Spike Island

Spike Island (no certificate as yet)

(Plays as part of the BFI London Film Festival on 13th and 14th October and is expected to go on general release next year)

I was lucky enough to get to the World Premier of the Stone Roses inspired movie Spike Island last week. It won't be out until Spring next year. Here's my review.

Music movies are mostly biographical, telling the life stories of the stars. Rarely do they attempt to show how music impacts upon the fans. Spike Island, suffused with the Stone Roses’ trippy acid rhythms and wah-wah guitars, is, however, such a movie.

Manchester, 1990, and five teenagers and members of a band, are trying to find tickets for the Stone Roses’ seminal gig in the shadow of a chemical plant at Spike Island, near Widness. The concert was to go down in British pop music history, the moment when an obstreperous group of Mancunians would lay claim to being the greatest band - ever. Even now to say you were at Spike Island is to say you were at the dawn of a new wave in UK popular culture.

And yet our band of teenage scallies  - Tits, Dodge, Zippy, Little Gaz and Penfold - have only 72 hours to lay their hands on tickets.

For these baggies music is everything and they worship at the alter of Ian Brown, the Stone Roses front man who, for a short time, laid claim to being the popstar with more attitude than a summer rioter armed with a house brick. Indeed, there is one moment when Brown (no doubt to his own amusement) is described as so “punk” he’s “John Lydon times ten.”

But the boys fail to get their tickets and set off on a journey to force their way in. Along the way they must confront their dysfuntional homes lives, burgeoning love lives, friendships in crisis and, perhaps more than anything else, their hopes for the future.

In one sense Spike Island, directed by Mat Whitecross, plays a well-worn comic turn. It has the now very familiar ring of the it’s-grim-up-north-but-we’re-bearing-it-with-fortitude-and-humour style so well defined by movies like Brassed Off (1996) and Billy Elliott (2000). Only on this occassion its with acid.

We mustn’t forget the context of Spike Island and the Stone Roses. I990 was the beginning of a vicious UK recession that would put a tenth of the working age population out of work and wreak even further damage on industries across the north of England. What Spike Island the movie does is capture the disaffection of a working class youth who believed that everything was failing them - the economy, school, home. Indeed, our protagonists turn on their school, an institution apparently preoccupied with teaching them about the past rather than preparing them for a future. As Tits tells a teacher in a direct quote from Mr Brown himself: “The past was yours, the future’s mine.”

It’s that line that really sets the theme for this and nearly every other coming of age story - a youth attempting to define his own destiny against the run of events. Tits wants something more than the grim “red bricks” in which he lives. The symbol of that effort is Ian Brown and the Stone Roses. Tits and his band define themselves through the music and what they believe it stands for. In this instance Ian Brown’s moody insistence that he will determine his own future. And in displaying that Spike Island reveals that peculiarity in British culture - how a musical movement, or a band, can come to define a time, a place, its ambitions, frustrations even its tragedies. Coming from the south of England that may not have been so deeply felt. Coming from Manchester it must have been profoundly visceral.

Not least because the boys have a contradictory relationship with their home town. It’s both a source of pride and a place they need to escape. It was ever thus.

Spike Island works best when the band is moving. The soundtrack combines to make the movie dynamic. But after an uproarious start, with a school break-in, the movie slows while it attempts to set up its characters. It’s during these passages that it risks stalling. Once the boys are forced into getting on the road Spike Island’s energy and pace is recovered.

From the start, however, it captures the tone of the times. Not just the music but the clothes, the language and speech patterns, even that curious walk that Ian Brown and the Gallagher brothers would turn into something of a motif for their less than sunny dispositions and Manc attitude.

Spike Island’s undoubted star is Elliott Tittensor, as Tits, who cut his teeth on Channels 4’s Shameless. He captures the rancour of a troubled young man but retains enough subtlety to reveal sensitivity once his love life picks up.

In some ways this should become a cult movie. The subject matter is there to do it. But many of its jokes and set-ups are just a little too predictable to give it a biting edge. Indeed, you feel the director and writer’s urge to add humour softens the real grittiness of growing up at that time. What it perhaps needs is a little more of Ian Brown’s acidic authenticity.

That said Spike Island remains a celebration of great music and you will warm to a group of characters determined to rise above their circumstances. Ian Brown perhaps captured their conviction best when he said: “It’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.”

/ends

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