Music and films

It will be films galore from Wednesday as the East End film festival gets under way. The six day festival will be showing a huge number of documentaries in a load of different places, the big ticket attraction being a new documentary on The Libertines. On a personal note I’m hoping to grab a ticket to ‘Good Times’. A film which charts one man’s journey to spread ‘Sound System Culture’ to the wider world through the Notting Hill Carnival.

Alternatively I'll try and see ‘Furious Force of Rhymes’. A film which spreads light on the “rebellious and controversial" language of hip-hop music from Israel to Columbia.

Here are some of my favourite musical docs.

Happy Easter

No Direction Home:

Charting the career of the great Bob Dylan the film, directed by Scorcese, goes from his beginnings in a small town, to his journey to New York to discover himself and his music to his subsequent superstardom upon the release of ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’.

The best thing about this is the how it exposes the political nature of folk music. My favourite scene in the whole film is when Bob Dylan plays a music festival with electric guitars. The elderly Pete Seeger, outraged at what he perceives to be crime against folk music, tries to unplug the whole thing. The ‘electrification’ of Dylan’s music is a touchy subject indeed. Did it betray the music? Did it open it up to new people? Did it evolve the genre? Debate, eh.

Heima:

I don’t really cry at films but Heima, the story of an epic homeland tour conducted by Sigur Ros, really got to me.  Their homeland of Iceland comes across on film as a beautiful place which the band really seem connected to. Even some of the instruments that the band used on their tour were taken from local mountains.

You get a sense throughout that the band are rooted to the landscape, that they draw inspiration from it and that they miss it, not only because they are coming home from an extended time away touring but also the landscape is changing. Old communities are dying out and big business is now ruining the landscape.

It made Iceland and the band seem quaint but inspirational and heart warming as well. The climax in Reykjavik is great.

Total Life Forever//Foals//:

Directed by Dave Ma (known lately for the new Wild Beast vid), this is more montage than documentary. The great thing about this is that it lets you in on the mechanics of an album; the album in question being one of my recent favourites, Total Life Forever. 

It starts in a house in Oxford as the band lay down some of the early riffs on tracks such as Spanish Sahara and takes us through to their time in the Svenska Grammafon studios outside Gothenberg in Sweden. Visually the environment of a studio, compared to say the epicness of Iceland, could be a bit of a stale backdrop, but the whole thing can keep your attention even if you’re not a fan of their music as you see the meticulousness that’s needed to put an album together. This is shown brilliantly by a guitarist tapping furiously at notes on the floor expecting the singers to replicate (Which to be fair they do, resulting in the excellent opening to This Orient).