“Anyway, I’ve got Jamie to see me home.”


Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush premiered on January 4th ’68 at The London Pavilion. The gala evening (as they always used to be called) was attended by a veritable Who’s Who of the swinging set: Joan Collins, Michael Caine, Alan Whicker, Lewis Gilbert, Michael Crawford, Simon Dee, Leslie Philips, John Hurt, Corin Redgrave, Una Stubbs, John Peel, Ed Stuart, Peter Murray, Valerie Singleton, Patti Boyd, Jane Asher, Paul McCartney and brother Mike McGear, Adam Faith, The Animals, Manfred Mann, Geno Washington, The Who, The Spencer Davis Group, Traffic and, er, Vera Lynn. Not forgetting the cast of course. Photographers suitably gurned for, the assembled mass then continued partying at the über-hip Revolution club in nearby swanky Mayfair.


hot new supergroup consisting of Steve Winwood, Dave Mason, Chris Wood and Jim Capaldi. It also became the A-side of their third single, released in late ’67. An alternate version of the sitar workout ‘Utterly Simple’ from their debut album Mr Fantasy and the otherwise unavailable ‘AmI What I Was Or Was I What I Am’, which dates from the same sessions, also appear here.


Most of the music, however, is provided by Winwood’s former charges The Spencer Davis Group, now with Eddie Hardin and Phil Sawyer in for the departing Winwood brothers, Steve and Muff. The group even makes a guest appearance at the church rave, where they can be seen lip-synching ‘Every Little Thing’, resplendent in white suits. The rest of their contributions are equally strong – particularly the psych-tinged ‘Taking Out Time’ and ‘Picture Of Her’ – and make up something of a lost ’67 SDG album, give that Sawyer left the band soon after.


The most evocative piece of music in the filmthough is ‘It’s Been A Long Time’. “Sung” by former John’s Children frontman Andy Ellison and presumably shoehorned into the movie by his wheeler-dealer manager Simon Napier-Bell (who also bagged credits for editing and arranging!), the song is completely unlike the crash- bang-wallop psychedelic rock Ellison was known for. Instead, its warm and whimsical lyrics and heart-stopping string arrangements make it the perfect recurring theme for several of Mulberry Bush’s romantic scenes.


The story goes that Hunter Davies originally approached Paul McCartney to compose the music for the film. McCartney declined but the idea of Davies’ Beatles biography was born. Ah well, you can’t win ’em all.


The soundtrack album appeared on United Artists Records in the UK and US with completely different sleeves. The more tastefully packaged UK version is now the harder of the two to find.


Reviews were mixed. Renata Adler gave it a particularly sound kicking in the March 5th edition of The New York Times, writing, “If sound in movies does not matter to you, it might be a good movie to see. It has the worst script, bar none, I have ever heard.” She goes on to claim that, “its awfulness is cumulative” but praises the dazzlingly psychedelic opening titles (the work of The Richard Williams Studio) and the “rather daring naked scenes of Mr Evans and Judy Geeson”, before deciding that Clive Donner “directs quite beautifully from one point of view. Not the viewpoint of spoken language certainly, or of narrative, but from a pictorial point of view – of what a new fantasy of mod love and courtship might look like.”


An undated Time Out review by TomMilne bemoans the fact that “the Stevenage council estate where [Jamie] lives looks like King’s Road-cum-Carnaby Street, fairly dripping with dolly birds; his dream fantasies are Dick Lester lookalikes, using speeded-up motion for good measure; and when he finally gets invited to a party, the scene looks as fashionably clichéd as the photographer’s studio antics in Antonioni’s Blow-Up.” He concludes, “Donner’s eagerness to pour ‘swinging style’ and pop songs over everything makes nonsense of the socially critical attitudes that filter weakly through from the script. So charmless as to be almost unwatchable.” Ouch!


But what did these “critics” know back then, eh? That world was still happening around them and they were right to highlight the film’s occasionally cartoonish direction and flawed script in the context of it actually being January of 1968, although some acknowledgment of them not living on a Stevenage council estate might have been nice too. It’s more about what the film has come to represent – youth, freedom and cheap thrills seen through a rose-tinted, purple plastic vision of ’60s naivety – that makes us love it so much.


Mulberry Bush made regular appearances on British late night TV during the ’80s and ’90s before being consigned to relative obscurity. A bootleg DVD, transferred from an early Channel 4 TV broadcast, pops up on eBay from time to time, complete with a homemade bonus feature about the film’s Stevenage locations, filmed by fans.


Now, as the filmapproaches its 43rd anniversary, it has finally been gifted with its first ever legitimate release courtesy of those tireless fellows at BFI Flipside. As well as the full, uncut film(the Evans/Geeson nude scenes and a couple of smuttier lines of dialogue were pruned in ’67 and it still received an X certificate – early TV outings used the uncut version), the DVD/Blu-ray adds a ’71 promotional documentary called Stevenage: The First New Town.


US (top) and UK soundtrack albums.


While a large number of Mulberry Bush’s stars went on to enjoy successful careers in filmand television, Barry Evans struggled through years of being typecast as a randy 18-year-old in smutty ’70s movies like Adventures Of A Taxi Driver and TV shows Doctor In The House and Mind Your Language, never quite shaking off his characterisation of Jamie McGregor. He died in ’97, discovered in a bungalow in a Leicestershire village, drunk and alone. His death remains a mystery.


A doubly cruel ending for a man who brought so much life to his roles and propelled the filmin which he made his debut – and his mark – so special.


Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush is out on DVD/Blu-ray through BFI Flipside on 13th September. With many thanks to Jill Reading and Ian O’Sullivan at the BFI.


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