Return of the bodgie

RETURN TO THE SCENE: Richard O'Brien turns heads on Hamilton's Victoria St. (IAIN MCGREGOR / Waikato Times)

Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/waikatotimes/0,2106,3109754a6578,00.html

27 November 2004

It was camp, it was trash, and it struck a chord that still resonates with audiences around the world. LESTER THORLEY meets the Waikato misfit who trod a Rocky road to fame.

ALL these years, myth has credited certain Waikato folk with being the inspiration for the characters in the Rocky Horror Show.

As he sashays along Victoria St in mustard-coloured ostrich hide winklepickers, cream skintight jeans, a bulky maroon denim jacket, wraparound sunglasses and a beanie, the one man who can answer that definitively has a smile on his face.

"There is no truth in that whatsoever," says Richard O'Brien. And that's whether you believe the people concerned lived in Hamilton or the other supposed location, Morrinsville.

But Hamilton can claim credit for one song from the cult 1970s stage show and movie, "Whatever Happened To Saturday Night?".

O'Brien wrote it recalling a night with his outsider rock 'n' roll "bodgie" mates hassling a guy parked up with his girlfriend in a giant American car at Hamilton Lake.

At midnight yesterday a statue of O'Brien as his Rocky Horror character – creepy butler Riff Raff – was unveiled in a pedestrian precinct near the south end of Victoria St.

This week the 62-year-old returned to the city where he lived for two relatively short periods of his life, to find Rocky Horror Hamilton flags featuring giant red lips hanging from light poles down the main street.

He was born in Britain, and after his family moved to New Zealand, lived in Hamilton for two intermediate school years. It was the second Hamilton stint – from 1959 when he was 17 until 1964 – which seems to have been so influential.

The statue marks the spot where he worked in a barber shop in front of the now-demolished Embassy movie theatre, where he watched late-night double features – B grade horror and sci-fi titles such as I Was A Teenage Werewolf and The Snorkel.

Tonight yet another run of O'Brien's camp, rock 'n' roll and innuendo-filled stage show starts, at Christchurch's Court Theatre with George Henare in the role of transvestite Frank N Furter from the galaxy Transylvania. This year former TVNZ news anchor Richard Long narrated the show in Palmerston North, reprising the role famously held by former Prime Minister Robert Muldoon in 1986. Next year Hamilton Operatic will stage the 30th anniversary production.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the movie which hit cinemas two years after the stage show debuted in London in 1973, had a sell-out season at Hamilton's Victoria Cinema last year.

Co-director Garry Potts says there were packed houses of Rocky Horror fanatics, many from both genders in fishnet stockings with all the accessories of a true fan. "It took two cleaners four hours after one show to clean up the crazy mess created. Balloons, rice, confetti, paper hats, paper whistles and lots of feathers. All evidence of a successful Transylvanian shindig!"

He says that a year later, small amounts of rice still appear on the floor under seats. Rice throwing during the wedding scene was banned at this week's late-night double feature screening with King Kong.

On Thursday, as O'Brien glances up at three people manoeuvring a headless mannequin on a dentist's chair on a platform above the old Embassy site, he rejects the notion of being proud at having worldwide fame 40 years after he left Hamilton for good.

"I'm not a fan of pride. I do believe it's a cardinal sin and comes before a fall."

THE RIFF RAFF statue does more than celebrate O'Brien's enduring stage and screen phenomenon. It is a monument to how an 8 1/2 stone bodgie, a wannabe actor and guitar player and an outsider in a 1960s rugby, racing and beer provincial heartland, followed his dreams.

"I must have lived an awful lot in my head," O'Brien says of those days.

"In my lunch hour I used to go across the road to bookshops and voraciously read books I couldn't afford."

Anything about art, photography, design.

O'Brien is a natural performer. If someone mentions James Bond he suddenly does a Sean Connery impersonation; a song seems perennially on his lips; and his eccentric, often flamboyant clothes sense lends him a Peter Pan aura.

"I tried to join the grown ups, but it just didn't work for me."

He has some vivid memories of the city. One is of a dredge which used to be anchored under Victoria Bridge.

"I used to love watching the bucket come up and the ochre water bleeding out of its jaws, and running barefoot along the river bank path."

A 1959 photo captures 17-year-old O'Brien in the bodgie uniform – quiffed hair and jeans – with his childhood friend Brian "Jacko" Jamieson on southern Victoria St.

For some reason a freelance photographer approached the pair, who are still friends. Jamieson lives in the US and works for Warner Brothers, but was expected to be at the unveiling last night.

O'Brien says that despite his skinny physique he would never allow himself to be victimised if he encountered some of the macho behaviour of the day.

"I may be a fool, but I'm not someone else's fool."

If entertaining them didn't work, he still didn't back down.

"I wanted them to say `he may be skinny, he may be small, but by god he's tough'."

Aged 22, he left for England to pursue his acting dreams, via stints as a truck driver, hairdresser and stuntman. He had parts in stage shows Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar and began writing musical numbers with his then wife, Kimi Wong.

Within two years, Rocky Horror would hit the stage and in many people's eyes he would forever be frozen in time as Riff Raff.

Nothing he has written since has been anywhere near as successful, though he has never lacked for acting jobs in his south London base.

