US director Joe Massot, known for the psychedelic 60s curiosity Wonderwall and Led Zeppelin concert movie The Song Remains the Same, directed this tremendously vivid 1981 documentary about the British 2 Tone movement, this vital music being a kind of evolutionary product of reggae’s coexistence with punk the decade before.
Working with producer Gavrik Losey, son of Joseph, Massot gives us live footage, whimsically interspersed with Pathé newsreels from the early 60s (not so long before the present-day material) with plummy-voiced chaps earnestly intoning about “young people”. The movie is a madeleine for people of my generation: summoning up the sweat of venues such as London’s Lyceum Ballroom in the Strand, it shudders with the bands’ inexhaustible jogging-on-the-spot energy, the kind of live show where the singer lets rip directly into the ecstatic faces of the people at the front, virtually snogging them.
