Gary Oldman’s favourite song by The Who: “What I call divine desperation”
As icons of alternative culture who stormed their way into the mainstream, The Who and Gary Oldman have a whole lot in common. Both came to prominence in a wave of other British artists: The Who with the British invasion of the mid-1960s and Oldman with his Brit-pack of the late 1980s featuring the likes of Colin Firth and Daniel Day-Lewis. On a deeper level, though, both of them find the meeting point between masculine stoicism and bleeding-heart emotionality that makes their work so compelling.
Oldman, in particular, is almost the go-to actor when you want to convey that this character is gruff but with a storm brewing underneath. Whether that’s for heroic characters like Jim Gordon, Sirius Black and George Smiley, or more interestingly, his absolutely unparalleled run as more immoral characters like Sid Vicious, Count Dracula and True Romance’s Drexl Spivey.
He also has a long-running connection with music. His first ambition as a kid was to be a musician, and he told Charlie Rose in an interview in 1995 that he would rather be a musician than an actor. Not to mention that after taking his role in Sid & Nancy, he probably learned more about the bass guitar than Vicious himself ever knew. This is supported by his Harry Potter co-star Daniel Radcliffe, who rhapsodised about Oldman teaching him how to play the bassline for ‘Come Together’ by The Beatles in a Reddit AMA.
Which wouldn’t be the last musical connection he’d have with The Boy Who Lived. In an interview with Nemone Metaxas for BBC Radio 6, Oldman listed his five favourite songs. While it included everyone from Muddy Waters to The Bronx, the key addition was a classic track by The Who. Fittingly enough, it was their 1970 standalone single ‘The Seeker’. However, its connection to Oldman is more than just its title. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Pete Townshend went deep on the kind of character the song describes.
“Quite loosely, ‘The Seeker’ was just a thing about what I call Divine Desperation,” he said. “And what it does to people. It just kind of covers a whole area where the guy’s being fantastically tough and ruthlessly nasty and he’s being incredibly selfish and he’s hurting people, wrecking people’s homes, abusing his heroes. He’s doing nothing and the only thing he really can’t be sure of is his death, and that at least dead, he’s going to get what he wants. He thinks!”
When one thinks of the rogues gallery Oldman has portrayed on screen, many of them are covered by Townshend’s description of the titular seeker. Violent, damaged men who place their single-minded search for clarity above anyone in their path. JFK’s Lee Harvey Oswald, Leon: The Professional’s Norman Stansfield and even Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ Dreyfus would show that Oldman would relate to the character’s drive.
It also helps that the track’s an absolute banger. A prime slice of prime Who that balances their hard-rock thunder in the 1970s with the songwriting chops of their mid-60s power-pop. Both of these factors make it a high point in a career full of them, and when an authority like Gary Oldman is telling you so, you’d do well not to question him.
