Amid the recent Wayne Rooney debacle (this is the one where he sarcastically applauded a referee rather than the other 17 which will no doubt immediately follow), Sir Alex Ferguson was heard to remark that ‘He has a chip on his shoulder, like everyone from that City’. Cue an onslaught of po-faced indignation from Liverpool’s chief whingers at the very suggestion that any Scouser could be criticised openly in the press. In a passing comment. At a private function.
Liverpool ‘Business Representative’ (read stall holder) Frank McKenna immediately chimed in with that well-worn chorus, ‘People in Liverpool have a sense of humour and can take a few jokes made at our expense’. Could have fooled me Frank! Let’s look at the evidence…
October 2004 – Boris Johnson accuses Liverpool of ‘wallowing in misery’ following a three hour silence and commemorative dinner plate to mourn the loss of Ken Bigley, who once got on the X5 bus. Liverpool’s outrage is incandescent, and copies of Johnson’s Spectator article are burned in the street. April 1989 – The Sun publishes a characteristically incorrect story about Liverpool fans urinating on corpses and picking their pockets during the Hillsborough Disaster. The resulting bile on Merseyside lasted for over 15 years. Now I’m all for Sun-bashing, even when there isn’t a good reason, but 15 years? Not exactly characteristic of the easy-going live and let live Scouser we’ve been assured is the norm, is it now?
Where did this idea of the Funny Scouser come from? Was it simply an exercise in spin? An attempt to overhaul the old image of the thieving druggie Scouser with a bubble perm and someone else’s benefit book? The evidence for this Funny Scouser myth seems to be scant at best. Any lexicon of Scouse comedians tends to turn up the same half dozen names- Les Dennis, Ken Dodd, Ted Ray, Tommy Handley, Robb Wilton, Arthur Askey. So that’s one who has started his career within the last 30 years, and four who are dead. Hardly a Who’s Who of side splitting.
In 2002 there was a Liverpool City Council motion to open a Comedy Hall Of Fame in the Empire theatre. The plan only stalled when the list of probable inductees was read out and included, er, Les Dennis, Ken Dodd, Ted Ray, Tommy Handley, Robb Wilton and Arthur Askey.
Seeing as these are the Comedy Greats to whom Liverpool owes it’s genetic funny bone, let’s examine them a little more closely. Dodd made his name by making up words such as ‘tattyfilarious’ and brandishing a duster. I can almost hear you pissing yourselves at the memory. Les Dennis, the cuckolded Mavis impersonator whose shelf life ran out about the same time as Dustin Gee’s left ventricle. Thank God that woman said ‘my cardigan’ when asked to name something blue on Family Fortunes, otherwise we might never have heard from him again. Ted Ray was actually from Wigan and died nearly thirty years ago, and the last time Tommy Handley was cracking gags we were still mourning Queen Victoria. Robb Wilton was dead by the advent of television, which leaves Arthur Askey as the man chosen to shoulder the Comedy Greatness of Liverpool. I don’t know why all Scousers don’t visit his grave more often to pay their respects to the Godfather of that irrepressible Scouse wit. Maybe because he was buried in London where he escaped to almost immediately after leaving the womb.
Far from being the UK’s chuckle machines, there are few more humourless peoples than Scousers who have been slighted, or disagreed with, or looked at. Heaven forfend you don’t find their unique brand of loudmouthed ‘comedic’ water torture amusing – they’ll continue regardless. I had the deep misfortune of sitting behind a table full of Scouse holidaymakers on their way to bargain flights out of Gatwick a few months back. They had descended on a student who was getting off the train at Crewe (actually, I have my suspicions she had a ticket to London Euston but feared she might kill), and mocked her incessantly for the twenty minutes she was on the train. In any other town in the world, this would have been considered rude and worthy of a sharp slap about the ears, but the Famous Scouse Sense Of Humour dictated that the poor girl sat there and endured the constant howling of “What do you study den? Psychology!??!! Psychology??! You reckon we’re all fuckin nuts den do ye? Where you from? Crewe?!?! Crew?!!? I wouldn’t admit dat love! Crewe!?!’. And so on ad nauseum, which may as well be Liverpool’s new Latin motto.
