Stephen Collings rolls up to a different kind of music festival this summer – on the big screen.
Tickets for the major UK festivals may have sold out within days, largely due to avaricious eBay ticket touts, but you can still grab the hottest ticket in town for the best festival line-up you’ll see this, or any other summer. No, Bob Geldof isn’t making another altruistic bid for the Nobel Peace Prize with a tired parade of poodle rockers. And Michael Eavis has chosen to leave hundreds of hippies homeless, or at least tepee-less, with the notable absence of Glastonbury from this year’s festival calendar. So where can this must-see event be found? Not in the leafy environs of Hyde Park, and certainly not on the fields of Reading and Leeds (apparently now with 99% less rock) but in the anodyne concrete setting of the National Film Theatre. Yes, the NFT has crafted a 2-month season of cinematic concerts, festival films and documentaries especially for lovers of live music, imaginatively titled Access All Areas. You know those fantasy festival line-ups where even death does not preclude inclusion? Well, this virtual festival comes pretty close to any music lover’s definitive list with a string of headliners from Abba to Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones to The Kinks, Bolan and Bowie to younger pretenders like The Flaming Lips and Sigur Rós.
Access All Areas kicked off with the UK premiere of The Beastie Boys’ Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That!, a live film strung together from Hi8 camera footage shot by 50 of their fans and which is but one of a number of hip hop genre films featured here. While the tiresome trio’s feature resembles nothing more than an edited selection of concert bootlegs, it does represent the fan’s perspective which is rarely seen on screen, and goes some way to redressing the years of exhausted visual clichés, from the crane shot swooping over a sea of perspiration-drenched disciples to dizzying zooms and unnecessary split screen edits. Freestyle: The Art Of Rapping and Thrown In And Spat Out: A Selection Of Grime DVDs are also present to wave the urban music flag, while a special preview of Michel Gondry’s old-school celebration, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, boasts the blingtastic performances of Kanye West, Mos Def, Jill Scott and The Fugees.
Musical excess onstage is complemented by creativity behind the lens, and it is not just Gondry and others like Julian Temple who cut their directorial teeth in the name of music. Martin Scorsese’s editing skills feature on Woodstock, while Jonathan Demme’s work with conceptual art rockers Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense, has often been hailed as the greatest concert film ever made. Demme makes a rare Q&A appearance at the festival to promote his latest film, Neil Young: Heart Of Gold, while Year Of The Horse is an equally affectionate tribute to the Canadian troubadour at the hands of indie darling, Jim Jarmusch.
From the largest festivals to the smallest club, when the lights go up, there is an invisible electricity between the performer and the audience, and the experience is at once both collective, often tribal, but also uniquely personal. The director’s dilemma is that live performance is rarely objective, so does he place himself onstage with the artist or is he part of the crowd? What makes the star headliners of the NFT line-up proverbial celluloid wheat, compared to the endless racks of music film chaff?
One successful approach to the concert film has been to turn a performance into an event or narrative, allowing the audience to peek behind the velvet curtain, exposing, and yet at the same time reaffirming, the fragile mythology of the rock star. That we see David Bowie applying his stage makeup and costumes in DA Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars does not make his performance any less exciting, and when the camera turns on the devoted audience, we can share in their appreciation. Even offstage, you get the impression that Bowie is still ‘performing’ to the cameras and while some live events can be scripted for effect on film, others are a result of happy coincidence. Little did rockumentary maestro Pennebaker know that he would capture one of the greatest moments of rock ‘n’ roll history as Bowie sensationally retires his androgynous alter ego onstage, cueing screams of disbelief from the crowd. Not only are such films tomes of musical posterity, but they also share the vivid cinematic immediacy of any verité documentary.
Similarly, Gimme Shelter - the story of The Rolling Stones at Altamont - is a fully laminated backstage pass snapshot of the pension-dodging rockers at their most indulgent, including hiring the Hells Angels as security, which ultimately led to the stabbing of an audience member, captured on film. The annals of rock ‘n’ roll unfold frame by frame, and for those like myself born a generation too late, these films offer vicarious thrills and convincing evidence to the oft-repeated charge that they don’t make music like they used to. For those wanting proof, exhibits A and B are presented here in the form of Johnny Cash’s San Quentin prison gig and Las Vegas-era Elvis Presley, both set to illuminate the NFT screen. On the back of Walk The Line and Johnny Cash’s posthumous domination of the country music charts, the Man in Black is an obvious addition to the stellar line-up. His Sun Records label-mate Elvis truly epitomised the self-destructive lifestyle that young pretenders have imitated ever since, and Elvis: That’s The Way It Is finds the legendary singer during his most indulgent years.
