The Only Way Is Up:A UK Pop Map of the Eighties.

"Eighties, I'm living in the eighties" - Eighties, Killing Joke.

BBC4's three part series Smashing Hits! The 80s Pop Map of Britain and Ireland (presented by Midge Ure and Kim Appleby - both ends of the decade covered there) was really just an excuse to show more clips of a time when British music was dominant, innovative, catchy as fuck, and exploding in so many different directions that it was often pretty difficult to keep track of.

As Midge and Kim drive up and down motorways mucking around, bantering (Kim compliments Ure's 'well groomed moustache' in the Vienna video and Midge ribs her about her former penchant for shoulderpads), and singing to each other we get to visit London, Coventry, Sheffield, Glasgow, Dublin, Rhyl (!), and Manchester to discover what made the music from those different cities stand out in that particular decade. There's a look at key influences, brief mentions of social factors, and even briefer considerations of political events but, mostly, it's a light hearted, and fun, look back to the decade in which I came of musical age.

So I was bound to like it. Nostalgia is strong. Memories get more melancholic the further we move from them and there were a couple of occasions in which I was so reminded of my younger, more innocent, self that I ended up wiping tears from my eyes.

Depeche Mode - New Life

More about that later. We start in post-punk London with Gary Kemp, Rusty Egan, and Steve Strange holding court about The Blitz Club ("Studio 54 for the poor" according to Kemp) and the Sex boutique on King's Road and reminiscing about bands they were in like Visage and The Rich Kids and bands they probably wished they were in like Kraftwerk. Footage plays of clubbers dancing to The Model and Marco Pirroni talks about the two other leading influences in the scene:- David Bowie and Roxy Music.

Kraftwerk - The Model

Roxy Music - Ladytron

Spandau Ballet - To Cut A Long Story Short

"From half-spoken shadows emerges a canvas. A kiss of light breaks to reveal a moment when all mirrors are redundant. Listen to the portrait of the dance of perfection: the Spandau Ballet" is the now infamous introduction given by broadcaster and Face journalist Robert Elms for their early gig at the Scala. It's something that was immediately filed away in Pseud's Corner but To Cut A Long Story Short is still way better than you probably remember it to be.

It retains traces of Spandau Ballet's former iteration as post-punk outfit The Gentry but with guitars replaced by synths as the dominant instrument, and it gives no clue as to the band they'd soon be, smart suited balladeers crooning out over erection sections at school discos and provincial nightclubs up and down the country.

Many a young lady would have what felt like a frozen Mars bar thrust into her gut unsolicited during True during the decade. Nobody had a last dance to Adam and the Ants. That's when the teenage boys joined the floor to pretend to be dandy highwaymen. Smashing Hits actually bothers to tell a little of Adam Ant's story.

Adam And The Ants - Xerox

Adam And The Ants - Dog Eat Dog

Quite rare as normally that's jettisoned in favour of tales of expensive videos, a look at his fantastic outfits, and the story of the time he lobbed a car alternator through a pub window in Kentish Town because people in there had laughed at how he was dressed. He'd obviously forgotten that 'ridicule is nothing to be scared of'. 

With songs like Zerox and Car Trouble, the Ants were not making any serious inroads into the early eighties post-punk scene so, for the price of a 'grand', Malcolm McLaren got on board as an advisor. He suggested they ditch the leather gear and dress up as pirates and also played them The Royal Drummers of Burundi. A sound which, as we all know now, Adam and the Ants incorporated to huge success.

They made it. Along with The Police they were THE band for school kids at the time. I know. I was one. Spandau Ballet hit it big too, and they were soon joined by Duran Duran and Culture Club in the ranks of the pop elite. Cue vintage footage of Noel Edmonds interviewing Boy George and the not particularly contentious idea that the first issue of Smash Hits, The Face going colour, and, most of all, the beginning of MTV were the three main motors that moved the music scene fully into the day-glo eighties.

Adam And The Ants - Stand And Deliver

Soft Cell - Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

Spandau Ballet and, far more so, Duran Duran were soon making statement videos, Rio and Wild Boys still look ridiculous today, and it wasn't long before Gary Kemp was done up in a white suit pretending to be Al Green or Marvin Gaye. True, at least, was a memorable tune. The same could not be said for much of their output from that era.

I'd never really spent a lot of time thinking about Gary Kemp's love life. Or any to be honest. But I was both surprised and disappointed (my teenage self would have been utterly distraught) to discover that it was, possibly - the guilty parties remain coy, written for Clare Grogan. Beautiful, cool, Clare Grogan. Turning up as Ian Beale's 'love interest' in Eastenders, of course, remains an all time low but - Gary Kemp. He was in uncool Spandau Ballet. She was in the brilliant Altered Images. We'll come to them later.

As British pop took over America, like in the sixties, the pressure of playing the pop game was too much for some of those involved. Under pressure of constant touring, Adam and the Ants imploded at the 1981 Children's Royal Variety performance at the London Palladium. Sandwiched between Rod Hull and Emu and The Krankies on a bill for the times, Kevin Mooney threw his bass to the floor and totally gave up on miming. Adam Ant did not look best pleased.

Luckily for Mooney, Mr Ant did not have an alternator handy that evening. We'd be back in London later in the series to pick up on the scene that developed following the post-punk implosion and as a placeholder we signed out with Soft Cell's tender and beautiful Say Hello, Wave Goodbye. A song that captures the feel of old, romantic, seedy Soho. A Soho that's all but disappeared now.

Toots And The Maytals - 54 - 46 Was My Number

The Upsetters - Return Of Django

Midge and Kim head north-west to Coventry, the UK's spiritual home of ska. Pauline Black talks about being the only black kid in her school at Romford and laughs about being, probably, the only black person who was introduced to ska music by white friends. In her case the Dagenham skins!

Pauline Black's journey to Coventry was not much more than one hundred miles but others came from much further afield to work on rebuilding the city following the huge war damage Coventry suffered. Immigrants from the Caribbean would buy reggae music in an underground shop owned by the unlikely figure of Pete Waterman. One, future Special Neville Staple who'd moved to Warwickshire from Jamaica at the age of five, used to hide there when he was bunking off school and when Waterman's back was turned would nick records off of him.

Waterman employed MCs to toast in his club too. It was a long way from Steps, Sinitta, and Rick Astley. Black, Staple, and Waterman all crop up to talk about this formative time in 'Cov' and there's even footage of a young, but already front toothless, Jerry Dammers playing Professor Longhair and Fats Domino tunes on the piano and cracking open beers.

