DIR: Shane Meadows ST: Stephen Graham, Thomas Turgoose, Andrew Shim PLOT SYNOPSIS: England, 1983. Looking for attention and companionship, 12-year-old Midlands lad Shaun is adopted by a bunch of skinheads. All's fine until psychotic racist Cosmo enters the fray, splitting the group and bringing Shaun into contact with the ugly, violent side of Eighties life - the far right and the rise of the National Front. *** History tends to portray the skinhead movement as being a part of the far right. As director Shane Meadows' knows only too well from his own experiences as a skin growing up in Staffordshire during the 1980s, it's far more complicated than that. The movement's roots lie in the rude boy culture of the West Indies, its music predicated around ska, soul and reggae; only elements of it were notoriously politicised by the far right. This Is England, Meadows' fourth full-length feature, examines the rise of the National Front's youth movement and its polarizing effect on a group of young skins in the summer of 1983, particularly its impact on a cheeky, 12-year-old lad, Shaun, played by Thomas Turgoose. The film's 18 certificate means Turgoose can't attend any public screenings of the film, which is something of a shame. This Is England is at best a fantastic piece of social-documentary that deserves as wide an audience as possible, up there with Alan Clarke's 1992 skin drama Made In Britain as a vivid and vital document of one particularly unpleasant aspect of 80s life. Shaun's father was killed during the Falklands war, and he lives with his mother in the kind of run down council estate in the Midlands that gives the term "public housing" a bad name. He's chubby, precocious and picked-on at school. At the end of summer term, he falls in with a bunch of local skins, a semi-feral lot led by Woody (Joe Gilgun), who becomes the first of two father surrogates for Shaun. Woody's named after Joe Strummer's pre-101ers nickname, while the film's title is lifted from a late period Clash single - whose lyric "Those British boots go kick Bengali in the head", assumes a grim relevance later in the film. Woody's influence is arguably benign, and this section of the film - cut to a bunch of Toots & The Maytals songs - has a real warmth to it, as the kids fill out the balmy summer days playing street football or merrily trashing a brand new housing development. Meadows' clearly likes his gang of rapscallions; for all their delinquency, they're good-natured and there's a certain innocence to their larks. Even when Shaun gets a No 1 buzzcut, Ben Sherman shirt, braces and a pair of DMs, his mother, though furious, understands that Woody is, at least, looking out for the little lad. It's the arrival of the gang's former leader, Cosmo (Graham), an incipient volcano of a man who's just been released from prison, which marks the beginning of a far more dysfunctional and destructive relationship for Shaun. Meadows used the idea of a young boy falling under the corruptive spell of an adult in his 1999 film, A Room For Romeo Brass, and This Is England follows a similar trajectory. Cosmo, with a head full of racist views, resumes control of the gang, encouraging them, in the film's pivotal speech, to sign up for what he calls "the fight". Woody and a few of the others leave, while the remainder - including Shaun - begin attending British Movement meetings in the back of pubs, where grey little men with bad haircuts unveil their unsavoury vision of a new England. The relationship between Cosmo and Shaun is more than father-son, both of them have lost their fathers - at one point, Cosmo breaks down, screaming "What makes a bad dad? What makes a bad dad?", Meadows' suggesting his racism is somehow linked to a childhood trauma. It's the kind of over-sentimentality that risks undermining the film's authenticity; frustratingly, Meadows' is reluctant to just let Cosmo be a [ital] naturally [ital] unpleasant person. After all, not everyone has to be emotionally fucked-up to be a racist. Shaun himself is on the cusp of adulthood, at that age where kids ape adult behaviour, sometimes without necessarily understanding exactly what they're doing. There's a sweet scene early on in the film where Shaun escorts one of the girls, Smell, outside to a garden shed, about to embark on his first proper kiss. He considerately takes her hand and helps her down some steps - "Watch out, it might be slippery," he says, in just the way an adult might. Later, when he threatens a Pakistani shopkeeper or harasses Asian kids in the street, its an darker side of the same process, Shaun here mimicking Cosmo. Inevitably, the film ends in a blast of spectacular violence, Cosmo's pent-up rage and self-loathing given full flight, Stephen Graham evoking the same intensity and raw physicality as Ray Winstone in Nil By Mouth. Beyond comparisons with Made In Britain, you can see flashes too of Derek Jarman's The Last Of England (1988), which similarly raged against life in Thatcher's Britain. But the issues of race and national identity This Is England addresses have a contemporary urgency: England is at war, the far right is on rise, and immigration never seems far from the headlines. MICHAEL BONNER
DIR: Shane Meadows
ST: Stephen Graham, Thomas Turgoose, Andrew Shim
PLOT SYNOPSIS:
England, 1983. Looking for attention and companionship, 12-year-old Midlands lad Shaun is adopted by a bunch of skinheads. All’s fine until psychotic racist Cosmo enters the fray, splitting the group and bringing Shaun into contact with the ugly, violent side of Eighties life – the far right and the rise of the National Front.
