Hey Zeus!

In Xanadu

a damsel with a dulcimer

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment, 1816

Failure is oftentimes more interesting than success; it dates differently, and its most ungainly angles can poke into the future. The stone the builder rejected can become the cornerstone of interesting new structures, of trash, camp, and cultish modes of cool. Thus, the appearance of Xanadu (1980) in the movie spot of some godforsaken Sky-only channel piqued my interest. Should I record it and give it the once-over? With the first notes of ELO’s ‘I’m Alive’, where you can’t tell the strings apart from the arpeggiated synths, and those messily psychedelic green screen effects, I was hooked.

The plot of Xanadu, such as it is, goes as follows – Olivia Newton John’s Kira is one of the nine muses who come to life from a mural, and she roller skates along Venice Beach into the life of Michael Beck’s Sonny, a failed artist.¹ I missed the lines that made clear what she’s the muse of – she doesn’t improve Sonny’s talent, limited as it is to copying large poster versions of airbrushed record covers in some corner of the Record Industry – roller skating, perhaps? Interior design? Surely not dance, because her eight sisters dance better than she does (but she is, in fact, Terpsichore, the muse of dance and dance music, traditionally portrayed as “a damsel with a dulcimer”, i.e. its ancestor the lyre). Beck, smitten with the passing Kira, falls out with his boss and in with Gene Kelly’s Danny McGuire (a character borrowed from his 1944 film Cover Girl), who was once in a band, and love, with Kira (or someone who looked exactly like her, their exact relationship is left a bit vague) in World War 2. Danny is a Glen Miller fan, Michael digs – The Tubes! In the most unwieldy scene from a very unwieldy movie their competing visions, in zoot suits and jump suits, are blended into one. Danny is a property developer, Sonny an artist, so, inspired by Kira, they build a roller disco in a cool abandoned art deco auditorium. Kira is called back to Olympus, but Sonny gatecrashes the Gods and begs Zeus for one last visit from Kira, so she’s there for the opening of Xanadu, the roller disco, with her eight sisters (who dance in all the movie’s big numbers).

Danny’s Glen Miller fixation gives us very Michael Jackson-esque zoot suit mimes and tap routines, which have nothing on the Glen Miller Orchestra’s ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ sequence from Sun Valley Serenade (1941), its toe-tapping goodness shows how easy it would be a decade later for swing to turn into rock ‘n’ roll; the scene stolen by a fantastic vocal from Dorothy Dandridge and tap routine with the Nicholas Brothers in the segregated section at the end.

Glenn Miller, who was a huge star, disappeared over the English Channel on a flight to France on December 15 1944. The best theory to explain his loss, for a long time the subject of lurid rumours, is that his single-engined UC-64 Norseman, flying at low altitude, was hit by a bomb jettisoned from a bomber trying to get back to base.

Sonny’s dream band is played by the Tubes, in a mash-up with the Glenn Miller (and Andrews Sisters) tribute act.

The end result of this fusion of styles that surely don’t belong together (unless they helped inspire Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon) reminds me of Wang Chung’s ‘Dancehall Days’, perhaps the only time it’s ever really worked.

The Tubes' appearances in Xanadu provide evidence for Luke Haines’ Freaks Out! thesis, that there’s no such thing as post-punk. In 1975 their ‘White Punks On Dope’ was a clear prelude to punk; in Xanadu their styling has post-punk elements, they’re the same band, and really neither, they’re kind of prog-pop satirists, and their outrageous 70’s stage shows were choreographed by Kenny Ortega, who choreographed Xanadu with Jerry Trent.

It’s 1980, and both The Tubes and ELO (formerly the Electric Light Orchestra) are pioneers of the use of synthesizers in popular rock music. In the Tubes’ case this music is close to metal in its dynamics, while ELO’s Xanadu songs possess a soft one-TWO-one-TWO disco thump. Coincidentally, Gary Steel over at Witchdoctor has written a lovely review of ELO’s El Dorado (1974), sparing me the trouble of recounting their history, and his shameful passion for this '“guilty secret” has inspired what may be his finest writing. Jeff Lynne’s “fifth Beatle” antics threaten to obscure the stature of his pop genius. As Gary says, he’s not really a rocker, and I can live without hearing the ELO’s Night at the Proms mashup version of Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ ever again. But for disco-tinged, Beatlesque pop writing, and the addition of synth-age production to some thrillingly overblown string arrangements, he’s unequalled. “I’m Alive” keeps threatening to break into the chorus of one of Lynne’s greatest earworms, ‘Livin’ Thing’ (1976), and throughout Xanadu I kept fantasizing about the ultimate ELO album, one in which each song ineluctably leads into the chorus of ‘Livin’ Thing’. Lynne has the skill to do this, and link these songs together into one long track. In classical music (as Jeff should know) this form of composition is called ritornelle.

