The Return of Rocket to Russia, Action Painting & Some Swampland Jewels – Best Reissues & Compilations 2017

First up, The Ramones and a 40th anniversary deluxe treatment of Rocket To Russia.

You know the drill with The Ramones. A barrage of two-minute, rapid-fire fury with dumbass lyrics. Here with an added surf influence.

Rocket To Russia was maybe their last true masterpiece and their last album recorded with the band’s original lineup. This reissue does the album proud with two different mixes plus a shedload of previously unreleased material. Best of all, though, is the disc featuring the band’s concert at the Glasgow Apollo from December 19 1977. Exactly forty years ago.

Listen out for me. I was there down in the stalls bawling my head off.

There was usually a palpable undercurrent of violence and edginess whenever a punk act played the Apollo with a real us and them divide between fans and bouncers. The stage was far too high – it was never a good idea to book a seat in the two front rows. You would leave the hall at the end of the night with soot up your nose. There was no bar and only very basic toilet facilities.

Needless to say it’s my favourite ever venue though and The Ramones show from 1977 is one of the three best concerts I ever attended. My two other favourites, the first appearance of The Clash at the Apollo and Iggy Pop’s show there in 1979.

Here on what was their debut at the old hall, The Ramones are at their ferocious best. This isn’t from that show but instead from the Hogmanay show that The Ramones played at London’s Rainbow Theatre not long afterwards:

 
Brimming with freakbeat fireballs, The Creation compilation Action Painting is undoubtedly the definitive Creation artefact. Collected together for the first time are the band’s complete studio recordings which have been remastered from the original tapes by producer Shel Talmy. There’s even four tracks by an earlier incarnation of the band when they were known as The Mark Four. Plus an eighty page book.

As a teenager I first became aware of band via Boney M’s cover of Painter Man (so they served some purpose after all). That and the collage inside All Mod Cons. The Jams’ 5CD 1977 box set is recommended too incidentally as is Making Time – A Shel Talmy Production, which I have already reviewed here.

Originally released in the early days of 1968, this is How Does It Feel To Feel. Did Oasis ever manage this kind of swagger? Nope.

 
From the same era that gave us The Creation comes the Jon Savage compiled 1967 The Year Pop Divided. This collection includes psychedelia, garage nuggets, Tamla, southern soul, early funk, a little UK pop reggae in the shape of Ken Boothe and some Gallic space age Psyche Rock from Les Yper Sound.

I know very little about this latter act but imagine them living in a Pop Art apartment in Paris and hanging out with Yves Klein and the models he would drag over his canvases while smeared in blue paint. Insanely catchy, this should have been on the soundtrack of Barbarella or Modesty Blase. Stereolab, of course, love them.

Unfortunately there’s no video footage of Les Yper Sound that I can find online but here’s another Savage selected gem. From Spring 1967, this is I Can Hear The Grass Grow (Roy and the boys must have had acute hearing at this point in their careers or maybe there’s another explanation for this remarkable ability). The song also cropped up this year on the CD/DVD Digi-pack collection Magnetic Waves of Sound: The Best Of The Move which I might just treat myself to in the not too distant future.

 
Newly released on the ever excellent Soul Jazz label, Deutsche Elektronische Musik 3 is a 23 track compilation of experimental German music released between 1971 and 1981. There are Krautrock big hitters such as Neu!, Cluster and Popol Vuh and there are some lesser known acts like Klauss Weiss and Missus Beastly.

Highlights include Michael Bundt’s The Brain Of Oskar Panizza (from 1977, I can imagine the early Human League being influenced by this) and Neu!’s Neuschnee, one of the most influential tracks of the 1970s.

Here is a very much unofficial video for the latter:

 
Swampland Jewels (on Yep Roc Records) is another in a long line of fantastic compilations of Cajun music. A various artists collection of songs from the 1950s and ’60s, a version of this album originally appeared on the Goldband Records label in a 1979. Now expanded and accompanied with liner notes and photos courtesy of Steven Weiss – no relation to the Klauss Weiss mentioned earlier I presume – this is a hugely enjoyable listen.