The Specials (Dawning Of A) New Era

The Coventry Automatics - Too Much Too Young

Dammers and Hall formed The Coventry Automatics, adding Staple as a roadie to begin with, but their mix of reggae and punk attracted no major label interest whatsoever. So Dammers started his own label. The soon to be legendary Two-Tone. Run from a suburban house in Coventry, like a West Midlands Motown. The very first release, Gangsters by The Specials (The Coventry Automatics had chosen a less location specific name even if the sound remained rooted in the locale), was a hit and soon other Two-Tone records followed.

Special Lynval Golding invited The Selecter to the label, Rhoda Dakar talks of The Bodysnatchers supporting Shane MacGowan's pre-Pogues Nipple Erectors and ending up on TOTP after only two gigs (no wonder, Do Rock Steady was and is a great tune), and Pauline Black talks about her experiences with racism, recession, and the National Front sieg heiling at gigs and recruiting at school gates. Staple weighs in with a story about being gobbed at on stage.

It's a time I remember well and I feel fortunate that the music of Two-Tone spoke to me so strongly. I'd been won over so completely by the sound I could not fail to follow the political message but I'd like to think even if I'd thought the music was absolute pony I'd have still realised that the message was a better one than that being put out by the likes of the NF at the time.

The Specials - Gangsters

The Selecter - The Selecter

The Bodysnatchers - Do Rock Steady

Madness - The Prince

The Specials - Ghost Town

The song that best encapsulated the malaise, and the deterioration of working class towns up and down the country at the time, was Ghost Town. As riots broke out in Brixton, Leicester, Leeds, and elsewhere, Ghost Town knocked Michael Jackson's One Day In Your Life off the UK number one slot. While the country was rioting some were glued to the television watching Charles and Diana getting married.

Like now, the country was split and soon The Specials were too. Two-Tone, both the label and the movement, slowly disintegrated and Madness (a London band who'd signed for the label before departing for Stiff after their first single, The Prince) went on to become more of a pop band. A hugely successful one who went on to have more than twenty Top 20 hits.

Not that much of this impinged on Midge Ure's consciousness. Midge didn't get ska so he'd handed that section over to Kim. By the time they reached Sheffield, Midge was back in control, back in his comfort zone. David Bowie once described the music of Sheffield as "the sound of the future" and Glenn Gregory and Martyn Ware from Heaven 17 were on hand to josh with Ure about the city's musical heritage like the likely lads they are.

From 1979 onwards, Maggie Thatcher had set out to heavily cut the steel industry and that ended up leaving lots of mucky old industrial buildings available for cheap rent and these were the breeding grounds for a music scene that, despite The Human League covering Gary Glitter's Rock'n'Roll, looked far more to Brian Eno and Kraftwerk than it did rock and roll.

Gregory says he found guitars old fashioned and The Human League even went so far as to write a musical manifesto - (1) only electronic music (2) no samples (3) no love songs - that, along with Oakey's spectacular asymmetrical hairstyle, and the passion for brutalist architecture meant that the sound of Sheffield was, like Bowie had said, the sound of the future.

The Human League - Path Of Least Resistance

The Human League - Being Boiled

On first hearing Being Boiled, Bob Last of Edinburgh's Fast Records remarked "fucking hell, that bassline's epic" and compared it to Bootsy Collins! Bands like Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA added to the Sheffield industrial sound but one local band, Vice Versa, were struggling and after calling in Trevor Horn, changing direction, and changing their name created a Sheffield sound that was very different to The Human League.

The Human League - The Dignity Of Labour

The Human League - Rock'n'Roll

Heaven 17 = (We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang

ABC - Poison Arrow

Vice Versa became ABC, the Yorkshire Temptations, gold lame suit and all. It wasn't long before people were talking about the perfection of their pop sound and though their time in the sun was short, songs like Poison Arrow and The Look of Love are instant classics even now.

The post-industrial consensus was crumbling a little as bands from Sheffield admitted they actually liked funk groups like Parliament and disco acts like Chic. Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware left The Human League, and with Glenn Gregory formed Heaven 17, and The Human League got 'the girls' (Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall) in after, legend has it, Oakey spotted them dancing idiosyncratically in Sheffield's Crazy Daisy nightclub!

ABC - The Look Of Love

The Human League - Don't You Want Me?

Heaven 17's (We Don't Need No) Fascist Groove Thang stalled just outside the Top 40 in 1981 (written, Gregory recalls, as the band were concerned about nuclear attacks and the rise of fascism) but that year The Human League scored the Christmas number one (holding off both Cliff Richard's Daddy's Home and Abba's One Of Us) with the deathless, and utterly fantastic, classic Don't You Want Me? 

By April 1983, Heaven 17 nearly equalled that feat when Temptation reached number two. A song they describe as "based on the Lord's Prayer about sexual gratification that just keeps building like an Escher staircase". The Human League's third album Dare would go on to be a critically acclaimed global hit that, Don't You Want Me? aside, churned out another three massive hits in The Sound of The Crowd, Love Action, and Open Your Heart. They carried on having hits well into the nineties but they never reached the commercial, or critical, peak of Dare again.

Heaven 17 - Temptation

The Proclaimers - I'm On My Way

Two hundred and fifty miles north of Sheffield in Glasgow they were getting down to a very different beat indeed in the eighties. Kim gets Midge to sing Vienna in a Scottish accent for a laugh, there's a blast of The Proclaimers just to remind us where we are, and then it's time for another quick history lesson.

The river Clyde is the artery that made Glasgow the second city of Empire and it brought in sides of rock'n'roll, soul, and country from America too. Under the Tories, Scotland had been particularly badly hit by recession and out of this mix of exposure to Americana like The Byrds and having lots of free time to practice due to lack of work sprang bands like Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, The Bluebells, Altered Images, and Hue & Cry.

The Byrds - All I Really Wanna Do

Orange Juice - What Presence?!

In Orange Juice, Edwyn Collins mixed his love of The Byrds with the sounds of punk and disco and in interview we can see a cocksure young Edwyn making bold, and later to be proved untrue, claims that he wouldn't be moving to London. Clare Grogan's got a far more interesting story to tell than one about Gary Kemp (Gary Kemp, ffs) writing love songs about her.

Altered Images asked her sister to join them first. She wasn't interested but she mentioned that her little sister, Clare, was a big fan of Siouxsie and the Banshees so she'd probably do it. Which, of course, she did. Brilliantly.

Altered Images went on to support the Banshees on tour and bassist Steve Severin even ended up producing the band. John Peel picked up on them during a gig in Leeds but then a disastrous coincidence nearly saw them fall at the first hurdle. Their debut single, titled Dead Pop Stars, was released the exact same day that John Lennon was assassinated outside the Dakota in New York.

