They’re not really interviewed, but there’s a fair bit of footage of what looks like an amazing gig they were part of in Brooklyn.
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Was that the rooftop thing with Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Photos looked incredible.
Enjoyed it but did feel like it was a bit patchy, whenever a storyline about any of the bands seemed to get interesting they’d cut to another storyline.
Some of the footage was worth the price of admission alone - Interpol in the studio, YYY’s & Liars in that parking lot and the first LCD gig.
Did think that while they were never going to get close to the depth of the book there was so much more that could have gone in there (surprised at no mention of the Walkmen/Jonathan Fire*eater who seemed to be important bands when it was all kicking off). I’m now thinking that they just didn’t really have a lot of footage from the time to play around with. It didn’t run very long and the start and end montages were identical. Must have made a lot of it over lockdown as well seeing as most of the interviews were over the phone.
Strokes Chat:
In the what’s their best song thread there seemed to be a bit of disagreement over whether Room on Fire was considered a flop or not and I feel like the film reinforced that it was considered a flop at the time. Some mention of ‘you should be excited about selling half a million copies’ vs ‘this really should have sold in the millions considering the hype’. IIRC in the book Julian talks about how he felt they after Is This It they just couldn’t do anything right. Room on Fire was seen as too samey by the critics so they made a conscious effort to do something different with First Impressions and then the critics panned that for not sounding like the first two.
Fuck Ryan Adams. Shouldn’t get any airtime at all but I feel at least the film didn’t portray him in a good light. A snake.
Would give it a 6.5
yeah not sure if this is backed up by anything, but I feel that time period must be a relatively weak one when it comes to fan-documentation of scenes
you talk about a 90s scene and I feel you probably (?) still had plenty of people with camcorders and Super 8s, really into capturing stuff. Then you go the other side closer to 2010 and you have smart phones and decent digital cameras everywhere. That early/mid 00s must have been a bit of a wasteland for decent quality footage, with most footage from in-the-moment being caught on really shit early phones and bad cameras
does this hold up as a theory at all? I just can’t quite see why all the stuff we had in the film would be so blown out and distorted and honestly hard to watch sometimes. Even once we got to LCD that few years later, felt like the quality was significantly better
think the relatively poor footage was one of my main disappointments with it all, found it hard to get the “vibe” when it sounded as bad as it did
Nail on the head I think. Was thinking along the same lines.
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I think the early part of the book the documents JFE and the eventual run up to The Strokes was one of my favourite parts. I thought it was an odd decisions to cut that out and start with The Moldy Peaches (!?).
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The (poor) quality of the footage was one of the things I loved the most about it - it took me right back to that era.
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shit era for dorks!
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Yeah. Again, I think I’d put that down to the filmmakers having some footage of the Moldy Peaches and having fuck all of JFE. 
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this is a good book about Napster specifically. think I found a cheap second hand copy on ebay.
the preview isn’t showing up but the link works. it’s called All the Rave by Joseph Menn
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This is kind of fascinating from an archival perspective really and how stuff like documentaries/exhibitions/publications might have to treat that particular time period. Even personally, a lot of the images and videos I took around that time were really shit quality. Because of that I think there was less onus on keeping stuff, too.
I often think about this in a different way re: the shift to more ephemeral modes of documenting stuff like on Instagram stories or Tiktok. It’s being recorded in fairly high quality because of the tech we have, but doesn’t necessarily stay archived properly.
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Finally watched it, it was alright rather have more about TV On The Radio and even just a passing reference to Jonathan Fire*Eater which feels like a major a part of the book, that they never got their due for starting everything. The book’s better.
Also was that footage of the LCD Soundsystem gig isn’t their 1st gig was it. I thought their 1st gig was at Trash?
I thought Trash was their second show
Setlist.fm says it was the 1st show. Who can trust that website
Saw this on Sunday and already forgot about it. Even as a huge fan of the bands I thought it was pretty poor. Just kinda floated along and refused to get under the hood of anything, although I guess it did a decent job of conveying the excitement of a scene.
The LCD stuff seems to sit completely adjacent to everything else too, they don’t seem to even attempt to draw a line between what was happening them and with The Strokes/YYYs.
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There are quite a few gigs missing from that list though
Saw it last night. I really liked it but I haven’t read the book yet.
I was actually impressed by how much footage there was. No idea why they were always filming each other wandering around like that, but good that they were.
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Felt funny hearing David Holmes pop up in the middle of the film. All these ultra cool New York kids and then suddenly there’s this big Belfast accent in the middle of it.
Was quite eerie seeing the footage of Paul Banks wandering around the ashy New York streets on 9/11. Weird to remember that such familiar faces were living there in that city on that day.
There were quite a lot of young people in the screening I went to and I heard some of them scoffing and laughing at the bit about the Y2K scare. Made me feel ancient even though I was only 10 at the time.
Wasn’t sure if they’d include Ryan Adams - they do but he’s not in it for very long, they don’t play any of his music and he comes across as a massive pathetic loser.
Would have liked to see a bit more of TVOTR and Liars, but I guess they were probably a bit less central to the ‘scene’ of the time (the film doesn’t stretch anywhere near as late as 2011 as I understand the book does), both were less massive and had a slightly slower build and are less defined by their earliest material than the other acts here, with the exception of LCD. Also I guess Liars had fucked off to the New Jersey woods by album 2 and Berlin by album 3 (though Angus went out with Karen O for a while didn’t he?)
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