In coordination with the release of his newest film, Peterloo, this month The Pink Smoke will be exploring the work of noted curmudgeon and dyspeptic genius Mike Leigh. From his early teleplays to his recent historical dramas, Leigh's focus has stayed constant: the elusive qualities of happiness, the constrictions of family, the friction between the have's and have-not's, the relationship between work and personal fulfillment.

Leigh unusual method for developing his screenplays (and his unique process for working with actors) results in films that are notably chaotic, complex, and spilling over with a sense of life that few artworks can match. We're excited to explore the worlds that Leigh has created; his films provide a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new discoveries, strange notions, startling emotions, and (most importantly) unforgettable characters.

{PiNK SMOKE PODCAST: PETERLOO}
{THEiR EARLiER STUFF WAS BETTER}
{SPALL OR NOTHiNG: PART 1}
{SECOND CHANCES: CAREER GiRLS}
{MiKE ON A BiKE}

I'll warn you ahead of time: this piece does not have a satisfying conclusion unless you are satisfied by dumb ideas pursued far beyond their logical conclusions.

I love doing research, but it can be dangerous. Especially when you're lazy, and I am extremely lazy. To be lazy means to end up relying almost entirely on the internet for information needed for minor articles, quick fact verifications and, say, tweets. To be extremely lazy means to rely almost entirely on IMDb and Wikipedia. Today I am inviting you to join this lazy writer down the internet rabbit hole I ended up burrowing deeper and deeper into for hours.

It all began with a simple curiosity about Mike Leigh's humble beginnings as an actor. It's known to anyone with even a slight awareness of Leigh's career as a theatrical and film director that his organic process of 'devising' a play or movie involves intimate and intricate workshopping with the cast, who essentially create the characters whom Leigh will eventually work into various scenarios, which he will then mold into a story. (Terrible description - I sounded like the studio exec from Annie Hall there.) The process, at least what little of it to be revealed in documentaries like 1982's Arena special Mike Leigh Making Plays, is a complicated and seemingly exhausting one that takes months of preparation.

You don't reach that level of collaboration with performers without getting a little skin in the ol' acting game first, and sure enough 17-year-old Mike Leigh received a scholarship to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London (fellow Mancunian Ian McShane was a classmate). It was there that he learned all the theatrical rules he was determined to break: in his words, "We never asked questions beyond the immediate surface action of the play, questions about characters, their world, the meaning of the play, how the play or the characters related to real life, to our lives, to the world out there." But his training in RADA's drama program also led to a few small acting gigs in the mid-60's: an uncredited role in Michael Winner's West 11 (1963), the part of "Paul" in the Maigret television series episode "The Flemish Shop" and as "Jim" (again uncredited) in Two Left Feet (1965), directed by Roy Ward Baker and starring Michael Crawford, Nyree Dawn Porter and David Hemmings. Of those appearances, I've only seen the clip from "The Flemish Shop" in which Leigh plays a mute young man twitching nervously when confronted by authority figures, presumably because of murder!

IMDb lists these three credits and then nothing for the following 28 years during which Leigh was working on stage, in television and finally producing the feature films that have made him one of the most revered cinematic artists of his time. Leigh never gave himself so much as a wordless cameo in any of his 23 television and theatrical films, and other than an appearance as "Mike Leigh" in Tony Markes & Adam Rifkin's Welcome to Hollywood (presumably because he's playing a fictionalized version of himself, it shows up in the 'acting' section of his filmography), hasn't acted in movies for any other directors. Which is what makes his other two acting credits all the more beguiling.

According to IMDb, Mike Leigh appears as an actor in the music video for the early 90's Paul McCartney song "Biker Like an Icon," playing the subject biker. What's this? The Manchester moviemaker and the Liverpool lyricist teamed up together? Improv impressario involved as Beatle's beatific biker?? "Sexy Sadie" songsmith solicited screenwriter's service as eponymous enduro-enduring Englishman??? I had no idea there was any connection between these two very different British giants beyond Owen Gleiberman's review of Life is Sweet in which he compared Nicola to McCartney’s curmudgeonly grandfather in A Hard Day's Night. Actually, Leigh revealed during his time in the Criterion Closet that he was a student in London when Hard Days Night was filming and remembers witnessing the madcap production. "It's not one of the great films, but I've got a great soft spot for it. It's a film about getting out there and capturing things in a spontaneous way. Although it's not my kind of film, I've got a lot of respect for its energy and its look."

