ZZ Top - All Tomorrow’s Parties

“It’s Auschwitz with good music...”

…Which, as inappropriate quotes go, gives a fair summary of the weird seaside feel of the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, held at Butlin’s holiday camps and filled with alternative music royalty. This film documents its rise in typically eccentric fashion, using homegrown indie footage as ATP appears from the ashes of Belle & Sebastian’s fledgling Bowlie Weekender in 1999, a strange gothically clad version of the old rock’n’roll or soul weekenders.

So, we get given odd visual/ musical couplets, such as a Canada Goose being chased through the seaside chalets, flapping to the music of Mogwai; or A Hawk & A Hacksaw playing Klezmer polkas harassed by security in front of the Elvis fruit machines. A raging Nick Cave leads Grinderman into a fearsome No Pussy Blues, providing one of the highlights, along with his chats with Warren Ellis. The film does sometimes wander a little, but this is part of ATP’s charm.

Capturing the salty atmosphere of ATP’s moments of sudden spontaneity (chalet parties, singalongs on the lawn), it also offers musical variety aplenty. Alongside the expected indie Valhalla, Wu Tang gangstas, bowel-trembling dub from Jah Shaka Soundsystem and even Saul Williams’ luminescent poetry rapped to shots of Minehead beach at night.

4 stars 4 stars 4 stars 4 stars

Warp Films | B 002 QW 2OF 4

Reviewed by David Harvey
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