Not bad, I thought.

Can I just say, therefore, how much I enjoyed the dialogue between Dan and Pete above. Lots to think about there.

(I’m an old fashioned goil. I loved “Hello Dolly!”.

I enjoy this record more now than I did at the time (because of the under the dock/10 o’clock and arcade/lemonade alt testimonies), and like others, I’m surprised by how late in the summer/early autumn this hit the top. I had a long vacation job as a filing clerk in the solicitors’ office where I subsequently qualified, and I have a sort of false memory syndrome that myself and the typists were listening to this at teabreak time all summer. Weird.

I suppose whether or not we find Grease a good or a bad thing could be tied into our view of how intoductory education. If (for me) Grease led to people enjoying other, better musicals - or exploring the music of the period then it would undeniably be a good thing**. However if it is used as a representative of musicals or fifties music, and is used as a basis to judge to judge those eras and that music, then it is clearly rubbish.

*Hairspray, another film stuffed with pastiches, works because I think they songs are genuinely witty, good pastiches and done to service a terrific plot.
**YTOTIW, the theme tune, bobby soxing ONJ and John Travolta’s leg quakes notwithstanding!

Also, like Austin Powers, Grease is an example of a film whose supporters’ positive spin hardly extends beyond “It’s fun! Come on! Get a life”. The Guardian letters page had a similar reaction to Peter Bradshaw’s very amusing review of Mamma Mia! I’d like to think I’d never get close to using this line. Not even in defence of Mouldy Old Dough.

(Wanders off, muttering… tsk, don’t know why I bother…)

I never cared much for this for some reasons Pete outlines -the overegged pudding of the contrasts and the backing accents, and that horribly sung last word.

But it’s a teen-gateway musical partly because musicals never really sought that teenage audience before. There were attempts at rock/musical crossovers in the sixties, and Hair’s the most famous example, but also somewhat worthy efforts like Ooh My Soul (Othello - the soul musical anyone?). Before that the industry didn’t care about or notice teenagers, because well almost no one did. So the way of getting the kids into theatres is through safe rock-lite musicals. I suppose I still think that Grease is largely liked by people who never cared very much for rock ‘n’ roll. It’s somewhat like the recent-ish wave of Hip Hop musicals (The Bomb-Itty of Errors, Seven, etc.) which I find abhorrent, mainly because they seem to be aimed at an audience who thinks hip hop would be much nicer if only it were performed by well spoken musical theatre graduates.

And then I wonder, is it much of a gateway musical? Its position, as Billy has reminded us, at the top of C4’s 100 Greatest Musicals suggests it isn’t the gateway but the end of the road for most people.

You’re quite right to pick me up on the BritPop aside. I liked an awful lot of BritPop (more than I’m prepared, now, to admit) but I do also see that there’s a blokeish element that said, all this clever-clever ambient dance music shit is for women and poofs, let’s get guitars back in. And, without perhaps the same overt sexual politics, something of the same is at work in Grease. Historically, only, of course, and I don’t mean to say it currently functions in the same way. When did Sondheim last write a musical? Okay, I’ve just checked and it’s 2003.

Disney, of course, that’s where the musical went, though it killed its musicals with bad animation (Robin Hood is shocking to watch now) and only had its proper creative rebirth late into the eighties.

There are at least six number ones deriving from musicals to come in the next ten years but, ouch, bunny, that really hurt!

The musical didn’t die however, and was kept alive partially by Disney of all people, with its animated films from The Little Mermaid onwards, whilst dance movies took the musicas place (and most of their plots). Moulin Rouge (which I abhor) resurrected them, and Chicago made them critcally respectable, though musicals are still on shaky grounds.

I think you are also a little unfair about the 1980’s megamusical. Whilst I don’t care for most of them, I think their arrival was a direct response to the musical spectacle no longer being on screen, and perhaps a step back from the over-serious nature of much of the 1970’s musicals. Just because a musical can deal with the rise of Nazism, doesn’t mean it should. (That said I think Cabaret is the last great musical of this period).

You’re right about Rocky Horror too being a spiritual bedfellow, the problem with many of these films is that they forget that primarily the audience for musicals is a female led family one (something that Mamma Mia! absolutely knows).

But it’s terribly thin. Most of the songs miss their genre very badly, or do that unctuous thing of mixing rock with showtunes and so ending up with bastardized versions of both. Most of all, though, in its historical place, it’s thumbing its nose, intentionally or not, to everything else happening in musical theatre. In place of intelligently integrated music, we get dangling loose ends like Freddy My Love. In place of plot, we get winking cliché. In place of characterisation, we have off-the-peg familiars. It’s the BritPop of musical theatre.

The film is better loved than the stage show, not only because it has two hits that aren’t in the theatre piece, but also because it is pretty much the only satisfyingly realized musical film that Hollywood managed to produce between Hello Dolly! - which pretty much ended the classic run of golden age film musicals in 1969 - and, well take your pick… Chicago? 23 years later? The performances hit that level of unreality and archness quite well; has John Travolta ever done anything more roguishly camp - on screen, anyway - than the Greased Lightning sequence from the movie? But I think the film occupies a beloved place because it was defiantly un-smart at a time when the musical was getting the smarts bigtime. There was never a movie of Company, or Follies, alas, and if they’d pulled either of those off, things might have been different. But then, it’s hard to compete with cliché: as Sondheim once said, if the audience walks out whistling the tunes, they could have walked in whistling the tunes. Everything about Grease is predictable; that’s its charm, but that’s why I find it very hard to love.

Compare it with its British near-contemporary, the Rocky Horror Show, which is superficially doing some of the same things as Grease: but it does so with so much more wit, daring, bravado, and does genuinely clever and witty things with the music that makes anything from Grease seem lumpen and heavy-handed by comparison.

I’m aware that this sounds very snooty and mealy-mouthed, and I actually like this and the last single from the movie, but as a whole the Grease phenomenon seems to me to stand for defiant uninventiveness.

With you on Rose Royce, Rosie (that’s easier to type than say…)

thevisitor #15 - one couplet that covers a lot of ground, from around this time - The Jam’s “Billy Hunt”: “No-one pushes Billy Hunt around / Well they do, but not for long”.

By the time this hit the top many of us had seen the movie, which came out over here (UK) on the 14th September, and the soundtrack album had been in the charts since early July (although it didn’t hit #1 until October, when it stayed there for 13 weeks!), so I’m guessing people really did like this track!

Personally I can see it as a bit of fun, and it does have the feel of a true show tune, unlike YTOTIW. My main memory, which still rings true today, is that whenever it is played where there are many groups of people (usually in a pub), someone in every group will always make the “TWANG” noise at the point where the comb is flicked near the end of the song. Sometimes they will even get their comb out to do it. Almost always they will get the timing wrong, and their “twang” never sounds quite as good as the movie’s sound affect “TWANG”.

Whenever I think of the song now I always think of the T-Birds as Chuck Jones cartoon wolves, eyzapoppin’ and jaws-a-droppin’ just to hear if Danny, you know, kissed her. But as mentioned on the YTOTIW thread, this Sandy is much more attractive than late doors leather Sandy.

Also from a singalong perspective, whenever you hear a singalong of the “oh - those Suh-hum-mer…” you know you are about to hear the worst note ever song at full tilt at your ears. NIIIIIIIIIIIGHHH-HHHIIIIIIIGGGGHHHHTTTTTSSSS! Its kind of evil. So a 5 for me.

It was at least a month before it was a hit, I’m sure.