ELO’s ballad ‘Don’t Walk Away’ accompanies an animated sequence by Don Bluth, an ex-Disney employee who first enjoyed success with The Secret of NIHM (1982) and An American Tail (1986).²

The sequence was animated by Bluth himself while his team worked on The Secret of NIHM, and the money he made helped keep his studio open till the film was completed. But I’d like draw your attention to the way the sound effects play over the music, improving it considerably; in other sequences, those set inside the Xanadu roller disco’s pinball machine interior, arcade synth effects overlay the pop songs, and with this, as well as the heavy phasing on ‘I’m Alive’, and the synth-heavy blended feel of the ELO arrangements, we’re beginning to hear something that reminds me of second wave hyperpop, for example AKRIILA’s ‘para siempre (｡ᐳ﹏ᐸ)’.³ If Jeff Lynne could have done this to Olivia Newton John’s voice on ‘Xanadu’ I’d like to think he would have.

The songs in Xanadu that weren’t composed by Jeff Lynne were written by John Farrar, and to be sure most of these aren’t great (his ‘Suspended in Time’, performed by ONJELO, won the Golden Raspberry for Worst Song), but ‘Magic’ won a Grammy and, like ‘Xanadu’, went to #1 - quite deservedly; its slinky Fleetwood Mac-ish arrangement bringing it home. Farrar, who also wrote Olivia’s Grease hits, produces and plays guitar, electric piano, and synths.

Although its soundtrack was a best-seller, Xanadu was a box office and critical failure, and one of the two 1980 films that spurred the creation of the Golden Raspberry awards (the other was Can’t Stop the Music). Playwright Douglas Carter Beane, who wrote the book for the musical of the film, described Xanadu as "what happens when you let straight men near the musical... I blame cocaine. It's like people say, 'When you hear Ray Charles play, you can hear the heroin?' When you watch Xanadu, you can see the cocaine up on the screen.”.

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

But Xanadu did land with one section of its intended audience, pre-teen girls. Hayley tells me that it inspired her and her First Form friends to put on a roller disco performance, for which the school assembly was moved out to the tennis courts. She also points out that Olivia Newton John’s persona then was the equivalent of Taylor Swift’s today, the popular “good girl” with little of the adult sexuality that might intimidate young girls, appeal to their older brothers, and give their parents misgivings. There’s just not much sass, spunk or moxie in Kira - imagine what Madonna would have made of the role. Nor is there more than a brief glimpse of of sex in the dancing, quite an achievement in a film that’s mostly about hordes of attractive people moving like crazy. Michael Beck’s Sonny is a pure-hearted Sir Galahad type - he’s a rebel, sure, but we can’t imagine him so much as sneering at a woman. And as for Danny experiencing heartbreak because his lost love from 40 years ago has turned up, and he’s aged and she hasn’t, and she’s his young protegee’s love interest - all the rich pathos, and any humour, in that plot point is just brushed aside. All this is, indeed, the work of straight men; there isn’t even one double entendre in the script.

But never mind. Success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan, and it’s always up for adoption. Here’s Julianna Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton John, in which all the Xanadu classics are handled with the right kind of magic. Hayley and I always score the films we watch out of ten - she gives Xanadu a 2, but I give it a 6, meaning “could have been far better, but, even so, time well spent”.

Algoeurythmic Terps - Madonna - Music (Deep Dish Dot Com Remix)

1. In the first draft of the script, this mural had been painted by Sonny, but the script updates became so chaotic that this obvious point was lost.

2. A search for further pop video work by Bluth turns up The Scissor Sister’s ‘Mary’, within which Bluth animates a Rapunzel sequence.

3. Music from Colombia, released on a Chilean imprint, H/T The Other Dave Moore’s substack (correction, Akrilla is Chilean)