Control

I went to see Control the other day - it had been on for a while but somehow I'd not been able to get to see it for various reasons, so I'd resigned myself to missing it. Then I found it on at a small local cinema which specialises in second runs, and it was showing at 2.00 in the afternoon. I don't usually go to evening screenings as I'm usually too sleepy to stay up too late. So, I thought I'd make the effort to see it, and I'm very glad I did.
It was saturated in the atmosphere of the Seventies and I almost felt the film as well as saw it. The late-seventies is probably my favourite period for music, although I was well into my twenties. Sixties music is almost too familiar - it's embedded in my DNA, and I know most Sixties songs by heart. I spent hours listening to the radio, and on Radios Luxembourg and London tracks would be repeated endlessly. Seventies music started badly, and I could never like Led Zeppelin and their ilk however hard I tried (although I have a sneaking fondness for Kashmir), and , although I was a big fan of West Coast stuff at the time, as my boyfriend, later husband was, and still is, an ardent Deadhead, I tired of it eventually.
When punk took hold, it was a response to what was increasingly seen as a bloated, self-indulgent musical culture. Tracks would drag on for hours, and musicians saw themselves as heirs to Beethoven and Mozart. There was much talk of classical-rock, or jazz-rock 'fusion', but the music press, led by the NME were beginning to actively promote something called 'punk'. Something was in the air.....
My brother-in-law worked in a record shop in London, so we began to receive a flood of free albums, by bands, mostly British ones, that I'd never heard of. It was great stuff, and I loved it. Talking Heads, Television, Joe Jackson, Graham Parker, and all the punk bands, the Pistols, Buzzcocks, the Clash - all were a bracing blast of very fresh air. Joy Division were a bit different, more doomy, blacker, and when Ian Curtis died they seemed to disappear off the map. My children were getting older, and there were more of them, and life took over, so music began to take a back seat. Eighties music wasn't much to my taste anyway. So that's why the music of the late Seventies still has a hold on me.
Back to the film - its depiction of its period was extraordinarily vivid - the phone boxes, the grim interior decor, the clothes; all were recreated with a realism that was palpable, because it was felt as well as visualised. It made me realise once again, the extent to which life has changed in the 1990s, with the advent of mobile phones and the internet -this was a world in which they did not yet exist, there was no virtuality, everything had to be done manually. It was a world my parents, brought up by Victorians, recognised - it now seems antideluvian.
Curtis was a deeply troubled soul - it's funny, but in the film, he seemed happiest at work, dealing with the unemployed at the Jobcentre. It seemed to suit him, being a civil servant. On stage, performing, he was consumed, tormented - it made a compelling spectacle, but destroyed him. Sam Riley didn't just portray him, he inhabited him intuitively. He was terrified of losing control, but exulted in it simultaneously. It looked marvellous, the monochrome depiction of Macclesfield made it look beautiful, but never idealised. A great film, I thought, a tremendous achievement.