I Am Weekender

Back in the 90's it was the music journalists who had the power to create musical scenes. They were self important people who knew what they were doing, but tended to let their own opinions about things become centre stage. Now that print journalism is dead, these writers no longer have the same influence. The band Flowered Up were a brief footnote in the history of indie music lore, they weren't a massive success like The Stone Roses, but the music magazine writers tried to make them a thing. Weekender is the result of the brief cross pollination between indie guitar music and electronic dance music. Electronic producers like Andrew Weatherall had a history of remixing and producing guitar bands to make them more palatable to an electronic music audience and so more commercially successful. The overlong Weekender track was turned into a short film about someone going out for the weekend. And that is basically it. This documentary is yet another revisionist "everything done in the 90's was amazing" talking heads bore fest. The usual suspects aka rent a quotes turn up for another easy pay check. The narrative they are trying to spin is that this is some kind of massively influential and important film, when in reality it was released and didn't do much business. Because its actually quite boring and the music isn't really a good fit. Weekender is not a rave scene movie. Its a guitar band albeit remixed track about a post man who goes out at the weekend, takes drugs then struggles at work on Monday morning. Surely an electronic bands track would have made more sense? And that is probably the main reason Weekender was mainly ignored by ravers at the time. It didn't really resonate, despite what Irvine Welsh suggests. For one ravers weren't reading Melody Maker or NME, we had other magazines. Very few people bought Flowered Up records and even fewer watched Weekender. Partly because it wasn't readily available but that is generally because many of the people who had seen it didn't think it was good enough to promote through word of mouth. Anyway Weekender is now on YouTube. A bit like D Notes Coming Down, it tries to capture a bit of the rave scene but doesn't. So its a five for effort but that's pretty much it.