John Preston
Mystic, pioneering film-maker, falconer and father of eight, peter whitehead has led a full life. John Preston tracks one of the counter-culture’s most intriguing figures down to a modern housing estate in the midlands - and finds his address is not the only surprise in store
The car park at Kettering station is not the sort of place you expect to meet a mystic. But here is Peter Whitehead with long white hair and dark glasses emerging through the gloom of a January afternoon in a beaten-up, red Vauxhall Astra.
There can be no doubt that Whitehead is a mystic - apart from anything else, he claims to be 4,000 years old and to have been reborn early one morning in August 1996.
But he is, mercifully, a lot of other things besides: pioneer documentary-maker, novelist, falconer and the man who may have invented the pop video - an idea he finds abhorrent.
For 10 years,Whitehead ran a falcon-breeding programme in Saudi Arabia founded by King Faisal’s son, Prince Khalid Al-Faisal.
Once he showed Prince Charles around his falconry centre, a visit that went very well despite the fact that one of the falcons ejaculated over Whitehead’s hat. ‘Charles wrote to me afterwards and said it was the most extraordinary thing he’d ever seen,’ he says.
Having fallen into deepest obscurity, Whitehead is now making a comeback. Next month, the National Film Theatre is showing a season of his work, and there’s a new three-hour documentary by Paul Cronin, In the Beginning was the Image: Conversations with Peter Whitehead, to go with it.
The season will include Charlie is My Darling, the first documentary ever made about the Rolling Stones, as well as The Fall, the film that devotees consider to be his masterpiece, which has never received a commercial release.
Another 30 film festivals around the world are also in the process of mounting Whitehead festivals. All this belated recognition has had a dramatic effect on him.
Having sworn more than 30 years ago that he would never make another film, Whitehead, now aged 70, is planning to take up his camera again for one final time.
Recently, he’s been limbering up by shooting some footage of Pete Doherty in the recording studio, at Doherty’s request.
I’m not sure where I expected a mystic falconer to live - a cave, possibly - but certainly not in the spruce red-brick house on a modern estate that his car pulls up outside.
‘I’m selling this place,’ he declares, before he’s even opened the door. ‘In fact, I’m moving out tomorrow and going to live in Vienna.’
The money raised from the sale of his house will, he hopes, be sufficient to finance his new film. Lest anyone should think that Whitehead might be about to turn soft or commercial in his old age, it’s worth pointing out that this film, provisionally entitled Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts, will be light years removed from your standard multiplex fare.
‘I’m planning to totally deconstruct linear narrative,’ he says eagerly. ‘Actually, I’m basing the whole structure on the two circular tram routes that go around Vienna.’
Most self-proclaimed independent film-makers aren’t really independent at all; they’re happy to work for anyone who backs them.
Whitehead, though, is the genuine article, and has the debts to prove it. As he says, somewhat wearily: ‘The definition of a real independent film-maker is that you never have any money.’
Until he was 45, Whitehead insists, he never owned a thing. He had, however, shown an uncommon knack for landing in the thick of the action.
Raised in conditions of great poverty in the Lake District and London, he was 13 when he was plucked out of his grammar school and sent off to a public school in Harrogate - the beneficiary of a post-war Labour scheme to give bright, disadvantaged children a leg-up.
The result of this, he says, was that ‘I realised I could get by anywhere. And I’ve exploited that all my life. But, at the same time, I’ve never belonged anywhere.’
In mid-1960s London, Whitehead was unaware of the social revolution stirring around him - he was set on becoming a classical musician. But then he got a job for an Italian television company making short documentaries.
While he had no particular interest in the work - at least not at first - it taught him ‘to look for essentials. I developed this great facility to film in any situation and to capture the essence of it’.
Since his bosses seemed to have no idea what they wanted, Whitehead began to experiment, often shooting everything in a single take so that no one could edit what he’d done.
With bewildering speed, one thing led to another. To his astonishment, Whitehead, who had never listened to a pop record in his life, was asked by Top of the Pops to film Jimi Hendrix - the first time Hendrix had been captured on camera.