The statue is the 2000 brainchild of former Hamilton performance artist and writer Mark Servian, who saw a Dylan Taite documentary in which O'Brien took a nostalgic trip to Hamilton. Servian joined forces with friend Tracey Wood to push the project through numerous hurdles with business and council help.

Ironically, it wasn't driven by a love of the show.

"It struck me as a piece of history that Hamilton wasn't celebrating. The city has an undercurrent of culture that gets ignored. The statue makes freaks feel welcome."

Twenty years ago in Wellington, many of Servian's friends were hard-core Rocky Horror fans, and he admits to getting sick of the cult. But he says the show played a little-known part in New Zealand political history.

The McGillicuddy Serious Party member says its Wellington branch was the bizarre amalgamation of the city's Rocky Horror fans and a bunch of nerdy wargamers.

THE HOLLYWOOD Cinema in Avondale – a working class West Auckland suburb with no Avon but a lot of dale – was for 10 years the mecca for Rocky Horror fans.

Before the last screening at the Hollywood in 1988, the weekly Friday and Saturday night sessions set the record for the longest movie run in New Zealand history and kept one of the city's last old-style suburban cinemas open.

Among the early devotees was teachers college lecturer Sam Edwards, now a Hamilton film critic who rates Rocky Horror Picture Show as an almost faultless musical.

"The first time I went to the Hollywood was an eye opener, with the people who had dressed for it and knew every word of every song. It was just an incredible experience."

He remembers smelling marijuana smoke in the audience, which added to the surreal atmosphere of rice throwing and lyric reciting. A field trip to the Hollywood became a staple of Edwards' film studies students.

He says the movie's enduring appeal is fairly easy to pinpoint.

"Songs you can sing, characters who are unpredictably different, and a fantasy that is actually fun.

"It just grabs people who have a sense of energy and the sort of latent irresponsibility and fun which everyone tries to drive out of them at the age of three."

The musical transitions are seamless, and every song is singable.

"The one ambition I've had in my life is to sing Riff Raff's part, but I don't have the voice to manage it."

NAMING HIS cat Riff Raff qualifies Hamilton theatre actor David Artis as a Rocky Horror fanatic.

He is in the cast for the Operatic Society's Christmas production which started last night, but he was to head down to Victoria St for the party straight afterwards.

The movie was a huge influence on the British expat's move into professional theatre in the late 1970s.

"There's a lyric in Rocky Horror which says `don't dream it, be it', which inspired me."

He used to go to the movie dressed as Frank N Furter "in the days when I had a Frank N Furter body", though he says few of his friends could understand his Rocky Horror fascination.

"But I think all actors have something inside which wants to burst out in fish-net stockings."

He treasures his rare vinyl copy of a live movie soundtrack including audience participation, and has the film on DVD.

He says Rocky Horror appeals to people because it is incredibly bizarre, but inoffensive.

"It's just a rollicking good rock musical."

The young Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick, the appearance of singer Meat Loaf, and the understated but hugely charismatic performance of Tim Curry, sealed the movie's status, he says.

"The casting made it hugely successful. It had cult status right from the off. It melds together all things ridiculous in an amazingly theatrical way."

He wants to audition for a role in next year's anniversary production, as the narrator. But he knows "the world and his wife" will audition for the part.

In the meantime he will keep on listening to the CD in his car on the way home from work, and singing along in his head.

WITH HAT and glasses off, O'Brien's pale eyes and shiny bald pate attract recognition from patrons at outside tables at the south end's restaurants, cafes and bars.

"I think Hamilton now is very vibrant. I love it, because 15 years ago this part of the high street was a mess. I wish there was a little more of the past left though," he says as he detours to have a quick look at the clothes in boutique Solo, before recalling popping in to the Hamilton Hotel after work to drink stout in an attempt to put on weight.

O'Brien's parents live in Tauranga, his father now frail. He has a brother who was on hand last night, and a sister in New Zealand.

He comes back about every three years, and wants to reduce the gap to yearly before moving permanently in about five years.

"I never wanted fame or fortune, never been ambitious. I can say that with my hand on my heart. You try, and work, and learn your craft, and be as good as you can be."

He says he gained that fame and relative fortune – from Rocky Horror's longevity – by default.

Analysing his show's amazing endurance, O'Brien says "I think that it's a nice piece of trash".

People who watch it don't have to engage their brain, but they enjoy the rock 'n' roll and identify with the age-old fairytale components he included in the story, he says.

Describing himself as naturally lazy, he slightly regrets that he didn't pursue acting as strongly as he could have, but adds "what the hell".

He still loves being in front of an audience, hearing "the pat on the back" of applause.

"There is an element of narcissism and exhibitionism to all actors. I think the little showoff is always there, though some might deny it."

Rocky Horror changed his life.

"I was a jobbing actor, just starting out and getting more and more jobs. After Rocky Horror I concentrated on my writing."

Though he rates the songs of 1981 sequel Shock Treatment as much better than Rocky Horror, the film turned out to be a mess.

He says he is not on an endless search for the magic ingredient which he found with Rocky Horror.

"I want something to work in its own right. But Rocky of course is the one that caught the heart and minds of everybody."