Martin Scorsese doesn’t take no for an answer. When an already overtaxed Mike Figgis was invited to contribute to the seven part PBS series Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues, turning down the assignment proved rather more difficult than anticipated.

“Alex (Gibney, the series’ producer) called me and outlined the thing,” Figgis explains, “and I said, ‘It sounds great,’ but to be very honest I was reluctant to get involved because it sounded like a huge amount of work and I was in the middle of three other productions at that time. And then he did a very clever thing, he said, ‘Would you mind talking to Marty?’ And I remember I was driving somewhere in Italy and my mobile rang. Someone told me afterwards that Marty hates to make a phone call if he ever thinks the answer might be no, so the whole conversation was based upon how pleased he was that I was going to do it. And I just said, ‘I’m thrilled, I’m really honoured to be asked.’ And I put the phone down and went, ‘What happened?’ I mean, I’m really glad I did it, but to be honest, my rational mind was thinking, ‘You’re crazy, how on earth are you gonna do this?’
Scorsese’s evangelism as a film historian is legendary, borne out by his exhaustive documentaries on the last century of American and Italian cinema, but when this passion is brought to bear on something as emotive and integral to his work as music, one can expect remarkable results. The PBS series might excite and inflame in equal measure, but it also works as an indispensable repository of archive footage and contemporaneous newsreel. The impact of seeing Skip James, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Son House, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, John Lee Hooker and Willie Dixon in action can’t be underplayed. Put bluntly, you won’t see this shit on MTV.
Figgis, whose filmography contrasts relatively big budget productions such as Leaving Las Vegas with minimalist works like Miss Julie, contributes Red, White & Blues, a history of the 1960s British blues boom that fostered The Rolling Stones, Cream, The Yardbirds, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, Them and many others. It contains some of the most revealing interviews of the series, due in no small part to the director’s affinity with the musicians (a multi-instrumentalist from the age of ten, Figgis grew up steeped in jazz and blues, playing in bands with Bryan Ferry and John Porter in Newcastle). In fact, watching someone like Eric Clapton speak, one is surprised by the quasi-religious intensity he obviously still feels for the music.
“I wasn’t prepared for it really,” Figgis acknowledges, “not just from Eric but quite a few people. Pretty much all of them, without being pushed by me, so readily copped to this kind of thing: ‘We’ll never be confused with the real thing, but we had such a respect and love for this music and wanted to tell everybody about it, and in a way see that the originators got their credit and their dues.’ And I liked the respectfulness of that. There are other musicians who are not in the documentary who perhaps didn’t have quite the same respect for the music they were ripping off, but I found that a nice collective philosophy.”
On that subject, one glaring omission is Led Zeppelin, especially given that Page and John Paul Jones were pretty much ubiquitous.
“I think once Led Zep took off it went in a very powerful alternative direction, even though obviously the licks were still clearly identifiably from the same root,” Figgis considers. “There was a limit in terms of material for the film in terms of what I could get in. I tried very hard to get Keith Richards and Mick Jagger and was actually in Toronto when they were rehearsing and saw them a couple of times, but one time we were about to do an interview and their guitar technician suddenly died. So there are omissions, I think that’s inevitable.”
One of the most interesting aspects of the entire series is how the best moments stem from an apparently irreverent approach to the music, typified by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s bawdy mauling of ‘Special Rider Blues’. Figgis acknowledges this may be precisely why the blues has managed to mutate and survive in the genes of acts like the White Stripes and PJ Harvey, whereas jazz has all but suffocated in the vacuum of museum academia.
“I was in America just before the series came out on TV there,” he says, “and there was some pretty snotty stuff in the New York Times, because every fucking blues academic felt compelled to crawl out of the woodwork and pontificate about what was real blues, and I thought, ‘I haven’t heard these dialogues for a long time.’ That used to be such a ’60s thing! And one thing I really like about this whole project is what you just said, the absence of fake reverence like there was in that 12 or 15-part series on the history of jazz where they fucking talked over every goddamn great clip of Louis Armstrong or Charlie Parker, where you’d get some expert explaining why what you were trying to listen to was good. It just made me completely insane and consigned all of that energy to the past, because the minute you get that BBC2 voice, it means it was a historical event as opposed to something that just carries on. I love the fact that they just got together six or seven people and said, ‘Using your own taste buds, go ahead and make a film about the blues’.”