By Demetrius Romeo
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit they deserve. In this installment: music film director Peter Clifton, who helmed The Song Remains The Same.
When it comes to music – and particularly music films – the star is always the musical artist themselves. The director of said music film is rarely even mentioned, unless of course it’s a behind-the-camera superstar like Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Jonathan Demme or David Lynch. This does a great disservice to those who are able to expertly and imaginatively capture a band’s power on screen, and we’ve already covered a few in the Unsung Auteurs column with the gifted likes of Steve Binder, Mel Stuart, Michael Lindsay-Hogg and William Dear. To this list we now add director Peter Clifton, best known for the 1976 Led Zeppelin concert classic The Song Remains The Same.
Australian-born Peter Clifton was one of those kids whose life was irrevocably altered by the sight of Bill Haley performing “Rock Around The Clock” in the feature film Blackboard Jungle in the mid-‘50s. He cut his teeth on surf films, but it was his 1966 film of The Rolling Stones’ first Aussie tour – shot without permission from anybody – that launched his career. Within a few years, Clifton was hanging out with Andy Warhol, who came up with a poster and an alternate title – Popcorn – to Clifton’s The Beat Goes On, a collection of performance clips of English and American bands intercut with surfing footage. Popcorn opened the 1969 San Francisco Film Festival to great effect, but, Clifton admitted to FilmInk in 2005, “Andy and I didn’t get along, I’m afraid; his artwork looked to me like big photographs he’d blown up and coloured in.”
In 1973, Clifton made The London Rock And Roll Show, consisting of a Wembley Stadium performance by the likes of rock legends Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. The adventure began with an earlier trip to Majorca, where Peter “ran into a beautiful girl with a bag full of mescaline.” Over lunch, the girl got a bunch of English bankers stoned. By the end of the meal, they had pledged money for the film. “We got back to London and they gave me a cheque for twenty-five thousand pounds,” Peter recalled in 2005, but by the time the film was made, the bank had gone bust. “I owned the film myself, but I didn’t have the money to finish it. So there’s not one optical, not one effect, not one title, nothing. It came straight out of the camera like a Warhol film.”
By the early ‘80s, the international film industry had become “very ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’” so Peter Clifton headed back to Australia – just as the local music scene was coming of age. “On every corner, somebody was writing a brilliant song, whether it be ‘Solid Rock’ by Goanna or ‘What About Me’ by Moving Pictures,” he said. “For the first time, we were writing great songs about ourselves instead of copying America and England.” Peter had little choice but to make the documentary Australia Now, looking at acts like INXS, Midnight Oil and Mental As Anything.
Back in the early 2000s, when physical media was king, classic ‘60s and ‘70s bands were coming out of the woodwork when trying to compile lucrative DVDs and recalling “that Aussie guy” who filmed them way back when. Jimmy Page, for example, called out of the blue when preparing the mammoth Led Zeppelin DVD set, which was released back in 2003. “I didn’t recognise him…he’d had so much Botox done to himself!” Clifton told FilmInk in 2005. “I hadn’t seen him since I finished The Song Remains The Same. But we all became ‘hugs and kisses’ again; best mates.”
Clifton is indeed best known for The Song Remains The Same, which captures legendary rockers Led Zeppelin at the height of their powers, but he also delivers the goods with the very engaging America Live At Central Park 1979. From the cool roller skater gliding towards oncoming traffic to the band winter-surfing under the Golden Gate Bridge to the guy dealing drugs in Central Park within spitting distance of a proverbial New York City cop, it captures a moment in time. But when the band is captured in the studio overdubbing some of the recently recorded “live” music, it’s a bit of a letdown.
“I know what you mean,” Clifton admitted. “I don’t know why I let the cat out of the bag.” Fact is, virtually every apparently “live” recording involves overdubs. The Song Remains The Same was no different. “Sometimes when they’re playing live, they’ll fluff a note or something will go wrong …” But, he was quick to point out, overdubbing little bits and pieces on a twenty-four-track live recording isn’t cheating. “It’s really called ‘editing’,” he insists.
The rockumentaries have taught Clifton a lot about cinema. “You make every shot part of the storytelling, and every shot a winner, and you edit things very carefully, within the sound of the music, so that they’re seamless. I put a lot of work into those music films and they now stand the test of time because they’re not full of irrelevant images.”
Despite this, Peter had trouble bringing to the screen his vision of The Night We Called It A Day, the film he wrote with Michael Thomas about Frank Sinatra’s ill-fated visit to Australia, which was ultimately directed by Paul Goldman and released in 2003. “I decided that I wouldn’t direct this time, because it’s always been, ‘We know you can make rock and roll films, Peter, but can you handle drama?’”
Unfortunately, relinquishing control meant that the final cut lacked much of the cinematic punctuation, the “signposts”, that would have enabled the story to stay on track, and Clifton was annoyed that he wasn’t given longer to edit the film, and a budget to re-shoot the bits required to fulfill his initial vision. “When I made rock and roll films, nobody ever interfered with that. Jimmy Page would come in and say, ‘Oh, Peter, my bum looks a bit big in that shot’ so I’d change the angle or something after a bit of a fight, but we would go into the editing rooms and we would work out how to tell the story to its absolute best. A good filmmaker feels a film, he doesn’t reason it out. You’ve got to be able to feel it – and then fight as hard as you can to be able to get that vision achieved.”
Outspoken and enjoyably iconoclastic, Peter Clifton passed away in 2018, and his legacy stands as a truly essential player in the history of filmed music performances and concert movies.
The Song Remains The Same is screening at The British Film Festival. Click here for all touring, venue and ticketing details.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
