features Dana Gillespie plus at least one R&B act and one Thackray-esque folkie. Film makers were keen to remind the dirty macs that the girl slutting her stuff in some Soho sleaze joint could be their daughter, and, somewhat worryingly, make them cough up good money to cop an eyeful. Even more worryingly, they did.
This method got bums onto seats for Derek Ford’s Groupie Girl (more on this one in a future Shindig!), The Wife Swappers and Suburban Wives, and Val Guest’s Au Pair Girls. The latter is far and away the best, its Free Design-lite theme tune is to die for, and its “rock” club scene, involving a Jim Morrison-lookalike who calls women “chicko” and utters lines like “Nein, das ist verboten! A German bird wivaht ‘er boots? Never!” with a straight face, has to be seen to be believed.
But not everyone wanted to take such a salacious approach. The one thing that sold nearly as much as sex was music, and so it came to pass that if you wanted to push your movie, a good way of guaranteeing a quick overturn was to include a popular beat
combo. Well, that was the theory anyway. In truth, it didn’t always work and the films didn’t always sell, but that didn’t stop some fascinating curios getting made. Films cut from such cloth include Gonks Go Beat! (’65) including ‘that footage’ of The Graham Bond Organisation, haunted house comedy The Ghost Goes Gear (with The Spencer Davis Group) Baby Love (Katch 22) and the so- rare-it-may-not-even-exist Popdown, in which Blossom Toes, Julie Driscoll and Dantalion’s Chariot allegedly bamboozle some recently landed aliens. I say ‘allegedly’, because I haven’t met one person who’s seen it – also true of the British Black Power horror Death May Be Your Santa Claus, music by Second Hand. Is my bath ready?
Down the road apiece in Chelsea, that notorious huckster Harry Alan Towers was hatching a fiendish plan to bring the Marquis De Sade’s Venus In Furs, already an inspiration to one band readers might be familiar with, into the present. The fact that Italian director Massimo Dallamano had already done it a year before was of little importance to him, nor to director Jesus Franco, who deviated from De Sade’s novel completely (let’s be honest, the film has bugger all to do with it) and came up with a
bonkers script about a jazz musician (his ongoing obsession: he had previously directed under the pseudonyms of Clifford Brown and Dave Tough) caught up in a series of murders. And who would provide the freaky soundtrack for this visual smorgasbord? Uh-huh, it was the Manfreds, and in particular drummer Mike Hugg, a man who would be no stranger to the odd TV theme or two in the near future. One might even surmise that the film hastened Mann’s
Ian Ogilvy comes on strong in The Sorcerers (left) while Esme Johns and Donald Sumpter snuggle up in Groupie Girl (right).
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