I’ve written before – here and here – about my love of a spontaneous car-journey sing-a-long. It had bothered me, though, that I couldn’t recall a single example of this joyous, bonding experience ever making an appearance in a film or TV series.
Doubtless you’re all muttering moments under your breath right now, and you’re right, I had completely forgotten about one such sequence in a film, which I haven’t watched in donkey’s years, but happened to watch the other day, when it cropped up on one of the movie channels I subscribe to.
I speak, of course, of Cameron Crowe’s 2000 masterpiece Almost Famous, which tells the story of a teenage journalist writing for Rolling Stone magazine in the early 1970s, his touring with the fictitious rock band Stillwater, and his efforts to get his first cover story published.
Anyway, here’s the clip:
Were he still around, then Llŷr and I would have raised bottles of beer to our mouths to hide the fact we didn’t know all the words many times throughout that, all the time giggling and giving each other knowing looks.
It’s not the first, nor the most recent, time the song has cropped up in a film. Perhaps less surprisingly, it features in the rather wonderful Rocketman, a film I wanted to hate (I’ll explain why some other time) but which I actually think is, as they say in the land of the luvvies, an absolute triumph (dahling!):
(For ages now, I’ve been meaning to write a post comparing Rocketman with the other biopic that came out around the same time, Bohemian Rhapsody. I’ll get round to it eventually, y’know, like I keep saying about the next episode of The Chain…)
And here’s the song itself, from Elton’s 1971 album Madman Across The Water; unbelievably, this never got released as a single in the UK (before the pedants leave comments: not until 2015, when it managed to reach #70 in the charts):
And not a mention of mondegreen Tony Danza in sight.
More soon.
A History of Dubious Taste 