It reached number sixty-seven but they'd hoped for better. The follow up, A Day's Wait, failed to even bother the charts but the single after that, Happy Birthday, became their breakthrough and remains a staple at birthday parties to this day (perhaps third to Happy Birthday To You by the Hill sisters and Stevie Wonder's MLK tune). Old footage of it being performed on TOTP actually made me cry with joy.

Altered Images - Don't Talk To Me About Love

Altered Images - Happy Birthday

Altered Images - I Could Be Happy

Aztec Camera - Oblivious

Orange Juice - Rip It Up

It was so joyous, so happy, so young, so positive. Positivity as a reaction to the economic peril that Thatcher's policies had inflicted on eighties Scotland. Motown had been huge in Glasgow too and Pat Kane talks about his love of The Temptations' Ball of Confusion and Stevie Wonder's Living in the City before we're treated to a blast of Hue & Cry's Labour of Love. 

I'd have struggled, back then, to draw a link between Motown and Hue & Cry. Hue & Cry were not my scene at all and though I love the sentiment the song still doesn't do much for me. I found their fellow travellers Deacon Blue (don't worry, I won't share Dignity) even more dull but I did have a small soft spot for Wet Wet Wet whose Wishing I Was Lucky wasn't a bad song. By the time they were covering Love Is All Around I'd lost all interest.

Hue & Cry - Labour Of Love

There's a brief coda to the Scottish sojourn, more an aside really, as Kim visits Govan's Grand Ole Opry and hears Scottish music described as "music to get drunk to" or music to cry over. The Proclaimers' Sunshine on Leith is cited as a prime eighties exemplar. Perhaps there's some condition in broadcasting that if you make a programme about the music of Scotland you have to include at least two Proclaimers songs.

In Dublin, Midge and Kim kick off with Thin Lizzy's mix of hard rock and Celtic mysticism (Midge Ure actually briefly played guitar for Thin Lizzy) before taking a brief detour north of the border to Belfast and Derry. There's footage of The Undertones playing My Perfect Cousin but you know what that sounds like and there's also evidence that Stiff Little Fingers were The Clash of Northern Ireland but The Clash who actually fucking lived it. 1970s Belfast would have been a considerably more volatile place than 1970s Ladbroke Grove!

Stiff Little Fingers - At The Edge

U2 - The Ocean

U2 - New Year's Day

Back in Dublin, a city he clearly adores, Ure hooks up with his old Band Aid chum Bob Geldof  who swears like a trooper (a tonic for the trooper?) as they focus on the biggest band to come out of Ireland ever. U2. Who it's easy to forget were once, a very long time ago, actually pretty good.

I know, it's hard to believe. Early days saw U2, like many of their contemporaries, ripping off Bowie, Joy Division, and Echo and the Bunnymen but by the time they had their first top ten hit, New Year;'s Day, in 1983 they'd developed a sound uniquely their own - whether you liked it or not.

The Edge's (what's his real name again?) guitar sound had something very Irish/Celtic about it. You can hear it particularly in Pride (In The Name Of Love) which wasn't as good as earlier songs like I Will Follow and 11'o'Clock Tick Tock (according to my mate Vicki about being locked out of a Fall gig!) but far better than the albums full of dross they've been churning out for the last two decades.

They went from a decent post-punk band to pompous oafs in leather waistcoats and, ultimately, complete irrelevance. That they tried to mitigate this irrelevance with faux irony only compounded what a dreary prospect they'd become. As they say, though, nobody ever lost money by underestimating the poor taste of the public and as sure as they filled stadiums they emptied souls.

There's film of Bono shaking hands with Vladimir Putin and Kofi Annan and then we get to see him tie his hair back to look like Julian Sands in a critically disparaged erotic thriller from the next decade (yes, Boxing Helena) before Geldof puts the icing on this particularly shitty cake by getting the bands Love and Bread mixed up.

It's not often that cutting to a segment about Clannad and Enya could be described as an improvement but anything to get away from U2. The green valleys of Donegal, harps, hairspray, intense Irish eyes, an ethereal air, and, oh fuck it, Bono's rocked up again. Looking 'soulful'. Fuck off, man. Stop giving your albums away for free to people who don't want them, stop turning up at other people's parties, and stop taking newly famous musicians to one side to give them 'the talk'. It's bad enough you ruined your own band. Stop ruining everybody else's!

Enya - Orinoco Flow

I like Irish music (tin whistles, bodhrans, and even totally cliched fiddly diddly shit) but Enya and Clannad I struggle with. Moya Brennan comes across as absolutely lovely but trad Irish music mixed with a 10cc style production is something I could probably have managed to live without. I was clearly in a minority however. In 1988 Enya's Orinoco Flow, weirdly, spent three weeks at number one of the UK charts. Sandwiched between Whitney Houston and Robin Beck's The First Time!

The eighties wasn't the decade you think it was. It wasn't all brick mobile phones, big hair, gender bending, and people playing synths with their suit jacket sleeves rolled up. A cursory stroll round any medium sized market town would have found plenty of people in denim jackets covered in Judas Priest patches and crusties listening to Ozric Tentacles. There was also a strange passion for faux-Celltic claptrap as evinced by Enya's success. I'm surprised The Waterboys didn't show up on the programme.

Instead of that Midge Ure and Bob Geldof don't miss a chance to reminisce about Band Aid and Live Aid. As well they might. It was a demonstrably good thing and they've earned the right to be proud of what they did. But that's a whole other story and it's one you already know and one I have no intention of going into here except to say that I had hitherto been completely unaware that Do They Know It's Christmas was a rip off of the Z Cars theme tune. Oh, and also that many on the Band Aid record (Sting, Paul Weller, Wham!, Bananarama, and Paul Young) are all conspicuous by their absence elsewhere in this series.

To Wales next and a very brief history of Welsh pop music. Bonnie Tyler may not have had the looks of Keren Woodward (or the hair of Nick Rhodes) but she could belt out a tune. As could Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones but we were making a very specific stop in the north Welsh seaside town of Rhyl for a chat with Mike Peters from The Alarm, thankfully bandana free for once.

The Alarm - Deeside

There's some cliched shit about valleys and choirs, a blast of Total Eclipse of the Heart (I saw Bonnie brave the bottles that later broke Meatloaf's nose at Reading festival in 1988, she was a trooper), some stuff about English holiday cottages being burnt down by Welsh extremists, some more positive things about the hugely successful campaign to boost the Welsh language, and then a look at how bands who sung in the Welsh language, most Welsh bands at the time, were destined for obscurity.

The crowds in Wales went mad but, elsewhere, nobody could understand them! The Alarm sang in English and mixed the influence of The Sex Pistols with that of folk musicians from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan and when Public Image Ltd pulled out of a TOTP performance, The Alarm stood in with Sixty Eight Guns. Still a great song.

