Rating: D+
Dir: Herbert Curiel
Star: Herman Brood, Nina Hagen, Lene Lovich, Les Chappell
Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? That’s the famous Johnny Rotten quote which came to mind at the end of this mostly banal Dutch “new wave” film. Quotes used advisedly, since the Netherlands version appears to have more in common with British pub rock of the mid-seventies. Whatever originality and energy is to be found here, comes wearing an import sticker, appearing courtesy of the German Hagen and American Lovich. Star Brood seems not much past a more pretentious version of Sid Vicious, dressed up for a job interview, from the unrepentant drug use, through to doing a cover of “My Way” (a song which hit #1 in the Dutch charts after Brood’s death).
Indeed, there’s some spooky foreshadowing going on. Hagen tells an anecdote about meeting Vicious in a London hotel, and him thinking Nancy Spungen had overdosed, in between verses of a shrieking cover of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”. Except, she very deliberately enunciates, “Knockin’ on Herman’s Door”, at the time being in a relationship with Brood. Hagen is the musical equivalent of hot sauce for me – a little goes a long way – but knowing Brood would jump from a hotel roof in 2001 adds an undeniable frisson to this segment. Though I guess anyone who knew of his fondness for hard drugs, wouldn’t exactly be chipping in to his life insurance policy.
The plot, such as it is, sees everyone playing themselves, with Brood starring as a bank robber who wants to become a rock ‘n’ roll star. There’s a shit-ton of voice-over, delivered by Brood in a manner that suggests he is delivering deep, philosophical insights. Shame these are in Dutch, and so entirely lost on me. I suspect he desperately wants to be a rebel, but rebellion requires intolerance to function. Society in the Netherlands may simply have been too open-minded. Curiel, who’d go on to do a documentary about Brood in 1994, Rock ’n Roll Junkie, throws odd flourishes into things, like suddenly switching to a neon-blue filter for no apparent reason. But the majority feels like a fly-on-the-wall recording of the various artists, both performing and simply hanging out.
As such, it may well be one of those cases where “you had to be there.” If you were part of the Dutch new wave scene in the late seventies, this will no doubt have a great deal of resonance. That’s a pretty niche market, however, and if Brood is the most memorable character your local scene can produce… yeah, I’m not impressed. Admittedly, the whole country’s population was less than 15 million at the time. But London alone had the Pistols, Clash, Damned, Banshees, and many more. To be fair, musically, Brood is not untalented. It just feels – especially when playing blues – that he is facing backwards in time, rather than smashing the mould of existing music. I’d rather have seen ninety minutes of Lovich and Hagen, the latter painted up to look like a red-haired ancestor of Pris from Blade Runner. Now, that’s truly new wave.