BACK DURING the Great Doc Renaissance of 2005, audiences were happy to queue for Some Kind of Monster, an intimate look at Metallica in therapy, and Dig, a véritéportrait of "musical differences" between The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre.
Since then the vagaries of international distribution have squeezed superior musically themed documentaries out of cinemas, leaving punters with a series of opportunistic concert flicks fronted by various Disney ragamuffins. By the time Michael Jackson's This Is Itrolled into multiplexes last year, the genre was looking as lively as that film's subject.
Thank goodness then for Upside Down, a trend-bucking rock doc charting the rise and fall of independent UK label Creation Records, the one-time home of Primal Scream, Oasis, Ride and My Bloody Valentine.
"I think whatever started with Elvis back in the 1950s died in November 1999 with Creation Records," says Upside Down'sdirector, Danny O'Connor. "These were the last great left-field mavericks of rock'n'roll."
Founded by indie impresario Alan McGee back in 1983, Creation Records would define the jangly end of the 1980s with a stable of influential acts including The Jesus and Mary Chain. By the 1990s McGee’s garage venture had cracked the mainstream with hits for The Boo Radleys, Teenage Fanclub and Super Furry Animals. Not long after that, McGee had Oasis, soon to be the biggest act on the planet, on the books.
“Over the years independent music became indie,” says O’Connor. “Creation wasn’t indie. Indie wears comfy cardigans, indie apologises for itself. These guys were guys: you wouldn’t want to give them lip in a nightclub. They had that hard edge.”
That hard edge translated into hard living and a new rock swagger. Creation’s eccentric collective of rock gods were ideally suited to providing the soundtrack for the football-worshipping, raved-up lad culture of the 1990s.
“It wasn’t ‘check out my leather because the ladies love me’ with any of those guys,” says O’Connor. “It was very much about the clothes and the football and the pills, and going out and having a good time.”
Primal Scream, fronted by McGee's old Glaswegian school chum Bobby Gillespie, was Creation's earliest acquisition. Released in 1991, the band's Screamadelicamade enough of a splash to warrant, ultimately, its own 2010 Royal Mail stamp. "The core of the Creation story is that relationship between Alan McGee and Gillespie," says O'Connor. "Childhood friends who head out in to the world. One becomes a label guru and the other becomes a rock star. Pretty much their entire career has been together and they hate each other half the time. But if you walk up and smack one of them in the chops, the other one will kill you. I don't think it's a coincidence that you end up with all these pairs of tough, warring siblings at Creation."
It is now more than a decade since Creation shut up shop and, all in all, it has taken six years for the Co Donegal-born O'Connor to bring Upside Down's account of the label's tempestuous 15-year history to the screen.
“I started making this film never knowing if I would finish,” O’Connor says. “I got the green light from Alan McGee back in 2005, but then I had to persuade everybody else . . . Cameras didn’t go on until the end of 2008; we’ve been shooting on and off ever since. The archive searches were a colossal amount of work, but the bands were great. Oasis gave us stuff that had never been seen before from their personal archives. Ride, bless them, gave us their entire collection.”
Throughout Upside Downentertaining recollections from Noel Gallagher, Bobby Gillespie, Alan McGee and assorted label dignitaries, frame a portrait of a decade-long party, replete with pills and bailiffs. "Nobody did excess like Creation," says O'Connor. "It was fun, but it couldn't go on indefinitely. All those big male egos were going to clash at some point."
The final showdown, now lovingly commemorated on celluloid, has attracted huge interest. The film was one of the hottest tickets at October’s London Film Festival and has since been picked up for international distribution. Even O’Connor has been taken aback by the enthusiastic response.
“I’ve been so close to it for so long I hadn’t really thought about what people would make of it,” says the director. “I wanted to make something about that culture that even my mum could understand. But I had forgotten that Oasis still bring out screaming crowds in places like Barcelona. In this part of the world we think of them as a band that failed to crack America. We tend to forget they sold 50 million records. But in my head I still think of them as the English Lir.”
Upside Downwill screen at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival today; director Danny O'Connor will be in attendance
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THE WAY
Emilio Estevez directs his father, Martin Sheen, in a drama involving the pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago in north-west Spain. Father and son will be in attendance.
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ERRATUM
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BENDA BILILI!
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