Soon their mouth organs and, to nick one of their own jokes, so much hairspray that they're held responsible for the hole in the ozone layer became a familiar sight even as their music became less and less interesting. Mike Peters came across really well though. Articulate, poetic, friendly, and self-aware as he recounted how the Welsh music scene had previously been based in the southern cities of Cardiff and Swansea so to come from Rhyl and make it big was really something.

Maffia Mr Huws - Cysylltiad

The Alarm - Sixty Eight Guns

Catatonia - Road Rage

Sadly, for this programme, the flowering of Welsh pop with the Manic Street Preachers, Super Furry Animals, Catatonia, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, and, if you must, The Stereophonics didn't really happen until the nineties but it was bands like The Alarm, as well as Welsh language stalwarts like Datblygu and Anhrefn, that created the foundation for those groups to have such success. Or not, outrageously, in the case of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.

Two hundred and fifty miles away from Rhyl in London things were moving in a very different direction. The aftermath of the new romantic scene had thrown up the rather cringily named 'sophistipop' scene and bands like Swing Out Sister and Matt Bianco (famously called a "bunch of wankers" live on Saturday Superstore) joined with Sade and Paul Weller's post-Jam outfit The Style Council in creating a soundtrack for yuppies to drink champagne and shout into mobile phones to.

The Jam - Town Called Malice

The Style Council - Shout To The Top

Sade - Smooth Operator

Sade - Your Love Is King

Most of their fans weren't wine bar frequenting, pearl necklace (fnarr, fnarr) wearing Sloanes but simply working class people. Aspirational to use an utterly devalued adjective. I was a teenager throughout most of the eighties so wine bars, jazz, and grown up romance wasn't stuff I had the foggiest idea about. 

So most of this music meant little to me. I did see how much the poppier stuff wound up the 'real' music fans though so took to wearing a Five Star badge. Five Star were an absolute curio and they seemed to anger people in a borderline racist way. Buster Pearson from Romford was such a huge Jackson Five fan he got his kids to form a band who, remarkably, went on to have twelve top ten hits in the UK - the best, by far, being System Addict. Not bad for an act who got their big break on Pebble Mill at One!

Five Star - System Addict

Five Star were pure pop. Nothing sophisticated about it. But they existed at the same time and their self made, independent, story had more of a political dimension than Swing Out Sister or Matt Bianco. The Style Council aside, London's sophistipop (it hurts just typing it) was hugely apolitical.

It was different in Manchester where ex-Frantic Elevator Mick Hucknall's Simply Red released Money's Too Tight (To Mention) as their debut single in 1985 before going on to follow it with a steady stream of ever more boring singles. Holding Back The Years is so dull that it seems to slow down time and suck everything around it into a vortex of utter despair. I daren't risk listening to it. Some things you can't come back from!

Luckily, there were much more interesting things than Simply Red happening in Manchester. The Smiths and The Fall are passed over in favour of the Factory bands but that's ok, Morrissey's a vile racist dickhead these days and The Fall, despite being historically my favourite band, were hardly regular chart botherers. 

Shaun Ryder talks about the influence of punk and Bowie (you do start to spot a theme in eighties music whatever the city) and how when Happy Mondays formed some of them were still at school. Peter Hook pops up to note that Paul Ryder used to be his postman and would pass early Happy Mondays tapes to him.

New Order - Temptation

Happy Mondays were around a very long time before they found success but the story of Manchester music in the eighties really begins with Ian Curtis' suicide in May 1980. Curtis liked Kraftwerk, Donna Summer, and Giorgio Moroder but their influence was never particularly apparent in the music of Joy Division.

That changed with New Order. In May 1982 the Hacienda, part of Tony Wilson's vision for Manchester, opened but it struggled. People didn't want to go there. It was big, it was cold, and the DJ booth, we're informed, was a 'joke'. The fact New Order were getting huge wasn't even enough to pull in the punters. There's a great story about New Order refusing to mime on TOTP for Blue Monday. The no show led to the record dropping out of the charts so New Order became the first band to perform live on TOTP with the same song. After staying up all night the night before their performance could be most kindly described as 'unenthusiastic' and Blue Monday immediately dropped ten places in the charts. When the charts still mattered.

New Order - Blue Monday

Away from the TOTP studio, house and techno sides from Detroit and Chicago were being dropped on the Hac dancefloor, many of them brought back from Illinois by Mike Pickering on his trips to the US. Similar things were happening in London and we're treated to S'Express' Mark Moore talking about his mum's love of Stax, Motown, and James Brown and Moore himself DJing at The Mudd Club and mixing up Swiss oddballs Yello with Dead or Alive.

Pre-acid house boom the sound that was taking over London, at least gay London, was that of hi-NRG and venues like the Astoria and Heaven were the birthing grounds for it. Hazell Dean, from near Chelmsford, was one of those unlikely pop stars Britain's so good at unearthing. From an early performance on Cheggers Plays Pop she went on have an 'indie' hit with Searchin'  before calling in Stock, Aitken, and Waterman for its follow up Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go). A song, described at the time by my mate Bugsy, as Blue Monday as if remixed by a clown!

Hazell Dean - Searchin'

Hazell Dean - Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go)

In the US, hi-NRG had been given the rather fantastic name of 'boystown' and Stock, Aitken, and Waterman (who'd clearly moved on from his ska era) loved boystown. Waterman called it "modern Motown" and set about transforming it into pop music suitable for teenagers. Making its homosexuality less 'threatening' you could say, or sanitising it. 

After Hazell had given them their first pop hit in 1984 they followed up with Sonia, Rick Astley, Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, and the show's co host Kim Appleby and her sister Mel. None of these are acts who will trouble compilers of lists of the best albums ever but all of them were huge at the time. You really could not escape them - and many wanted to.

The advent of CDs had pushed the music industry away from singles to albums and SAW exploited the space that'd been left by filling it with Sinitta singing Toy Boy and Kylie's cover of The Locomotion. They went on to produce thirteen number one singles in a style Waterman (who, quite bizarrely namedrops Bogshed during his interview) describes as "northern soul records with a drum machine".

But, far away from the manufactured pop stars and formation dancing of TOTP and SAW, the house music scene was still rising. In 1987 Paul Oakenfold and his mates come back from Ibiza, that same year Steve 'Silk' Hurley topped the UK charts with Jack Your Body, and then, in '88, ecstasy fuelled the second summer of love. Rick Astley didn't cut it. Nor did Taffy.

