Why is M.I.A. such a problematic pop star? Why can't she just shut up and release a hit? Tellingly, this is the very question the singer poses at the start of Matangi/Maya/M.I.A - a question she's been asked throughout her career, from interviewers to management.
The most famous face in musical history, and perhaps the instigator of modern culture as we know it; he truly was the King. But for a documentary focused on such an icon, The King touches very little on Elvis Presley the man.
Gota Fría, or “cold drop”, is a Spanish weather phenomenon associated with violent rainstorms, when high pressure has caused a pocket of cold air to dissociate itself from the warmer clouds. Meteorologists, please excuse my basic and probably erroneous interpretation; the point here is that any person who’s experienced mental ill-health will likely relate to the idea of a sudden dip in temperature, a torrential downpour, and the accompanying isolation.
“There’s a rhythm in the air around Memphis, there always has been,” Carl Perkins once said.
Comprehensively charting hip hop’s rise from the underground to the mainstream is no mean feat, but that’s exactly what Canadian MC Shad aims to do over four hour-long episodes. Originally shown in the US in 2016, and available in full on Netflix, Hip Hop Evolution has finally reached the British box via Sky Arts.
Playwright Joe Penhall and the music biz? Well, they have history. When he was writing the book for Sunny Afternoon, his 2014 hit musical about the Kinks, he had a few run-ins with Ray Davies, the band’s lead singer.
Maen, a member of the rap collective Sa’aleek, was working one night in their small makeshift studio in the Qalandia refugee camp near Ramallah. He dozed off, only to find the studio door had been concreted over and he was trapped. It took fellow band members 36 hours to dig him out, but Maen didn't seem that worse for wear. As studio disaster anecdotes go, that takes some beating...
The crucial yet almost indefinable role of music in film – it’s a subject ripe for exploration and celebration, from the musicological technicalities of leitmotifs and ostinatos, through to the colourful characters working to bring directors’ sometimes vague musical notions to sonic reality. All of which gets raced through in this jam-packed documentary by first-time director Matt Schrader, a somewhat frenetic, 93-minute dash through the subject.
Schrader has clearly put in a massive amount of work, and Score is very much a labour of love. He’s amassed dozens of interviews, with remarkable access to what seems like every major Hollywood film composer working today, plus directors, film company executives, even Moby and Kalamazoo psychology professor Siu-Lan Tan, offering their expertise on the science and emotional impact of music. Schrader sets out to trace the history of film music – from silent movies to the development of orchestral scores, 1960s experimentalism, 1970s punk and electronica, and the re-emergence of the big orchestral sound. And he intersperses his pithy history lessons with chapters on everything from favourite recording venues to the stress caused by unrealistic deadlines, from wacky instruments to the wonders of electronic sound manipulation.
In true Reithian fashion, there’s plenty here to inform, educate and entertain. But if all that sounds like a lot to digest in just 93 minutes – well, it is. Schrader’s somewhat breathless pace means that many of the areas he tackles hardly get a mention before he’s dashed on to his next subject. A promising exploration of the demands placed on orchestral musicians – who are expected to sightread from scratch for live takes – is curtailed after just a few seconds, for example, while tales of the ghosts of London’s Air Studios from composer David Arnold (pictured below) are disconcertingly allowed far more time.
With his mass of interviews, too, Schrader seems determined to be scrupulously fair in giving speakers roughly equal air time – with the unfortunate result that several more minor figures spend quite a bit of time saying not much at all. Okay, he does focus on a handful of major composers for deeper exploration – John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Thomas Newman and Hans Zimmer – and Zimmer, in particular, is refreshingly candid in expressing his insecurities over where his next music will even come from. Disney executive Mitchell Lieb, too, seems caught off-guard when revealing that each of the company’s movies costing ‘close to half a billion dollars’ to make, with inevitable financial fallout for everyone involved – not least the composer.
Perhaps understandably, Schrader also remains frustratingly light on the technical details of the music itself. Howard Shore moves towards discussing the leitmotifs that structure his Lord of the Rings scores, and Schrader introduces some clever animated sequences showing how the Tolkein characters’ themes evolve across the trilogy. There’s mention, too, of the ubiquitous ostinatos of Zimmer’s repeating string patterns, and of the subtly innovative textures he generates. But Score could do with a lot more discussion of how composers achieve their effects – and whether successful film music is all about simply going for the most obvious emotional hook.
