This was the big bang moment for cringe comedy and spoof mockumentary, and it was an American classic whose every superb gag came to be savoured and replayed through its massive 1980s popularity on home video, securing for the and their international treasure status. Now it is rereleased in anticipation of the forthcoming sequel, prising open the chrysalis doors for the band to emerge once more into our lives.
The film is about the glorious nightmare of Britain’s heavy rock colossus Spinal Tap, and the horrendous contrast between their mythic pomp and their declining commercial prestige; it is a tragicomic and comically influential disconnect, flavoured with ironic self-awareness and poignant vulnerability. When lead vocalist David St Hubbins, secretly devastated by the thought of the band splitting up, says: “What does the end feel like? It’s like saying when you try to extrapolate the end of the universe, you say, if the universe is indeed infinite, then how … what does that mean?”
Michael McKean plays lead vocalist St Hubbins, who sports a Jaggeresque pout and sneer on stage; Christopher Guest is sub-Jimmy Page lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel, while Harry Shearer is the easygoing, pipe-smoking bassist Derek Smalls who, like Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, is maybe more of a jazz guy at heart. These fictional monsters, in their ascent to legendary status, have long since transcended conventional comparisons, but I like to think they have been collectively inspired by lesser-known British rockers Foghat, once very big in the US.
Our story begins in 1982, as Tap, beginning their long slide from relevance, embark on an ill-advised US tour to promote their new album Smell the Glove, from which the record company, embarrassed by its contractual commitment to the band, is planning to dissociate itself on the pretext of its grotesquely sexist cover artwork. Cancellations and disasters follow, and there is a resurgence of Nigel’s longstanding antipathy to David’s Yoko-style girlfriend Jeanine (June Chadwick), whose new conceptual ideas for the band are conceived with exquisite satirical cruelty.
The band’s formidable manager Ian (Tony Hendra) displays various mean streaks of homophobia and antisemitism and wields a cricket bat when he needs to – like Led Zeppelin’s Peter Grant – to get tough with promoters. But Ian quits, so does Nigel and soon Tap are looking into the abyss.
There are blue-chip cameos from Bruno Kirby as the Sinatra-loving limo driver, Billy Crystal and Dana Carvey as the “mime-waiters”, Patrick Macnee as company chief Sir Denis Eton-Hogg, Anjelica Huston as the builder of the tiny Stonehenge and Fred Willard as the air force lieutenant who welcomes the band to their gig playing the base’s “at ease” weekend.
This Is Spinal Tap is shrewd and ahead of its time in seeing how a certain strain of white rock appeared to be utterly innocent of its debt to black music as well as seeing how a hilariously juvenilised masculinity was so often at its heart, with musicians believing that they had armadillos in their trousers. It is a story about failure, the kind of failure that reveals red-pill truths about the music business that success can’t. Many Tap fans will have been masochistically hoping that the band could have produced their planned Jack the Ripper musical on Broadway or London’s West End: (“You’re a naughty one – saucy Jack! You’re a haughty one – saucy Jack!”).
Well, Tap survived to see heavy rock accepted as part of the Spotify mainstream-rainbow of tastes and styles and the late Ozzy Osbourne almost sanctified. And perhaps the film’s satirical creatures, and the paradoxical affection they inspired, have thus been overtaken by events. The film’s superb improvisational lightness, musical pastiche and lethally observed humour are still a joy.
• This Is Spinal Tap is in cinemas from 24 August.
