‘It shook the plaster off the ceiling’: Self Esteem and David Hare on reviving rock romp Teeth ‘n’ Smiles

2026-03-23 - 16:19

It lit up the 1970s with its nihilistic tale of a hippie band imploding in a trail of drugs, booze and violence. What can it tell us about the music business today? Writer David Hare and wild-child rocker Self Esteem plug in The first time Rebecca Lucy Taylor read David Hare’s 1975 play Teeth ’n’ Smiles, she says, her “mind was blown”. “I couldn’t believe it,” says the artist better known to music fans as Self Esteem. “The way I feel about my actual life is so mirrored in this play. It just mirrors what the music industry today is like.” In a sense, that’s a surprising thing to say. You could view Teeth ’n’ Smiles as something of a period piece. Set in 1969, it is the saga of a band imploding in a mass of drugs, alcohol and violence backstage at a Cambridge May ball – inspired, Hare says, by the experience of seeing a “grumpy, angry, miserable” Manfred Mann going through the motions at a similar event while he was a student at Jesus College. There is debate among the band’s members about the late-60s countercultural “acid dream”, and the attendant belief in rock music as a revolutionary force capable of inciting social change. But the play seems less a product of the era in which it is set than that in which it was written. It is soaked in the disillusionment and broiling discontent of the mid-70s, when the countercultural dream was unequivocally over. Continue reading...