August 17, 2003
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Review by Eddie: 24 Hour Party People
Finally got to see this film! We had tickets to the preview, like ages ago, but silly Eddie screwed up the screening times!
As a piece of filmmaking, it’s great – and funny! I really like how the lead character (Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson) would just turn to camera to explain who someone was, or exactly what was happening in the film around him!
Unfortunately though, the film works on the pretense that you actually know/care/give a rat’s ass about Joy Division/New Order/Happy Mondays, and that the world at large even has the faintest idea who A Certain Ratio and Durutti Column are.
Also – like every movie down the ages that has ever attempted to document popular culture – the film makes some wildly bogus statements-as-facts that I can just hear everyone south of Manchester (hello London!) gnashing their teeth about!
The whole ‘Happy Mondays started rave culture’ and ‘for the first time ever an audience saluted the DJ, and rave was born’ statements the film make, are just utter BS!
FACT: DJ’s were becoming an alternative to bands as early as 1985 (and I’m not even going into the Gay Disco/Hi-NRG area, which started even earlier). Saying that DJ culture was born in one particular club in the North of England, is just plain dumb. The first true movement that later become known as Rave was Acid House. Bands like the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses picked up on this new culture of clubs, beats and fashion, and it became identifiable in their look and sound. But above everything else, they were still just Rock bands.
Let’s face it- outside of Manchester, how many clubs in the late 80’s/early 90′s do you remember playing Happy Mondays tracks? The Stone Roses got played because they used James Brown’s looped ‘Funky Drummer’. Primal Scream got played. Happy Mondays symbolized the whole Madchester/baggy thing, but let’s face it – they were a product of Rave culture, not the source or inspiration.
God, I hate revisionism…