Tracks include Herman Guilee’s Bon Ton Roula, a straight-ahead bouncy number that’ll have you mamboing within seconds and Al Ferrier’s Yard Dog, which blurs the line between traditional Cajun and Bayou rockabilly.

Finally on the reissue & compilation front, a wee mention for Serge Gainsbourg & Jean-Claude Vannier’s OST Les Chemins Des Katmandou (on Finders Keepers) and Keb Darge And Cut Chemist Present The Dark Side (on BBE). And here’s a link to my favourite reissue of 2017, The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead.

Supersonic & Wonderwall (Friday Night Film Club #2)

Oasis: Supersonic (2016) Director: Mat Whitecross
Wonderwall (1968) Director: Joe Massot 

Over the past coupla weeks I’ve watched two documentaries about filmmaking.

One, Hitchcock/Truffaut, examined the French auteur’s book on the master of suspense with Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Wes Anderson and others analysing Hitchcock’s techniques and legacy.

The other documentary was Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, which traced the careers of the men behind the company that specialised in bandwagon jumping movies about ninjas, break dancers and ludicrous all action affairs that usually starred Chuck Norris getting busy with a bazooka. Talking heads here included Bo Derek and Molly Ringwald.

I’m a big fan of Hitchcock and own many of his films on DVD. I also have a number of Trauffaut’s films in my collection and a quad poster for Jules at Jim hangs on my living room wall. I own nothing from the Cannon, em, canon. Albeit I confess I have enjoyed some of their output, the Ninja Trilogy and Runaway Train springing to mind.

You’ve likely guessed that I actually preferred Electric Boogaloo, although I would recommend you to see both.

I mention this to explain that while I’m not a fan, I thought I’d take a chance on Oasis: Supersonic when I came across it in a local charity shop earlier this week.

Supersonic traces the career of Oasis from the childhood of the Gallagher’s through to the Knebworth enormo-shows in the summer of 1996, thus avoiding the far from engrossing years following the fiasco of Be Here Now.

In many ways the most interesting aspect of the film is seeing the pre-fame days of Noel and Liam growing up in Burnage, a world of guitars and Greggs, marijuana and Man City.

‘We’re just lads from a council estate,’ Noel explains. ‘Two brothers. Headcases.’

Luckily the two headcases possessed a pair of traits that helped make them stand out: real self-belief and gargantuan ambition. And Noel was blessed with the capacity to come up with songs that were equal parts pop anthem and terrace chant.

‘I want the severed head of Phil Collins in my fridge by the end of the decade,’ a young Noel declares. ‘And if I haven’t, I’ll be a failure.’

To cut a potentially long review short, I found Supersonic only moderately engaging but the older Gallagher brother does repeatedly demonstrate his ability to conjure up a memorable quote.

A meat and two veg documentary on a meat and two veg band.

And now for the film that gave Oasis the title for their 1995 single Wonderwall.

Can you imagine the reaction of the team behind the film when they discovered that one of Britain’s biggest ever bands had decided to name their new single – certain to sell shedloads of copies – after their long neglected film?

I’m guessing some fist pumps and a very loud ‘Oh yeeeeesssssssss’.

Featuring a score supplied by George Harrison (and some friends) and made at a point when relations within The Beatles were more frosty than fab, Wonderwall tells the story of Oscar Collins (Jack MacGowran), a middle-aged scientist who is about to get a glimpse into the world of the beautiful people.

The professor lives in a cramped flat in West London. He looks perpetually puzzled by the world and is single, socially inept and staggeringly absent-minded – when he attempts to steep his feet in a bucket of warm water he forgets to take off his socks.

