Concrete Poetry

Got the chance to see tomorrow night's BBC4 music documentary Synth Britannia a week or two back. It is a delight, particularly for those of us who were at an impressionable age when the Human League and Depeche Mode first made it onto Top of the Pops.
As well as its nostalgic appeal there are a couple of other reasons for watching it. Firstly (pace previous Bleak Moments) there's the opportunity to see places like Sheffield and Manchester as they looked in the seventies - a kind of council estate sci-fi film set - all concrete and long overcoats.



There's also a recognition of the importance of JG Ballard in late seventies/early eighties pop culture. There's an extract from some old Ballardian film or TV interview which included a few slowburn erotic images of a pretty woman and a car. Which prompted a memory of another music film that offered an element of auto-erotica in its make-up. I recall in Jon Savage's film about punk from some years back a sequence in which one vaguely punkily dressed (or undressed) model strips in an open car door cross-cut with a night-time car journey all soundtracked by some shredded guitar courtesy of David Bowie (from Diamond Dogs if memory serves).
Cars, sex, council estates. That's a recipe for the great British pop movie I'd say. Anyone come close to making it? Off the top of my head, Anton Corbijn's Control maybe? A couple of scenes in Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson. Anyone for dramatising The Human League story? Tom Hardy as Phil Oakey? I can almost picture it. (TJ)