***
History tends to portray the skinhead movement as being a part of the far right. As director Shane Meadows’ knows only too well from his own experiences as a skin growing up in Staffordshire during the 1980s, it’s far more complicated than that. The movement’s roots lie in the rude boy culture of the West Indies, its music predicated around ska, soul and reggae; only elements of it were notoriously politicised by the far right. This Is England, Meadows’ fourth full-length feature, examines the rise of the National Front’s youth movement and its polarizing effect on a group of young skins in the summer of 1983, particularly its impact on a cheeky, 12-year-old lad, Shaun, played by Thomas Turgoose.
The film’s 18 certificate means Turgoose can’t attend any public screenings of the film, which is something of a shame. This Is England is at best a fantastic piece of social-documentary that deserves as wide an audience as possible, up there with Alan Clarke’s 1992 skin drama Made In Britain as a vivid and vital document of one particularly unpleasant aspect of 80s life.
Shaun’s father was killed during the Falklands war, and he lives with his mother in the kind of run down council estate in the Midlands that gives the term “public housing” a bad name. He’s chubby, precocious and picked-on at school. At the end of summer term, he falls in with a bunch of local skins, a semi-feral lot led by Woody (Joe Gilgun), who becomes the first of two father surrogates for Shaun. Woody’s named after Joe Strummer’s pre-101ers nickname, while the film’s title is lifted from a late period Clash single – whose lyric “Those British boots go kick Bengali in the head”, assumes a grim relevance later in the film.
Woody’s influence is arguably benign, and this section of the film – cut to a bunch of Toots & The Maytals songs – has a real warmth to it, as the kids fill out the balmy summer days playing street football or merrily trashing a brand new housing development. Meadows’ clearly likes his gang of rapscallions; for all their delinquency, they’re good-natured and there’s a certain innocence to their larks. Even when Shaun gets a No 1 buzzcut, Ben Sherman shirt, braces and a pair of DMs, his mother, though furious, understands that Woody is, at least, looking out for the little lad. It’s the arrival of the gang’s former leader, Cosmo (Graham), an incipient volcano of a man who’s just been released from prison, which marks the beginning of a far more dysfunctional and destructive relationship for Shaun.
Meadows used the idea of a young boy falling under the corruptive spell of an adult in his 1999 film, A Room For Romeo Brass, and This Is England follows a similar trajectory. Cosmo, with a head full of racist views, resumes control of the gang, encouraging them, in the film’s pivotal speech, to sign up for what he calls “the fight”. Woody and a few of the others leave, while the remainder – including Shaun – begin attending British Movement meetings in the back of pubs, where grey little men with bad haircuts unveil their unsavoury vision of a new England.
The relationship between Cosmo and Shaun is more than father-son, both of them have lost their fathers – at one point, Cosmo breaks down, screaming “What makes a bad dad? What makes a bad dad?”, Meadows’ suggesting his racism is somehow linked to a childhood trauma. It’s the kind of over-sentimentality that risks undermining the film’s authenticity; frustratingly, Meadows’ is reluctant to just let Cosmo be a [ital] naturally [ital] unpleasant person. After all, not everyone has to be emotionally fucked-up to be a racist.
Shaun himself is on the cusp of adulthood, at that age where kids ape adult behaviour, sometimes without necessarily understanding exactly what they’re doing. There’s a sweet scene early on in the film where Shaun escorts one of the girls, Smell, outside to a garden shed, about to embark on his first proper kiss. He considerately takes her hand and helps her down some steps – “Watch out, it might be slippery,” he says, in just the way an adult might. Later, when he threatens a Pakistani shopkeeper or harasses Asian kids in the street, its an darker side of the same process, Shaun here mimicking Cosmo.
Inevitably, the film ends in a blast of spectacular violence, Cosmo’s pent-up rage and self-loathing given full flight, Stephen Graham evoking the same intensity and raw physicality as Ray Winstone in Nil By Mouth.
Beyond comparisons with Made In Britain, you can see flashes too of Derek Jarman’s The Last Of England (1988), which similarly raged against life in Thatcher’s Britain. But the issues of race and national identity This Is England addresses have a contemporary urgency: England is at war, the far right is on rise, and immigration never seems far from the headlines.
MICHAEL BONNER
Arcade Fire
Aha, at last a very good reason to hate Kings Of Leon. In the past I’ve always considered them pretty much the perfect band just shy of that killer song. Well, now the bastards have it in the shape of ‘On Call’ from the newie ‘Because Of The Times’. While the crowd around me suddenly transform into, like, this scene straight out of Haight Ashbury circa 1967 with gamine supermodel angels gyrating in a trance to the band’s every ebb and flow, the crowd picks up bare-chested Caleb’s macho holler “Be there!” and thunders it back like the Kings are, I dunno, U2 or something.
So that’s it now. Every band in the world can wake up every morning and think: “Fuck, why aren’t we the Kings Of Leon”? They’ve got the lot… so cool, not an ugly amongst them, every gal in the place just falling over herself to rake her claws down their backs. Like I said, bastards!
Kings Of Leon
This is the best set I’ve ever seen them play, the new stuff bringing the beef alongside old faves ‘Molly Chambers’ and ‘California Waiting’. So cool, too, the way the newly-shaven Nathan blows bubblegum as he drums. They ain’t the Southern Strokes no mo’. Talking of which, whatever happened to…? Fab’s here, off his tits. Wastes his time these days drumming for Har Mar. Albert’s got his own thing going, Julian guests on the new QOTSA album… Is the game all up? Maybe they need five years in the wilderness, just so Paul Tollett can drag them back together for Coachella 2012 and remind us all how much we miss them.
By the way, Queens hired a plane to advertise their newie. It flew over the crowd as Arcade Fire played. Wait till you hear the first track. Wow! Pure Led Zep circa ‘Houses Of The Holy’.
After the Fire, Red Hot Chili Peppers are shocking. Dull, dull, dull. A show that manages to be simultaneously showy in all the wrong ways and utterly pedestrian. They could have phoned this performance in it ‘s so unspontaneous. Which makes you wonder, if they can’t get it up for an adoring crowd like this – easily the biggest for any single band Coachella has ever assembled before the main stage - when can they get it up? ‘Californication’ is obviously greeted like the Festival theme song but really that’s happening over in the Sahara Tent where Lindsay Lohan’s joined the merry throng to yell along to the mighty LCD Soundsystem’s ‘North American Scum’. LCD are awesome and just about have it over the hyperactive !!! and Hot Chip who raised the roof earlier in the day at the Mojave Tent with an astonishing ‘Over And Over’.
Best bit of what’s been a truly brilliant day? Easy. Roky Erickson & The Explosives in the Gobi Tent. I mean, really, I had no idea just how amazing this man was. I’d read all the stuff about how great Texan psychedelic punk pioneers13th Floor Elevators were back in the daze and how Roky gobbled acid or something till they locked him away and did the Cuckoo’s Nest electrode brain-frying thing to him so I guess I was expecting a reanimated corpse.
What we got though, was this perpetually chewing, grinning werewolf, maggot pale and howling that he’d discovered the doorway to Hades as an awesomely screwed-down-tight band brought the brimstone to the Elevators’ ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’, a ‘Starry Eyes’ that would not have disgraced Neil Young, a terrifying ‘Don’t Shake Me Lucifer’ and barroom howl-at-the mooners ‘Red Temple Prayer’ (C’mon, how often do you get to scream along to song about working in the Kremlin with a two-headed dog?) and ‘Cold Night For Alligators’.
Roky Erikson
The Gobi was transformed into a scene from the Titty Twister as Roky took crackling lead guitar for ‘The Beast Is Coming’. Man, it was like Tom Fogerty singing the Book Of Revelations while Buddy Guy flayed the strings. Grown men wept. I shit you not. One of those gigs that makes you glad you lived to see it. The tent wasn’t that full and there were a number of disciples with their phones aloft so I’d check Youtube if you’d don’t believe me.
