Squirrel And G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile

And On The Seventh Day God Created Manchester… The Second Summer Of Love…

We went to see a remarkable movie at the weekend in the Embarcadero – 24 Hour Party People. It’s a cool narrative pseudo-documentary about the birth of “Madchester” and Factory Records, following Joy Division through their evolution to New Order, how the Blue Monday dance track funded the Hacienda nightclub (while failing to enrich the band itself), and how the Hacienda birthed rave culture and the Happy Mondays. This movie is really something special, and worth seeing alone for the acapella version of Blue Monday. The understated performance of Sean Harris as the doomed proto-goth Ian Curtis is amazing, and Steve Coogan (who based his “Alan Partridge TV comedy character on Tony Wilson) finally gets the chance to be a better Tony Wilson. It’s also amazing how unearthly similar John Simm (the Jip guy from Human Traffic) actually is to New Order’s enigmatic vocalist Bernie Sumner. Spot-on casting there. Unfortunately in a bit of Stalinist-type revisionism, it deletes Gillian Gilbert from New Order as she’s nowhere to be seen. Sadly though, the guy playing the OG Freaky Dancer Bez, the archtype for all the hardcore ravers that were to come, “Fred Astaire’s baggy bastard son”, doesn’t look nearly wasted enough to seem authentic. It’s time to go listen to the John Cale-produced and immaculately titled Squirrel And G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out) album again…