What makes a good dance music documentary? (DJ Mag)

“The idea of people knowing the truth, nobody likes to do that,” claims Steve Lawler in the first few seconds of The Art Of The DJ, director Piers Sanderson’s candid portrait of the Birmingham-born artist known as the King of Space. “In the rock world, you see it all the time,” the DJ continues, “in our world it doesn’t exist.” Lawler is referring to the way he saw dance music documented at the time, be that through grandiose myth-making, poor research, or even the regurgitation of straight up lies. As if to counteract all that, Lawler spends the next 80 minutes telling his own story in a frank and measured manner.

Sanderson’s film came out in 2015, and in the decade since, a seemingly endless slew of dance music documentaries have poured into our streaming services, but only a few truly great examples have ridden the crest of these murky waves. You may have even been lucky enough to catch some of them on the big screen.

The intangible nature of music as a sonic artform often begs the question: does this really need to be a visual documentary? Watching a film which relies too much on people sitting in rooms talking about music can conjure the old adage: writing about music is like dancing about architecture. But, in the right hands, with the right balance of footage, soundbites and interviews, a music doc can be moulded into a work of art. The best, whatever the genre, often have a very human story at their centre.

A recent exemplary offering is Hyper: The Stevie Hyper D Story, directed by Jamie Ross-Hulme, which turns the spotlight towards the jungle MC who was on the cusp of wider success when he died in 1998, struck down by a hereditary heart condition at just 31.

Hyper’s story already had all the beats for a captivating story — an unusual upbringing, an aspirational journey, an untimely tragedy — but while working on an early cut of the film with Hyper’s nephew and co-writer Darrell Austin, Ross-Hulme realised there was a deeper plot unfolding behind their standard biopic, and persuaded Austin to cast himself as a central part of the narrative. The result focuses Hyper’s tight-knit family at the heart of the picture, with Austin taking the audience on a cathartic ride through distant memories, and an archive of the MC’s idiosyncratic career. It defies convention, flitting back and forth through the timeline without losing its thread, and while the domestic tale of a Fulham family might sound like the antithesis of the big and bashy jungle raves he performed at, Hyper is as much a time capsule of the scene itself, which evolves on screen as the MC’s career progresses.

There are parallels between Hyper and Tim McKenzie-Smith’s Getting It Back: The Story Of Cymande, which began as a spotlight on an unsung band whose records became a staple of early hip-hop sets at the hands of Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash etc, but quickly developed into a tale of two childhood friends whose relationship has endured through the peaks and troughs of the music business. Like the contrast between huge raves and Hyper’s family home, Getting It Back offsets wild tales of touring the States supporting Al Green with a trip back to the South London street where guitarist Patrick Patterson and bassist Steve Scipio first met as neighbours when they were just 13. In both cases, the finer details of the artists and their music are fascinating, but it’s this very human element that carries them.

Aaron Trinder’s excellent Free Party: A Folk History sidesteps a single character or group, opting to take the audience on a trip through the meandering pre-history of raving as we know it, from its anarchic roots of ’70s free festivals to the social fall-out and legal upheaval following the big one at Castlemorton in ’92. It’s a predominantly linear journey, but Trinder is aware that most of its audience will approach it from a dance music perspective, so it opens at the turn of the ’90s before winding it back a couple of decades to the Windsor Free Festival, gatherings at Stonehenge, and the Battle Of The Beanfield in ’85 on the cusp of the acid house revolution. “I wanted the ravers (in the audience) to discover the travellers in act two,” Trinder explains, “the way the ravers (in the film) discovered the travellers at Glastonbury in 1990.”

Trinder watched every music documentary he could get his hands on for reference, identifying various tropes and cliches which he planned to avoid. Instead of the usual handful of talking heads, there’s a dizzying array of voices, many disembodied over the archive footage, leading to an immersive and often psychedelic experience. “Like a trip”, Trinder illuminates, “an actual trip, and it had to be a fun one.”