The minute the put upon woman left the train, the lead ape began to assess their performance. “Aw, she enjoyed that bit of banter didn’t she eh? I bet we made her day.’ He seemed blissfully unaware that she would tell everyone she met that day of the morning she spent on the train with the Scousers. And that everyone would nod and groan in sympathy as they remembered their own Morning With The Scousers, from which they are still recovering. If you ever want someone to roll their eyes and groan for any reason, ‘Some Scousers were talking to me on the train’ will illicit that response immediately. The international code for ‘I was bored shitless by some wannabe Ken Dodds’.
This year, a poll was conducted which seemed to bear out the Scouse humour myth, as Liverpudlians were reported to be the funniest people in Britain. What escaped the headline writers was that the respondents were asked to name the people who made them laugh the most, which is not really the same thing. I’d wager that, rather than giggling away at their Best Of Les Dennis DVD, the people in question were actually swapping Scouse Train anecdotes in the pub, and laughing at how one city can breed a people who substitute timing and clever word play for ‘Hitler bombed our chippy’.
Face it Scousers, you’re no funnier than anyone else in Britain, and have no right to the role of Britain’s court jesters. Strange how any other Liverpudlian stereotype brings about much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but that some Scousers are happy to wear a permanent daft grin when outside the City limits, as if they are wandering 17th century clowns looking for a tavern to entertain in return for lodgings and meat. Scousers who are trying to be funny are as exhausting as any attention seeking toddler, without half the comedic skill. Just look at Stan Boardman. Could you spend more than eight minutes in a room with him without trying to claw your own ears off?
It will take a national effort akin to that of the Industrial Revolution to change people’s perceptions now, but wouldn’t it be nice to hear people say ‘You know what, Scousers just don’t make me laugh’. More than that, wouldn’t it be fucking funny?
Wednesday, 28 September 2005
Thursday, 28 July 2005
Sacred Cows - Bob Geldof
When I see pictures on the news of tiny African babies with flies in their eyes and trails of snot hanging from their noses, with distended bellies which seem to have been directly transplanted from darts playing dwarves, and a look of painful resignation to the uncomfortable and pointless death from starvation which inevitably awaits them, I weep. I weep not just because of the overwhelming tragedy of a baby starving to death whilst I whine about McDonalds leaving the cheese off my burger (seriously though, plain cheeseburger still means I want cheese on it), but because I know that within seconds of this ghastly news being broadcast, an even more abhorrent sight will fill my screen. That of Bob Fucking Geldof.
Bob Fucking Geldof (his official full name, at least in my house) sees the plight of Africans as a giant Bat signal, searching the skies of London for any no-talent, long forgotten nonentity who will heed it’s glow. Except there’s no bat sign lighting up the dreary skies of Ladbroke Grove, just a huge pound sign. “Magazine deals!” it throbs. “TV Shows!” it intones. And who should come running but Bob Fucking Geldof, Africa’s last resort.
BFG’s biography is a slim volume to say the least. Or it would have been if every child in Africa went to bed on a full stomach. Having left the prestigious Blackrock College in Dublin in the mid seventies, he went to work for The Georgia Straight, a left wing free paper based in Vancouver. The firey rhetoric of this hippie pamphlet was the breeding ground of Bob’s fervour, and who better than the Canadians to rabble rouse and feed the flames of revolution. It was this Baptism of fire which gave BFG the temerity to pen one of his two hits, I Don’t Like Mondays, about mass murderer Brenda Ann Spencer. Her record of “killed two, injured nine” puts her just ahead of Beth Jordache in the female killer ratings. The single hit number one in 1979 and that should have been that. Four years of Bob Fucking Geldof was four years too many, but at least it was all over, he could go back to Vancouver and take part in a protest against cuts in arable farming subsidies, or whatever the fuck Canadians care about.
But no! Wait! What is that on the horizon? Yes, it’s a tumult of human suffering, and just like the motion picture of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, BFG’s involved again. After seeing the death and starvation which was destroying African lives, Bob thought it would be a spiffing idea to do a charity record to raise money for the poor mites. And it was a brilliant idea. But why did this tone deaf, gutter mouthed wannabe pikey have to get involved past the inception? Maybe because he felt that Trevor Horn didn’t have the necessary production experience to handle a single release? Trev may have produced Welcome To The Pleasuredome which had just sold over 4 million copies, but Bob had been working on Deep In The Heart Of Nowhere, which went on to sell, er, bugger all! No? Maybe then, Bob felt that the assembled rock stars did not have the media skills to front a campaign such as this. How could shrinking violets like Boy George and Marilyn have coped with the spotlight?