Steve "Silk" Hurley - Jack Your Body

Taffy - I Love My Radio

S'Express - Theme From S'Express

M/A/R/R/S (Pump Up The Volume), Bomb The Bass (Beat Dis), and S'Express (with their Rose Royce sampling theme tune) did. They stood up with the best American imports but  Radio 1 was not interested. These records received very little airplay, often they didn't have videos (as any regular Chart Show viewer will recall), and yet both S'Express and M/A/R/R/S had number one singles.

A lot of these records were made by black people and as Jazzie B says, and has been proven, many black people at the time were subtly excluded from clubs, So a parallel scene cropped up, inspired by Jamaican sound systems and from this, Jazzie's Soul II Soul were born. They started selling clothes in Camden and then went on to making their own records. Mark Moore talks about London's eclecticism but Jazzie B's experiences show that it was not as open to all as it should have been.

Sugar Minott - Good Thing Going

Soul II Soul - Keep On Movin'

Soul II Soul - Back To Life

As Soul II Soul began to prove London's dancefloor dominance, in Manchester, and in Hulme specifically, A Guy Called Gerald hit back with the timeless Voodoo Ray. Originally titled Voodoo Rage but Gerald ran out of sample space (!), it reached number twelve in the charts but its future ubiquity and infectiousness resulted in Voodoo Ray being termed THE British house anthem.

A Guy Called Gerald - Voodoo Ray

Happy Mondays - Wrote For Luck

Which is fair enough. When acid house broke in Manchester, Happy Mondays kept hold of the guitars (Shaun Ryder talks of loving Captain Beefheart, The Ramones, Frank Zappa, and even Showaddywaddy) but they weren't missing out on the clubbing - and definitely not the drugs. All the bands on Factory, even the shit ones Ryder asserts, were cool.

His were one of the coolest, and best. When Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses both appeared on the same episode of Top Of The Pops in November 1989 (a show I remember watching and being very excited by, if a little confused by Kirsty McColl's guest appearance) it seemed like a victory for Manchester, a victory for our music against the yuppie music, and even a victory for punk spirit, if not turgid punk rock music.

The takeaway message I got from Smashing Hits! The 80s Pop Map of Britain and Ireland was that Britain may have crap cuisine, crap weather, and an absolute shower of shit running the country, but when it comes to music we're really fucking good at it. To quote a huge band of the eighties strangely absent from this programme, give a little respect!

Happy Party - Twenty Four Hour Party People

The Stone Roses - Fool's Gold

Happy Mondays - Hallelujah

Poivrons Rouges:The Eye of Felix Vallotton.

Poivrons rouges! Red peppers! Food. It's always food. I've quietened down my Facebook usage considerably of late (disappointed with algorithms, people leaving, and lack of response to posts more than any genuine worries about data mining) but one thing that I'm keeping with, for now, is my album of art snaps:- 'Taking a line for a walk. Journeys into the art of London' and following Saturday's visit to the Royal Academy to see the Felix Vallotton:Painter of Disquiet exhibition I posted four photos of four of my favourite paintings on show there.

The one that got all the chat was 1915's Red Peppers. Or, to give it its French name - all works were subtitled in Vallotton's chosen language - Poivrons rouges. It's no surprise. For whilst I'm not in any doubt of the drooling, gluttonous nature of my friends (and indeed 'friends'), Red Peppers is a remarkable painting. To my eyes, it's the missing link between Chardin and Cezanne and, to me, that's no small beer.

One friend said it looked like a photograph and then went on to say she was unhappy with the red on the knife. A debate ensued. Was the red on the knife a reflection of the pepper on its steel surface? Did it improve the painting? Did it make it worse? I thought it was a reflection, rather than juice from the pepper itself, and I thought that it made the painting. Not everyone agreed. Never in my life has a discussion about a painting of a piece of cutlery caused such heated debate.

The curators of Painter of Disquiet had a third explanation. Rather than reflection or actual pepper, could the red represent blood? Vallotton painted Red Peppers during World War I and was this his way of symbolically showing us that although his gaze may be focused on the interior and the still life, his mind was very much aware of what was going on elsewhere, events that were happening across France that were anything but still?

 

Red Peppers (1915)

The Coffee Service (1887)

We could argue the toss until the red peppers overripen and go soft and mushy but what's not up for debate is Vallotton's skill with a paintbrush or, and you only have to look at 1887's Coffee Service to see this, his masterful way of rendering reflections in steel surfaces. This unassuming painting is as if Vallotton has brought Giorgio Morandi's cups, spoons, and assorted kitchenware into sharper focus and is worthy of a place on the top table (yes, table) with Avigdor Arikha's simple yet exquisite Sam's Spoon.

But lovingly rendered representations of prosaic household goods is far from Vallotton's only gift to the art world. Despite being known as the 'very singular Vallotton' he's a thorny artist to pin down and at times, while passing through the small yet busy rooms of the RA's upper gallery, it's almost as if we're looking at paintings by completely different artists.

There's Vallotton the portraitist with an unflinching eye for detail, Vallotton the painter of nudes, and Vallotton the expressionist riffing on Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde. That Vallotton is very close to the Vallotton of fauvism, the one who seems more aligned with Andre Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck than Vilhelm Hammershoi or Johannes Vermeer, both of whom sprang to mind looking at some of Vallotton's earlier paintings. Towards the end of both his career and this show there are even nods towards both impressionism and abstraction.

It'd be unfair to accuse Felix Vallotton of being a weather vane that blew in the wind of popular taste and client demand but, at the same time, he was definitely not an artist, like for example Cezanne, set on a predetermined course towards an ultimate destination. There was no glittering castle on the horizon of Vallotton's Oz.

Self-portrait at the Age of Twenty (1885)

Juliette Lacour (1886)

For Vallotton, it was about the journey more than it was about the destination. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1865 he set off for Paris at the age of just sixteen. A city that would see anarchist bombings, assassinations, and all manner of political upheaval as the century neared its close.

While, at the same time, cementing its reputation as the undisputed arts capital of the world. Vallotton's early work combined sardonic woodcut vignettes lampooning bourgeois hypocrisy with Bonnard/Vuillard style riots of colour and then, in 1899, he married Gabrielle Rodriques-Henriques, a wealthy art dealer's daughter, and turned his back on his bohemian Left Bank lifestyle and allowed his output to take an altogether more singular path, finally earning his sobriquet.

At least that's the rough narrative. Vallotton seems to dip back and forwards in style as suits him and, as a relative beginner, to his work it was sometimes difficult to make chronological sense of his artistic development. It was never, however, difficult to admire his work. His early portraits were made after rejecting a place at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in favour of the informal, and more liberal, Academie Julian.

