Spinal Tap (1984)

11/10

Elevator pitch

A rockmentary following the British band Spinal Tap on a disastrous tour of the States. Founding members David St Hubbins (Michael McKean), lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) variously play gigs, fall out, get back together and lose drummers in weird accidents. The tour is a disaster but, it turns out, they are now ‘big in Japan’.

The rockumentary is, of course, a mockumentary. Spinal Tap aren’t a real band and the whole thing is a comedy about a group of self-deluded and very stupid musicians, fumbling about at the bottom of the record bins. It is simply presented as a documentary, with much praise being heaped, over the years, on cinematographer Peter Smokler, who was a documentary camera man and who keeps a sense of cinéma vérité to the whole thing.

But then it is really a documentary after all. A documentary not about a rock group but about a group of improv comedians pretending to be a rock group. The team, including director Rob Reiner, had rough outlines of scenes or incidents but all the dialogue was improvised during filming, so that Smokler was genuinely capturing a live event as it happened in front of him.

Obviously some of the structure of the movie was planned ahead and some elements were added in the shooting, such as the introduction of David St Hubbins’ girlfriend Jeanine in an effort to generate a narrative, but there was plenty that was just made up as they went along.

The convention is that a film is made three times: first on the page, second on the sound stage, third in the edit. Spinal Tap was therefore only made once. It joins a number of notable films, such as Annie Hall (1977) and Star Wars (1977), that became that notable only in the edit.

This improv comedy tradition is not something we really have in the UK, and certainly didn’t at the time. Rather than the Second City, SNL, Hollywood pipeline, we had the University revue, Edinburgh Fringe, TV show journey that gave us things like The Comic Strip, a Channel 4 strand of comedy movies made by Peter Richardson and usually starring some combination of Young Ones.

By a weird coincidence, at exactly the same time as Spinal Tap was being filmed, The Comic Strip were making their own mock/rockumentary Bad News On Tour (1983), also about an inept and very stupid heavy rock band going on tour. The comparison between the two tells you a lot about the differences between British and American culture in the early ‘80s, not least the fact that the Bad News tour is a lot smaller and cheaper than Spinal Tap’s and only lasts for the 30 minutes of a TV show rather than a full feature movie. Just the difference in scale of finances and possible ambition is striking.

Also, though, Bad News On Tour is much more evidently written than Spinal Tap. There is evidently a fair amount of improvisation, but scenes are more obviously shaped as jokes and there is a lot more business around the act of documentary making - another layer of meta narrative is created on top of the fiction.

It is tempting to see this comparison between improvisation and scripted comedy as one of personal freedoms compared to class-ridden hierarchy. The American project arises from a disparate group working together to make something extraordinary, while the British actors do as they’re told by the writer and the director.

You could equally, though, frame as the democratic socialist Europeans all pulling together in their own roles, compared to the American individuals all fighting like rats in a sack for the big laugh line that will end the scene. Certainly on rewatch you can begin to see the moments different members of Spinal Tap catch each other by surprise or sit on someone else’s joke.

Discomforts

What’s wrong with being sexy?

Look, the plot line with Jeanine is a little uncomfortable, reminding one, as it does, of the bile that has been heaped on Yoko Ono over the years, which was always largely sexist and racist in origin. The final shot of her, being cowed by Tap’s cricket bat toting manager Ian is a little squirm inducing.

On the other hand, that’s the joke, after all. Of course, if they’d been the ones smelling the glove, that would have been ok.

Delights

We’re not going to rehearse the jokes here, because we all know them anyway, and the spot on parody of the music is much remarked on. Also, as a teenaged Queen fan, the accuracy of the parody was more of a discomfort, to be honest.

So we’ll just draw attention to the English accents that McKean, Guest and Shearer do. Americans tend to sound more like Dick Van Dyke or Johnny Depp when they try to do an English accent, but these three are really amazingly good. I thought they were English the first time I saw the film. Mind you, while Christopher Haden-Guest, 5th Baron Haden-Guest was born and largely raised in the States, he is a member of the British aristocracy, so that may have helped with the mockney.

Can we show the kids?

We actually watched this with a kid who enjoyed it, although he did caveat that with ‘not the funniest thing I’ve ever seen’. Spinal Tap is definitely one of those films in danger of being suffocated by its own legend. In the mid ‘80s, its very existence as a mock documentary, its playing around with form and reality, was a marvellous thing; in a media saturated twenty first century, where the mishaps of idiots are broadcasted at us in a never-ending stream, it feels less magical.

Is it still worth it?

The bit that today feels the funniest is the post-credit sequence, which is just a selection of banging one-liners, like a really short edition of The Fast Show. It’s certainly got my favourite bit: Nigel Tufnel trying to imagine what it might be like to work in a hat shop. ‘Would you...what size do you wear, sir?’ Something about Christopher Guest’s innocent, enthusiastic performance is utterly charming. More relevantly, it's a scene I think of every time I wonder what I’m doing with my ‘career’ (in the sense of running downhill at high speed, out of control): ‘No! We’re all out, do you wear black?’

This is why we want to show these films to the kids, after all, because they have become, through rewatching, an intrinsic part of our own history, of ourselves. And of our social identity. At the time, in the ‘80s, the only way you found out about cult films like Spinal Tap, was because someone told you. Someone mentioned it in an interview in NME, someone quoted it in conversation, someone, four pints and two spliffs in, demanded that everyone watch it.

From there the dialogue from the film became part of your dialect, interwoven into how you speak to each other. One of your friends tries something new and another pipes up with ‘hope you enjoy our new direction... Derek Smalls, he wrote this’; a particularly idiotic opinion might be greeted with a ‘It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever’, an enthusiastic welcome at a party might elicit a ‘Bobbi Fleckman, hostess with the mostest!’

These quotations aren’t supposed to be funny, they’re simply social markers, the equivalent of the dog licking my elbow when it's sticking out from under the covers, a little reminder that ‘hello, I am here and we are part of the same gang’. As a result a rewatch soon stops being a viewing of a film and becomes a celebration of that social relationship, of the history and experience of that friendship.

At the climax of the film the estranged David St Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel reconcile on stage, reclaiming their childhood friendship and arrested adolescence, standing side by side happily playing their stupid songs. We realise in that moment that the point isn’t the band, the band is just an excuse for the friendship. As doomed drummer Mick Shrimpton puts it: ‘As long as there is, you know, sex and drugs, I can do without the rock’n’roll.’

This is what cult movies like Spinal Tap are really for. Those acts of friendship that we do not face-to-face but side-to-side, something that is an unacknowledged and unremarkable performance in intimacy, a revelling in each other’s company and mutual weltanschauung.

Of course it helps if you also have a tiny model of Stonehenge to dance around, too.

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Speaking of ludicrous rock n’ roll, here’s Dame Frederick and the boys: