Movies About Music - Part 1

I saw Sex And Drugs And Rock 'N Roll yesterday: it's supposed to be about Ian Dury. You can look up the details of his life here. You'd better do, because you won't learn anything about it from the film. It opens with him rehearsing while Olivia Williams is giving birth upstairs - that's to let you know he's a self-obsessed screw-up and it pretty much carries on from there in the same vein. You will not find out that he studied at the Royal College of Art under Peter Blake (there's a scene where his bullied son asks if they are "posh", Dury says "we're Arts and Crafts". Not from the RCA he isn't - he's posh.) He was an art teacher married with a young daughter who decides to get into rock 'n roll. Way too late in life. There's no attempt to explain that, it's just a given, and the man remains therefore a total mystery or a bag of bad behaviour.

The Blockheads are appallingly treated by the film - depicted as a bunch of no-hopers when they were in fact one of the tightest British bands that ever performed (right up there with the Average White Band) and they performed music that was closer to jazz-funk than rock 'n roll. Check this out.



Where did these guys come from and how did they stay in such good musical shape? Chas Jankel, who is a songwriter good enough to have Quincy Jones cover one of his songs and get an international hit with it (Ai No Corrida), appears from nowhere, gets hired and disappears into a back room to churn out hit after hit to Dury's lyrics. Like they didn't already know who he was before they hired him. To see the movie, you'd think no-one ever rehearsed or discussed arrangements - and yet they must have done. A song as good as Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick does nto appear like Venus from the head of Jupiter.

The movie addresses none of this. Instead we get a decent forty minutes or so of Andy Serkis with a band performing Dury's songs - and doing a damn good job of it - and the usual tales of, well, sex and drugs and rock 'n roll. It's a good a way of passing Sunday afternoon at the movies, but it ain't about the life of a musician.