Spinal Tap review: ahead of its time with glorious heavy-rock nightmare

hadwick), 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 humor are still a joy. This Is Spinal Tap is in cinemas from 24 August.