JOHN HIND:"What about the stories about Performance - Mick Jagger and James Fox taking hard drugs, Jagger and Anita Pallenberg having frenetic sex between takes, Pallenberg stealing crucial props before you'd finished with them. True stories ?"

NICOLAS ROEG: "Well … I don't know, it's so long ago … it's the distant past. They're all old people now, aren't they ? Old ladies and gentlemen".

"Nothing is true. Everything is permitted"

MICK JAGGER : Performance

After an illustrious career-peak as cameraman in England and America, Roeg's directorial work began spectacularly.

Performance remains extraordinary, a film Colin McCabe - in his BFI Modern Classics volume - calls "the greatest British film ever made" .

The combination of Roeg and Donald Cammell's creative forces - although still laced with mystery - brought something genuinely new to filmgoers unprepared for its fusion of sex, drugs, violence, philosophy, music … the kaleidoscope continues to turn startlingly over 30 years later.

Performance captures - in a way that bizarrely has dated little - the zeitgeist of its time, the '60s/70s cusp, refracted through the story of Chas (James Fox), a minor London gangster on the run from a Kray-like boss after one shooting too far.

He hides in the Ladbroke Grove home of Turner (Mick Jagger). A polar opposite to Chas, Turner's bohemian lifestyle as musician (and the relationship he shares with Pherber and Lucy in the house) begins sucking Chas in, and identities and genders begin to shift …

With its mythical production shoot, resonant performances and knockout soundtrack, Performance is at once a full-on classic, with considerable cult credentials to boot.

Alarming and disgusting Warner Brothers who financed it (a favourite Roeg story describes how one studio stooge complained that the bath-water shown in Turner's flat was dirty), Performance underwent much post-shoot upheavals which delayed its release for some two years. The negative studio reaction even threatened to blight the professional standing of its technical contributors.

Like many a Roeg-directed work, it also exists in versions subtly different depending on the world territory (US audiences usually end up losing out).

Whilst you're still debating the final shot, it's worth marvelling too at the Roeg/Cammell combo, a perfect synergy (that hackneyed Hollywood term) never bettered in modern cinema for its scope and ambition, and never fully explained.