Scorsese’s “Vinyl” is a broken record

By Tom Shone

Great artists sometimes need to be dissuaded from tackling their inspiration head-on – the results can be dispiritingly literal. Steven Spielberg didn’t need to make “Hook”: we already knew he was a Peter Pannish wunderkind. David Cronenberg didn’t need to adapt “The Naked Lunch”: he’d been adapting William Burroughs his entire career. Martin Scorsese has spent his life importing the energy and spirit of rock ’n’ roll into areas not typically associated with it. He has made gangland seem rock’n’roll (“Goodfellas”). He has made Wall Street seem rock ’n’ roll (“The Wolf of Wall Street”). The idea for his new HBO series, “Vinyl”, which came originally from Mick Jagger, therefore swings somewhere between genius and tautology: can Scorsese invest rock ’n’ roll with the energy and spirit of rock ’n’ roll?

Bobby Cannavale plays a 1970s Italian-American record producer called Richie Finestra, who has, as he puts it, struck it “ridiculously stinking fucking rich”. He is about to become even richer when a German media conglomerate, Polygram, buys his moribund record company, American Century Music. Hoovering up coke with his clients for days on end, trying to secure Led Zeppelin before the Germans sign, struggling to keep his marriage to a former Andy Warhol Factory girl called Devon (Olivia Wilde) intact, Richie is a lost soul on a fast track down. This is a Scorsese specialty, and in the first episode, which he directed, he supplies a New York to match his gutter’s-eye memory of the period. We get subways covered with graffiti, garbage-strewn streets, clubs littered with bodies. And if the flying phones don’t hit you, duck for the incoming name-drops: “So I was with Daltry and Moon…”, “Andy asked after you the other night, Lou was with us…”, “Donny fucking Osmond — can you believe it?”