While analysing some scientific data he’s disturbed by some very loud Indian style Raga music. Through a peephole in a huge Pre-Raphaelite inspired canvas in his living room he sneaks a glance into the room next door and sees for the first time his new neighbour, a young woman clad in the latest Carnaby Street fashions who looks like the epitome of the Swinging London chick. This is Penny Lane (oh dear!) played by Jane Birkin.

This proves to be the start of an obsession for Oscar.

Soon he’s tearing out the painting, easing out bricks and drilling holes to get a better gander – and don’t ask why she doesn’t seem to notice any of this.

Next door is a different, very exotic world. Hip, happening and very definitely Hippy with a capital H, Penny’s pad is a vibrant pop art palace decorated in hand painted psychedelic art drenched in acidic primary colours.

Here Penny, a model, takes part in photoshoots and holds far out parties with her pals in some groovy fashions, some of the men’s outfits resembling the kind of kit favoured by Austin Powers.

Oscar begins imagining some elaborate fantasies involving Penny. He stops going into work and rips his phone off the hook. When a work colleague visits to see if he’s okay, Oscar chides his behaviour as ‘Very strange indeed’. Which could act as a shorthand description of Wonderwall although another line of dialogue, when Penny’s boyfriend discusses his relationship and claims ‘It’s a drag,’ could again serve as an equally succinct way to sum up the film.

This is a pity as there was a lot of talent involved in its making. Apart from Harrison, there’s Jane Birkin who soon teamed up with Serge Gainsbourg; Jack MacGowran, a legend of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre who was later cast in The Exorcist; while the writers both had great pedigrees (Gérard Brach who devised the story often collaborated with Roman Polanski and penned the screenplay for The Name of the Rose while the screenwriter Guillermo Cabrera Infante co-wrote the script for 1971’s Vanishing Point under the pseudonym Guillermo Caín).

Then there’s The Fool, the design collective that forged a close working connection with The Beatles, most famously creating the three-story mural painted on the façade of the Beatles’ Apple Boutique on the corner of Baker Street. I was very impressed by their set designs, costumes and title cards which are easily the best thing about Wonderwall.

The film seems to have been put together with a hippy dippy, go with the flow attitude.

Structure and character arcs? Those are for straights, man!

The comedy also generally backfires and the music only intermittently excels. Oh and if you want to see this purely on account of Anita Pallenberg, then don’t bother, you might blink at the wrong time and miss her.

The main problem, though, is the fact that while seemingly innocent and definitely eccentric, it’s impossible for audiences to ignore the professor’s voyeurism – which at no time does he even question, let alone feel any guilt over.

Equal parts psychedelia, surrealism and Goonish absurdism, Wonderwall might be classified as a cult film but it’s nowhere near a cult classic.

Although Liam Gallagher might disagree.

It’s maybe worth a watch as a curiosity, a glimpse of the country in the immediate wake of the Summer of Love but I wouldn’t recommend anybody seek it out unless they are big George Harrison fans.

For a better film about Peeping Toms try, well, Peeping Tom, while for a better Swinging London film try Blow Up (which Birkin also appeared in).

If I haven’t completely put you off, here’s the trailer:

The accompanying soundtrack album, Wonderwall Music, became the first solo album by a Beatle and also the first release on Apple Records.

And here’s a little taster from it:

Big Gold Dream: Play To Win (The DVD)

Just out in DVD this week is Big Gold Dream, the feature length documentary that I reviewed in roughcut form back in the autumn of 2015.

To the surprise of the team behind the film, the first batch of DVDs completely sold out in just over 30 minutes and when a second, larger batch was put together it sold out in under 24 hours. Deservedly so as this really is a must-see ninety minutes for anybody with an interest in the punk/post-punk/independent scene that developed in Scotland during the late 1970s and 1980s.

As Neil Cooper puts it in his blurb on the back cover of the DVD: ‘Everything you hear today, tomorrow and knocked into the middle of next week started here. Indie-Disco, Art-Rock and Difficult Fun are all in the mix.’