Next came a request to shoot some footage of the recently formed Pink Floyd. Despite finding their music ‘ghastly’, Whitehead agreed.
He’d already met Syd Barrett because he shared a house with some friends of Barrett’s in Cambridge. ‘And then I met him again in London because I had an affair with his girlfriend.’
How did Barrett feel about that? ‘Oh, I don’t think he knew. He was far too out of it to notice.’
Whitehead paid £90 of his own money and persuaded the band to make its inaugural visit to a recording studio.
‘I recorded 11 minutes of them playing. And do you know?’ he says with an uncharacteristic note of wistfulness in his voice, ‘I made more money out of those 11 minutes than from anything else I’ve ever done.”
Soon he was shooting the Stones in Dublin, Allen Ginsberg at the Royal Albert Hall and Led Zeppelin at the Roundhouse.
In 1967, he shot Benefit of the Doubt, about the VietnamWar. Given Whitehead’s approach - and the spirit of the times - one might assume that his films would be unwieldy monuments to self-indulgence.
In fact, they’re very sharply observed, often extremely funny and surprisingly cohesive. After making a documentary about Swinging London, called Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London - typically, Whitehead claims to have been bored to tears by Swinging London - in 1968 he went off to New York intending to make a similar film there.
But once in America he became swept up in the civil-rights movement. After a day spent filming Bobby Kennedy, Whitehead wished him good luck in his bid to become President.
‘Kennedy gave me this odd look and said, “There are lots of things standing between me and the White House”.’ Three weeks later, Kennedy was assassinated.
Whitehead’s response to all this upheaval was to make The Fall, a film that was in part about a student sit-in at New York’s Columbia University and in part an exploration of what it means to be a documentary-maker.
In a move that anticipated the work of Nick Broomfield by many years, he put himself in the frame - the director trying to make sense of what he’s recording while simultaneously examining his role in shaping it.
But, by this point, Whitehead had become so obsessed with film-making that he could scarcely tell the difference between reality and his filmed version of it.
‘I’d reached a stage where I couldn’t do anything without relating it to the possibility or necessity of filming it. I would walk down the street and imagine I was filming the whole time. In my head, I’d be zooming and editing away.
‘Then at night I used to dream that I was in a film and that when the film came to an end I’d be dead. I felt that by filming things I was connecting with them, but in fact it was quite the opposite. The camera was essentially separating me from life.’
As soon as he’d finished The Fall, he had a nervous breakdown. ‘I didn’t know who I was any more. I seemed to have this public existence, but it felt like a completely false self to me.’
Soon afterwards came one of his epiphanies. On a visit to the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1969, Whitehead ran out of the cinema and sat on a park bench, wondering what to do with his life.
‘While I was sitting there, a little old man came by with some bread and started literally calling the birds out of the air. One of the birds would land on his shoulder, and he’d say, “Not you Charlie; it’s Rose’s turn first.” I realised that he recognised each bird and it struck me that here was an example of someone who was completely in touch with the natural world.’
At that moment, Whitehead decided to stop making films. ‘As soon as I’d done so, I had this incredible feeling of relief and ecstasy.’ In future, he resolved, he too would become a birdman - more specifically a breeder of falcons, this despite knowing nothing about them.
He bought his first falcon for £8 after seeing an advertisement in Exchange & Mart. ‘When I saw it, I felt this enormous sense of identification. It was if I had re-connected with my myth.
‘You see, I had to go through my symbolic dismemberment and fragmentation to find myself again - just like Osiris in Ancient Egypt, whose body was broken up into 13 pieces. He had to be put back together again, although his penis, of course, was never found.’
This is vintage Whitehead. As he talks, his conversation snakes about, shoots off at tangents and is punctuated by occasional cries of, ‘Oh no, I’ve lost my thread again!’
Yet, somehow, it always manages to come back to the original subject. Perhaps because this, invariably, is Whitehead himself.
He is, quite possibly, the most self-absorbed person I have ever met, someone whose life has been spent immersed in a rich soup of symbolism, allusion and introversion.