I remember seeing McCartney perform the horrible "Biker Like an Icon" on Saturday Night Live in February of '93 and thinking he was singing "She loved her Michael-Ikel-Ikel." 'That's a pretty stupid way to sing that name,' I thought. Then I found out the lyric was "She loved her biker like an icon," which was so much fucking worse! I mean christ, this was 1993! Siamese Dream! Bjork's solo debut! Afghan Whig's Gentlemen! 36 Chambers! Cure for Pain! Midnight Marauders! PJ Harvey was singing "rub it better 'till it bleeds"! And the best that one of the most legendary English songwriters in the history of popular music could come up with was, "She loved her biker like an icon"?

It's the kind of thing that makes me wonder if Sir Paul wasn't conducting an elaborate experiment to see just what he could get away with in terms of absolutely shitty songwriting given his reputation as a living legend, and the conclusion was that he could get away with literally fucking anything.¹

So out of morbid curiosity I went over to YouTube (now that I was really in research mode!) and watched the "Biker Like an Icon" video, which is largely unremarkable. Sepia-tinged shots of a thin, blonde woman (Tamzin Haughton, who has one other acting credit on her IMDb page and also directed two short films) walking along a desert landscape, chilling by a motel pool, staring at a Polaroid as McCartney warbles "gazing at his picture every day" (y'know, like an icon!) and cruising along a city street in a convertible at night as McCartney fades in and out on the right side of the screen, apparently not caring what words are coming out of his mouth. There's a seizure-inducing bit of breakneck editing and strobe lighting in the middle of the video, during which we're treated to the Linda McCartney version of headbanging which I imagine will be waiting for me in hell.

The viewer never gets a clear glance at the iconic biker, only shots of him in a helmet out on the road and dark, blurry outlines of a body on the beach. The best shot we get is him shirtless (with the helmet still on!) with tattoos up and down his left arm. It's established that most of the shots of the woman are through the biker's POV, that we're seeing her through the eyes of the biker she loves like a goddamn icon, so the best close-ups provided are of a random hand or leg.

Do any of these saintly appendages belong to renowned filmmaker Mike Leigh? Is that his image on the Polaroid? "Icon" video director Richard Heslop is also credited by IMDb as a "biker," so we might be dealing with two road warriors in this forgotten music video I've now thought about more than any other person. Just how many biker blokes has this lady elevated to "iconic" status anyway? Incidentally, I hope McCartney is aware that the specific term "biker" is meant to denote someone who is the member of a biker gang or motorcycle club. Chains Cooper is a biker. Raven Shaddock is a biker. Kaneda is a biker. The Knightriders are bikers. Perry Tyson, Patty Bernstein and Ace Hunter are bikers. Andrew McCarthy in Mannequin is not a biker. Wreck-Gar is a robot that turns into a motorcycle. Vanilla Ice is cool as ice. You can see what I'm getting at here.

Heslop has an impressive resume. In his 40-year career as a filmmaker, artist and photographer he's worked with the likes of William Burroughs and Derek Jarman, directed The Smith's "The Queen is Dead" as his first music video and made over 80 more for artists such as The Cure, New Order and Sinead O'Connor. But the name "Mike Leigh" can't be found anywhere on his official website, and even though he worked camera for several Jarman movies he didn't crew on any of Leigh's films. There's no obvious connection between the two men besides the fact that they're both British directors.

Which leads to the other befuddling acting credit on Leigh's page - IMDb insists he appears in Queen: Made in Heaven, a 47-minute compilation of music videos from 1997 tied in to the 1995 album Queen of the same name released nearly four years to the day after the death of Freddie Mercury. IMDb lists seven directors, one being Richard Heslop (also credited as the DP?), which suggests that seven music videos are represented.

