James D.
Cooper’s celebratory documentary traces the roots of the Who via its
affectionate portrait of the idiosyncratic management team that helped define
the band.
Is it
too sweeping a statement to say Lambert & Stamp instantly earns a place in
the pantheon of great music docs? Who cares, let’s just go ahead and say it.
This wildly entertaining account of the genesis and rise of the Who gives due
acknowledgement to Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, described by Roger Daltrey as
the band’s fifth and sixth members. James D. Cooper’s rollicking film is a
heady return to Swinging Sixties England at the height of the Mod explosion
that’s packed with primo archival material and killer tunes. It’s also a
vigorous testament to the rewards of creative collaboration, shining a
spotlight on two highly unorthodox, self-invented rock entrepreneurs.
The
brilliant synergy of those contradictory yet complementary personalities should
make this dynamically packaged movie of interest to audiences far beyond
hardcore Who fans. As an account of the early days of a band that galvanized
“My Generation” while smashing up guitars, it’s as probing and candid as one
could hope for -- stuffed with memorable anecdotes and tasty trivia nuggets.
But Lambert & Stamp is arguably even more rewarding – not to mention
surprisingly moving – as an intimate snapshot of an unlikely chalk-and-cheese
friendship.
Lambert
died in 1981, which might be expected to cause an imbalance in the way the
band’s joint managers are represented. Though he also died in late 2012, the
garrulous Stamp was still very much around at the time this film was being
made, to share his colourful recollections first-hand. But Cooper and ace
editor Christopher Tellefsen have accessed an extraordinary trove of filmed
material and interviews that make Lambert every bit as vivid a presence in
absentia as his friend and business partner, or the surviving Who members,
Daltrey and Pete Townshend.
The
abundance of terrific footage from the era is perhaps a direct reflection of
the shared interest that first drew Lambert and Stamp together when they met
while working as assistants at Shepperton Studios in the early ‘60s – they were
both film lovers and aspiring directors in thrall to the French New Wave. They
didn’t set out to make a mark on popular-music history. Rather, their impetus
was to find a band they could take under their inexperienced wings and steer to
a sufficient degree of success to make a movie about them, thus providing the
would-be auteurs with an entrée into the film biz.
Townshend
reflects that “irreverence” is probably the wrong word to describe their
approach, since that would imply that they weren’t fully invested in the
process. But there’s undeniably a larkish, make-it-up-as-we-go spirit that
characterizes Lambert and Stamp’s role in moulding the raw talent of the High
Numbers, as the group was originally called, into rock royalty.
Townshend’s
art school chum Richard Barnes observes that Lambert and Stamp were such
inherently different types that they seemed almost like characters out of a
sitcom. Indeed there is a certain odd-couple, buddy-movie vibe to Cooper’s film
that feeds its ample humour.
Lambert
was the terribly posh son of the celebrated classical composer and conductor
Constant Lambert, and the godchild of Margot Fonteyn. An Oxford-educated,
well-travelled polyglot who was as openly gay as was possible at a time when
homosexuality was still illegal in England, he is first seen cruising around
Beverly Hills in the back of a Rolls, expounding on the demise of opera and the
symphony and heralding pop as the new frontier. Barnes jokes of the dedicated
chain smoker: “We think he used one match in his whole life to light the first
cigarette.” One of Lambert’s earliest film jobs was as a cameraman on explorer
John Hemming’s dangerous Iriri River expedition into unexplored country in
Brazil in 1961.
Stamp,
on the other hand, was an unvarnished London East Ender whose father was a
Thames tugboat captain. His brother, the actor Terence Stamp, describes him as
“a rough, tough fighting sort of spiv,” whose only notable interest was in
girls. It’s inferred that his working-class background and Lambert’s sexuality
gave them an outsider status in common that overcame any barriers of class.
Refreshingly,
Lambert being gay never appears to have caused any problem for the straight
guys in his orbit. Townshend even grumbles amusingly that he never made a pass,
making him feel unattractive, while Daltrey says he was the first toff ever to
speak to him without condescension.
