There's a track on Joy Division's 1979 album 'Unknown Pleasures' called 'Insight', in which the narrator - possibly Ian Curtis, possibly a character - reflects on the lost dreams of youth; how he's resolved to never fulfilling them. And how that fact no longer fills him with fear. It's a song for a 45-year-old man sung by a 22-year-old. At the 2 minute 15 second mark, immediately following a sonic shoot-out, there's a strange ribbed sound, in an album filled with extraordinary sounds, repeated three times in quick succession. Hooky's bass? Stephen Morris' snare? Something producer Martin Hannett cooked up over the mixing desk? Who knows? But that sound, at less than a second long, is more interesting than anything in the whole of Awaydays.
The 1998 cult novel the film is adapted from, however, is just fascinating. Straddling Liverpool's music and football scenes circa 1979, this complex rites-of-passage tale explores class-tourism, teenage nihilism, pack-violence, and the unspoken homo-erotic tensions in close male friendships. And the music of Joy Division. It's beautiful, poetic, and quite literary, but don't take this reviewer's word for it - take its author Kevin Sampson's: "It's beautiful, poetic, and quite literary." Sampson also wrote the screenplay, about which he says "It's taut and punchy, but poetic too. It's beautiful." Can you detect a theme here? "As a film", he says, "it's in a league of its own." Except this time, it isn't. Awaydays functions as a really good argument for why writers should never be allowed to adapt their own novels for the screen.
As in the novel, arty Carty (Nicky Bell) becomes fascinated with the hooligans at Tranmere Rovers. His passport into this knife-wielding, wedge-cut world is Elvis (Liam Boyle), a young working-class romantic-savage who stands at the intersection between two subcultures. The noose he hangs in his new wave riot of a bedroom, "a reminder of the absurdity of life and certainty of death". The unlikely pair embark on a messy, complicated bromance, before the disturbed Elvis drifts into heroin abuse and a depressive spiral, while Carty is sucked ever deeper into a lifestyle he cannot control. Can either of them bail out before something terrible happens?
Something terrible already happened - this movie: a pretentious, grubbily voyeuristic paean to football hooliganism, kitted out with ubiquitous slo-mo violence, tactical post-punk hits and retro fashions, while entirely lacking the kind of insights director Alan Clarke brought to 1988's The Firm. There are serious casting problems too: Carty is supposed to be a kind of proto-Renton from Trainspotting, selfish and ruthless - yet Bell possesses all the charisma of Rodders from 'Only Fools And Horses'. The dialogue and delivery also errs on the 'Grange Hill' side, while as is often the case with pop-period dramas, the clothes look too box-fresh and the walk-on bands suspiciously modern-sounding.
Another thing that sticks in the craw a bit is the film's use of Joy Division, a band currently enjoying a huge cultural resuscitation. As in the novel, Awaydays heavily genuflects to everybody's favourite Ballardian bards, thematically and musically. Scene after scene depicts Carty and Elvis gazing out over the Mersey, dreaming of Berlin, while enormous chemical barges drift by to doomy soundtracks from Unknown Pleasures and Closer. "Where will it end?" Elvis repeatedly quotes from 'Day Of The Lords'. While his exit, he assures Carty, will be facilitated to the strains of Curtis, Hooky and Co: "'New Dawn Fades' on low, noose around the neck, off we jolly well pop."
All this, at least, is in context. And yet... and yet had Awaydays been made by anyone other than Sampson and producer Dave Hughes (both original scenesters), and had Sampson not already doffed his cap to them, you'd swear blind its makers were cynically exploiting the music and mythos of this immensely popular band to peddle their poxy movie. As Nigel Blackwell of Birkenhead's Half Man Half Biscuit sung in 2005, "I've been to a post-punk postcard fair in me Joy Division oven gloves", a comment on the lengths merchandising will go to turn profundity into commodity. (Satire so often being a psychic projection of future reality, two years later Yo! Sushi was offering diners a 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' salmon and tuna takeaway box set.)
Awaydays' use of the group's music does seem contrived and desperate, but perhaps it isn't the film's fault. Ian Curtis has been metaphorically exhumed so many times since 1980, it's eventually bound to result in Joy fatigue. Familiarity will tear us apart. And yet nobody's really to blame. Certainly not New Order. Nor Anton Corbijn. Or even Tony Wilson, God rest him.