Yet the crystalline precision of these paintings suggest he was not entirely free from formality. The young confident, serious painter, still only twenty, stares intensely and dispassionately almost beyond the viewer. The background a nondescript inky darkness worthy of Rembrandt. Juliette Lacour, on the other hand, and accused by a friend of mine of having a 'bad hair day', looks downbeat and pensive. Her resigned demeanour echoed in the background of unforgiving smoke stacks and caliginous clouds.

In 1892's The Sick Girl, Vallotton showed he could turn his hand to tableaux as well as portraiture. A disinterested maid all but ignores the patient as she brings her refreshments and Vallotton, himself, has put as much passion into the chair, china, and bedside cabinet as he has the protagonists.

The Sick Girl (1892)

The Five Painters (1902-03)

Another ensemble piece, The Five Painters, shows Pierre Bonnard, Edouward Vuillard, and the lesser known Charles Cottet and Ker-Xavier Roussel with Vallotton, either aloof or somehow detached, looking over them from a slight distance. The group were known as the 'Nabis' (prophets) and due to Vallotton's Swiss birth he was 'the foreign Nabi'.

It wasn't just the circumstances of his birth that set him apart in real life. It was also his determination not to be stymied or hemmed in by the the Nabis doctrinaire diktats. The Nabis advocated an anti-natural approach to painting and felt art should be about emotion, not replication of the external world. Vallotton joined them in being inspired by the woodblock prints of Japanese artists like Katsushika Hokusai and Kitagawa Utamaro and, like his fellow Nabis, went on to make use of flattened perspectives and simplified forms but, unlike his fellow Nabis, he strove very quickly to break from his self-imposed shackles and was soon experimenting with other techniques and styles.

Moonlight and The Waltz, both from the 1890s, are floaty and ethereal and definitely speak more of emotion than they are tethered in any form of reality. Bathing on a Summer Evening broke so far from any tradition of realism that the work was "incomprehensible to the public who saw it at the Salons des Independants" in 1893 and even Toulouse-Lautrec, who was one who did 'get' it, wondered if the police may come and remove it.

Moonlight (c.1895)

The Waltz (1893)

Bathing on a Summer Evening (1892-93)

Three Bathers (1894)

Street Scene in Paris (c.1897)

1897's Street Scene in Paris is said to be one of Vallotton's most emblematic of the Nabis aesthetic. Much of it reveals the unpainted cardboard surface, the figures are cropped in unorthodox fashion, and the whole thing appears as if painted from above therefore giving the figures a flat, and unrealistic, look. As it Vallotton were removed, detached from his subjects. An observer rather than a partaker in life's rich pagaentry.

But elsewhere, Vallotton seems to be jumping right in and looking his subjects straight in the eye. The Woman in a Purple Dress under the Lamp is believed to be Helene Chatenay, a young seamstress who Vallotton had a seven year relationship with before abandoning her in 1899 for Rodrigues-Henriques (for the money, it's insinuated). Chatenay is caught in a moment of deep thought, almost as solitary as one of Edward Hopper's characters. Perhaps she's aware that Vallotton will soon leave her.

Woman in a Purple Dress under the Lamp (1898)

Self-portrait (1897)

Laziness (1896)

Not long after his marriage to Rodrigues-Henriques, Vallotton was involved in another abandonment. This time it was woodcuts that were given up on. So that Vallotton could pursue what he considered his true vocation. Painting. 

His last series of woodcuts, shown at the World's Fair in Paris in 1900 showed firework displays, picnic lunches, and recreations of Algerian street scenes. Building up to this, Vallotton had formed a close association with the artistic and literary review La Revue blanche (founded by the Natanson brothers:- Alexandre, Alfred, and Thadee) which included contributions by such major names as Marcel Proust, Alfred Jarry, Stephane Mallarme, Claude Debussy, and Erik Satie.

Vallotton, in the big league now, painted portraits of some of the principal players like Misia Godebska, wife of Thadee Natanson while also, of course, popping in one of his own self-portraits just to remind readers that he wasn't a mere hack for hire but was a prime mover on the scene. Elsewhere his work took to satirising the sexual mores of the Parisian bourgeoisie and even, it seems to me, telling little stories of romantic intrigue, lust, anxiety, and despair with just the one painting.

Misia at Her Dressing Table (1898)

The Lie (1898)

Waiting (1899)

The man in a suit peering impatiently from behind his net curtain in 1899's Waiting is waiting for who exactly? Maybe the lady in the red dress in the previous year's The Lie is late home and who's that she's with? Why is their embrace both tender and awkward? The poses struck by the characters in Vallotton's mini-dramas are as forced as the over the top colour schemes but instead of rendering the work ludicrous it somehow brings it in to focus even more.

We recognise and feel these emotions even as we know deep down we're being played. These people are actors and Vallotton is the director of their actions and, thus, our emotions. Look closely at 1898's The Red Room and this becomes even more clear. Are the couple in the doorway in a passionate clinch? Or are they arguing? Could they be in that state of a relationship when they are, somehow, simultaneously doing both? The props scattered around the table all risk taking on the role of Chekhov's gun. Potential weapons, possible props, or, perhaps like the use of such a dark red hue, highly ambiguous symbolism?

Vallotton has even gone so far as to include himself in a portrait bust resting on the mantelpiece. It's both his way of signing the work and also of letting us know that this drama has been designed and directed by his red right hand. It's no surprise that other members of the Nabis had been involved with the avant-garde theatre companies that were the first to produce the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg in Paris.

The Red Room (1898)

Five O'Clock (1898)

Five o'clock was the time of the day when French men were known to visit their mistresses before returning to their families and the embrace captured in the painting of the same name is both rushed and lustful but lacking in passion. Vallotton was a great observer of these private, snatched, moments but he also turned his eye often towards more sedate domestic life and genteel scenes of lazy alfresco afternoons spent underneath parasols and in the gardens of the French capital.

When La Revue blanche closed and the Nabis split up in 1903, Vallotton, by dint of marrying upwards, was cushioned from any real financial concern and also, due to his breadth as an artist, was able to continue in much the same vein as he had been before. In fact with even less of a commercial imperative underpinning his work he was able to briefly rest on his laurels with self-satisfied images of his own smug domestic bliss before going on to employ a harder edged realism than had been seen before.

The Ball (1899)

On the Beach (1899)

The long shadows and silhouetted figures suggest all was not well in paradise. 'Disquiet' crept into these otherwise idealised scenes of Rodrigues-Henriques, now Mrs Vallotton. She would be portrayed performing ordinary domestic chores but often from strange angles as if Vallotton's restless soul was determined to create a narrative from his mundane, moneyed, and luxurious life.

