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Jockey Slut - Volume 5 Number 04/05/2002
Fight Club
Music documentaries are no more than sugar -coated homilies to their subjects, right? Wrong. Sex, Drugs & Ruck 'n' Roll attempts to reconcile style with substance once more, although with a worrying lack of porn...
If all the various different types of documentary series were to meet up for a fight it is more than clear who would win. Yes, despite the fact that they can't speak or do anything particularly useful (except live and, er, reproduce - and how hard is that?) the heavyweights of the documentary world are animals - and not even hard animals like tigers or dead fast things like cheetahs, but things that look nice. Stay in on a Saturday night and you can learn all about penguins, or if you are lucky, drunk monkeys.
By comparison, the stature of the music documentary is such that it probably wouldn't even have been invited along for the ruck - at best it's holding the coat of a series about great engineers. 'Sex, Drugs & Ruck 'N' Roll', a new series of music documentaries on Play UK, aims to change things.
"The concept behind the series," reveals producer Katie Kinnaird, "is to take ten people who've had a massive effect on music in Britain and put them into a wider context - show the cultural climate that they emerged from and how they impacted upon people. What we hope we've ended up with is ten 25-minute biographies that pick up on points of interest and also consciously take a less traveled path. We've deliberately tried to avoid making this an 'I Love 1984' sound bite/nostalgia-led thing."
Good job too. So who've we got then? On the Slut friendly side of things there's Bob Marley, Joy Division, Tupac Shakur, The Stone Roses, Prince and, if we're being generous, Madonna - 'cause it's okay to like pop these days, you know. All are subject to analysis from various friends, colleagues, social commentators, journalists (Kate Thornton and Stuart Maconie are suspiciously absent, however) and in the case of Prince, psychologists to try and explain why he went a bit mad.
Of course the key problem with any profile-led discussions, especially in these media savvy days, is that they all to frequently turn PR love-ins for the particular subject in question. The recent 'you really are great, you are, Victoria' analysis of Mrs Beckham being a case in point. So how does 'Sex, Drugs...' overcome this?
"I hope that we've been objective as possible," says Katie. "If there existed plural views on the artists, we tried to cover this. For instance, with the Stone Roses we've got Mani, but also their former manager, Paul Birch, who had paint thrown over him by the band. It's problematic these days in that people are very reticent to slag people off on film. In many cases, though, the people we've interviewed in connection with the series have been genuinely moved by the artists in question. For example, Felix Da Housecat is completely gutted that Prince isn't all that good anymore, and bands were queuing up to say how influential Joy Division were to them, and the situation was the same with the Stone Roses."
The frankly appalling series title, however, is surely nothing more than a clever ruse to catch out drunk refugees from Channel 5, who on returning home from the pub (the series goes out at 11.10pm on Friday nights) are looking for some soft porn action.
"There is a general lack of soft porn, I'm afraid," Katie notes. "music has always been associated with sex, drugs and bad behaviour. What we're trying to show is how this impacted upon the careers of the various artists, how it feeds into their music. The themes highlighted in the title are basically a good window into this, but we're not using it as a basis to be sensationalist of judgmental."
Well, it's got to be better than 'The Secret Life Of a Field Mouse', hasn't it?
Sean O'Connell
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