Anthony Burgess is feeling a malenky bit poogly about hearing the music for the stage version of his 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. “I’m a bit scared of it because my original intention was to use the music of Beethoven,” he says. “It was appropriate because that was the music the hero Alex likes. He rather despises the other stuff.”
Alex is the teenage thug of Burgess’s future world who is thrilled by acts of violence and who is in turn “cured” of his evil bias through aversion therapy. The “other stuff” he despises is rock music. In the case of the new RSC production, directed by Ron Daniels, the music has been composed by Bono and the Edge, of the group U2.
Burgess doesn’t find “a great deal” in rock music. He says it is not big enough for him, an opinion he attributes to his musicianship rather than to his 72 years. But, unfortunately for him, because of A Clockwork Orange he has for 25 years attracted the attention of rock musicians.
There have been groups which have wanted to stage rock operas based on the book, groups which have named themselves after the book or characters in it (the Droogs, Heaven 17) and groups, like the Addicts from Ipswich, whose image of white boiler suits tucked into large boots and black bowler hats, was based on the filmic Alex.
In creating Alex, the anti-social teenager whose Anglo-Russian slang nadsat distances him from the adult world and whose only moments of joy come through loud music, impersonal sex, drugs and violence, Burgess thought he was portraying a nightmare of evil. But in the changing moral climate of the Sixties, Alex and his droogs began to look more like heroes to a generation who were becoming less respectful of authority and more fascinated by the “cheap thrills” which authorities sought to curb.
To Andrew Loog Oldham (in 1964 the youthful manager of the Rolling Stones) A Clockwork Orange embodied the aggressive and anti-social attitude he wanted to foster as an image for his group. “The Rolling Stones,” he had boasted on the cover of their debut album, “are more than just a group, they are a way of life.”
Along with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and a driver called Reg the Butcher, who had been hired to exert muscle, he started living out the droogish fantasy. “We went through the whole Clockwork Orange thing together,” Richards later said.
Oldham even planned to purchase the film rights and use A Clockwork Orange as the Rolling Stones’ bad boy response to the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night. “The time wasn’t right though,” says Burgess. “We were not ready for nudity and rape on the screen.”
For the group’s second album, Oldham composed a lengthy sleeve note written in imitation nadsat, referring to himself and the Stones as “six hip malchicks” and urging the penniless record shop browser to find a blind man, “knock him on the head, steal his wallet and low and behold you have the loot if you put in the boot, good, another one sold!”
This passage was later removed by the record company after protests from organizations for the blind and a complaint from a member of the House of Lords to the Director of Public Prosecutions, calling it “a deliberate incitement to criminal action.”
The film of A Clockwork Orange, eventually made by Stanley Kubrick in 1971, contained no rock stars and no rock music. The soundtrack was mostly Beethoven, Purcell and Rossini, some of it adapted for synthesizer. But, with its images of high-rise urban desolation and its evocation of a futuristic youth culture, it had a unique appeal to rock fans.
David Bowie, then writing The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, was among the first to be affected, dressing in a modified droog costume and coming on stage to the synthesized sounds of Beethoven’s Ninth, Alex’s favourite piece of music.
In the mid-Eighties the film — only available in Britain on pirate videos — inspired a youth cult centred on U.K. Today, a fashion stall in Kensington Market where the bowler hats, brollies, steel braces and designer cod pieces on sale were all based on the Clockwork Orange uniform.
The cult was organized, says one of the leaders, as a reaction to deteriorating values. The aim was to promote “self-respect and self-pride rather than self-destruction” and the adoption of the droog costume was meant to be subversive. “We wanted to show that you could be firm and strong without being violent and perverse.”
Among the stall’s customers, the controversial EMI band Sigue Sigue Sputnik actively promoted the image of menace and mayhem. They used the Clockwork Orange soundtrack to whip their audience into what they called “a violent state,” used the film as a reference point in both their songs and promotion, and opened their debut single with a shout of, “ultra-violence! ultra-violence!”
But it was the punks of the mid-Seventies who came closest to living out the nightmare of A Clockwork Orange. Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, with their love of spitting at “pathetic” people, their dismissal of love and their celebration of aimlessness, appeared to have been modelled on Alex and his sidekick Dim.
It disturbed Burgess that A Clockwork Orange has largely been misunderstood; that it has been taken up as a model for stylish loutishness rather than as a warning about the nature of good and evil and the responsibility on us to choose which we follow.
“Without being pretentious, it is what I would call a theological book, in that it posits that you have to have evil if you are going to have good. If you only have one of them there is no choice,” he said.
Bono and the Edge are the least droogish musicians so far to become identified with A Clockwork Orange. Passionately against violence and drug abuse; concerned by spiritual poverty, unemployment and aimlessness; they would no doubt spend hours talking with Alex but would never don bowlers and boots.
Yet, oddly enough, because of their Christian compassion, their view of A Clockwork Orange as a morality tale about the effect of starving the young of creative options, coincides with the author’s intended message. Their reference point for the droogs has been the crack-dealing gangs and urban hip-hop culture of Los Angeles. Burgess’s was the Teddy Boys and rockers of the late Fifties, whom he saw in Soho coffee bars. “I saw fairly clearly at that time,” he says, “that the future was going to be plagued by a great deal of youthful energy that was not being trained in the direction of knowledge or creation and hence had to give itself over to destruction.”
The RSC production he sees as a way of putting a cap on rock’s pursuit of his project. “I don’t like the book all that much,” he says. “Unfortunately it has pursued me for the past 30 years and goes on pursuing me. I hope that with this production I might be free of it.”
A Clockwork Orange previews are from next Friday and it opens on February 6 at the Barbican Theatre.
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