If you want to purchase a copy, here’s your link and if you want to hear about the sequel of sorts made by the same the team, click here for my interview with director Grant McPhee.

Here’s a re-post of my review:

Big Gold Dream: Scottish Post-Punk and Infiltrating the Mainstream

I’ve rewound to the early days of 1979. By this point independent music labels have started springing up in Scotland; there’s Sensible and Zoom in Edinburgh for instance, Boring in Glasgow, NRG in Dundee and No Bad in Dunfermline but they’re still a real rarity.

I’ve rewound to the early days of 1979. By this point independent music labels have started springing up in Scotland; there’s Sensible and Zoom in Edinburgh for instance, Boring in Glasgow, NRG in Dundee and No Bad in Dunfermline but they’re still a real rarity.

In an NME article titled Product Packaging, and Rebel Music, I read about the most high profile addition to this trend, Edinburgh’s Fast Product, whose first releases, singles by The Mekons and 2.3, had came out around a year earlier.

Bob Last, a former architecture student and theatre set designer at the Traverse, is interviewed and writer Ian Cranna concludes that: ‘Last has the potential to be what Brecht was in theatre,’ a statement that sounds mightily impressive even though at this point in my life I know as much about concepts such as Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect as I do about quantum mechanics.

Nowadays I’m reasonably up to speed with Brecht and, although I’m still pretty mystified by the science behind the big bang theory, I think I can at least say that according to the new feature length documentary Big Gold Dream, the nearest musical equivalent of any big bang exploding the whole punk and independent movement in Scotland into life would be The Slits and Subway Sect performing on the Edinburgh Playhouse date of The Clash’s White Riot Tour.

‘It was a real Year Zero moment,’ Davy Henderson explains in the film. ‘It was incredible.’

Many young fans were certainly galvanised that evening and a bunch of them would quickly gravitate to the artistic hub of the Keir Street tenement flat of Bob Last and Fast co-conspirator Hilary Morrison, where they would discuss music and literature, try out some William Burroughs style cut-ups and eat a lot of toasties.

Fire Engines, Keir St. Sitting Room: Photo by Hilary Morrison

‘Glam punk’ Morrison is an always particularly entertaining presence in the film, talking of her delight at Johnny Rotten telling her that he despised her when she asked him to sign a Sex Pistols single in Virgin Records in Edinburgh and recalling the tale of having to break into somebody’s uncle’s remote Borders cottage in order to record the first single by The Mekons. I won’t though spoil the ending of her very amusing story about a photoshoot that involves various Fire Engines, £15 worth of meat from Safeway, baby oil and a visit regarding a break-in unrelated to any recording session.

Alan Rankine also made me smile while relaying a meeting between American impresario Seymour Stein and The Associates, where the Sire head honcho offers them the moon unaware that Billy Mackenzie was far from the average rock star and more interested in whippets than whopping advances, especially if the money involved world tours.

Fast Product release a string of stunningly inventive tracks by The Mekons, Gang of Four, Human League, Scars, Dead Kennedys and even as part of their one-off Earcom series, Joy Division. They also turn down any chance of Joy Division signing to Fast due to their problematic name, turn down the chance to release Human Fly by The Cramps and somehow manage to sell rotting orange peel. The label mutates into Pop:Aural and brings out records by local acts including a Fire Engines single called Big Gold Dream.

A new kid on the block independent makes its presence felt very quickly in Glasgow and the inter label rivalry between Fast/Pop:Aural and Postcard Records is explored. Yes, both labels share the belief that Scottish acts shouldn’t have to up sticks and move to London in order to have a shot at success but they disagree about so much more with Alan Horne branding Fast ‘pathetic’ in one music press interview – although Bob Last denies the feud involved him sending any death threats to his west coast adversaries.

Glad to hear it.

