It lit up the 1970s with its nihilistic tale of a hippie band imploding in a trail of drugs, booze and violence. What can it tell us about the music business today? Writer David Hare and wild-child rocker Self Esteem plug in <\/p>\n\n
The first time Rebecca Lucy Taylor read David Hare\u2019s 1975 play Teeth \u2019n\u2019 Smiles, she says, her \u201cmind was blown\u201d. \u201cI couldn\u2019t believe it,\u201d says the artist better known to music fans as Self Esteem. \u201cThe way I feel about my actual life is so mirrored in this play. It just mirrors what the music industry today is like.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a sense, that\u2019s a surprising thing to say. You could view Teeth \u2019n\u2019 Smiles as something of a period piece. Set in 1969, it is the saga of a band imploding in a mass of drugs, alcohol and violence backstage at a Cambridge May ball \u2013 inspired, Hare says, by the experience of seeing a \u201cgrumpy, angry, miserable\u201d Manfred Mann going through the motions at a similar event while he was a student at Jesus College. There is debate among the band\u2019s members about the late-60s countercultural \u201cacid dream\u201d, and the attendant belief in rock music as a revolutionary force capable of inciting social change. But the play seems less a product of the era in which it is set than that in which it was written. It is soaked in the disillusionment and broiling discontent of the mid-70s, when the countercultural dream was unequivocally over.<\/p>\n
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