While
combing music venues for a band to launch, they were drawn to a dingy club with
lines of scooters parked outside, where Daltrey, Townshend, John Entwistle and
Keith Moon pumped out feedback-heavy sounds from the stage for a crowd of
mesmerized Mods. With no music-industry experience and no connections, Lambert
and Stamp had only chutzpah to recommend them, but the guys in what was to
become the Who liked the shtick of these instinctive ideas men.
This
influential period in British pop culture has been widely documented elsewhere
– not to mention depicted in dramatized form in the 1979 film Quadrophenia,
based on the Who’s concept album. But the footage here, coupled with the
incisive commentary, is bracingly immersive. While Stamp says his thing was
“Trotsky rhetoric,” Lambert excelled at erudite social commentary, distilling
the teen Mod gestalt (in television interviews in German and French, as well as
English) into an eruption of revolutionary self-empowerment and rule flaunting
that served to forestall the post-20 slide into middle-class convention.
Lambert and Stamp positioned the Who at the centre of this ferment as a whole
new philosophy in popular music, which stood apart from what the Beatles or
Stones were doing.
While
the band and its managers for many years were spending more than they earned,
Lambert shared “his aristocratic expertise in how to get by with no money,” as
Townshend puts it. But his influence was felt in other ways, too, throwing
Purcell recordings and other classical music championed by his father at
Townshend to inform his understanding of structure and melody.
Cooper
deliberately jumps around in his chronicle, avoiding a restrictive timeline in
favour of energizing non-linear curiosity. While less attention inevitably is
given to the late Entwistle and Moon than to Daltrey and Townshend, pithy
observations illuminate the contributions and personalities of all four
musicians. Accounts of friction within the band – particularly before Daltrey
tamed his scrappy street-fighter nature and stopped taking the bait of Moon’s
goading cruelty – are especially absorbing.
However,
the most compelling conflict emerges with the slow disintegration of Lambert
and Stamp’s relationship to the Who, which started with the release of “Tommy.”
Townshend is both forthright and self-protective in his account of the
gestation of that rock-opera concept album and the eventual 1975 Ken Russell
movie, conceding that Lambert helped identify a through-line in a post-war story
that began as a more amorphous spiritual allegory.
Lambert
and Stamp naturally assumed that they would produce and direct the film
version, fulfilling their long-stalled ambition. But Townshend balked at the
idea and the deal went in another direction. This also caused a rift between
the management partners. Stamp got an executive producer credit on the movie,
while lead producer Robert Stigwood shut Lambert out due to his escalating drug
habit.
The pain
of that period, plus subsequent lawsuits, professional separations and deaths
might threaten to cast a downbeat pall over a film about collaboration. But its
water-under-the-bridge sense of Zen-like acceptance makes the final section
incredibly poignant. The graciousness shown by Daltrey perhaps instigates this
resolution, but it’s Stamp’s humour and rough-hewn wisdom that make it
resonate. When he discusses letting go of the dream to make a great film that
he had carried around since he was 16, the hard-won peace of the man is
beautiful, made even more so by the knowledge of his death since these
interviews were shot.
Needless
to say, the ageless music of the Who courses through the film like electricity,
along with that of other artists associated with Lambert and Stamp, among them
Jimi Hendrix (whom they signed to a record deal before they even had a label).
One clip in which Townshend gives Lambert and Stamp a first acoustic taste of
“Glittering Girl” is a gem.
Editor
Tellefsen’s credits are in narrative features, and this marks an impressive
step into documentary, incorporating lively graphic elements and image
manipulation, and making extensive use of black and white on new interviews to
integrate them amongst the vintage clips. Cooper tells a full-bodied story in
this fast-paced two hours, harnessing the chaotic energy of two men who
generated a whirl of unconventional ideas and strategies.
Venue:
Sundance Film Festival (Documentary Premieres)
With:
Chris Stamp, Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Terence Stamp, Heather Daltrey, John
Hemming, Richard Barnes, Robert Fearnley-Whittingstall, Irish Jack
Production
companies: Motocinema, Harms/Cooper
Director:
James D. Cooper
Producers:
Loretta Harms, Douglas Graves
Executive
producers: Loretta Harms, Mark Mullen
Director
of photography: James D. Cooper
Music:
The Who
Editor:
Christopher Tellefsen
Sales:
Motocinema
No
rating, 117 minutes.