Okay, maybe it was that he felt the artists needed a helping hand, with their relative lack of savvy where the music industry was concerned. True, BFG was on the slippery slope to anonymity, but surely he had some sage advice to offer greenhorns like Paul McCartney, David Bowie, James Taylor and Sting. I mean what could they have known about releasing a record? No? Wait, I’ve cracked it. I know exactly what Bob had to offer the Band Aid single. Desperation.
The starving people in Africa were desperate, but even though they had gone without food for so long that their digestive systems were breaking down their internal organs for sustenance, even though they were literally being eaten alive from the inside out, none of them could match the compounded anguish of a man who would sooner punch his own mother in the face on national television than be anonymous. Pundits marveled at the way he ignored the promotional opportunities for his own album release, preferring instead to use his time in the dimming spotlight to underline the plight of tiny starving babies. Well, duh!
Given the choice between being well know for helping the helpless to eke out their pathetic lives, or for being totally and utterly ridiculed for subjecting the British public to one of the shittest albums ever to make someone chew his own ears off, he went for the kudos?! Well, fuck me backwards if he isn’t a modern day saint. The choice he made was one that anyone else in the entire fucking universe would have. Talk about right place at the right time, he clawed his way up from the pit of eternal musical hellfire to plaster his crater face all over the newspapers and to staple his wretched anatomy to the sidecar of fame. Right place? Yeah, after a good few months frenzied assault on the public psyche.
He traveled further to get the ‘right place’ than any other no mark. He made sure he flew out First Class to the US to appear on the recording of We Are The World. One of the hopeless organizers, currently residing in the Where Are They Now files was one ‘Michael Jackson’, how he managed to get it off the ground without Bob’s help I’ll never know. But still the Shining White Hope wasn’t satisfied. He disagreed with Margaret Thatcher! Can you imagine! It was so much of a national sport at the time that we considered it as a Commonwealth Games event, but good show Bob! You tarnished that halo of hers didn’t you?
Nearly a year ago Bob slipped to his lowest point yet. He hadn’t released an album since 2001, and despite over a million letters of thanks he hadn’t finished foisting his tramp-like visage on us just yet. People were beginning to forget about Bob Geldof, so out came the Band Aid 20 single, just in time to make some money, feed some Africans and put Sir Bob back on the agenda. Fair enough it was actually Midge Ure who had the idea of releasing the record again, obviously thinking that anything Bob could flog like a dead mare, he could flog better. That one backfired didn’t it Midge? He needed you to write the frigging thing in the first place, but try and grab some of that limelight for yourself and he’d chop your arm off. The record was horrible and populated by no-mark flashes in a shit stained pan. Turin Breaks and Danny Goffey? Wow! There truly are stars in my eyes! Maybe more money would have been raised by asking each of the desperate, wannabe saviours to pay fifty grand to appear on the record. That would have seen off Lemar for a start.
Then, just as we thought it was safe to enjoy life again, Live 8 was announced. Live 8 , the most pointless, ego massaging irrelevance since, well, Band Aid 20 was an insult to anyone who ever went without to send money abroad. “We don’t want your money, we want you” intoned the fetid pile of bone that is BFG (now Sir Bob Geldof. Obviously, even though it’s an honorary title, making ‘Sir’ Bob as clueless as ‘Professor’ Phil Redmond). And so a cavalcade of pop mediocrity and reanimated corpses (what, you didn’t seriously think Roger Waters was still alive did you?) were treated to the best publicity that African suffering could buy. On average, those who performed were treated to a 120% rise in album sales. 120%!!!!! And lucky us, even Sir Bob was on hand to perform I Don’t Like Mondays, even though any African artists were sent straight back to Matabeleland for even daring to suggest they should be involved. They weren’t commercially viable enough to take up space on the stage, whereas Bob and the Boomtown Rats are on every teenager’s wall. You can’t walk past a youth club in Britain without hearing 15 year olds discussing the relative merits of Mondo Bongo versus V Deep.