Even bands that were once revolutionary have now been embraced by the mainstream and Westway To The World, a documentary on The Clash, proved a fitting closure to the agitprop punk pioneers before the untimely death of singer, Joe Strummer. Pop promo purveyor Julian Temple’s (whose Glastonbury also features) definitive documentary on the Sex Pistols, The Filth And The Fury, also heralds the possibility of anarchy in the NFT, while post-punk pretenders like The Police and Magazine rock their way around Europe in the cut-and-paste scattershot documentary, Urgh! A Music War.
Bringing us right up to date, Access All Areas also features a number of contemporary artists and documentaries. Domino: Worlds of Possibility - The Sequel features the promos of the iconic label’s stable of artists, including Franz Ferdinand and current music press darlings, The Arctic Monkeys. The Flaming Lips – The Fearless Freaks is Bradley Beesley's look at the psychedelic world of Wayne Coyne’s troupe, while last year’s hit indie film Dig! returns to the big screen, documenting the friendship-turned-feud between The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols.
Whilst concerts are communions between the preachers to the converted, music festivals offer a more eclectic experience and onstage histrionics are often mere soundtracks to the events across the barriers. Flower children and beatniks abound in Woodstock (The Director’s Cut) and Festival Express (Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead touring the festival circuit), and, ever since, festival-goers have tried to recreate the uninhibited ‘hippy-chic’ liberation of past generations; a strange prospect for those who have paid upwards of £100 for a ticket. The “I was there” factor is certainly part of the attraction as festivals have also been the site of many iconic moments in rock. Those replayed here include Bob Dylan’s controversial conversion to electric in Festival, documenting the Newport Folk Festival between 1963 and 1966, while pyromaniac plectrum genius Jimi Hendrix infamously sacrifices his guitar in Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop, the 1967 festival also featuring legendary performances from Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and The Mamas And The Papas.
Most festival line-ups are notoriously male-centric but fans of female performers will not be disappointed here. Reclusive heroine Kate Bush has not performed live in over 25 years but an archive performance from 1979 gets a rare airing here, as does an explosive Siouxsie & The Banshees classic. The wonderful Vashti Bunyan features in a documentary Vashti Bunyan: Here Before, which accompanies a documentary on the 2005 Green Man Festival, while a 1997 documentary about women-only festival Lilith Fair features femme tunesmiths Sheryl Crow, Beth Orton and president-provocateurs, The Dixie Chicks.
Despite all the ‘spirit of the 60s’ clichés that still apply, modern audiences do not have the same political and social imperatives that turned festivals into cultural revolutions. The modern festival, by comparison, is a commercial and sanitised affair. No more climbing over the fence at Glastonbury or paying the stoned attendant to let your mates in for a fiver. And for those averse to camping (and I count myself among the great washed), All Tomorrow’s Parties festival at Camber Sands even offers comfortable en suite chalets. The sea of lighters that once flickered into life during a band’s anthemic ballad has now been replaced by the luminescent glow of mobile phones, while finding your tent among the masses of identical domes is made easier with transmitters that flash upon the simple receipt of a text message.
Perhaps the NFT festival, with all its comforts, signals the future of the concert film. While most of the classics here are available on DVD, even the sharpest home sound system cannot compete with this unique opportunity to perhaps recapture some of the original atmosphere, both for those who were there first time around and those who wish they were.
Sigur Rós, already stars of Screaming Masterpiece, last year’s documentary about the proliferation of Icelandic musical talent, close the season with a concert from their homeland beamed live into cinemas across the world. Promoted as “ a new milestone in the history of the concert film ”, David Bowie actually debuted this particular cinematic milestone back in 2003, but nonetheless, the high definition, 5.1 sound broadcast of the Icelanders’ emotional soundscapes (popularised by BBC’s Planet Earth trailers) should prove a climactic encore.
So, roll up your tent, pack away your wellies and get yourself down to the South Bank for the most essential festival this summer.
http://www.bfi.org.uk/incinemas/nft/seasons/accessallareas/
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