The devil, it seems, was finding work for his idle hands to do and a sense of ennui permeates his work of this era. There is little easy about these scenes that should be so comforting. The Red Room, Etretat, is almost a masterclass in making boredom look interesting and luxury look frustrating. Mrs Vallotton seems lost in her needlework, the small child no doubt lost in their imagination, but what of the artist himself? Is he lost in his painting or is he just lost? Lost in the heat of it all?

Interior with Woman in Red (1903)

The Red Room, Etretat (1899)

Woman Searching through a Cupboard (1901)

The Visit by Lamplight (1899-1900)

Vallotton was a master of painting artificial light and, of course, night was the best time to do this but nothing in paintings like The Visit by Lamplight or Dinner by Lamplight suggest his mind was any more at ease during the evenings than it was during the seemingly endless days of lounging around on expensive furniture.

The rooms are claustrophobic, family faces start to resemble grotesque masks (some years before Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon), and Vallotton himself is often shown as a shadow. Banquo's ghost at the feast. Simultaneously there but not there.The plates are full, the decor is of the most exacting standard, yet it's hard to look at these paintings and draw the conclusion that this was a totally happy household.

Dinner by Lamplight (1899)

Gertrude Stein (1907)

If Vallotton beat Picasso to th ol' mask thing, Picasso bested him by two years when it came to painting  Gertrude Stein, the celebrated American writer and art collector who had moved to Paris to be near the action in 1903. Stein was apparently more impressed with Vallotton's painting technique than with the result. 

Vallotton, if we are to judge by the following section of the exhibition, wasn't too bothered. He had his eyes on other women. Naked women. Ones with no clothes on. From 1904 onwards, and this can't surely have anything to do with those unhappy looking family portraits, Felix Vallotton made the female nude his principal subject.

Taking Ingres as inspiration, Vallotton set about making a thorough inspection of the unclothed female form. They're not as lecherous as Gauguin's (and certainly not as problematically noncey) and they're not as misogynistic as those of Degas. For the most part they're honest and touching rather than fin de siecle grot but there's no doubting there's still a little bit of the Peeping Tom/through the keyhole voyeur about them.

Nude in the Red Room (1897)

Models Resting (1905)

Model Sitting on a Divan in the Studio (1904)

Nude Holding Her Gown (1904)

These women, caught in their boudoirs and their own private moments either dressing, undressing, or just lying around naked chatting like one does, are at least given personality. They're not just bodies to be gawped at and fantasised about. I'd say it's unlikely an artist would choose to make paintings like this today but I've seen the work of Lisa Yuskavage and, anyway, the naked human body is a fascinating subject. One we shouldn't be so prudish about. Like most artists of his time, however, it must be noted that boobs and bums crop up a lot more in Vallotton's paintings than do men's dicks. 

That's okay, Vallotton probably wasn't that into cock. It's not his fault that the art world at the time, and now for the most part, prefer work by heterosexual men of subjects that heterosexual men like to look at. At least Vallotton was 'brave' enough to include a woman of colour in one of his paintings. She even got to keep her kit on unlike her white, much more pink really, co-star. A response, we're told, to Manet's 1863 Olympia which depicted a similar scenario. In an attempt at positioning Vallotton as a more modern artist than it seems likely he actually was, the curators have persisted in a narrative that the black woman is relaxed, confident, and active while the white woman is disengaged and passive.

The White Woman and the Black Woman (1913)

Nude Seated in a Red Armchair (1897)

If Vallotton had intended for us to read his painting that way, good on him. But I'm not convinced. His paintings do, as I wrote earlier, tell stories but I don't think that's the one he's telling here. Chaste Suzanne, from 1922, borrows a story. That of Susanna and the Elders from the Old Testament. It's one that Artemisia Gentileschi painted in the early seventeenth century (and one that cropped up in the National Gallery's 2016 Beyond Caravaggio exhibition and some numpty new blogger had a crack at writing about) and tells the tale of a young and innocent woman becoming the victim of two lecherous older men.

Vallotton has, seemingly - and I do buy this one, turned the tables. Suzanne, now with a z (you cunt), is now a 'wily seductress' (ok, the language isn't as 'woke' as the idea) who has enthralled two balding men. They look to me dressed for the theatre and in 1909's marvellous theatre box we can see that the theatre is a subject Vallotton returned to time and again. 

When he wasn't creating his own theatrical sets in oil he was rendering those from the actual theatre. The Theatre Box, apart from the two heads popping over the parapet to view the action, could almost be an abstract expressionist work worthy of Rothko. It's divided into two large fields of pure colour. The yellow of the balcony and the inky blackness of the background. Art was developing in new directions and Vallotton, a man who had plenty of time on his hands and no great money worries, was following it.

Chaste Suzanne (1922)

The Theatre Box (1909)

Of course the greatest 'theatre' to be found at the time was on the killing fields of Europe and Vallotton, speaking from the comfortable position of one who would never have to fight in one, wrote in a 1917 essay, "War! The word is magnificent. The day I saw it appearing in big letters on the walls, I honestly believe I felt the strongest emotion in my life". 

There's much to admire in Vallotton the painter but Vallotton the man, in instances such as these, leaves you exasperated and disappointed. To his credit he did at least try to enlist but, at 49 years old, he must have been fairly certain he would have been refused. Instead, deeply patriotic about his French homeland, he went on a tour of the trenches in the Champagne region and, to depict this, even briefly returned to woodcut in a series titled This is War! (C'est la guerre!).

The portfolio was broken up into six prints (The Trench, The Orgy, Barbed Wire, In the Darkness, The Lookout, and The Civilians) and although they don't flinch in depicting the brutality of World War I (there are explosions and corpses sprawled over barbed wire) there's something almost prurient about them. It's as if the man who had become bored of his gilded home life, his aristocratic wife, and his lovely furniture got a primeval thrill out of war. He seemed to view it as a game, a football match where you pick your team and cheer them on no matter what, and he seemed to get far more excited about people having their limbs blown off than he did by the naked women he'd been painting in the build up to the war.

This is War! (1915-16)

This is War! (1915-16)

Apples (1919)

"A man's man" no doubt! What it says about his interior motivations and psychology I'm not sure but it seems a little concerning. What it did for his art, however, was completely reset it. He was reborn anew, an artist invigorated by the changing nature and landscape of the world. Not for him a Paul Nash style retreat into the forests and trees to seek solace from the killing. Instead, Vallotton now painted everything as if sharpened and bloodied by the possibility of imminent death. 

It's worth reminding ourselves that Paul Nash saw service and Felix Vallotton did not. Those who have never seen a war are quick to romanticise it and often foolish enough to bring on another.  Vallotton's apples, and indeed peppers, were as sanguine as they were succulent looking. In the nourishment they provided they represented life but in their colours they foretold the bloody deaths that had so excited the ageing painter.