If anything, it's probably our fault. The market is duly rounding up every last shred of the past to cater to our insatiable nostalgia. That definitive album (until the next even more 'definitive' one), complete with 15 outtakes, seven additional remixes, 52 alternate versions and a live gig, is ours for the download. Along, no doubt, with the Ian Curtis pincushion, jelly mould and soap-on-a-rope. Where will it end, indeed?
The 1998 cult novel the film is adapted from, however, is just fascinating. Straddling Liverpool's music and football scenes circa 1979, this complex rites-of-passage tale explores class-tourism, teenage nihilism, pack-violence, and the unspoken homo-erotic tensions in close male friendships. And the music of Joy Division. It's beautiful, poetic, and quite literary, but don't take this reviewer's word for it - take its author Kevin Sampson's: "It's beautiful, poetic, and quite literary." Sampson also wrote the screenplay, about which he says "It's taut and punchy, but poetic too. It's beautiful." Can you detect a theme here? "As a film", he says, "it's in a league of its own." Except this time, it isn't. Awaydays functions as a really good argument for why writers should never be allowed to adapt their own novels for the screen.
As in the novel, arty Carty (Nicky Bell) becomes fascinated with the hooligans at Tranmere Rovers. His passport into this knife-wielding, wedge-cut world is Elvis (Liam Boyle), a young working-class romantic-savage who stands at the intersection between two subcultures. The noose he hangs in his new wave riot of a bedroom, "a reminder of the absurdity of life and certainty of death". The unlikely pair embark on a messy, complicated bromance, before the disturbed Elvis drifts into heroin abuse and a depressive spiral, while Carty is sucked ever deeper into a lifestyle he cannot control. Can either of them bail out before something terrible happens?
Something terrible already happened - this movie: a pretentious, grubbily voyeuristic paean to football hooliganism, kitted out with ubiquitous slo-mo violence, tactical post-punk hits and retro fashions, while entirely lacking the kind of insights director Alan Clarke brought to 1988's The Firm. There are serious casting problems too: Carty is supposed to be a kind of proto-Renton from Trainspotting, selfish and ruthless - yet Bell possesses all the charisma of Rodders from 'Only Fools And Horses'. The dialogue and delivery also errs on the 'Grange Hill' side, while as is often the case with pop-period dramas, the clothes look too box-fresh and the walk-on bands suspiciously modern-sounding.
Another thing that sticks in the craw a bit is the film's use of Joy Division, a band currently enjoying a huge cultural resuscitation. As in the novel, Awaydays heavily genuflects to everybody's favourite Ballardian bards, thematically and musically. Scene after scene depicts Carty and Elvis gazing out over the Mersey, dreaming of Berlin, while enormous chemical barges drift by to doomy soundtracks from Unknown Pleasures and Closer. "Where will it end?" Elvis repeatedly quotes from 'Day Of The Lords'. While his exit, he assures Carty, will be facilitated to the strains of Curtis, Hooky and Co: "'New Dawn Fades' on low, noose around the neck, off we jolly well pop."
All this, at least, is in context. And yet... and yet had Awaydays been made by anyone other than Sampson and producer Dave Hughes (both original scenesters), and had Sampson not already doffed his cap to them, you'd swear blind its makers were cynically exploiting the music and mythos of this immensely popular band to peddle their poxy movie. As Nigel Blackwell of Birkenhead's Half Man Half Biscuit sung in 2005, "I've been to a post-punk postcard fair in me Joy Division oven gloves", a comment on the lengths merchandising will go to turn profundity into commodity. (Satire so often being a psychic projection of future reality, two years later Yo! Sushi was offering diners a 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' salmon and tuna takeaway box set.)
Awaydays' use of the group's music does seem contrived and desperate, but perhaps it isn't the film's fault. Ian Curtis has been metaphorically exhumed so many times since 1980, it's eventually bound to result in Joy fatigue. Familiarity will tear us apart. And yet nobody's really to blame. Certainly not New Order. Nor Anton Corbijn. Or even Tony Wilson, God rest him.
If anything, it's probably our fault. The market is duly rounding up every last shred of the past to cater to our insatiable nostalgia. That definitive album (until the next even more 'definitive' one), complete with 15 outtakes, seven additional remixes, 52 alternate versions and a live gig, is ours for the download. Along, no doubt, with the Ian Curtis pincushion, jelly mould and soap-on-a-rope. Where will it end, indeed?