So anyway, I bump into some good friends who are staying at a hotel reasonably nearby and at the next table to theirs at breakfast were Melanie Griffith and Linda Carter having a natter. That’s Coachella for you - Wonderwoman, and Roky all in one day. Beyond surreal or what?
Check in tomorrow and I’ll endeavour to have a butcher’s at Happy Mondays sans Bez who’s too naughty to get a visa, the reformed Rage Against The Machine, Willie Nelson, Lily Allen, CSS, Klaxons and all their loved-up crew.
Steve Sutherland
Jesus and Mary Chain
About halfway through Jim asked: “Are you having fun?” The surprisingly massive crowd roared the traditional festival affirmative. “Well,” sneered Jim, “Let’s see what we can do about that.” It would have been the day’s best black comedy moment, but they topped it when paisley mini-skirted Hollywood screen goddess Scarlett Johansson, hidden under a trendy trilby, joined them for ‘Some Candy Talking’. What the fuck? Apparently William just called up her agent and she said yes. Simple as that. William’s now threatening to call up a new girl in every town on the rapidly expanding tour they’re planning. Last night, at a warm-up at the Glass House in Pomona, it was Annie Hardy of Giant Drag. They bowed out with a truly caustic ‘Reverence’. Really good to have them back. Oh, and Uncut’s picture researcher Phil King was on bass.
Other Uncut favourites doing turns during the day were Bjork, who was accompanied for her headline set mostly plucked from her new album, ‘Volta’, by a big brass band and all-female choir, Interpol who took us into the night with their Joy Division thing, and shamanic homeboy hero Perry Farrell and his new band full of girls who look like supermodels, Satellite Party. They played to a smallish crowd on the main stage during the blistering heat in the late afternoon and didn’t really get too much going except an unsurprisingly well received version of Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Stop Don’t Go’.
Arctic Monkeys also played the main stage and pulled a big-ish crowd of committed Brits and curious locals. The set was mostly the new stuff off ‘My Favourite Nightmare’ which confused the hell out the people around me who just didn’t know quite what to make of them. During the furious thrashy bits, several longhairs, tanned like gods, tried to head bang, only to be pulled up short when the verses kicked back in. Others resorted to air drumming. Weird.
Don’t get me wrong, they went down OK but Alex Turner’s passive-aggressive stance of wry, detatched amusement, as if he’s viewing somebody else’s gig rather than participating in his own, made it hard for Arctic virgins to get involved.
They did ‘Scummy Man’, ‘Fake Tales Of San Francisco’ and ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ off the first album, and ‘Brianstorm’, ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’ and some more off the newie, Alex pissing himself when a girl he’d pointed out who’d hauled herself onto her boyfriend’s shoulders flashed her tits at the stage.
The new stuff is great and all but, honestly, the tender sarcasm of the lyrics got a bit lost in translation, Alex stuck behind his guitar unable – reluctant maybe – to bring a theatrical life to the songs the way an un-encumbered Morrissey, Ian Brown or even Liam Gallagher can.
“Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen,” Alex signed off like a Bingo caller addressing a hall full of pensioners. “It’s been a pleasure. Really, it has. We’ve enjoyed ourselves. Enjoy the rest of the evening. Be careful. Wrap up.”
Arctic Monkeys
The real drama was happening over in a packed to bursting Gobi Tent where that magnificent creation Amy Winehouse was greeted like a conquering queen and was proceeding mightily to re-import some soul back where it originally came from until one of many beakers of vodka kicked in and things started to get a bit screwy. Claiming nerves, she fluffed her intros, bemused the crowd by threatening to steal their bags when it got dark, rambled on between numbers, forgot what she was doing and saying a whole lot of the time, andc was only transported to a good place, it seemed, when the songs took her over. My, ‘Valerie’ was awesome but there’s something very wrong going on with Amy and someone had best take Alex Turner’s advice and take good care of her.
Amy Winehouse
Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you about The Good The Bad And The Queen, Arcade Fire, Kings Of Leon, LCD Soundsystem and Roky Erikson (really!) among others.
One down, two to go. Where’s the Factor 50?