His landscapes too were drenched in unreal colours, and here he picked up again the movement towards abstraction that had become apparent in his pre-war painting. He called these works 'paysages composes' (composed landscapes) and spoke passionately about dreaming of painting free from any respect for literal nature and full of pure emotion. He was, to all intents and purposes, returning to the Nabis school of thought and imagining where, if they had not broken up, they might have gone next.

In 1925, Felix Vallotton died of cancer and it was left to other, now much more famous, artists to pick up where his work left off. But so varied was his output, so many different directions did he branch out in, that his place in art history, judging by this exquisite and timely RA retrospective, has been unfairly marginalised. Look at the range in the last four landscape paintings, all by Vallotton and all painted within a period of just twelve years, and marvel at how one man seems to have created the work of four artists.

Boredom may have made him abandon a once loved partner, marry into money, fail to find comfort in domestic bliss, and celebrate the death and destruction of war. But boredom, and of course disquiet, made him a questing artist always looking through new eyes and pushing art forward in more than one direction at the same time. Be glad you were neither married to him nor had to fight a war on his behalf but be thankful that, nearly a century after his death, we still have his work. It's not very humdrum.

Sunset, Villerville (1917)

Last Rays (1911)

Sunset, Grey-blue High Sea (1911)

Sandbanks on the Loire (1923)

Fleapit revisited:Ad Astra.

"I'm unsure of the future, but I'm not concerned. I will rely on those closest to me, and I will share their burdens as they share mine. I will live and love" - Roy McBride, astronaut.

James Gray's Ad Astra, starring Brad Pitt as Roy McBride, manages to pull off the trick most science fiction movies aim for, at least should aim for. It tackles big themes of redemption, loss, escape, love, being true to one's self, and the psychological stress of solitude while, at the same time, having some pretty cool images of rockets blasting off into space and astronauts fighting and shooting each other while spinning round in zero gravity.

The basic gist of the film is that McBride, a taciturn, yet focused, space station worker in the near future (it's always the near future these days as the apocalypse starts to feel within touching distance) is sent on a mission to Neptune (via the moon and Mars) to terminate the failed 'Lima Project'. A project in which his celebrated father H Clifford McBride is believed to have died working on.

The elder McBride is so esteemed as an astronaut that his picture hangs next to those of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins and we also hear how he was the first man to reach both Jupiter and Saturn. But his last work, the 'Lima project', not only caused him to disappear and orphaned his son but is now believed to be creating deadly 'surges' that could threaten all life on Earth and destroy the entire solar system!

Big stakes! But Ad Astra succeeds by remembering to marry a story of potential global annihilation with the personal, mostly delivered through a series of interior monologues in Roy McBride's mind and psychological evaluations delivered to faceless and uncaring AI bots. The near future world of Ad Astra is, like most near futures we see on screen now, a slightly depressing one and one that lacks warmth, humanity, or connection.

There are people who were born, and have lived most of their lives, in an underground bunker on Mars (Ruth Negga's Helen Lantos talks positively of her one and only visit to the beautiful blue planet of Earth), and humans, having used all of Earth's resources, have, somewhat predictably, taken to fighting over what's left on the surface of the moon.

Which makes for a pretty good lunar rover car chase/shoot out, one worthy of a space western, as much as it does a comment on the seemingly unending human capacity for greed and mutually assured self-destruction. The moon, McBride laments, has not lived up to its potential and has disappointingly become just another outpost of Earth. The capitalist consumerist imperatives of our planet are obvious the moment tourists land there.

It's been colonised, basically, and not just by armies (it's noticeable that NASA is never referred to in the film, Roy McBride works for the US Air Force Space Division) but by big business. The moon airport/space port has concession stands, opportunities for visiting kids to have their photo taken with people dressed up as aliens, and chain restaurants. I spotted a branch of Applebee's. A company that seems to be having its triple chocolate meltdown cake and eating it by having a piece of product placement in a film that hints very strongly at its disapproval of corporate domination. How post-modern.

The moon airport looks pretty much like any other airport and, notwithstanding just how impressive the special fx are in sci-fi films these day - something I always forget because I don't go to see that many, Ad Astra, visually at least, is not dissimilar to many other films of its genre. I spotted nods to Star Wars, Gravity, Alien, and 2001:A Space Odyssey.

 

There's even a scene which seems to be a riff on Titanic but the overwhelming influence, and director Gray has been very open about this, is Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. That book was also the blueprint for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse Now was, of course, set in Vietnam and Heart of Darkness in the Congo but the story of a man venturing into potential oblivion unsure of what he'll find, what dangers he will face, and what demons his own mind may unleash upon him has proved to have great potential and moving it from Africa to Asia to, er, Neptune hasn't affected its power.

Brad Pitt gives a solid, unshowy, performance (as befits his character) as Roy McBride yet still manages to dominate the screen. The likes of Ruth Negga, Tommy Lee Jones (seen in flashbacks and video messages to his son), Kimberley Elise, and John Ortiz cope admirably with their limited screen time while Liv Tyler (as Eve, McBride's presumably estranged former partner) is so underused as to barely warrant inclusion in the film. Perhaps she's just there to remind us that Roy McBride, and indeed Brad Pitt, despite spending lengthy periods of time alone, is resolutely heterosexual.

Donald Sutherland crops up as veteran astronaut Loren Dean, a former friend of McBride Snr and while it  doesn't seem a push to imagine in the near future that octogenarians will be holding down high ranking positions in the USAF Space Division, it does seem unlikely that they'd still be zooming around in space.

It adds to the strangeness of the often vertigo inducing Ad Astra. For the most part the narrative is easy enough to follow, though the random ferocious baboons that show up after McBride's ship is diverted to help a Norwegian craft in trouble seem to be a complete, and slightly disturbing, outlier to the thrust of the story.

There are hints that this is some kind of Greek odyssey (the ship's name is Cepheus - the father of Princess Andromeda in the Perseus legend as well as the name of one of the Argonauts - and there's something almost Oedipal in McBride's feelings for his father though fortunately, considering its 12A certification, the mum stuff's kept out) and the title is taken from the Roman poet Virgil's Aeneid. Ad Astra meaning 'to the stars' in Latin.

These could be seem as toweringly pretentious affectations on behalf of director Gray and his team but, in truth, despite its interstellar setting, Ad Astra tells, pretty well for most of its duration, a classic story. One of one man and his quest to find the truth. Something the best of us are all, surely, searching for. Hopefully we won't need to spend over three months confined to a tin can floating through the darkness of space to the farthest reaches of our solar system to find out. They really would discover rings around your Uranus if that was to happen.