Flowered Up captured the spirit of rave and baggy – but they were always headed for tragedy
They were the “southern Happy Mondays”: a gang of north London scruffbags who burst out of late-Eighties British clubland, perfectly formed to fit with the then-dominant culture, at the sweet spot where acid house met baggy. A band of estate-kid mates with a pair of battling brothers at their heart. They looked, according to one music industry figure, amazing: the singer “had the face [and] the wardrobe of the times”. But that label boss didn’t want to hear any music – “it’d be terrible if it was rubbish”. And this was the man who signed them. They were, according to a contemporary interview in the Melody Maker of 18 April 1992, “at best rogues, at worst out-and-out thugs”.
They were Flowered Up and they bloomed brightly, brilliantly and briefly – a pair of luminous singles, a brace of calamitously thrilling gigs, a so-so album and a final testament that reverberates to this day: a 13-minute single and accompanying 18-minute video, Weekender. “Epochal” doesn’t do it justice.
Weekender was “really the first proper meditation, in a way, on the rave scene”, according to Jeremy Deller, the Turner Prize-winning artist and thoughtful chronicler of those times, reflecting on a film that was restored and re-released last year by the British Film Institute. “The first artwork produced about the rave scene.” Or, as the band’s contemporary Shaun Ryder puts it: “I would describe it as a mini-masterpiece movie.”
“Some films are a voice for people,” says singer Róisín Murphy, her thoughts recorded for last year’s making-of documentary, . “You see yourself in it and you’re given a