Rather than other dance music docs, Trinder cites the work of Julien Temple and Brett Morgen as major influences on Free Party, particularly Morgen’s acclaimed Bowie film Moonage Daydream, which came out while he was deep in the editing process. “I went back and watched all Morgen’s other ones,” Trinder recalls. “I loved Montage Of Heck, his film about Kurt Cobain, which is absolutely brilliant.” Likewise, Ross-Hulme’s main reference point for Hyper was Searching For Sugarman, an investigation into the long forgotten folk-funk singer Rodriguez by the late Malik Bendjelloul. “There were so many similarities between Rodriguez and Stevie Hyper D,” Ross-Hulme reflects, “they’re both kind of folk legend stories, and Stevie got lost in a similar way to Rodriguez.”

Ross-Hulme, who hired 4K cameras for Hyper with a cinema release in mind, admits that some of the film’s best soundbites came from iPhone voice notes which were recorded after they’d finished shooting the interviews. Whatever the quality of this material, it’s how the filmmaker weaves these elements together which makes them worth watching.

Archive footage can make or break a good documentary too. When they began making Hyper, Austin only had two VHS tapes of footage collecting dust amongst a box of his uncle’s memorabilia. Trinder knew Free Party needed a lot of news footage which could be prohibitively expensive, but went ahead with the clips anyway, thinking, “Fuck it, I’ll find a way!” At one point, early in production when it was still a short film about the infamous week-long rave at The Roundhouse, Trinder considered simply making it as an audio documentary, while Hyper began life as a radio show which Austin had worked on in 2010 with co-writer Matthew Gale.

A music documentary without any music is of course pretty useless, so the next headache is sourcing the soundtrack. Original recordings can sidestep this often costly process, but assuming the film is about a specific artist, or a particular scene, then there will be key records which need to feature. For example 808 — Alexander Dunn’s profile of the iconic Roland drum machine — would’ve fallen flat without ‘Planet Rock’ on its soundtrack, but luckily Arthur Baker was on board as a producer which no doubt eased the licensing process. Trinder was relieved to find sympathetic artists including Orbital, Aphex Twin and The KLF all had a kinship with the Free Party story, which made clearing tracks for use in the film all the more easy.

But even with all these elements in place — a great story, a compelling cast, eye-catching footage and an iconic soundtrack — things can still go amiss while trying to cram an expansive narrative into less than two hours. Armchair experts will always rear their ugly heads, ready to reprimand the filmmakers for missing some minor detail, but often these elements will end up on the cutting room floor in an effort to make it more palatable. A music doc isn’t an academic text, after all, but it’s important to not miss key moments when trimming it into shape.

Case in point: 808 acknowledges that the “distinct beats” of Planet Rock “echoed throughout nightclubs and on the streets, inspiring the development of new musical genres”, but even with Arthur Baker’s involvement, Dunn somehow left out the serendipitous episode when Baker hired a guy with a drum machine to come to the ‘Planet Rock’ session, a guy who just happened to have an 808, thus inadvertently helping to spawn electro, freestyle, Miami bass, house, techno, funk carioca, ghetto-tech and so on.

Finally, a great dance music documentary should have a pithy conclusion. No spoilers, but Hyper and Free Party reflect on the legacy and influence of their respective subjects, and both feature emotional and satisfying endings. A conclusion doesn’t have to be too analytical, but just enough to summarise and justify the past hour or so.

In the final stretch of The Art Of The DJ, Lawler reflects on the best feeling as a DJ: “It’s when you get to a certain point in your set, and you just feel it in the room,” he expounds. “You just feel it. You can’t smell it, you can’t see it, you can’t touch it, you just feel it.” After hours of screening dance music docs, and listening back through interviews, this writer doesn’t have a cast-iron tangible conclusion, but a very enthusiastic Trinder sums up the whole process succinctly: “The music drives it,” he insists. “You’ve got the right synch and archive, and in just a couple of hours you go: ‘That’s what it should be.’”