Written by Kevin Tuxford
I’ve heard people cite the obvious connections between glam, punk, and post punk, but I’ve never heard people recall the impact of “Cabaret” in 1972. People later on may have forgotten that this film was a major impact, and won eight Academy Awards in America, and another seven in England.
It captured on film the same atmosphere of decadence and impending madness that had already made their mark in the music of the Doors and Kurt Weill.
Remember that by the mid seventies, economic turmoil and oil embargoes, and the continuing Vietnam War were taking a serious toll on the rosy psychedelic optimism of the post-sixties world.
I used to collect newspaper clippings to use making punk flyers, Back when the LA Times used to run ads for porno movies, there was one that stuck out, and captured the spirit of the emerging post-punk milieu: “Depraved, decadent, damned… Nazi Germany, 1939.
No one I ever knew thought that Sid Vicious or Siouxsie Sioux were Nazis or white supremacists for wearing swastikas, but the connection between the “cabaret” era between the wars Germany with late seventies Cold War American/English MADness was obvious.