As he admits, ‘I’ve never been remotely interested in the real world - although you could argue that I’m trying to become a little more interested in it at the moment.’
But however preoccupied he may have been with his myth, there was never any danger of Whitehead’s own penis getting lost. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he clocked up a considerable number of affairs, with -among others - Nico, the artist Niki de St Phalle, Sharon Tate, Bianca Jagger and Nathalie Delon.
Having made up his mind to become a falconer, though, he left all these fleshly concerns behind and set off into the Moroccan desert, determined to be ‘restored into the bosom of nature’.
For the next few years, he smuggled falcon eggs back to England, hatching the birds at his home in Kettering and then training them. At this point, he was approached by Prince Khalid Al-Faisal, who invited him to set up a falcon-breeding programme.
Given a lavish budget and a purpose-built falconry on top of the highest mountain in Saudi Arabia, Whitehead suddenly found himself surrounded by princes, Rolls-Royces and private jets.
‘I ran this very successful artificial insemination programme. The birds for breeding were usually brought up without contact with other birds. As a result, they became “imprinted” on me and weren’t sure if I was a bird or they were human. The males would copulate on my head and then ejaculate into this specially made hat I wore to collect their semen.’
But when the first Gulf War broke out in 1991, Whitehead had to escape with his falcons in the middle of the night and flee to Spain.
In the end, he sold his birds for a knock-down price and returned to England in much the same state as he had left it - almost empty-handed.
Settling back in Kettering, he wrote novels at the rate of two a year, which he published himself in the absence of any commercial interest. ‘I was quite happy writing away and assumed that that was how I’d spend the rest of my life. But then last year all these film festivals came calling’
At this point in our conversation I am beginning to think that Whitehead has no more surprises left to spring on me. But here, as it transpires, I am quite wrong. A propos of nothing, he suddenly announces, ‘At this moment I have three months to live.’
Is he sure? He nods. ‘I’ve been under a death sentence for the past five years - ever since I had my heart attack. Now I’m living on half a bypass, I’ve got two leaky valves, atrial fibrillation and I’m inoperable.
‘That’s why I want to get this film made as soon as possible. I’ll be really angry if I suddenly have a week to live. Not that I have any fear of death, because I know it’s not the end - but because I have so much left to do.’
And there is one further surprise in store. I knew already that Whitehead is a much-married man - one of his wives was Dido Goldsmith, niece of the late Sir James - and that he has fathered several children. In both cases, though, I have badly underestimated the numbers.
‘I have eight children,’ he says. ‘Seven daughters and a son.’
And how many times has he been married? ‘Let me see. Four, I think. Something like that.’
There might be more? ‘It’s possible. I can never quite remember.’
His latest wife turns out to be just 24 years old. ‘She’s Polish, a lovely girl. She’s not very happy about my moving to Vienna, but you know’ He lifts a hand then lets it fall, ‘What can you do?’
Despite his leaky valves and his limited life-expectancy, Whitehead insists he’s in a very optimistic state at the moment.
‘On the whole, I feel great, although I do have bad days. The weather affects me a lot. Apparently, one third of people who die from a second heart attack do so on a day when the atmospheric pressure drops or rises by more than 10 millibars. One third die within two hours of waking on a Monday morning and one third dies within two hours of having sex.
‘So you see,’ he says, offering what seems a peculiarly practical piece of advice from a mystic, ‘if you want to live forever, remember not to have sex just after waking up on a Monday morning if it looks like it’s going to rain.’
this interview first publlished in the telegraph
Reading “Terrorism Considered As One Of The Fine Arts”, the first part of the “Nohzone Trilogy”, by Peter Whitehead, is like slipping on a cosy pair of slippers, or climbing into a hot bath. Its hero, Michael Schlieman, an academic drafted into MI5 whilst at Cambridge, loves the Lakeland poets, malt whisky, pretty young girls and a bit of noir. He has a helpless everyman quality which is endearing, but only to the point where familiar references hold sway. But this is Peter Whitehead, and familiar references are the first things up against the wall.
