"Memory is born slippy. It has a will of its own. A butterfly bumping endlessly against a dirty windowpane. But then the sun comes out and there they are--memories glowing like stained glass." --Julien Temple, from Rebel Eye
The first memoir from Julien Temple, the filmmaker who found the Sex Pistols in 1975 and went on to record fifty years of everything from punk to David Bowie, from the Rolling Stones to Earth Girls Are Easy, in a propulsive life story cut together like one of his own films.
On a hot August day in 1975, a London film student hears a Small Faces song coming from a derelict warehouse. He follows it to a loft where four boys are ripping the song to pieces. Everyone else is still in flared jeans, but these chaps look like insect men from outer space. He asks whether they would like to be in a film. Their reply is unprintable. Undaunted on the bus home, he tells his friends he has seen the future.
Julien Temple filmed the Sex Pistols before anyone knew them, and never stopped. That footage became The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and, twenty years later, The Filth and the Fury. David Bowie, who loved the film's Sid Vicious "My Way" sequence, hired Temple to direct "Jazzin' for Blue Jean," then agreed to act in Temple's adaptation of Absolute Beginners and wrote its title song. Temple made videos for the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and Janet Jackson; the cult comedy Earth Girls Are Easy, which cast an unknown Jim Carrey; films about Joe Strummer, Dr. Feelgood, Keith Richards, Detroit, and London; and, for twenty years, the Glastonbury Festival.
Rebel Eye reads the way Temple cuts his films: 113 short scenes with electric transitions. A blind great-grandmother in Somerset takes an axe to an elephant's trunk. A Studio 54 doorman sends Donald Trump back to his limousine, then lets Temple in for his English accent. Malcolm McLaren refuses a plastic bag holding £200,000 of Richard Branson's cash. A Stage 3 cancer diagnosis arrives, but he keeps the camera running.
Edited by James Truman, former editorial director of Condé Nast, and illustrated in full color from Temple's own archive, this is the memoir of a man who has spent fifty years pointing a camera at the moment things change, knowing that memory is the least reliable camera of all.