The film leaves quite a lot of unanswered questions, in fact – how directors even choose their composers, for a start; how composers interpret or adjust their music to suit directors’ demands; and why scores simply get ditched at the last minute (as, according to the movie, they often do). A bigger frustration is that Schrader sticks so unvaryingly to mainstream Hollywood movies, as if that’s all there is – or at least all that matters. What about the music written for Soviet cinema, or Toru Takemitsu’s copious scores for Japanese films? Or, aside from Spielberg and Williams, those director/composer partnerships that develop across several films – Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman, or Paul Thomas Anderson and Jonny Greenwood?
It’s not that Schrader’s film isn’t well structured. There’s always a clear sense of where you are, and he jumps nimbly from subject to subject in a way that’s always entertaining. It’s just that his focus is so mind-bogglingly broad that it feels like little is covered in sufficient depth, and his relentlessly frenetic pacing makes the film feel – bizarrely – both rushed and overlong. Score is a hugely ambitious undertaking (probably far too ambitious, in fact) and it’s never less than stimulating and rewarding. But there’s little chance of coming away from it with much more of an awareness of how and why a movie’s music affects you. It seems like it’s aimed at an audience who both love film music and know very little about it – which, given the obsessive dedication many film music fans display, is rather an unlikely combination.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Score
If the Small Faces weren’t quite The Beatles or the Stones, they were one of the classic British bands of their era, and their recordings are treasured by ancient Mods, Damon Albarn, Noel Gallagher and even discerning representatives of today’s youth.
Michael Winterbottom has always been a mercurial director, moving swiftly between genres, fiction and documentary, keeping us on our toes. But with On the Road it’s time to mark the tiniest of trends.
24 Hour Party People is one of the best films about the music industry ever made, a riotous fictionalisation of the revolution in Manchester in the Eighties and Nineties that revolved around Tony Wilson’s Factory Records and the bands Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays. 9 Songs was a radical experiment, as the director presented a sequence of gigs as the backdrop of a sexually explicit love story.
Now music features again, in what appears to be the most traditional approach of a trilogy of music-related films, albeit one with a sly sleight of hand.
The heart of the film is a documentary account of a young band on the road, as Winterbottom and a no doubt skeleton crew accompany the up-and-coming London indie four-piece Wolf Alice on a nationwide tour to promote their debut album My Love is Cool.
From Dublin and Belfast, through the North to Glasgow and back towards London, we’re given a low-key, fly-on-the-wall view of the day-to-day of touring: countless miles on the cramped tour bus, arrival, unloading the kit, sound check, press and radio interviews, the concert, dismantling the stage, loading the bus, a party, back in the bus and all over again… This is the no-frills reality of the road, with none of the usual rock and roll clichés and histrionics that we’re accustomed to and that can, in truth, get all very tiresome.
Winterbottom is a master of detachment, who allows characters, actors, stories to reveal their own nuances
While Winterbottom wants to convey the repetitiveness and gruelling relentless of the tour, there’s nothing boring about it for the viewer: even in the short bursts of performance that we're given, the power and poetry of Wolf Alice comes across strongly. In between the gigs, as we slowly get to know the band members, they prove to be charismatic and likeable, bonded by their passion for music and an unspoken, no-nonsense professionalism.
There's also a gentle romantic thread to the film, between Estelle, a new member of the band’s record company, who is helping them with their promotional duties, and Joe, one of the roadies. Chalk and cheese – she from London, he an older Glaswegian, she confident, highly musical herself, he shy and a little morose – they nevertheless bond within the enforced intimacy of the tour bus.
If their eventual liaison seems rather risqué for a documentary, here is Winterbottom’s little twist, and the revelation that On the Road is a cunning addition to the vogue for doc-fiction hybrids. The pair are actually played by actors Leah Harvey and James McArdle, who were inserted into the real world of the band and crew, performing their characters' tasks for real, while playing to Winterbottom’s tune.
It’s not entirely necessary, for the endeavour would have worked very well as a straight-forward documentary. But it’s the kind of move that seems to keep Winterbottom interested. The chief benefit is that Harvey – a new young actress playing a tour newbie – serves as the audience's eyes and ears. Harvey also reveals some singer-songwriter chops of her own; she’s definitely a star in the making.
Another actor in the mix is Winterbottom regular Shirley Henderson, who has a cameo as Joe’s alcoholic mum, whom he briefly meets when the tour reaches Glasgow. But for the most part the band – singer Ellie Rowsell, guitarist Joff Oddie, bassist Theo Ellis and drummer Joel Amey – offer more than enough personality. They’re extremely endearing when following a number of performances with enthusiastic DJ sets for the same fans. And we feel their pain as they begin to fade towards the end of the tour, victims of their own commitment and the demands of the touring life.
All of this is viewed with highly distinctive ease. Winterbottom is a master of detachment, who allows characters, actors, stories to reveal their own nuances, without his help. And the result here is one of his most satisfying films.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for On the Road