This must mean that Heslop's contribution to Made in Heaven is the music video for "I Was Born to Love You," a song originally recorded for Mercury's 1985 solo album that was reworked by his bandmates for inclusion on the posthumous Queen album. Freddie's disco-fueled original became a cool music video by David Mallet, Heslop did one for the new 6-minute "vinyl edit" Queen version produced by the British Film Institute. It's a black-and-white montage of folks hanging around a block of council flats (sort of like All or Nothing, which came out 5 years later) that opens with young folks making out in an elevator before branching out to kids playing inside cardboard Daleks, families hanging around inside their apartments, a couple pouring some sort of liquid on each other's heads and laughing, then finally some teens trashing and burning a car at night.

Unless he's one of the random silhouettes lit against the raging inferno of the flaming automobile, Mike Leigh does not appear in the video. The only person involved over the age of 25 is this guy:

And yet (since it's arty like a short film, I guess) the video ends with credits. And goddammit:

This seems to confirm it: there's been a mix-up. The fact that Leigh is unquestionably absent from "I Was Born to Love You" puts the last nail in the coffin: IMDb is just confused and this is a different Mike Leigh, some actor or friend of Heslop's who popped up in his videos. (Such confusion has been known to happen: just see the case of Terry Evans in the Appendix section of my Mongrel article.) That's all there is to it, end of story.

...On the other hand.

It could have been Leigh in "Biker Like an Icon." There's nothing about Leigh being a bike enthusiast in any of the interviews with him that I've read, but Phil Davis' character Cyril in High Hopes, a bearded intellectual with a gruff exterior, especially when forced to deal with morons spawned by Margaret Thatcher's England, is as close to a Mike Leigh surrogate as any character in his films. And Cyril is a biker. So it's possible Mike Leigh is a motorcycle guy, which would explain how he ended up in the McCartney video (it might even be that Heslop used unrelated footage of Leigh on a bike?) Mike Leigh, biker: Plausible.

I decided to follow this final bit of evidence to the bitter end by googling "Mike Leigh motorcycle." Nothing helpful, no outside-IMDb mention of Leigh being involved with "Biker Like an Icon." However, I did find a curious Wikipedia claim when poking around the 1964 British film The Leather Boys, directed by Sidney J. Furie of Iron Eagle and Superman IV fame, starring Rita Tushingham (The Knack... and How to Get It) and Colin Campbell (My Beautiful Laundrette).² The screenwriter Gillian Freeman (who in a sad coincidence died this past February) wrote the novel on which the The Leather Boys was based, under the name "Eliot George." Wikipedia claims:

"The first paperback edition had a cover that featured Mike Leigh, the now famous film director, as a photographic model of one of the main characters."

What??

So I looked up the cover. I found three, all unlikely be first editions but the only ones featuring photographic models. The first of them (credited to "Eliot George") seems to clearly be actors from the movie; the guy in profile looks nothing like Leigh. The second (credited to "Gillian Freeman") features a dark-haired dude standing next to a blonde. The dude looks nothing like Leigh. And the third, published by Four Square and credited to Freeman, features two young blokes in the foreground... neither of whom look like Mike Leigh.³

You be the judge:

Leigh of course was acting in the mid-60's, would have been part of the film scene, might have even taken a model gig or two for extra bucks or for a laugh, but nobody on these covers looks like twenty-something Mike Leigh! Twenty-something Mike Leigh looks, incredibly enough, like a younger version of the current Mike Leigh.

And now I have even more useless information that I can't do anything with anyway!!

That's what I get for being such a lazy researcher. I did try to contact Richard Heslop through his website, but the email was kicked back automatically as if the internet gods had deemed my query too insignificant to bother anybody with. I have no idea to whom I'd address a question about Mike Leigh appearing on the cover of The Leather Boys. Still, this was a fun rabbit hole to get lost in, if only because it's interesting to try and learn something different about a great filmmaker. I love Mike Leigh like an icon; it just annoys me that if I ever get the opportunity to see him again, my first question is going to have to be, "So - were you once in a Paul McCartney video?"