Performance

Mick, is it you? James, is it you? Mick and James, is it you? Is it you, boys? Is it you, girls? Who cares? My mind is a whirligig and it's all your fault. The most frightening thing is that it all makes sense to me and it always did. And I didn't even have any mushrooms when I went to see it. Nobody really knew Nicolas Roeg when this first appeared in the theatres, but it certainly was a portent of things to come. I think Marianne Faithfull remarks on the behind-the-scenes aspect of the production most succinctly in describing it as a "psychosexual lab" run by Donald Cammell (noted as director along with Roeg), having James Fox as "the prime experimental animal." She adds, "One of the subplots to the making of Performance is this: what would happen if you took a repressed upper-class Englishman and loaded him up with a bunch of psychotropic drugs, played mind games with him, buggered him, and then put him in a film that recapitulates all this (,but with genuine gangsters)?" Ah, weren't the sixties wonderful?