The latest scene to be shot takes place in a large cinder block industrial-grey hotel. Camera-spectator stands unobtrusive in corner. This could be the old-style luxury hotel or mansion if it weren't so grimly stripped of ornament, so processed and bold. Look out the windows and you'll see a receding avenue of identical buildings, like a great main street or city thoroughfare carefully denuded of any individuality, monolithic shapes like banks and department stores, though not cluttered with bright eye-catching signs and displays, but blank-walled and vacant-eyed, uniform, like a row of tombs. Rectangle being the obvious form, and essential to the grid pattern, all constructed from the same dull grey-brown brick, cheap and dense. Oh blessed uniformity. Allows one to concentrate.
Up in the penthouse suite of this hotel are staying the personnel and entourage of a heavy metal band. They are currently partying. It's an interesting process.
They're also going through the formal tradition of a room-wreck, done with celebratory gusto and a sense ot showmanship. What outlandish boys. They bill themselves as the return of Hair Rock, that much-missed genre. Transatlantic accents, "decadence", androgyny, copious amounts of coke. We need more spandex strides and poodle perms in pop music. Shouts of "Rawk n Rawl!", the stoner aesthetic. Mixed with make-up and hellfire, thunder n lightning, flirtations with soft-focus Satanism. They are spraying fire extinguishers, their boots trampling the bedcovers, kicking in doors, sweating to live out the bad boy role. Arcane kiss-curls, curlicues of make-up, sharptongue grimaces.
The lead singer, Izzy, stradles the plush carpet, his lurex pants glistening, and with a fluid yet wildly uncontrolled motion flings his white swallowtail guitar through the window. The band's shouts and leers become louder and more stylised, more violent, as if grasping for something tangible in the rooms they occupy in restless, unstable huddles. Bottle of vodka and nosecandy in the bathtub. Someone already fucking in the hall. From the floor below all you'd hear would be boots trampling broken glass and fixtures being ripped from walls. A big Fender bass takes a long arcing dive from one of the low topfloor windows, followed by assorted debris.