The general consensus on BFG is that wishy washy nonsense of “Whatever you think of the bloke, you have to admire what he’s done.” No, actually we don’t. We know all too well what’s going on in Africa. We knew it in 1984 because it was on the frigging nine o’clock news! We saw the exact same report as Geldof, but we weren’t arrogant enough to think that was our ticket to a lifetime of fame, a knighthood and a noble peace prize nomination. If every child went to bed in Africa having eaten three squares, Bob Geldof would end up in a pauper’s grave. If that isn’t an incentive to help Africa, I don’t know what is.
Bob Fucking Geldof (his official full name, at least in my house) sees the plight of Africans as a giant Bat signal, searching the skies of London for any no-talent, long forgotten nonentity who will heed it’s glow. Except there’s no bat sign lighting up the dreary skies of Ladbroke Grove, just a huge pound sign. “Magazine deals!” it throbs. “TV Shows!” it intones. And who should come running but Bob Fucking Geldof, Africa’s last resort.
BFG’s biography is a slim volume to say the least. Or it would have been if every child in Africa went to bed on a full stomach. Having left the prestigious Blackrock College in Dublin in the mid seventies, he went to work for The Georgia Straight, a left wing free paper based in Vancouver. The firey rhetoric of this hippie pamphlet was the breeding ground of Bob’s fervour, and who better than the Canadians to rabble rouse and feed the flames of revolution. It was this Baptism of fire which gave BFG the temerity to pen one of his two hits, I Don’t Like Mondays, about mass murderer Brenda Ann Spencer. Her record of “killed two, injured nine” puts her just ahead of Beth Jordache in the female killer ratings. The single hit number one in 1979 and that should have been that. Four years of Bob Fucking Geldof was four years too many, but at least it was all over, he could go back to Vancouver and take part in a protest against cuts in arable farming subsidies, or whatever the fuck Canadians care about.
But no! Wait! What is that on the horizon? Yes, it’s a tumult of human suffering, and just like the motion picture of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, BFG’s involved again. After seeing the death and starvation which was destroying African lives, Bob thought it would be a spiffing idea to do a charity record to raise money for the poor mites. And it was a brilliant idea. But why did this tone deaf, gutter mouthed wannabe pikey have to get involved past the inception? Maybe because he felt that Trevor Horn didn’t have the necessary production experience to handle a single release? Trev may have produced Welcome To The Pleasuredome which had just sold over 4 million copies, but Bob had been working on Deep In The Heart Of Nowhere, which went on to sell, er, bugger all! No? Maybe then, Bob felt that the assembled rock stars did not have the media skills to front a campaign such as this. How could shrinking violets like Boy George and Marilyn have coped with the spotlight?
Okay, maybe it was that he felt the artists needed a helping hand, with their relative lack of savvy where the music industry was concerned. True, BFG was on the slippery slope to anonymity, but surely he had some sage advice to offer greenhorns like Paul McCartney, David Bowie, James Taylor and Sting. I mean what could they have known about releasing a record? No? Wait, I’ve cracked it. I know exactly what Bob had to offer the Band Aid single. Desperation.
The starving people in Africa were desperate, but even though they had gone without food for so long that their digestive systems were breaking down their internal organs for sustenance, even though they were literally being eaten alive from the inside out, none of them could match the compounded anguish of a man who would sooner punch his own mother in the face on national television than be anonymous. Pundits marveled at the way he ignored the promotional opportunities for his own album release, preferring instead to use his time in the dimming spotlight to underline the plight of tiny starving babies. Well, duh!
Given the choice between being well know for helping the helpless to eke out their pathetic lives, or for being totally and utterly ridiculed for subjecting the British public to one of the shittest albums ever to make someone chew his own ears off, he went for the kudos?! Well, fuck me backwards if he isn’t a modern day saint. The choice he made was one that anyone else in the entire fucking universe would have. Talk about right place at the right time, he clawed his way up from the pit of eternal musical hellfire to plaster his crater face all over the newspapers and to staple his wretched anatomy to the sidecar of fame. Right place? Yeah, after a good few months frenzied assault on the public psyche.
