Shelved for two years by disgusted Warner Bros execs but since declared a true classic, Performance is not a film for all tastes. However, for those wired up the right (or wrong) way, Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell's amoral tale of 1960s glam and gangsters, surrealism and sado-masochism, is heady stuff.

Chas (Fox), a dapper, psychopathic enforcer for a flamboyant East End crime boss, is forced to flee when his penchant for violence leads to an attempt on his life. While waiting for a fake passport, he rents a room at the Notting Hill address of Turner (an incomparable Mick Jagger), a faded rock star who sees in Chas a dangerous alter-ego, and during a trippy dark night of the soul, spikes Chas with mushrooms to reclaim his dangerous mojo.

Obsessed with image, fame, style and notoriety, Performance may reek of sixties incense candles and tie-dyes, but is as fresh and relevant now as it was almost four decades ago.

Shot in 1968, but unreleased until 1970 (albeit heavily cut) when the old Hollywood had collapsed under the weight of Bonnie & Clyde and Easy Rider, Performance slammed together the public’s obsession with Kray-style gangsters and Rolling Stone rock gods.

But, heavily influenced by the French New Wave and America avant-garde (spearheaded by Jagger associate Kenneth Anger) Roeg and Cammell took a distinctly underground approach to the underworld.

From the opening shot of a spy plane roaring past the camera, to the cut-up editing techniques that flash scenes forwards and backwards, up and down, vice and versa, Performance will baffle anyone expecting a straight gangster thriller.

Adding to the unease is an early auto-erotic sex scene and Chas' clear delight in being beaten by a trio of heavies during the attempt on his life. All this plus heroin and Mick Jagger in the middle of a threesome and small wonder the wife of a Warner Bros' boss vomited with shock at a preview screening. Another exec grumbled, "Even the bathwater's dirty," when listing the film's faults.

Rock and roll to its core, Performance is also sharply comic, with capitalist gangsters explaining free-market economics to their victims ("You weren't took over Joe, you was merged.") and numerous stand-out scenes of power-play between Chas and Turner that culminate in maybe the first rock video, when Turner imagines himself as a gangster boss and belts out a rock ditty to the criminal old school.

Influencing everything from A Clockwork Orange to Gangster No.1, this is a Mephistophelean masterpiece. The climactic shot of a bullet travelling through a brain is literally mindblowing.

Rob Daniel