Notably, Alan Horne, a kind of West End of Glasgow Warhol in the early ’80s, passed up on the chance to appear here and I’m sure that, if he is even anything like the spectacularly acerbic young man of the Postcard era, director Grant McPhee could have had great fun intercutting between the pair as they aimed a few digs at each other – like the footage of Alan McGee and Kevin Shields in the documentary Beautiful Music.

‘He was condescending and dismissive of musicians’, Campbell Owens of Aztec Camera complains although David McClymont from Orange Juice remembers him as being ‘a lovely guy’. But only very ironically.

A happier relationship existed between Bob Last and Tony Wilson with Last even offering Wilson advice when he was setting up Factory. It would have been interesting to learn Wilson’s thoughts on Fast but at least we get to hear what the ever reliable raconteur Peter Hook has to say about the two men.

Scars doing pix for single sleeve: Photo by Hilary Morrison

Anyone who read my Scottish Post–Punk Top Ten a few weeks back won’t be too surprised to learn that I’m very happy that Scars are one of the most heavily featured acts here, with Douglas McIntyre of Creeping Bent Records going as far as to argue that Horrorshow and Adult/ery were Scotland’s Anarchy in the UK but if there is a heart of the documentary it’s probably Fire Engines singer Davy Henderson, later also of Win, Nectarine No. 9 and The Sexual Objects. Henderson is always fascinating, often funny and obviously still haunted by his decision (urged on by Bob Last) to break up Fire Engines. ‘One of the biggest regrets of my life,’ he admits.

Around this point it’s time for the infiltrating the mainstream part of Big Gold Dream, some of the film’s participants achieving this ambition more successfully than others.

Win seem to be on the verge of a real commercial breakthrough after their uber-pop single You’ve Got The Power is used in a very imaginative ad for a third-rate Scottish lager but they’re cruelly denied a place in the top 40 due to the track being chart weighted as such a high percentage of sales were concentrated in one part of Britain.

Aztec Camera, Strawberry Switchblade and The Bluebells fare better as do Orange Juice, who move from Postcard to Polydor, while Alan Horne is offered his own label by London Records which he names Swamplands – the cutesy pussycat Postcard logo replaced by a prowling panther (something I’d strangely never picked up on until Allan Campbell mentioned it here).

It’s Bob Last, however, in his role as manager (or Executive Manipulator) of The Human League and Heaven 17 who is involved in the most stratospheric success aided greatly by his decision to help split the original Human League line-up in two and bring former Rezillo Jo Callis into the shiny new version of the band and later insisting that the shiny new version of the band release Don’t You Want Me as a single despite pressure from Phil Oakey not to.

Despite the global success of Dare and the undoubted influence of Fast Product, Bob Last didn’t go on to equal in music or any other medium what Brecht did in theatre, which is hardly a disgrace. And he did also go on to co-produce one of the most magical animated movies that you could ever wish to see, The Illusionist, which also incidentally features music by Malcolm Ross and Ian Stoddart – who both appear in Big Gold Dream – and Leo Condie in the guise of beat combo, Billy Boy and the Britoons.

Big Gold Dream won the Audience Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and so far reviews have been highly favourable: my fellow blogger the Vinyl Villain, for instance, calling it ‘a joy to watch’.

Richard Jobson, though, isn’t much of a fan, tweeting: ‘Just watched Big Gold Dream rewrite history to fit a story and Bob Last’s ego – fuck off.’

I thought myself that at least some mention of The Skids could have been made – likewise Johnny and the Self Abusers/Simple Minds, but just don’t ask me what I would have cut to make room for these suggestions as there are so many great interviewees here such as Fay Fife, Billy Sloan, Jill Bryson, Vic Godard and Tam Dean Burn to name only a handful.

The film is a vast improvement on the fatally flawed BBC Scotland doc Caledonia Dreaming (no Hue and Cry and Wet Wet Wet for starters). In fact, it is easily the best documentary on Scottish music I can think of and one of the best music documentaries made in the last decade or so and the good news is that a sequel Teenage Superstars: The Fall of Postcard and the Rise of 53rd & 3rd Records will follow on, hopefully in the not too distant future.

