wadechurton Review of Never Too Young to Rock

Never Too Young to Rock (1975)

Dredged from the tar-pits of 1970s British cinema...

[2/10 · 17 June 2012]

Glam rock had its heady heyday around 1972-73, and then subsided slowly and painfully over the next few years until disco, punk and new wave arose to prominence. As you can see however, this movie came out in mid-1976. Bowie had time to already have been a soul-singer and was then getting into Euro-funk. Marc Bolan was now another 'soul' singer and Gary Glitter had tried and failed at that and had 'retired'. The New York Dolls had split in 1975, Roxy Music too, Alice Cooper was doing ballads and booze in equal amounts and in general rock culture no longer viewed glam and its ideas as a going concern, not when you had the Sex Pistols currently tearing up the rules. 'NTYTR' is a cheap (honestly, the production values would have shamed 'On The Buses'), cheerful (well, there are a lot of silly noises and stuff when people have fights) and thoroughly exploitative effort which manages to make Britain look like the most miserable, cold, grimy, rain-sodden and permanently overcast hole on earth. The acting is strictly 'school pantomime', the script makes no sense and the direction of both 'story' and music is astonishingly poor. So then let us view the bands as the 'lucky dips' in a barrel of dank, decaying sawdust. There are some memorable pop tunes (albeit mostly a couple of years out of date by 1976), but the bands are a sorry lot All are 'off the boil' career-wise; in fact someone should have had a word with jowly, pudgy Mud vocalist Les Gray about maybe laying off the pies and chips before filming began so that your brightly coloured attention-seeking costumes don't look dangerously 'snug'. Look, 'YNTYTR' is confusing, slightly sad and actually somewhat depressing, and even if you were a fan of the third-rate acts (Slik? Who the bloody hell are they? Oh right; that's a game but evidently embarrassed pre-Ultravox Midge Ure on guitar), then rest assured that you will find something which will hit you in the pit of your stomach, somewhere. And not in a good way, either. In closing, the movie's title is a bit misleading, since I can't remember seeing anyone under 25 in the whole thing. Most professional glam musicians were holdovers from the 1960s who shrugged, sighed, put on glittery outfits and acted a little 'swish' to keep up with the times. Anyone with talent withdrew and moved on. These are the clock-punching guys who couldn't or wouldn't move on, gelled forever in the congealment at the bottom of the cinematic barrel that is 'YNTYTR'.