PARIS: The 1970s may have been the decade that fashion forgot, but Martin Scorsese believes that was because the world was too busy with drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll to care.

The acclaimed director has brought all that excess to the small screen in his new hard rocking television series, Vinyl, set in the bacchanalian world of a New York record company.

Scorsese, who made his name with Mean Streets in 1973 as the city’s music scene roared its loudest, has been working on and off on the project for 18 years with none other than Mick Jagger.

The Rolling Stones frontman was already rock royalty by the early 1970s, and his insider knowledge of the industry is clear in the no-holds-barred HBO series which premieres in the United States and Europe on Feb 14 and 15.

Jagger’s son James even plays the snarling singer of a fictional punk band called the Nasty Bits who arrives hungry and raw on the books of the failing America Music Company just as it is about to go bust.

But it is the label’s cocaine-fuelled owner Richie Finestra, played by with manic gusto by Bobby Cannavale, who is the centre of the story.

“Vinyl starts in ‘73 when a bizarre mix of glam rock, Led Zeppelin and the early strains of disco, punk and hip-hop shared the New York scene,” said Scorsese while he was still shooting the two-hour pilot.

Gangsters and big money

“It’s full of stories of gangsters, drugs, rock’n’ roll and big money,” he added.

The series starts with Finestra trying to cash in the chaotic list of bands he has signed — often at random — by off-loading the company and its cooked books onto German giant Polygram.

While he lives the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle to the full, rubbing shoulders with Elvis Presley, Lou Reed, David Bowie and Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, his wife Devon (played by Olivia Wilde of House fame) goes quietly mad at home.

She has swapped life hanging out with the Velvet Underground in Andy Warhol’s Factory with the bored conformity of Stepford Wives suburbia.

Jagger has gone to pains to deny that the Finestra character is even loosely based on Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary Turkish boss of Atlantic Records with whom the singer was close, but he said the industry was full of “crazy people” at the time.

“They were so wacky that it was hard to write up how mad they were in real life and expect people to actually believe that a businessperson could behave like that,” he told Billboard magazine.

He also made no bones about the fact that as executive producer he suggested that his musician son would be great as the heroin addict punk singer Kip Stevens.

‘Screaming racket’

“He loves that kind of music — that kind of screaming racket. So I thought I’d put James into the mix. I’m very pleased with him,” the 72-year-old added.

Scorsese and Jagger previously worked together on his 2008 feature on the Stones, Shine a Light, one of a series of landmark music documentaries the director has made including No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton: Nothing but the Blues, as well as the major series The Blues, which marked the centenary of the music’s birth.

“Mick and I started working on Vinyl in 1998,” Scorsese said, but their plans for a feature film fell victim to the financial crisis in 2008, when studio bosses would no longer bankroll the project, then called “The Long Play”.

Instead Scorsese’s longtime collaborator Terence Winter, who wrote the script for The Wolf of Wall Street, said there was so much material it would be better as a TV series and suggested they put their heads together.

Winter and Scorsese were working on their Prohibition era gangster epic Boardwalk Empire at the time for HBO, now regarded as a television classic.

Already critics are talking about Vinyl in the same hushed tones, with the Hollywood Reporter calling the “propulsive new series... a kind of rock ‘n’ roll Game of Thrones” and Variety declaring it one of the year’s “most anticipated TV series”.—AFP

Published in Dawn, February 9th, 2016