Bruce Lacey: The Preservation Man

Filmed by Ken Russell in 1962, one of the 21 films he made for the BBC arts programme, 'Monitor', 'The Preservation Man' is an affectionate short about the artist, performer and great British eccentric, Bruce Lacey.

Lacey was a techno-pagan shaman; a painter; a film-maker; a creator of kinetic sculptures; a performance artist (before the phrase was even coined); a member of the surrealist comedy troupe, 'The Alberts'; collaborator with the likes of Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Michael Bentine and Ivor Cutler; inspiration to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band; George Harrison's flautist gardener in 'Help!'; the subject of the Fairport Convention song that bears his name and which features the sounds of some of his creations, and improvising avant-garde electronic musician as documented on the Trunk Records release, 'The Spacey Bruce Lacey'.  

'The Preservation Man' captures Lacey in full creative flow and it's not a stretch to view this as almost a companion piece to 'The Lonely Shore'.  In that earlier 'Monitor' film the post-apocalypse archeologists make conjectures about the ephemera of our day to day world whilst here, one rejects work-a-day knowledge and instead reappropriates, reconfigures and reinterprets with an infectious abandon.

NOTE:  The film is muted, from 8:15 to 9:06. a transcript of the missing section where Lacey discusses dressing as a policeman and crashing parties can be found in the comments of the video. 

 

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The Lonely Shore

Written by Jacquetta Hawkes, filmed by Ken Russell and with commentary by Tony Church, this fabulous little film was one of 21 that Russell made for the fortnightly BBC arts programme 'Monitor' between 1959 and 1962.

The entirely fascinating Hawkes - the first woman to read for the Archeology & Anthropology degree at the University of Cambridge, co-founder of CND, gay rights campaigner & wife of novelist J.B. Priestly - provides a text that is as cutting as it is blunt, that satirises both the language and assumptions of her own disciplines and the cosy absurdities and consumerist excesses of British life in the early 1960s.   

Following an undisclosed apocalypse that, in 1962, decimated Britain, the film is told from the perspective of a future archaeological team examining the finds an earlier team left scattered on a beach after their deaths.  As the narrator comments, interprets, and invents uses and meanings, the camera roams from object to object, lingering briefly on each so that we can appreciate the incongruity of it's setting, the mundanity of the thing and the bleak humour in the description.

Looking very much like an early set design for the later Spike Milligan and John Antrobus' post-apocalyptic satirical black comedy 'The Bed Sitting Room' while walking a similiar path, 'The Lonely Shore" presents a gently biting satire on the time it was made that still feels worryingly apposite today. 

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Bruce Lacey

Bruce Lacey (with R.O.S.A. B.O.S.O.M.)

As this damnable year continues to take it's toll in what Cyclobe's Stephen Thrower described yesterday as being like "a Rapture for interesting people" this morning I find out that the world has also lost the artist and musician Bruce Lacey.

Lacey's pursuit of his muse and the humour he brought to his creations meant that he walked a path that brought him into contact with many of the counterculture figureheads of the British arts and entertainment worlds from the 1950s onwards including The Goons, The Beatles who got him to play George Harrison's gardener in Help!, Fairport Convention who wrote a song about him (see below), Ken Russell who made a short film about him and Dave Allen who featured him in his fantastic film about English eccentrics.  More recently Trunk Records released an amazing retrospective of his music called The Spacey Bruce Lacey (btw - I heartily recommend clicking that there link for a really interesting article about Lacey by William Fowler of the BFI)

So R.I.P. sir.  We thank you for being so very you.

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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate rrunning costs.