The strange afterlife of This is Spinal Tap |
A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever – credited to the late Rob Reiner, with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, as well as to their Tap alter-egos Marty Dibergi, Nigel Tufnel, David St Hubbins and Derek Smalls – serves as a fitting companion to This is Spinal Tap (1984), the mother of all mockumentaries, much beloved by middle-aged men and their poor put-upon children. (My wife and my daughter, I should say, absolutely hate it: but then they prefer Pitch Perfect – and Pitch Perfect 2. So there’s no accounting for taste.)
Part oral history, part behind-the-scenes memoir and part self-aware parody of rock memoir, the book’s a bit of a mess – much like the fictional band. It could well have been a work of serious cultural criticism if written by, say, a David Hepworth or a Greil Marcus, a proper rock critic, examining the context of Spinal Tap’s emergence in relation to late-stage capitalism and what happens when a parody becomes canonical and… Actually, I’ve lost interest in completing that sentence, so who the hell would want to read a whole book like that?
For those who somehow missed the original film and the recent sequel,........