Category Archives: Music documentary

Beatles on the brink: the truth about the Fab Four’s final days

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The director’s new documentary weaves together hours of unseen footage to dispel many myths about the band’s final months. John Harris, who was involved in the project, tells the inside story

On paper, the idea looked brilliant. In the opening weeks of January 1969, the Beatles were working up new songs for a televised concert, and being filmed as they did so. Where the event would take place was unclear – but as rehearsals at Twickenham film studios went on, one of their associates came up with the idea of travelling to Libya, where they would perform in the remains of a famous amphitheatre, part of an ancient Roman city called Sabratha. As the plan was discussed amid set designs and maps one Wednesday afternoon, a new element was added: why not invite a few hundred fans to join them on a specially chartered ocean liner?

Over the previous few days, John Lennon had been quiet and withdrawn, but now he seemed to be brimming with enthusiasm. The ship, he said, could be the setting for final dress rehearsals. He envisaged the group timing their set so they fell into a carefully picked musical moment just as the sun came up over the Mediterranean. If the four of them had been wondering how to present their performance, here was the most gloriously simple of answers: “God’s the gimmick,” he enthused.

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Jeanie Finlay: ‘I don’t film alpha males. They don’t need more exposure’

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She spent a year in her room as a teenager, and now makes heart-wrenching documentaries about people looking for safe spaces in record shops, on goth cruises – and even on the set of Game of Thrones

There are many wonderful moments in the films of Jeanie Finlay but my current favourite is in Seahorse, her intimate and profoundly moving 2019 documentary about the struggles of transgender man Freddy McConnell to conceive and give birth to his own child. The scene takes place during a party at Freddy’s mum’s house as a room full of family friends, all women, talk to Freddy about the clothes he’ll wear during pregnancy.

Related: ‘It’s so normalised you think it’s part of your job’: the woman who lifted the lid on harassment in TV

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WITCH: We Intend to Cause Havoc review – the history of Zamrock, Africa’s great forgotten rockers

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Film-maker Gio Arlotta and two young musicians are on a quest to track down the legendary leader of a 1970s Zambian band

Who knew 1970s Zambia had its own thriving musical genre? This modest documentary revisits the brief, almost-forgotten history of “Zamrock” – or at least what remains of it, which appears to be very little beyond the back catalogue of its leading band, Witch. Witch’s rhythmic blend of British blues, funk, psychedelic and garage rock has aged very well, and reissues of their albums in the 2010s found a new audience, including Italian film-maker Gio Arlotta, who consequently undertook an expedition to Zambia to try to find the band, accompanied by two young Dutch musicians, Jacco Gardner and Nic Mauskovic.

There’s now a well-trodden route for such musical travelogues, laid down by the likes of Buena Vista Social Club and Searching for Sugar Man, and while this lacks the polish or drama of either of those, it’s an engaging and uplifting journey. One of the problems it runs into is a lack of surviving footage of Witch in action. Arlotta and co scour Zambia’s pre-digital archives, but the best they come up with is some unseen footage of James Brown. Nor does it help that most of Witch’s original lineup are dead.

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Poly Styrene’s inspiring sensitivity should be the true legacy of punk

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Mixed race, with braces on her teeth, Poly broke the mould of UK punk. A new documentary explores her struggle to find meaning in the Day-Glo chaos of modern life

The moment I heard that Marianne Elliott-Said, AKA Poly Styrene, had died, I was at band practice. We put on X-Ray Spex and jumped around, screaming along to Identity, Oh Bondage Up Yours! and Germ Free Adolescents. On that day in 2011 we lost one of punk’s greatest heroes and one of the few who really looked and sounded like me. She broke the mould of UK punk stereotypes. She was brown, chubby, weirdly dressed and had braces on her teeth. Even in an era when quirky, abrasive style was all the rage, she stood out.

Poly Styrene embraced this. She played with the attention her weirdness attracted, making a cartoon of herself. To be an artist is often to feel like a shiny trinket – hip and trendy one moment and disposable the next – and Poly had a fascination with all things garish and throwaway. She knew that through selling her art, she herself would inevitably become the product. Consumer culture overwhelmed and horrified her at times but she poured those thoughts and feelings into surrealist, confrontational art and music.

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Taylor Swift: The Long Pond Studio Sessions review – cosy campfire confessions

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The pop star’s Disney+ movie about quarantine album Folklore reveals the potency of her songwriting, though it’s hazy on any ‘pandemic epiphanies’

Pre-pandemic, few artists were so keenly attuned to the music industry’s calendar as Taylor Swift. She timed her album releases for awards contention and singles to sustain her world tours; the promotional cycle for 1989, released in 2014, seemed to go on for years. With coronavirus, that “circus” – as she puts it on Mirrorball, one of a few songs on her “quarantine album”, Folklore, that address the pandemic directly – was abruptly called off.

Stripped of those structures, “this lockdown could have been a time where I absolutely lost my mind”, Swift says in The Long Pond Studio Sessions, a film that explores the making and meaning of Folklore. Instead, in a matter of months, she created an album as good as any she has ever written. She collaborated remotely with the National’s Aaron Dessner, writing to his musical sketches and self-recording her performances at home.

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Singer, activist, sex machine, addict: the troubled brilliance of Billie Holiday

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A new documentary uncovers lost tapes to tell the intimate real story of the jazz singer – one with terrible resonance today as the US continues to fight institutional racism

There’s an electrifying moment in Billie, a new documentary about Billie Holiday, when Jonathan “Jo” Jones, a tempestuous, influential African American drummer who played with Holiday from the 1930s to 50s, challenges his white interviewer. “You don’t know what we was going through then,” he says, referring to travelling through the deep south on Count Basie’s tour bus. “What were you going through?” asks the interviewer, Linda Lipnack Kuehl. “We was going through hell!” he shouts. “Miss Billie Holiday didn’t have the privilege of using a toilet in a filling station. The boys at least could go out in the woods. You don’t know anything about it because you’ve never had to subjugate yourself to it. Never!”

James Erskine’s film is constructed entirely from such interviews by Kuehl, a high-school teacher and Holiday fan with a sideline in arts journalism. In 1971, she began plans for a biography: Holiday had died aged 44 in 1959 and, 11 years on, Kuehl wanted to speak to those who were there throughout her life. She interviewed and interviewed and was still finding people in 1978 – almost 200 of them in all. The project overwhelmed her and she never finished it, and in 1979 she was found dead on a Washington sidewalk. Police deemed it suicide, Kuehl having supposedly jumped from her hotel room, although there was no proof of this.

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