The Rockumentary King

We're running a training & mentoring programme for Mexican and British documentary film-makers called Docunexion, both in Britain (with Sheffield DOCfest last June) and in Mexico City (with DocsDF this week). 
But never mind about that!  I got to meet the rockumentary king, Julien Temple, who's here for the fest, introducing a few of his films and being a judge of others. 
Ever since I watched the truly terrific Oil City Confidential a year and a half ago (see post), I've been reappraising his work and really it's a good body of work: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, Absolute Beginners, The Filth and the Fury, Glastonbury, London: the Modern Babylon, and Oil City. And those are just the ones I've seen, and of course there's a huge list of music videos too.  
We chatted about lots of stuff, including 1984 (he shot Sade, Stones, Kinks videos and, most famously, Bowie's 'Jazzin' For Blue Jean'), another film about Wilko Johnson, and he told me about John Lydon turning down the offer for the Sex Pistols to perform 'God Save the Queen' at the London Olympics Opening Ceremony, after the Queen herself had given the OK!  

Feelgood

From CBGB's to Canvey Island. Same era, same raw music, same rowdy audiences - just separated by 5,000 miles of water...
Four years after it was released, I just watched a cracking rockumentary of 70s pub rockers Dr Feelgood. I'm not a huge fan of Julien Temple or the Feelgoods, but Oil City Confidential is terrific.
Temple has made a lot of films about music, and even more music videos*, but I'd wager this is his best. 
It really captures the ordinariness and (yet) the energy of the Feelgoods: their Canvey Island background (where the houses are dwarfed by oil refineries), their incendiary gigs, at first in pubs then bigger venues as, by the mid 70s, they became short-lived stars, the drink & drugs, Lee Brilleux's blues-and-harmonica snarl, Wilko Johnson's machine-gun guitar and manic stare… it's all in there. The music was 'just' R&B, nothing innovative, but what they did, they did brilliantly - especially live.
What I liked most was the tiny detail: the hundreds of edits from old B&W noir & gangster films as well as blink-and-you-miss-them re-enactments which Temple must have shot specially, all of which somehow fit perfectly together; the maps of Canvey with tiny plaster models of the pubs they played in and the Dinky toy vans that took them there; the interview with Brilleux's elderly mum; Wilko with his guitar outside an amusement arcade at night just rabbiting on; and just so much detail. 
Johnson left under a cloud in '77, they lost it in the 80s, Brilleux died of cancer in '94, the band carried on (and is still going, with completely different members), and Johnson was diagnosed with terminal cancer himself a year ago. Rock and (indeed) Roll.
(*Given his penchant for rock, I was surprised to find out that Temple shot promos for Gary Numan, Depeche Mode and - incredibly - Jean-Michel Jarre)