He traveled further to get the ‘right place’ than any other no mark. He made sure he flew out First Class to the US to appear on the recording of We Are The World. One of the hopeless organizers, currently residing in the Where Are They Now files was one ‘Michael Jackson’, how he managed to get it off the ground without Bob’s help I’ll never know. But still the Shining White Hope wasn’t satisfied. He disagreed with Margaret Thatcher! Can you imagine! It was so much of a national sport at the time that we considered it as a Commonwealth Games event, but good show Bob! You tarnished that halo of hers didn’t you?
Nearly a year ago Bob slipped to his lowest point yet. He hadn’t released an album since 2001, and despite over a million letters of thanks he hadn’t finished foisting his tramp-like visage on us just yet. People were beginning to forget about Bob Geldof, so out came the Band Aid 20 single, just in time to make some money, feed some Africans and put Sir Bob back on the agenda. Fair enough it was actually Midge Ure who had the idea of releasing the record again, obviously thinking that anything Bob could flog like a dead mare, he could flog better. That one backfired didn’t it Midge? He needed you to write the frigging thing in the first place, but try and grab some of that limelight for yourself and he’d chop your arm off. The record was horrible and populated by no-mark flashes in a shit stained pan. Turin Breaks and Danny Goffey? Wow! There truly are stars in my eyes! Maybe more money would have been raised by asking each of the desperate, wannabe saviours to pay fifty grand to appear on the record. That would have seen off Lemar for a start.
Then, just as we thought it was safe to enjoy life again, Live 8 was announced. Live 8 , the most pointless, ego massaging irrelevance since, well, Band Aid 20 was an insult to anyone who ever went without to send money abroad. “We don’t want your money, we want you” intoned the fetid pile of bone that is BFG (now Sir Bob Geldof. Obviously, even though it’s an honorary title, making ‘Sir’ Bob as clueless as ‘Professor’ Phil Redmond). And so a cavalcade of pop mediocrity and reanimated corpses (what, you didn’t seriously think Roger Waters was still alive did you?) were treated to the best publicity that African suffering could buy. On average, those who performed were treated to a 120% rise in album sales. 120%!!!!! And lucky us, even Sir Bob was on hand to perform I Don’t Like Mondays, even though any African artists were sent straight back to Matabeleland for even daring to suggest they should be involved. They weren’t commercially viable enough to take up space on the stage, whereas Bob and the Boomtown Rats are on every teenager’s wall. You can’t walk past a youth club in Britain without hearing 15 year olds discussing the relative merits of Mondo Bongo versus V Deep.
The general consensus on BFG is that wishy washy nonsense of “Whatever you think of the bloke, you have to admire what he’s done.” No, actually we don’t. We know all too well what’s going on in Africa. We knew it in 1984 because it was on the frigging nine o’clock news! We saw the exact same report as Geldof, but we weren’t arrogant enough to think that was our ticket to a lifetime of fame, a knighthood and a noble peace prize nomination. If every child went to bed in Africa having eaten three squares, Bob Geldof would end up in a pauper’s grave. If that isn’t an incentive to help Africa, I don’t know what is.
Wednesday, 15 June 2005
Film Review - Tarnation dir. Jonathan Caouette
Since seeing Jonathan Caouette’s mega-low budget documentary Tarnation, I have been asked for this review several times. I tried to kid my self that my failure to deliver it was down to laziness on my part, when at the back of my mind I knew it down to lack of ability. When I review films, I try to be funny, I try to be witty, and I try to think up a really dynamite line – something nice and quotable. After seeing Tarnation, it just wouldn’t come. I couldn’t describe it, I couldn’t think of a summation which could grace the DVD cover. This is the only review I can truthfully give.
Tarnation is not a documentary, it’s not even a film. Made on Apple’s iMovies programme, it cost under $300 to make. The director compiled it using old video footage, the tragic attempt of a young boy to make sense of his life by committing it to video and watching it back, trying to convince himself, often successfully, that it was a work of fiction that stopped affecting him after the TV was turned off. At one point, a 14 year old Jonathan, who was serially abused by his grandparents and a parade of junkies that his mother brought to their home, performs an improvised monologue as a southern belle being beaten by her husband. He’s actually very good, which is even more disturbing than the pantomime unfolding before us. Caouette is depicting himself as a bit player in his sick mother’s life. She was a photographic model at the height of flower power, until she was paralysed in a fall. Her parents took the advice of a doctor who said that her ‘paralysis’ was psychosomatic and that she may benefit from a course of shock therapy. After ten years of this treatment, Renee LaBlanc was brain damaged and suffering from schizophrenia. This is the story of her and Jonathan’s life, as if it were understood and complied by a stranger.
