What influence did Joe Orton have on British Rock and Roll, if any?

Maybe I should rephrase it as attitude, more than direct, quotations. This is a man who was going to write a beatles movie!

Without Joe Orton, I believe that there would not be british punk, David Bowie, Suede, etc..etc..

Feel free to disagree with me.

Perhaps Edna would like to write in to the thread and comment?

A dangerous pairing but a pairing that worked very well indeed. After the imprisonment, true, the time seperate from Kenneth, Joe really begiun to write classics but the formative years spent with Kenneth really gave Joe his literary identity and coupled with his Leicester working class background, an ability to be the first punk rock superstar.

What I always wonder is what Kenneth ripped out of the diary? The final last few pages?

I do not want to come across as a fanboy but that quote is what got me into Joe Orton at a very tender age. Still love that quote. 'Give me the ability to rage correctly', even more relevant in this day and age then in england 1960s.

Agreed about Morrissey, but Joe Orton, english boy, was the first to give out a massive fuck you to pop culture.

I think you can get the Beatles script in book form. I even think I started to read it, but they werwe not called John Paul George and Ringo, so I gave up.

joe orton is one of my 10 fav famous people ever, and lahr's "prick up your ears" easily one of the best bios ever. finally read his collected plays last year and they hold up remarkably well; sometimes a bit too polished, but generally - for all the - surprisingly naturalistic and believable.

it still blows me away how relentlessly, heartlessly, hilariously mean a person he was. you read those diaries and he's just brutal to ken halliwell (who admittedly probably was not much fun to live with). he barely seems human at times. it's as if he thought he was a character in one of his plays - and halliwell, of course, eventually did what any good orton character would do.

He fancies Paul with his new moustache, but ends up copping off with one of the Easybeats who was there too, iirc.

There is bookloads of material for John Savage in this one single diary entry.

Don't know about 2 years later, but he struck me as the kind of writer who would eventually turn into a bitter reactionary cf. Osbourne or Amis.

After Halliwell's suicide, I can envisage a couple of succesful British films (along the lines of If, maybe), then a move to LA in the early 70s & a complete embracing of that lifestyle, occasionally returning to GB to appear on Parkinson, South Bank Show etc.

Beckett? On Morton Feldman? And Michael Mantler... oh, hold on, not really rock 'n' roll is it?

Before Joe Orton, John Osborne was the 'angry young man' of the postwar generation of playwrights. Orton found an alternative and funnier way to voice the same issues.

Could any playwright these days claim to have some sort of influence on music

Not without the help of another medium, whether it's film or YouTube - in the way that Chuck Palahniuk is as influential a novelist as any in the past decade, but having a film version of Fight Club made that happen.