Drummers, like goalkeepers, are a totally different breed. They play by different rules, as evidenced by Topper Headon, who beat the sticks for The Clash in the first days of punk, and who is the subject of a new feature project by Lionel Guedj, who rocks (the casbah) with Business Doc Europe.
Lionel Guedj is, he admits, a huge fan of The Clash who were, as MIA cognoscenti will no doubt know, the band of bands, the outfit to whom other thrash musical combos doffed their collective cap, the primus inter pares of punk rock.
And the man who kept them in musical time was Topper Headon, who may have been diminutive in stature but was a giant among drummers.
The director first met Topper when he was co-directing his debut feature Rock’n’roll…Of Corse! and first heard Topper’s post-Clash story of poverty, addiction and survival. Guedj was immediately determined that the drummer would be the subject of a feature doc. Topper had gone through “thirteen rounds of rehab,” had resorted to busking on the London tube, had been homeless and had even served time at her Majesty’s pleasure, ie in jail. What’s more he had lost all contact with friends and associates.
“He struck me, he just moved me,” says Guedj of their encounter after he managed to track Topper down to star in his feature film debut. “I just wanted to understand how life works when it goes like that. You know, when you’ve been the guy Topper Headon has been from The Clash, the guy who amongst other things wrote ‘Rock the Casbah’, which is, you know, one of the biggest [songs] of The Clash. I mean, how?”
Guedj continues: “I wanted to do something on him because it wasn’t just about, you know, a guy who was a brilliant musician. I mean, there’s tons of brilliant musicians and we could do, I don’t know, hundreds of movies about brilliant musicians. But there was some kind of very touching and moving story behind him. And he’s a drummer and a drummer is different, you know. As we used to say, he’s not a fucking musician, he is a drummer.”
The €536k budget film will comprise interviews with the great and the good of the age and rarely-seen archive, which may be grainy and scratchy “but what I’m looking for is authenticity,” underlines Guedj, who is looking for financial partners, sales agents, buyers and potential co-producers at MIA.
“We have access [to archive] because we are totally backed by the management and the band itself. So we’re going to dive into that,” he adds, although he remains on the look-out for more footage from the late 1970s. “And, of course, then we’re going to film new original material. So we’re going to film a lot with Topper, probably go back to those places, you know, those mythical places, the venues and stuff like that from the past. We’re going to go with the band’s members [remaining members, given that lead singer Joe Strummer died tragically young in 2002]. We’re going to go with the people surrounding The Clash who have always surrounded The Clash. And the idea is to try to recreate the atmosphere, but everything from a modern point of view.”
In his notes Guedj says how, “music will act as a second narrator alongside Topper’s voice. We’ll strive to stick to Topper’s personality, always on the move while making room for the sensory aspect, favouring a mix of voices, songs and exclusive footage in order to put into perspective an extraordinary fate.”
Guedj will continue to shoot in the UK and the US and hopes to complete photography by summer 2022 before editing, post-production and delivery by May 2023.
Furthermore, the director is convinced of his project’s contemporary appeal to audiences both who remember The Clash in their pomp or who resort to raiding their parents’ old vinyls for inspiration and instruction. “This film might be even more relevant today than it was 40 years ago. And you know, that’s very interesting,” ends Guedj, with a drum roll.
