“Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.”
Extract from Everyone Sang by Siegfried Sassoon
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.”
Extract from Everyone Sang by Siegfried Sassoon
I must confess to feeling a tiny bit anxious whenever I see a musical advertised at the cinema, and not for the reasons you might imagine. While the uncanny appearance of Radius patron, Dame Judi Dench, in a computerised fur suit for the trailer of the forthcoming Cats movie is a sight that is undeniably difficult to put out of anyone’s mind, for me there are often much deeper disturbances at work.
A similar thing happened when I saw La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016), the day before the news of the Manchester arena bombings broke. Listening to the news on the radio, I cried when I remembered the opening sequence of young people, dancing on the roofs of their cars in a traffic jam on the freeway that seemed to stretch out forever. All that youthful energy, all that life, going nowhere.
So, when I proposed a group trip to see Blinded by the Light (Gurinder Chadha, 2019) after this year's Radius AGM, I felt a twinge of sympathy, and shuddered, when one of our company said that they didn't usually like musicals because people just don't break into song and dance in everyday life.
As it turned out, the film’s realistic setting couldn't be further from the realms of those other "let's-do-the-show-right-here" type Hollywood extravaganzas. Based on Sarfraz Manzoor's memoir of growing up as a young Muslim in eighties Britain, the film carries many painful reminders of the origins of current sectarian arguments. In his search for anything that speaks to the loneliness of being a cultural outsider, the protagonist Javed latches on to the life changing image and philosophy of... Bruce Springsteen. Despite being already a decade out of date to his New-Romantic friends, the message of Bruce's songs begin to act as spiritual guidance for the young poet and the implications of this revelation carefully unfold over the course of his final year at high school.
As Javed skulks around the local estate in the wind and rain with his Sony Walkman, the words of Springsteen's lyrics spread out across the screen accompanied by lightning flashes. When Javed begins singing along to his headphones it seems like the most natural transition in the world and yet at the same time utterly extraordinary. A British Muslim boy is connecting to the experience of a middle-aged working class American rocker and seeing his own soul reflected there. Springsteen’s anthem of being ‘Born to Run’ accompanies him from running in terror from local thugs, to running through the streets with his friends for the simple joy of being alive and being young.
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Of course, the test of any conversion experience is whether it is able to make the leap from the specific to the universal and, as its title suggests, Blinded by the Light is not afraid to explore those contradictions. With a very light touch, the absurdity of teenage musical tribes is contrasted with deeply-felt religious family taboos and the violent racism of nationalist politics. Without giving away too much away, Javed discovers movingly that his own hero worship of Springsteen is a personal rite of a passage – a template that he can use to understand the passionate loyalties and very different belief systems of the people who care about him.
Blinded by the Light is ultimately a rallying call to us, the audience, to find those things that make our own hearts sing. It invites us to look around and apply our own words, music and poetry to whatever voice inside us needs expression.
And yes, it hurts to say so, but in its own way it encourages us to start the show right here.
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