Big Gold Dream: Scottish Post-Punk and Infiltrating the Mainstream

.

I’ve rewound to the early days of 1979. By this point independent music labels have started springing up in Scotland; there’s Sensible and Zoom in Edinburgh for instance, Boring in Glasgow, NRG in Dundee and No Bad in Dunfermline but they’re still a real rarity.

In an NME article titled Product Packaging, and Rebel Music, I read about the most high profile addition to this trend, Edinburgh’s Fast Product, whose first releases, singles by The Mekons and 2.3, had came out around a year earlier.

Bob Last, a former architecture student and theatre set designer at the Traverse, is interviewed and writer Ian Cranna concludes that: ‘Last has the potential to be what Brecht was in theatre,’ a statement that sounds mightily impressive even though at this point in my life I know as much about concepts such as Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect as I do about quantum mechanics.

Nowadays I’m reasonably up to speed with Brecht and, although I’m still pretty mystified by the science behind the big bang theory, I think I can at least say that according to the new feature length documentary Big Gold Dream, the nearest musical equivalent of any big bang exploding the whole punk and independent movement in Scotland into life would be The Slits and Subway Sect performing on the Edinburgh Playhouse date of The Clash’s White Riot Tour.

‘It was a real Year Zero moment,’ Davy Henderson explains in the film. ‘It was incredible.’

Many young fans were certainly galvanised that evening and a bunch of them would quickly gravitate to the artistic hub of the Keir Street tenement flat of Bob Last and Fast co-conspirator Hilary Morrison, where they would discuss music and literature, try out some William Burroughs style cut-ups and eat a lot of toasties.

Fire Engines, Keir St. Sitting Room: Photo by Hilary Morrison

‘Glam punk’ Morrison is an always particularly entertaining presence in the film, talking of her delight at Johnny Rotten telling her that he despised her when she asked him to sign a Sex Pistols single in Virgin Records in Edinburgh and recalling the tale of having to break into somebody’s uncle’s remote Borders cottage in order to record the first single by The Mekons. I won’t though spoil the ending of her very amusing story about a photoshoot that involves various Fire Engines, £15 worth of meat from Safeway, baby oil and a visit regarding a break-in unrelated to any recording session.

Alan Rankine also made me smile while relaying a meeting between American impresario Seymour Stein and The Associates, where the Sire head honcho offers them the moon unaware that Billy Mackenzie was far from the average rock star and more interested in whippets than whopping advances, especially if the money involved world tours.

Fast Product release a string of stunningly inventive tracks by The Mekons, Gang of Four, Human League, Scars, Dead Kennedys and even as part of their one-off Earcom series, Joy Division. They also turn down any chance of Joy Division signing to Fast due to their problematic name, turn down the chance to release Human Fly by The Cramps and somehow manage to sell rotting orange peel. The label mutates into Pop:Aural and brings out records by local acts including a Fire Engines single called Big Gold Dream.

A new kid on the block independent makes its presence felt very quickly in Glasgow and the inter label rivalry between Fast/Pop:Aural and Postcard Records is explored. Yes, both labels share the belief that Scottish acts shouldn’t have to up sticks and move to London in order to have a shot at success but they disagree about so much more with Alan Horne branding Fast ‘pathetic’ in one music press interview – although Bob Last denies the feud involved him sending any death threats to his west coast adversaries.

Glad to hear it.

Notably, Alan Horne, a kind of West End of Glasgow Warhol in the early ’80s, passed up on the chance to appear here and I’m sure that, if he is even anything like the spectacularly acerbic young man of the Postcard era, director Grant McPhee could have had great fun intercutting between the pair as they aimed a few digs at each other – like the footage of Alan McGee and Kevin Shields in the documentary Beautiful Music.

