Hello. My brain works strangely. I imagine most people’s do. My decision to publish two posts a month, at least, with one of them being a post about music films, somehow translated that I had to watch the films I was writing about in said month (as in January if posting in January). [Where does this ‘had to’ come from?]. As opposed to, the tack I have taken now, of what I have seen in the 30-odd days since the last post. A different kind of month. So, for missive deux, here are the delights of my music film viewing since missive un.

Reeling with PJ Harvey (Mochnacz, 1994)

It’s bittersweet to see a young PJ Harvey so unguarded an unformed in this ‘video album’ from 1994, when compared to 2019’s A Dog Called Money (dir. Seamus Murphy). The latter film is all austere earnestness. A universe away from how silly and free in her body she is in this film by Maria Mochnacz who directed many of her iconic videos in the mid-90s. It is a film, as opposed to a ‘video album’. It is a collection of songs (mostly performed live in concert with some music videos interspersed) but it feels closer to a tour film in its chronology and configuration - with studio time, backstage antics, photo shoots all orbiting the live performances.

The bittersweetness comes from the gulf between the gangly, awkward and curious Harvey that ghosts through the studio, tour bus and backstage areas and the performer on stage. So assured and magnetic. The gap between person and persona is stark so early in her career. The sadness of how that was sculpted into something more guarded for self-preservation can be felt keenly in the later film mentioned here. One where there is a sickly after-taste of patronisation in seeing her walking around War zones and the USA in mid noughties turmoil, looking sad and channeling the horrors she sees. Reeling is a film that is really alive. A stunning document of an icon and singular artist coming into being in public.

Thanks to my friend Kat Flint-Nicol for bringing this into my orbit. Kat is preparing to make her first film (she’ll hate me for writing this), a music film, a short, and so was revisiting this film about one of her favourite artists, the Peej, for inspiration and reference. I can’t wait to see Kat’s film about the Cornish Bank in Falmouth, and maybe write about it here.

The Fearless Freaks (Beesley, 2005)

There is a moment over half-way through this documentary about The Flaming Lips where it earns its 18 certification (UK BBFC) and where the film moves for a time outside of its rigid formulaic box. The sequence is an extended conversation with band member Steven Drozd as he discusses and showcases his heroin use and addiction. It’s a remarkably frank moment, one a lot of music films would shy away from, exposing as it does the rawness and matter-of-factness of addiction. Around Drozd’s accounting, there are contributions from other band members, and family members, about the realities of being friends with and working with an addict. There is no shame heaped on, no judgement. Just a conversation about what it is. It’s such a shame that so much of the rest of the film is so straight and obvious, for a band who have never been either of those things. I love The Flaming Lips, so it’s been a joy to revisit them on screen in the past month.

Christmas on Mars (Coyne, Beesley, Salisbury, 2008)

For me, a much more fitting representation of the Flaming Lips cinematically is their ultra wyrd alien odyssey vanity project Christmas film Christmas on Mars, finally released in 2008 following a 7-year production schedule [behind the scenes footage of which is included in the doc discussed above]. Shot on Film, I remember being invited to screen a print of the film at 2008’s Filmstock Film Festival in Luton, which I co-directed with friend Justin John Doherty. It was a thrill to screen on celluloid, not least because we are both big fans of the band. Seeing them at Kentish Town Forum on the Yoshimi tour in 2003 remains one of my favourite gigs of all time.

The film is a curio to be sure, and one that I think many have been and will continue to be frustrated by. For me, it feels like a kindred soul to many films and filmmakers I have fondness for, if not outright adore. It’s Edward D. Wood Jr. meets Jodorowsky, with more than a smattering of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968). I started my rewatch on a Sunday morning, so I felt the film’s Buck Rogers vibes strongly. It’s a beautifully shot midnight movie, one laden with liberal expletives commonly associated with bad improv.

I love that the band took the elevation in their status afforded by signing to Warner Brothers to embark on this hybrid narrative/promo film where the band act, not as versions of themselves but completely separate and unmusical characters. And that Warner Brothers under-wote the making of it. It has more than a whiff of the vanity projects of The Style Council - JerUSAlem (Belfield, 1986) or The Pet Shop Boys’ - It Couldn’t Happen Here (Bond, 1987) but shot through with a fervent counter-cultural, Z-movie feel akin to the kinds of thing Nicolas Winding Refn restored and shared via his byNWR.com channel a few years back, and that I interviewed him for Little White Lies and the Quietus about. I mostly felt a resonance with Rick Schmidt’s Emerald Cities (1983).

It’s interesting that so many of my reference points are from the 1980s, the zenith of No Wave low-budget cinema and also the exploration of the boundaries of the newly emerged pop promo. And yet, it makes sense, as this is the milieu that the Flaming Lips emerged from in Oklahoma in the middle of that decade, as punk and hardcore mutated. Mutation is strong in this film, that itself is a mutant and also plays with mutant imagery familiar from (albeit on a far-lesser budget than) Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990), released the same year the Lips signed to WB.

As a cinematic artefact it sits on the periphery of the music film ecosystem, closer to the raw and unformed works in another byNWR.com collection - Ears, Eyes and Throats. Featured in that collection of underground punk cinema are some films featuring The Residents. Christmas on Mars also feels like a cousin to Marie Losier’s superb film about The Residents, from 2025, Barking in the Dark. And yet, despite these peripheral connections, because it’s the Flaming Lips, there’s an oddness due to the fact that they were for a time, prominently mainstream compared to their roots. They were a hugely successful and popular band. The White Stripes appear in the documentary The Fearless Freaks, and here in this oddball odyssey the likes of Adam Goldberg and Fred Armisen pop up.

There’s such a blend of the lo-fi, the strange and homemade, and the sentimental and earnest that feels so present in the band’s best music (or maybe that should be my favourite so it sounds less objective). Despite this being a very sweary and for the most part horribly acted, the music is wonderful, the sets have a glorious B movie texture and tactility and the film feels deeply engaged in the Now, despite being hard to specify temporally in and of itself.

There’s something about a film where Mars has been colonised and abandoned, where Christmas is used a symbolic distraction, that feels very 2026. And this bubbling political tone is very Lips to me. As is the acid philosophising about the cosmos and community, about looking to space for answers about how to feel more connected with this planet, about how communing with aliens helps us understand how to commune with other beings like us on this planet. And also, how sometimes we just need the human experience of being listened to, to help us figure out what we need to say and do.

If there are music films you think I should watch and would like me to write about, that aren’t covered in my book, drop me an email.

Events, Gigs & Travels in February

February 25 to March 1, London - I am visiting my friend Dario Llinares and we plan to watch some films in cinemas. Get in touch if you want to join or meet up. I arrive Wednesday afternoon (25th) and leave Sunday morning (1st)

Events & Travels Further Afield in Time & Space

London - May 22-24

Sydney, New York, Los Angeles - June [Dates TBC]

Berlin - November [Dates TBC]