Caouette has been portrayed as the unreliable narrator, but the film actually comes to us with a feeling of unwanted honesty. The onslaught of captions, still pictures, music and the rudimentary image manipulation which iMovies offers is like a waking nightmare at times, but it makes statements rather than begging for an emotional response. There is no Dawson’s Creek style musical manipulation, and the director has depicted himself as sympathetic, suffering, annoying, self-obsessed, selfless and selfish all at the same time. Other reviews of Tarnation have been concerned with whether this is a good film. I question these peoples understanding of what this ‘documentary’ was supposed to achieve. At the screening I saw, Jonathan Caouette was present, and answering questions about the film, and still I have no idea why this film was made, or who it was made for. The closest metaphor I can apply is that of a stomach bug. It seems that everything that happened in Jonathan’s life has been regurgitated onto film, and that the director can no more control the results than he can form a perfect turkey dinner from a pool of vomit.
I have concluded that 25 years of Hollywood film making has convinced me that film needs to be entertaining, or diverting, or that it at least has to have a point. Tarnation satisfies none of these conditions, yet I urge you to see it. Forget what you have previously expected from celluloid, it doesn’t apply here.
Tarnation is not a documentary, it’s not even a film. Made on Apple’s iMovies programme, it cost under $300 to make. The director compiled it using old video footage, the tragic attempt of a young boy to make sense of his life by committing it to video and watching it back, trying to convince himself, often successfully, that it was a work of fiction that stopped affecting him after the TV was turned off. At one point, a 14 year old Jonathan, who was serially abused by his grandparents and a parade of junkies that his mother brought to their home, performs an improvised monologue as a southern belle being beaten by her husband. He’s actually very good, which is even more disturbing than the pantomime unfolding before us. Caouette is depicting himself as a bit player in his sick mother’s life. She was a photographic model at the height of flower power, until she was paralysed in a fall. Her parents took the advice of a doctor who said that her ‘paralysis’ was psychosomatic and that she may benefit from a course of shock therapy. After ten years of this treatment, Renee LaBlanc was brain damaged and suffering from schizophrenia. This is the story of her and Jonathan’s life, as if it were understood and complied by a stranger.
Caouette has been portrayed as the unreliable narrator, but the film actually comes to us with a feeling of unwanted honesty. The onslaught of captions, still pictures, music and the rudimentary image manipulation which iMovies offers is like a waking nightmare at times, but it makes statements rather than begging for an emotional response. There is no Dawson’s Creek style musical manipulation, and the director has depicted himself as sympathetic, suffering, annoying, self-obsessed, selfless and selfish all at the same time. Other reviews of Tarnation have been concerned with whether this is a good film. I question these peoples understanding of what this ‘documentary’ was supposed to achieve. At the screening I saw, Jonathan Caouette was present, and answering questions about the film, and still I have no idea why this film was made, or who it was made for. The closest metaphor I can apply is that of a stomach bug. It seems that everything that happened in Jonathan’s life has been regurgitated onto film, and that the director can no more control the results than he can form a perfect turkey dinner from a pool of vomit.
I have concluded that 25 years of Hollywood film making has convinced me that film needs to be entertaining, or diverting, or that it at least has to have a point. Tarnation satisfies none of these conditions, yet I urge you to see it. Forget what you have previously expected from celluloid, it doesn’t apply here.
Monday, 24 January 2005
Film Review - Gigantic dir. A.J. Schnack
Despite the title, the two Johns in question would like you to know that this is not a porn film. 'Gigantic' is the story of They Might Be Giants, and what a story that is...
John Flansburgh and John Linnell met as school children in the middle class town of Lincoln, Massachussets. Linnell recalls how Flansburgh accosted him in the school hallway, and asked him to collaborate on a play which had 30 acts consisting of one line of dialogue. They were just teenagers, but the relationship between two boys just as strange as each other would continue into adulthood, and provide the world with an off kilter alternative to music, and to life.
