It’s hard now to believe that erstwhile registered sex offender Pete Townshend received an Oscar nomination for the score of TOMMY (Ken Russell, 1975), but he did. TOMMY combines a Mod-ish interest in popular culture taken too seriously with art-school tropes not taken seriously enough, and The Who always reserved the right to say “only joking” if an idea didn’t fly. TOMMY flew pretty high at the time and was taken pretty seriously for a while, and made it onto the schedules of BBC 2 when I was far too young to be watching that sort of thing. At about the age that means your hard-working, late-working parents don’t think you need a sitter any more, you could soak up a lot of what passed for late-night TV in those days before they got home – and TOMMY seemed to be on about every other month.

Jack Nicholson is creepy as hell and Tina Turner is … unspeakably fucking terrifying.

The film has enough of the rambling flamboyance that Russell deployed so well splashed up the walls, like Ann-Margret flavour baked-beans, that one can glide over the wonky story telling and dubious religions messages. Townshend really is a member of a weird culty thing, so he knows the score; and does that make the Tommy Camps in TOMMY good or bad? Well, that’s art, I guess, it keeps you guessing. Anyway, while Tommy is a tight and mostly coherent album, distributing the songs over all those starry cameos in the film pretty much turns it into a dog’s breakfast (much like those latter-day retreads of The Wall) except that they are so well chosen. Sir Elton is The Pinball Wizard. Paul Nicholas is Cousin Kevin. Jack Nicholson is creepy as hell and Tina Turner is … unspeakably fucking terrifying. From behind a wall of sofa cushions built in preparation I’d peek out at The Acid Queen. This was better than Dr. Who! Some dim early conception of sexiness would swirl around for a bit but soon be swept away by the utter horror of that twirling hypodermic iron maiden, the leering silver evil of it. Dodgy SFX be damned, I can’t even look at stills of it on Google without breaking out into a sweat. I had nightmares for a week every time. And never missed a chance to see it.

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