"Lost in France" (2016)

Some time ago, unknown to each other, two men with respectable white collar jobs went to a concert by Luke Haines. Both of them enjoyed the concert but one of them decided to jack in his job and become a documentary filmmaker who would start his career with a film about Luke Haines. That man was not me; rather it was Niall McCann and his Luke Haines film was called Art Will Save The World. More recently he made a another music-themed film, called Lost in France, which is about the Glasgow record label Chemikal Underground and acts that have appeared on it (Mogwai, Arab Strap, The Delgados, etc.). The film kind of takes its title from the time a load of Chemikal Underground acts played a small music festival in Mauron, France back in the 1990s and then brings some of these artists back to play gigs in the same place again. Several of the artists and label organisers (overlapping categories) say in the film that the French music festival was not a particularly seminal experience in the label's life but the device still works as frame on which to hang things.

For all my interest in the music of Glasgow, my focus has been more on Belle & Sebastian, their friends and relations and older acts like Teenage Fanclub, the Vaselines, and the Jesus and Mary Chain etc., who might be seen by some as more "indie" than the Chemikal Underground acts. I do not know The Delgados at all, I know Arab Strap almost as a caricature (the joke among some of our friends was that they were basically a band fronted by the Ewan Bremner character from Mike Leigh's Naked) but I have at least seen Mogwai a few times at All Tomorrow's Parties even if I have never fully surrendered to them. The film therefore was an interesting window into a mysterious and half-glimpsed world.

The film also works as a meditation on the nature of the music industry generally. There are the usual discussions of why some artists become successful and others less so. The film features Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand, who apparently had some links to Chemikal Underground in days of yore, and he himself notes how the fates made his band successful while others failed to attract a wide popular audience (though he does say "I mean, I'm not saying 'why were we successful?', because I know why we were successful: we wrote a lot of catchy songs that people liked"; it would be a strange universe if the popularities of Arab Strap and Franz Ferdinand were reversed). The more general point is made that Chemikal Underground started at a time when people still bought records rather than streaming or downloading music for free. Stewart Henderson of The Delgados and Chemikal Underground itself notes that in days of yore the income from record sales meant that the label was able to support small-scale bands playing gigs in relatively out of the way places in the USA (in expectation of further record sales); that will not be happening any more. So the film ends up being a bit elegiac for a now vanished era, with an accompanying sense that perhaps music is something that is coming to an end.

That said it is not a mopey film. The musicians have a lot of roffles on their second trip to France and with their reminiscences about the first. One my favourite possibly unintentionally hilarious moments was when they arrive once more in Mauron and are greeted by some French bloke who was involved in organising the original festival. He shakes the men's hands and then gives a monster hug to Emma Pollock (solo artist and member of The Delgados) that perhaps over-lingers, while her husband/partner (another Delgado) stands around awkwardly.

Less appealingly this did come across as a pretty blokey scene and it would have been a total sausagefest if it had not been for Emma Pollock. She also seemed to be slightly flying the flag for the more "indie" Glasgow, with her nice coat being in striking contrast to the more non-descript outfits of the blokes.

Anyway, as mentioned above, this whole scene is one I am relatively unfamiliar with and after seeing the film I was struck by the idea of purchasing a representative record by each of the key acts referenced in it. So to what extent can readers recommend to me albums by the following artists: Mogwai, The Delgados, RM Hubbert, Emma Pollock and Arab Strap?

Readers may also be interested to hear that Niall McCann has now made another music-themed film, The Science of Ghosts, which deals with the musician Adrian Crowley and which will be shown at the Audi Dublin International Film Festival on 26 February 2018.

image source (The Quietus: Interview with Lost In France Director Niall McCann)

"Art Will Save The World: a Film About Luke Haines" (2012)

Back in 2007 Luke Haines played Dublin. Two civil servants attended the concert. One of them went up to Mr Haines after the show and said, "I would like to make a film about you". When that fellow revealed his status as a civil servant, Mr Haines laughed in his face and told him to fuck off, but the fellow persevered - dropping out of the service, going to film school and finally securing the funding to make the film, eventually winning over Luke Haines' support for the project. As a result, he made a film which I then saw at a Sunday afternoon screening in the Irish Film Institute. No one knows what happened to the other civil servant.

In some respects this film follows the usual music biopic model. There is a bit of narration form Mr Haines telling the story of his amazing career in music. Archive footage shows his past bands appearing on television and stuff. Various people appear and talk about what they think of Luke Haines and his music (sadly there is no appearance by Metallica or Steve Albini). But it also does a bit of deconstructing he documentary, man, bringing home the blah blah blah artifice of the form, with some people saying things they affirm not to be true. There are also scenes where a load of chancers are auditioned for the role of playing Luke Haines (sadly there are then no scenes of any of these people being Luke Haines, perhaps with one of them fighting Luke Haines to establish which one is the real deal and so on).

I enjoyed this film, particularly the archive footage and any of the scenes were Haines was talking to camera, but I also found it a bit disappointing. Some of this I think comes from the inevitable disappointment of seeing a documentary about a subject you already know a lot a about - I was sorry they did not include more of this or highlight the importance of that. The fairly low budget of the film was a factor here too - the filmmaker attended a talk afterwards and said it was all shot in a couple of days or something, and it does rather show. I suspect, though, that these are the quibbles that come with too much knowledge of a subject - if you just knew a couple of songs by Luke Haines (or less) and were curious to know more about him then this would be a great film to see.

Another problematic feature of the film was that it seems like it came to the cinemas last year but was made some time before that, so events had passed it by somewhat. Obviously the film could have done with an in-depth discussion of Mr Haines' concept album about 1970s British wrestlers and an Irish audience may have been interested in some coverage of his recent collaboration with Cathal Coughlan on the uncovering of the North Sea Scrolls. But the area where the time lag seemed most of a disappointment was in the film's lack of engagement with the whole Jimmy Savile business and the rounding-up of every man involved in the entertainment industry back in the 1970s. The seedy side of the music and entertainment business back then seems like a real concern of Luke Haines in his songwriting, to such an extent that a lot of the Savile and related stories in the papers seemed like the coming to life of Luke Haines lyrics, and it would have been interesting for the film to touch on all that.

The PoMo deconstructionist elements did not annoy me as much as they might have done - indeed, some of them were actually funny. However, I think this drawing-attention-to-the-artificiality-of-the-documentary is something that documentary makers should stop thinking of as in any way big and clever. I am media-literate enough to be aware that there is a certain amount of artifice involved in making documentaries and it really is not something I need to be reminded of when watching them. Unless I am watching a documentary about documentaries, obv.

One final point - Luke Haines is joining that select band of men who looks better as they get older. The contrast between the shots of Young Haines, with his long indie hair as opposed to the dapper chap that is Old Haines is very striking.

LATER - I wonder if I am being insufficiently enthusiastic here? I came away from the film wanting to re-listen to all my Luke Haines-related records, thinking also that there are still nuggets out there on those of his records that I have yet to acquire and listen to properly. This, surely, is a key sign of a successful music documentary.

That concert in 2007

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