Chris Stamp: “I want to manage this band…”
Terence Stamp: “Are they good looking? Like The Beatles?”
Chris Stamp: “Eh… No. Not exactly.”
In the early sixties friends Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp (actor Terence’s younger brother) fancied themselves as filmmakers but, as lowly runners and second assistant directors, they saw the chasm between their positon and their dreams too wide to traverse the usual way. So they decided to take an alternate route: they would seek out a rock band, convince them to let the duo manage them, turn them into chart toppers, and then make a film about them. They stumbled upon The High Numbers kicking up a storm at a London club and although not having one iota on how to manage a band went about turning them into The Who...
Let’s get the shaky stuff out of the way first. Director James D. Cooper has the annoying habit of asking questions off camera when he’s not mic’d up, making his questions unintelligible and the answers - “Oh yeah, definitely!” – meaningless. It loses some of its magic as things wind down, with the breakup of the partnership post Tommy and Lambert’s descent into heroin addiction glossed over in favour of an elongated cosy epilogue. Cooper can also be guilty of letting The Who’s story eclipse Lambert and Stamp’s too.
But when the documentary is evenly distributed between Townshend, Daltrey and Stamp (Lambert died in 1981), Lambert & Stamp is a boisterous and energetic thing. Cooper encourages his engaging interviewees free reign to wittingly regale the viewer with tales and scenarios that would delight fans: changing original name The High Numbers because it sounded like Bingo, Lambert’s idea for Daltrey to stutter during My Generation, and the management’s preference to nurture Townshend’s writing talents and Moon’s on stage persona at the expense of Daltrey and Entwistle. And it goes on: offering Jimi Hendrix a record deal when they didn’t have a record label, branching out to manage and produce Arthur Brown and Thunderclap Newman. Cooper really gets across the fly-by-night style of the duo. All magic stuff.
The director’s use of archive footage and music gets across the energy and atmosphere of those early Mod gigs, and he unearths some wonderful TV interviews of Stamp and Lambert in the mid-sixties as they travelled far and wide pushing The Who (they even lobbied the Russians to have Tommy played in Moscow.
Shave off twenty minutes of fat and Lambert & Stamp would be in far fitter shape than it is.
