As someone with his wits about him once said, writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Which raises the question: where does that leave writing about popular music in specific relation to British cinema? This book gamely attempts to tackle the problem, but only really proves the pointlessness of trying. Author Donnelly hedges his bets by pitching the tome somewhere between the last word in a very specific field of scholarship and being - as the back cover blurb has it - 'a mine of pub trivia information'. It's between these two stools that it squarely falls.
The lion's share of the text is taken up by short encyclopedic entries covering every British film to have been touched by the hand of Pop. We're not talking just A Hard Day's Night and Trainspotting here; it catalogues even Mary Millington soft-porn ventures which feature hits of the day behind stripteases, not to mention the likes of Superman and Highlander III which qualify by dint of British involvement in their production. These entries are broken down into decades, each prefaced by a brief essay highlighting the ongoing relationship between Britpop and Britfilm, from the 1950s onwards. For sure, the evolving interface between the two is an intriguing area. The book demonstrates very clearly how the film industry has gone from using early British rock 'n' roll as exploitative filler in lowest of low-budget features to the current situation, where hits on the soundtrack (or better still, hits-to-be) are gold dust to British film productions. En route it covers a number of forgotten dirt-cheap curios, and it's this venturing off the beaten track that is the book's best feature. There's no denying that Donnelly's researched the subject as thoroughly as anyone might want.
Ultimately, though, this isn't a work that will satisfy the scholarly minded; there isn't sufficient meaty substance in the essays, which are tiresomely repetitive and don't really glue together the horde of films catalogued within. It's also too bone-dry to attract passing music fans; there's little enlightening detail on individual films and barely a shred of humour to engage the casual reader. It reads unfortunately like an over-extended chapter from a better and more concise work (as the introduction admits, it began life as the author's doctoral thesis). Without any contextual analysis of, say, the use of popular music in American cinema, it's hard to glean any illuminating conclusions about British cinema in particular. Consequently the book can only truly appeal to those unhealthily fascinated by precisely which bass or keyboards player from which third-rate band went on to score which tenth-rate British cinema venture. On balance, perhaps the cover's right, and pub-quiz compilers will be the obvious crowd to welcome this with open arms. But then, is that the audience BFI Publishing should be reaching out to?
Reviewed by Andy Murray