Make no mistake about it, this documentary is a love story between the band and the audience. You will not find any semblance of objectivity in the director A.J. Schnack, or any of the dozen or so interviewees, the message being 'If you don't like They Might Be Giants, you should'. And would we have it any other way? Of course not. In true TMBG style, the story of how two boys named John met and became They Might Be Giants is peppered with animation and lyric readings by celebrity fans such as Harry Shearer and Janeane Garofalo. Director Schnack is careful to allow the auteurism of the band to enrich his raw footage.
The extras included on the DVD are superb. As well as deleted scenes and raw interview footage, there are a handful of promo videos and even radio interviews. The producers even manage to track down the performance of 'Birdhouse In Your Soul' from the Tonight Show, and the edition or Nick Rocks hosted by a very young looking John and John. The commentary by John, John, director AJ and journalist Sarah Vowell is by turns informative, insightful and hilarious, and well worth a listen. The documentary consists of studio and location interviews with the two Johns, and a supporting cast of musicians, journalists and record company and band staff who have some personal insight into this intriguing journey.
Fans are included, but the director has wisely chosen to concentrate on the people who were there seeing the band's history unfold. There is a significant amount of archive footage and early TV performances which really help to set the scene historically and do away with long expositional interviews which weigh down so many band biogs. Linnell and Flansburgh still look for all the world like two old friends who are having a great time being in a band. They treat the interviews very much in the spirit for which they were intended. You will not find their respective wives here, nor will you hear tales of debauchery or titbits of celebrity gossip. The closest we get to the offstage lives of the Johns is a rare sight of Linnell's son Henry being pushed around the park. This lack of personal information has frustrated some fans, but in a film which is such a celebration of music and particularly of haing fun with music, it would be jarring to have tell all accounts of the Johns' lives.
If you are not a fan of They Might Be Giants, you won't be reading this review anyway, so buy this DVD and get that little bit closer to the uplifting history of one of the world's most wonder filled bands.
John Flansburgh and John Linnell met as school children in the middle class town of Lincoln, Massachussets. Linnell recalls how Flansburgh accosted him in the school hallway, and asked him to collaborate on a play which had 30 acts consisting of one line of dialogue. They were just teenagers, but the relationship between two boys just as strange as each other would continue into adulthood, and provide the world with an off kilter alternative to music, and to life.
Make no mistake about it, this documentary is a love story between the band and the audience. You will not find any semblance of objectivity in the director A.J. Schnack, or any of the dozen or so interviewees, the message being 'If you don't like They Might Be Giants, you should'. And would we have it any other way? Of course not. In true TMBG style, the story of how two boys named John met and became They Might Be Giants is peppered with animation and lyric readings by celebrity fans such as Harry Shearer and Janeane Garofalo. Director Schnack is careful to allow the auteurism of the band to enrich his raw footage.
The extras included on the DVD are superb. As well as deleted scenes and raw interview footage, there are a handful of promo videos and even radio interviews. The producers even manage to track down the performance of 'Birdhouse In Your Soul' from the Tonight Show, and the edition or Nick Rocks hosted by a very young looking John and John. The commentary by John, John, director AJ and journalist Sarah Vowell is by turns informative, insightful and hilarious, and well worth a listen. The documentary consists of studio and location interviews with the two Johns, and a supporting cast of musicians, journalists and record company and band staff who have some personal insight into this intriguing journey.
Fans are included, but the director has wisely chosen to concentrate on the people who were there seeing the band's history unfold. There is a significant amount of archive footage and early TV performances which really help to set the scene historically and do away with long expositional interviews which weigh down so many band biogs. Linnell and Flansburgh still look for all the world like two old friends who are having a great time being in a band. They treat the interviews very much in the spirit for which they were intended. You will not find their respective wives here, nor will you hear tales of debauchery or titbits of celebrity gossip. The closest we get to the offstage lives of the Johns is a rare sight of Linnell's son Henry being pushed around the park. This lack of personal information has frustrated some fans, but in a film which is such a celebration of music and particularly of haing fun with music, it would be jarring to have tell all accounts of the Johns' lives.
If you are not a fan of They Might Be Giants, you won't be reading this review anyway, so buy this DVD and get that little bit closer to the uplifting history of one of the world's most wonder filled bands.
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