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Performance location:
The Notting Hill retreat of Turner Purple: 25 Powis Square
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PERFORMANCE
filming locations |
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CREDITS |
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“The
only performance that makes it, that makes it all
the way, is the one that achieves madness.”
That old art movie chestnut, the
personality swap, is made over by the dream teaming
of Nicolas Roeg
and Donald
Cammell with such style and innovation that, alongside
Peeping Tom,
this has to be one of the best British movies ever.
If you needed a demonstration of the massive cultural
shift in the 1960s, you need only look at the films
made around Notting Hill.
At the beginning of the decade, British cinema was
just coming to terms with social realism and location
filming. In 1962, Bryan
Forbes's The L-Shaped
Room squeezed a microcosm of social 'issues'
into a shabby West London boarding house: abortion,
race, lesbianism, prostitution...
A year later saw down-at-heel loser Alfred Lynch getting
drawn into a life of crime in Michael
Winner's downbeat West
11 (the area's postcode). Both films are
worthy slices of grainy, black-and-white social realism.
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Performance location:
The betting office of doomed Joey Maddocks: Fulham Road, Fulham |
During the opening credits of the Winner
film, Lynch walks past the pillared portico of a once-imposing
four-story house, cracked, ravaged and peeling, and
doubtless carved up into crumby bedsits. Five years
later, this same house was the setting for Cammell
and Roeg's
eye-popping melange of magic mushrooms, homoerotic
gangsterism, rock decadence, gender fluidity and Jorge
Luis Borges.
The directors stretched the language of cinema with
fractured, cubist editing, and fluid visuals as a
juryroom morphs into a porn cinema and a burned out
rockstar into a gang boss.
Shot in 1968, the film was left on the shelf for two
years by shell-shocked studio execs who had no idea
what to make of it. I loved the movie. Along with
Alain Resnais' L'Année
Derniere A Marienbad, it seemed to redefine
the possibilities of cinema, but it remained pretty
much a one-off in the UK. Only Ken
Russell, it seemed, grasped the notion that Brit
cinema could be more than earnest realism, English
Heritage or Confessions of a Carry On.
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Performance location:
The ‘Notting Hill’ flat interior:
23 Lowndes Square, Knightsbridge |
Performance was
one of the key movies which triggered off my fascination
with film locations. When I first moved to London,
I was determined to track down the rather sinister
retreat of Turner Purple (Mick
Jagger). The address is clearly given in the film
as '81 Powis Square'. And although there is a Powis
Square in Notting
Hill, there's no 81.
It won't take you long to figure out that the house
is 25 Powis Square,
at the corner of Talbot Road. The neighbourhood has
moved seriously upmarket since the 60s. The derelict
area in front of the house is now fenced and manicured
into a playground and you're unlikely to find magic
mushrooms on the doorstep.
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Performance location:
Chas phones Harry Flowers for help: Old York Road, Wandsworth |
The interiors were filmed in the much posher 23
Lowndes Square, SW1, in Knightsbridge.
Queen’s Gate Mews,
running between Queen’s Gate and Gloucester Road,
is where the unfortunate chauffeur gets his head shaved.
The Mews was later (real) home to Guy
Ritchie, and is featured in Layer
Cake.
The buffet of Kensington
Olympia Station stands in for ‘Paddington’,
where on-the-lam gangster Chas (James
Fox) overhears that there’s a basement flat
vacant in Powis Square.
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Performance location:
Gang boss Harry Flowers' office: 115 Mount Street,
Mayfair |
Directly opposite Chelsea FC's Stamford Bridge ground and the new Chelsea Village complex
on Fulham Road
is hair salon Brazilian Look, 469
Fulham Road, which was the betting office
of Joey Maddocks (Anthony
Valentine), smashed up by Chas.
Just north of
Wandsworth Town Station
on Old York Road,
Chas phones his one-time boss Harry Flowers (Johnny
Shannon) for help after the killing of bookie
Joey. This is close to the underpass where the tramp is attacked in A Clockwork Orange, by the way.
The office of gangster boss Harry Flowers was 115
Mount Street, Mayfair, W1, now the Goedhuis
Art Gallery.
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FILMING
LOCATIONS FOR PERFORMANCE
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TRAVEL
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London:
Flights: Heathrow
Airport; Gatwick
Airport
Powis Square is
east of Portobello Road, south from Westbourne Park
Road (tube: Westbourne park or Ladbroke Grove,
Hammersmith & City Line)
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ASSOCIATED
FILMS |
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Notting
Hill is a regular screen location,
from the early 60s (The
L-Shaped Room, West
11), when it was a rundown area of
bedsits, through the later 60s when Portobello
Road became one of the centres of the Swinging
London scene (Otley,
The Italian
Job) to its evolution into a media darlings'
enclave, celebrated in Notting
Hill itself.
Nearby, you'll also find locations from Alfie,
Withnail &
I (where the Hill is passed off as ëCamden
Town í) and About
A Boy
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