BFI
8/10
IT’S been much bootlegged on low-quality prints, but this documentary film of Britain’s six biggest 2 Tone bands – The Specials, Madness, The Beat, Selecter, Bad Manners and The Bodysnatchers – playing live to excitable audiences in 1980 is an audio-visual treat that works best on the big screen. The director’s credit goes to Joe Massot, the big-name American filmmaker behind (soundtracked by George Harrison) and Led Zeppelin’s concert film , though the real creative force behind the project was British cameraman Joe Dunton, ascribed with “visual concept and photography”. should not be what he described as “a third-row film”, a passive recording. A pioneer of assorted camera gizmos, Dunton had trained dozens of cameramen to use a newfangled stabilising mount called the Steadicam, and wanted to use it to take us into the heart of onstage mayhem.
