I Am Weekender

Back in the 90's it was the music journalists who had the power to create musical scenes. They were self important people who knew what they were doing, but tended to let their own opinions about things become centre stage. Now that print journalism is dead, these writers no longer have the same influence. The band Flowered Up were a brief footnote in the history of indie music lore, they weren't a massive success like The Stone Roses, but the music magazine writers tried to make them a thing. Weekender is the result of the brief cross pollination between indie guitar music and electronic dance music. Electronic producers like Andrew Weatherall had a history of remixing and producing guitar bands to make them more palatable to an electronic music audience and so more commercially successful. The overlong Weekender track was turned into a short film about someone going out for the weekend. And that is basically it. This documentary is yet another revisionist "everything done in the 90's was amazing" talking heads bore fest. The usual suspects aka rent a quotes turn up for another easy pay check. The narrative they are trying to spin is that this is some kind of massively influential and important film, when in reality it was released and didn't do much business. Because its actually quite boring and the music isn't really a good fit. Weekender is not a rave scene movie. Its a guitar band albeit remixed track about a post man who goes out at the weekend, takes drugs then struggles at work on Monday morning. Surely an electronic bands track would have made more sense? And that is probably the main reason Weekender was mainly ignored by ravers at the time. It didn't really resonate, despite what Irvine Welsh suggests. For one ravers weren't reading Melody Maker or NME, we had other magazines. Very few people bought Flowered Up records and even fewer watched Weekender. Partly because it wasn't readily available but that is generally because many of the people who had seen it didn't think it was good enough to promote through word of mouth. Anyway Weekender is now on YouTube. A bit like D Notes Coming Down, it tries to capture a bit of the rave scene but doesn't. So its a five for effort but that's pretty much it.

I remember Flowered Up from back in my Melody Maker buying days and recall they were regarded as the baggy band from London, this being an angle of sorts seeing as all the rest of the groups from this genre seemed to be from the north of England. Like many they went from cover stars to a footnote extremely rapidly but I do recall the song Weekender getting some good notices and was aware of an associated promo video. This film looks at the band generally but is more specifically about the song and video. Like loads of documentaries about music history there seems to be at least some exaggeration at play in this one, as while it seems fair to say that Weekender was one of the highlights of the early 90's indie-dance culture and its video was well done, its impact was pretty underground and there's most probably an element of revisionism at play by putting it so high up on a pedestal. All that being said, it is still great that this film exists at all and that the original video is getting recognition as an impressive bit of work. There's some bits and pieces of historical context here which was interesting, such as a snippet from the Daily Star describing the band as evil or something and ecstasy as the 'killer drug'. This sort of over-the-top patter was pretty much par for the course back at the time but it is dispiriting to be reminded of it never-the-less. The doc otherwise is mainly made up of recollections of a variety of talking heads made up of band members, people from the label and famous fans. Some of this is pretty good value, albeit you will have to endure Bobby Gillespie once again appearing to be unable to string two sentences together without referring to the 'working class'. It's a resolutely lo-fi film but the film-makers have certainly managed to gather a decent mount of footage from back in the day, in order to keep things visually interesting. I would have probably have liked a little more detail on Flowered Up's overall career as well but I guess that's a minor complaint.

Overall, this one is definitely best experienced by watching the Weekender video straight afterwards. Its very nice that this doc will introduce this song and film to people unaware of it. It is a very specific and brief moment in British music culture but it's kind of an interesting one.