Stereophonic: all the sex, drugs, tears and boredom of true rock 'n' roll

New Statesman​

6 days ago

Photo by Marc Brenner
The Fleetwood Mac model is the only one you can use to tell the story of a fictional band these days, because there are two women at its core, they're allies, and they both write songs: all the problems of the Seventies rock world are sidestepped right there. And so, in Stereophonic, we watch five men and women, Brits and Americans – all of whom could potentially be shagging each other, though some are also married to each other – slinking around looking dazzling, making a Rumours-style masterpiece, in the wondrous days when everything was brown.
Arriving from Broadway fizzing with five-star energy, the show looks just like Amazon Prime's Daisy Jones and the Six, which was carried along by Elvis's astonishing granddaughter Riley Keough. But the challenges chosen by the writer David Adjimi, who took five years to do this script, are more eccentric: how to make two of the dullest settings – the windowless recording studio, and the circular, drug-fuelled diatribe – into something you actually want to see.
The play is set entirely behind the mixing desk, over a period that should have been a month and ended up a year, and it asks the question I have always wondered about: how the hell is this setting conducive to creativity? The music starts and is instantly stopped, because there's not enough EQ on the mike, because people are arguing, and because each day begins with every band member completely trashed from the night before. The coffee machine is broken, but coke's the 'same thing', and the 'bag', as it's referred to, is a character of its own – around 2lbs of white powder swung about like a medieval mace. My throat tickled from the smell of earthy faux fags onstage.
The problem with fictional bands has always been portraying songwriting and recording on stage or screen. It is impossible to make it interesting, unless it's Get Back and you're the Beatles. It is an internal wonder, a mental process: too often directors resort to what I call the 'Hey guys, what do you think of this' moment, when a deathless hit emerges in three spontaneous chords.
Stereophonic is more realistic than this, and its realism is the heart of its success – at one point, six days' of studio time are given over to getting the sound of a snare right. The realism extends to a script that I found fresh in ways I can't fully explain. The characters – high, emotionally wounded, or giddy with cabin fever – talk nonsense as well as sense, and Adjimi exploits the originality in coke-fuelled language: bassist Reg is a 'sad man in a blanket'; English toff drummer Simon is trying to clean him up but, equally stoned, proposes going home to make dinner and try out his grandmother's recipe of a 'chicken smashed by a brick'.
Band members start a speech in puffed up arrogance or make a desperate bid for creative independence – then find their ideas derailing mid flow, and shrink back and forth between self-expression and conformity in a way that feels truly psychological. At the heart of the web is the coercive singer-guitarist Peter (Jack Riddiford) – the Lindsay Buckingham to Diana's Stevie Nicks: she, played by Lucy Karczewski, has five songs on the album, more than anyone else, but her husband can't handle it, and whenever she presents something, he stares off with hate into the middle distance. He sold her guitar seven years ago ('I was going to learn it!' she sobs) and she's never had anything to do with her hands: all Peter can suggest is a Nicksian wave of the fingers.
Arcade Fire's Will Butler, who wrote the music, probably wishes he'd been working in the Seventies – many musicians do. I thought Stereophonic was an immersive album experience, a kind of West End gimmick, and I was looking forward to it, but the music is more incidental than that, though it fleshes out in increasingly long studio sessions as the album gets written, flopping or firing up depending on what kind of day they're having. It's quite a thing to see the cast playing their instruments live: vocal takes are done in real time and laid on backing tracks right there in front of you. The real star is probably Eli Gelb, who plays the engineer schlub Grover, with a voice like Jonah Hill. He got the gig pretending he'd worked for the Eagles: his partner, the gnome-like Charlie, is only there because he's 'cousins with the main Doobie Brother'. Together, backs to the audience, all tight buttocks and flared jeans, they provide bemused commentary on the peacocks behind the glass. In the unseen outside world, the band's previous album goes to number one. 'I think we're really famous,' says someone. It doesn't look that great from here.
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[See also: The search for queer cinema]
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