‘He was condescending and dismissive of musicians’, Campbell Owens of Aztec Camera complains although David McClymont from Orange Juice remembers him as being ‘a lovely guy’. But only very ironically.

A happier relationship existed between Bob Last and Tony Wilson with Last even offering Wilson advice when he was setting up Factory. It would have been interesting to learn Wilson’s thoughts on Fast but at least we get to hear what the ever reliable raconteur Peter Hook has to say about the two men.

Scars doing pix for single sleeve: Photo by Hilary Morrison

Anyone who read my Scottish Post–Punk Top Ten a few weeks back won’t be too surprised to learn that I’m very happy that Scars are one of the most heavily featured acts here, with Douglas McIntyre of Creeping Bent Records going as far as to argue that Horrorshow and Adult/ery were Scotland’s Anarchy in the UK but if there is a heart of the documentary it’s probably Fire Engines singer Davy Henderson, later also of Win, Nectarine No. 9 and The Sexual Objects. Henderson is always fascinating, often funny and obviously still haunted by his decision (urged on by Bob Last) to break up Fire Engines. ‘One of the biggest regrets of my life,’ he admits.

Around this point it’s time for the infiltrating the mainstream part of Big Gold Dream, some of the film’s participants achieving this ambition more successfully than others.

Win seem to be on the verge of a real commercial breakthrough after their uber-pop single You’ve Got The Power is used in a very imaginative ad for a third-rate Scottish lager but they’re cruelly denied a place in the top 40 due to the track being chart weighted as such a high percentage of sales were concentrated in one part of Britain.

Aztec Camera, Strawberry Switchblade and The Bluebells fare better as do Orange Juice, who move from Postcard to Polydor, while Alan Horne is offered his own label by London Records which he names Swamplands – the cutesy pussycat Postcard logo replaced by a prowling panther (something I’d strangely never picked up on until Allan Campbell mentioned it here).

It’s Bob Last, however, in his role as manager (or Executive Manipulator) of The Human League and Heaven 17 who is involved in the most stratospheric success aided greatly by his decision to help split the original Human League line-up in two and bring former Rezillo Jo Callis into the shiny new version of the band and later insisting that the shiny new version of the band release Don’t You Want Me as a single despite pressure from Phil Oakey not to.

Despite the global success of Dare and the undoubted influence of Fast Product, Bob Last didn’t go on to equal in music or any other medium what Brecht did in theatre, which is hardly a disgrace. And he did also go on to co-produce one of the most magical animated movies that you could ever wish to see, The Illusionist, which also incidentally features music by Malcolm Ross and Ian Stoddart – who both appear in Big Gold Dream – and Leo Condie in the guise of beat combo, Billy Boy and the Britoons.

Big Gold Dream won the Audience Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and so far reviews have been highly favourable: my fellow blogger the Vinyl Villain, for instance, calling it ‘a joy to watch’.

Richard Jobson, though, isn’t much of a fan, tweeting: ‘Just watched Big Gold Dream rewrite history to fit a story and Bob Lasts ego – fuck off.’

I thought myself that at least some mention of The Skids could have been made – likewise Johnny and the Self Abusers/Simple Minds, but just don’t ask me what I would have cut to make room for these suggestions as there are so many great interviewees here such as Fay Fife, Billy Sloan, Jill Bryson, Vic Godard and Tam Dean Burn to name only a handful.

The film is a vast improvement on the fatally flawed BBC Scotland doc Caledonia Dreaming (no Hue and Cry and Wet Wet Wet for starters). In fact, it is easily the best documentary on Scottish music I can think of and one of the best music documentaries made in the last decade or so and the good news is that a sequel Teenage Superstars: The Fall of Postcard and the Rise of 53rd & 3rd Records will follow on, hopefully in the not too distant future.

Big Gold Dream will screen this Friday (2. Oct) at the Doc ‘n Roll Film Festival in London followed by a live Q&A with Bob Last. The film’s Facebook page can be found here while if you prefer Twitter, this is your link.