Read History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs for Free Online Page B

song.
    The song catches up, and traps him at just that point where it tips into uncertainty. “When the going gets tough—” When the going gets tough, you find out how feeble you really are. Paradoxically, your voice gets louder, your body more violent,because arguments, ideas, even words, are now useless, and your voice, as a sound, and your body, as movement, are all you have. Curtis stares into the face of the BBC camera, his own face transparent, his eyes shaking in their sockets, the notion that this is Ian Curtis, famous person, Existential hero, La Nausée on two legs, falling far short of a person wordlessly asking, Where am I, who are these people, why are they looking at me?
    Three years after he appeared as Ian Curtis in Control, Sam Riley played Pinkie in a remake of Brighton Rock. Graham Greene’s 1938 novel was set in the thirties, as was the 1947 film with Richard Attenborough as the small-time gangster—the killer who marries a waitress, Rose, because she’s a witness and now she’ll keep her mouth shut. But as Sam Riley steps out onto the Brighton pier, it’s 1964, with the Mods and Rockers about to take over the town and fight with knives and chains over the definition of cool.
    Riley’s face is squashed. “His brain is squirmin’ like a toad,” as Jim Morrison sang in “Riders on the Storm”— that’s what Riley’s Pinkie looks like. He is not as inhuman as Attenborough’s, or as smart—behind his own thoughts, his own gestures of disdain, contempt, impatience, loathing, you can see him worry, for a second, over the things about himself he doesn’t understand, and then you can see him decide he doesn’t care.
    In the crucial scene, just after Pinkie and Rose are married, in a squalid little civil ceremony, they’re walking on the Brighton pier. “Rose stopped him,” Greene wrote. “‘Look,’ she said, won’t you give me one of those? As a souvenir. They don’t cost much,’ she said, ‘only sixpence.’ It was a small glass box like a telephone cabinet. ‘Make a record of your own voice,’ the legend ran.” “‘What do you want me to say?’ ‘Just anything,’ she said. ‘Say something to me. Say Rose and—something.’” Pinkie goes in, reads the instructions: “He looked over his shoulder and there outside she was watching him, with a smile. He saw her as a stranger: a shabby child from Nelson Place . . . He put in a sixpence, and speaking in a low voice for fear it might carry beyond the box, he gave his message up to be graven on vulcanite: ‘God damn you, you little bitch, why can’t you go back home forever and leave me be?’” They don’t have a record player; it’s a keepsake, she isn’t going to hear it. Richard Attenborough’s record is worse: “You asked me to make a record of me voice,” he says, looking like Richard Widmark in the same year in Kiss of Death, the two movies playing as the world’s ugliest double feature. “Well, here it is. What you want me to say is, I love you”—romantic music comes up as Rose gazes adoringly through the glass—“Well, here’s the truth. I hate you, you little slut. You make me sick. Why don’t you get back to Nelson Place and leave me be?”
    Sam Riley’s Pinkie and Andrea Riseborough’s Rose areon the pier. She asks him for a record. He brushes her off. With people passing by, she screams at him: “If you don’t want me then why don’t you just leave me alone? What do you want me for?” People are staring. Pinkie is scared: this whole thing is about keeping him safe, respectable, out of prison. “I’d rather drown!” Rose says. “You can have your record,” he says. He says it again. She smiles at him. She apologizes. He goes into the booth, with Rose smiling and waving through the glass.
    Riley puts in a coin, and the machine places a 45 blank on the turntable. He looks down at it, his face serious and dark, as if he’s about to testify in court, to speak just before he is sentenced, to