man!, released in 1973, was something truly original. Somehow or other Anderson and producer Michael Medwin secured American finance for a film that resolutely resisted the upstairs-downstairs, heritage-industry clichés that our American cousins expected. The Britain it portrays, albeit with the broad brush of satire, is venal and tawdry, populated by bent coppers, mad scientists, ruthless tycoons, flagellant judges and sex-starved landladies. Through it all, wearing a perpetual optimistic grin, is the irrepressible Malcolm McDowell as travelling salesman Mick Travis. Up and down he goes, on a picaresque roller-coaster of a plot. About halfway through the film (which clocks in at just under three hours overall), he escapes from a crazy medical laboratory and is nearly run down by a minibus. It contains Alan Price’s band returning from a gig in the North, and, buried under a fur coat on the back seat, Helen Mirren. “This is Patricia,” says Price by way of introduction. “She’s very intelligent. She’s making a study of us.” The well-heeled daughter of immoral financier Sir James Burgess (played by Ralph Richardson), Patricia swiftly seduces the fresh-faced hero. On a city rooftop they share a champagne breakfast. Patricia dismisses Mick’s success-worship as “old-fashioned” but supplies him with enough tantalising detail of her father’s wealth to inspire Mick to blag his way into the old man’s office and secure himself a job. No less avaricious than her father, Patricia meanwhile dumps Mick to marry the Duke of Belminster.  Alan Price sings a lyric that sums up the spirit: “It’s around the world in circles turning / Earning what we can / While others dance away…” When later we encounter Patricia and her Duke, the wheel of fortune has indeed turned, and the once-affluent pair are sheltering on a bomb site among destitutes and meths-drinkers.

 

Anderson and Price had worked together before, on theatre projects, and when Price began performing with his old friend Georgie Fame, Anderson tried to set up a documentary about the pair. The finance for that one never came through, but it gave the director an idea for using Price in his next feature. The place of each song was specified in the script. Anderson recalled how he wrote a paragraph laying out what he thought the song should be about: “Alan then took this and interpreted or readjusted the idea to the song in terms of his feelings and attitudes – which were sufficiently different from mine to be creative, and sufficiently the same for it to work.” 

 

Price’s soundtrack functions in two ways – both as a Chorus commenting on the action and intermittently as part of the action. Anderson explained: “You feel perhaps that Alan has attained that attitude to life that it takes the hero, Mick, the whole story to get to.” Like a seer, he has foreknowledge. Mostly we see Price (on keyboards) and his band (Colin Green on guitar, Dave Markee on bass, Clive Thacker on drums) in a featureless studio (dubbed “Limbo” in the shooting script); the film cuts between them and the antics of the hapless hero.  

 

At just shy of half an hour, the resulting album is short, certainly compared to the baggy monster of a film that gave it birth. But many film soundtrack albums are more filler than substance. Nothing is wasted here. The songs combine irony and infectious lyricism. From the chirpy optimism of the title track – “If you’ve found the meaning of the truth in this old world, you are a lucky man!” to a weary pessimism about the judicial system – “We all want justice / But you got to have money to buy it” – there is a consistency that exceeds the scattergun targeting of Anderson’s satire. As Price sums it up in ‘Poor People’, “Someone’s got to win in the human race / If it isn’t you then it has to be me.” 

 

True, the Tyneside boy edges towards sentimentality in ‘My Home Town’. And yet, putting nostalgia to effective use and doubtless calling up childhood memories, he pulls off a coup by setting a new lyric to the Victorian hymn ‘What A Friend We Have In Jesus’. In Price’s version, “Everybody changes places / But the world still carries on”. This track gained new life in 1987 when it was used to soundtrack a Volkswagen TV commercial, bringing Price some later-career chart success. Ah, the irony! Music that began in homiletic piety passes through a 1970s satire on conspicuous consumption to end up being used to sell things.

 

I’d love to know if Dame Helen has any memories of working with Price, or he of her. She’s something of a failed rocker herself. A couple of years after making the film, she was onstage in the play Teeth’n’Smiles, playing a clapped-out rock singer. One night, waiting to go on, she was disturbed by a commotion from the street outside. It was a drunken Keith Moon. He stumbled into her dressing room, told her how he’d heard great reports of the show, and then attempted to join her on stage. He was stopped by the management. She says she’s always regretted that missed opportunity.

(First published in RnR magazine)