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Posts from the ‘Documentary film’ Category

May 19

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A Northern Soul film

When I left Nottingham for London just before the end of the ’60s, Northern Soul was still in its embryonic stage. We’d danced to “I Can’t Help Myself”, “This Old Heart of Mine”, “You Don’t Know Like I Know”, “Helpless” and “Knock on Wood”, but something different was about to emerge from that club culture. On a visit back home in, I think, 1972, my friend David Milton — who had a shop in Derby called R. E. Cords — told me what it had become, after Dave Godin had given it a name in his Blues & Soul column. At Brian Selby’s Selectadisc, on long-gone Arkwright Street, I bought the Fuller Brothers’ “Time’s A Wasting” on Soul Clock and a bootleg of David and the Giants’ “Ten Miles High”.

I’d pretty much stopped dancing by then, but although I was always at arm’s length from Northern Soul (no visits to the Torch in Stoke on Trent, Blackpool Mecca or Wigan Casino), it always exerted an emotional pull on me: geographical, tribal and musical. It reminds me of the wonderful Welsh word hiraeth: the longing for a home you may never have known.

Northern Soul: Still Burning is a new 90-minute documentary film written and directed by Alan Byron, on show in cinemas this week. Against a constantly changing background of appropriate music, it consists mostly of talking heads — the disc jockeys (Richard Searling, Russ Winstanley. Ian Levine, Kev Roberts), the participants and the observers, including the journalist Paul Mason, who was both, the designer Wayne Hemingway, the documentary maker Tony Palmer, whose 1977 Granada TV film provides priceless footage from Wigan in 1977, and Elaine Constantine, whose feature film Northern Soul (starring Steve Coogan and Lisa Stansfield) came out in 2015 and also provides clips. From the contemporary scene, we hear from Ady Croasdell, who deejays all-nighters at London’s 100 Club, and two young chaps running Northern Soul nights in Deptford. And there’s Tony Blackburn, whose story of how he became an accidental Northern Soul star is the film’s comic highlight.

But the principal concentration is on evoking the emergence 50 years ago of a social and cultural phenomenon in northern and midlands towns already feeling the blight of post-industrial decline through the closure of steel works, woollen mills and coal mines. The music itself is barely discussed: we don’t hear much about the (mostly) African Americans made it, or why, or what effect its belated rccognition in the UK might have had on them. Or, come to that, what it meant in musical terms (it would have been nice to have someone talking about the importance of vibes and baritone sax on so many of the records). No mention of the Northern Soul Prom of 2023, and the mixed reactions it provoked. Maybe all that is for another time.

You do get a sense, though, of how the combination of factors — summarised by Paul Mason as the music, the dancing, the fashion, and the drugs — so profoundly illuminated apparently ordinary young lives, and of how that feeling refuses to fade. Among the surviving witnesses, a woman named Marie Gillespie provides the most touching testimony; decades later, the meaning of it still shines in her eyes. It made me think how so many of the finest Northern Soul favourites — or even the lesser ones, the smudged copies of “Uptight” and “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” — add a potent hint of sadness and yearning to the relentless beat, and of how those complex emotions found a response in the dancers.

There’s no better example of that than the “three before eight” — Tobi Legend’s “Time Will Pass You By”, Jimmy Radcliffe’s “Long After Tonight Is All Over” and Dean Parrish’s “I’m on My Way” — traditionally played at the end of a Wigan Casino all-nighter. What feelings there are in those records: a urgent plea not to waste your life, a pledge of lasting faith, a shout of belief in the value of persistence and optimism despite the odds. On the Casino’s last night, in 1981, Richard Searling played the sequence three times before the doors of the old ballroom opened and the dancers met the morning light for the final time, their hearts full.

* For what it’s worth, here’s a baker’s dozen of my favourites, with no apologies for a complete lack of originality: 1 Frank Wilson: “Do I Love You (Deed I Do)” 2 Rita and the Tiaras: “Gone With the Wind Is My Love” 3 Billy Butler: “Right Track” 4 Ad Libs: “Nothing Worse Than Being Alone” 6 Tobi Legend: “Time Will Pass You By” 6 Shirley Ellis: “Soul Time” 7 Doni Burdick: “Bari Track” 8 Fuller Brothers: “Time’s A Wasting” 9 The Crow: “Your Autumn of Tomorrow” 10 The Tomangoes: “I Really Love You” 11 Frankie and the Classicals: “What Shall I Do” 12 Jackie Lee: “The Shotgun and the Duck” 13 David and the Giants: “Ten Miles High”

May 18

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Lambert & Stamp

Lambert & StampIt amazes me that so many documentary makers fail to heed the principal lesson of Asif Kapadia’s Senna, which is that any relevant archive footage, however scrappy, is more interesting than a talking head. It’s a pity that James D. Cooper didn’t learn it before he started putting together Lambert & Stamp, his film about the two men who managed the Who from their first success in 1964 until the relationship broke down in acrimony 10 years later.

A compelling subject is enough to carry the first half of the film. After that the viewer tires of extended close-ups of Pete Townshend, Chris Stamp and Roger Daltrey sitting in hotel rooms or studios, even when they’re saying interesting things. The archive clips are chopped up and edited fast on the eye, to borrow Bob Dylan’s phrase. Too fast, in fact. The eye wants to rest on them, to be given time to absorb the details. A technique wholly suited to the titles of Ready Steady Go! is not appropriate to this very different project. The exception is a wonderful piece of footage of Stamp and Kit Lambert encountering Jimi Hendrix and Chas Chandler in a London club, possibly the Ad Lib or the Bag O’Nails; we do get to look at that properly, thank goodness.

It’s a story that certainly deserved to be told. Stamp — born in London’s docklands, the son of a tugboat captain — brother of Terence, the male face of ’60s London — almost as good looking but sharp and tough, with more front than Harrods. Lambert — Lancing, Oxford, the Army — the gay son of a celebrated English composer — explaining mod culture to foreign TV interviewers in fluent French and German — empathising immediately with Townshend’s latent talent and Keith Moon’s very unlatent lunacy.

A pretty bruiser and a bruised prettiness: it was a potent combination. “I fell in love with both of them immediately,” Townshend recalls. It’s easy to see how he and, to varying degrees, the other members of the Who were jolted into self-actualisation by the vision and audacity of a pair of energetic wide boys whose real ambition was to get into the film business and who initially saw the music as a vehicle for their ambition.

The viewer does not come away with the impression that the whole truth about the break-up in 1974 has been told, and a few other salient features of the story have gone missing. One is any acknowledgment of Peter Meaden, their first manager when they were still the High Numbers: an authentic mod who helped establish their direction. Another is Shel Talmy, the producer of their first three (and greatest) singles, given only a passing and mildly derogatory mention, without being named.

Lambert died in 1981, aged 45, worn out by his destructive appetites, although the immediate cause of death was a cerebral haemorrhage following a domestic fall. Stamp had conquered his own addictions long before his death in 2012 at the age of 70, having spent many years as a therapist and counsellor. His interviews with the director are used extensively but, lacking the matching testimony of his former partner, his wry eloquence inevitably seems to unbalance the narrative.

At 120 minutes, the film eventually feels bloated. If the first hour passes like a series of three-minute singles, the second is a bit of a rock opera, the occasional interesting fragment separated by long stretches of filler. But, of course, anybody interested in the era should see it.