Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

Truthful, trippy, romantic, revolutionary, hectic, heroic,

and as close to the heart of the generation as you can get.

There's not very many pop videos you can say that about

and not be sent to hell.

'Weekender' is a small glimpse into that beginning of club culture.

It absolutely represents an era when we were all going out

and it totally nails it.

I just call it iconic.

Just one word, iconic.

It still gives me goose bumps when I see it.

'Weekender' it's just like 'Fantasia', reminds me of 'Fantasia'.

I would describe it as a mini... mini masterpiece movie really.

It gives me the feeling of five in the morning after one of those parties.

It's really the first proper meditation, in a way, on the rave scene.

It's the first artwork produced about the rave scene.

'Weekender' is not just a film.

It's an important cultural artefact, and it's one of the very...

in some ways, one of the last very genuine cultural statements

that we've been allowed to make in this country.

Some films are a voice for people.

Some... some films are.

You see yourself in it and you're given a voice.

And I think if that happens to you and you see something like that,

it never leaves you, always remains something very important to you.

So it was... it was a wild time.

And now, even thinking about it now, I have to pinch myself

that it really did happen.

I suppose it's become... it's become the legacy of Flowered Up.

I had been playing drums with Liam's younger brother

in just a local estate band, just jamming around with no real purpose.

And his brother Joe, who became the guitarist of Flowered Up

and his friend Andy, who was a bass player,

they already had a drummer who was much better than me.

So I suggested it to Liam after this gig

that he became the singer to this band,

which the other three guys would make up the rhythm section

and I would manage because I wasn't a very good drummer.

The first time I clapped my eyes on Liam I had no idea that he was in a group.

But ten, 15 minutes later, when Des told me that he was in a group,

I thought, "Oh, my goodness."

And then a couple of minutes later, when he told me

the group was called Flowered Up, I thought, "Oh, shit, can I sign you?"

And he said, "Do you wanna hear something?"

And I said, "Not really. I probably just rather not and sign you anyway.

"It'd be terrible if it was rubbish, but I kind of get the feeling it's not going to be",

because he had the face of the times.

He had the wardrobe of the times. He was the face.

I mean, as simple as that.

I used to work with Factory Records and I worked with Happy Mondays,

and I worked with New Order,

and that often got me into clubs and... and opened a few doors for me.

And it also got me hassled to fuck by people wanting me

to introduce them to Bez or get them on the front page of the "NME".

Des and Liam wanted both of those things and I was actually quite happy to oblige.

I got put in touch with Flowered Up via a bloke called Andy Weatherall,

God rest his soul.

He'd heard through the grapevine

that Flowered Up were looking for a new keyboard player.

So he put me forward for the job.

Nice little middle-class bloke

ends up somewhere in the depths of South London

meeting these nutters for the first time.

Des was cheeky, funny, charming... very naughty.

And Liam was this cool kid.

He was a wild fucking monkey,

he was all over the place

and an unbelievable frontman and creative.

This was kind of one of the first group that really, certainly in London

and London was a bit behind the times in terms of bands.

The club scene was fantastic, but this was the first group

that came along that was inspired not only by the dancefloor,

but also by what Happy Mondays

and the Stone Roses brought to the club.

That night that I met Liam, I went away

and I wrote a manifesto in my mind about how we do this.

And the first thing was first press, "Boy's Own",

first gigs, in clubs.

It wasn't rocket science, but it was bloody exciting.

So we got involved and we did a couple of singles and things were going good.

But you know, we were making a lot of noise

and the majors were constantly sniffing around

and I kind of knew that we weren't gonna be able to keep them.

Someone was gonna offer them silly money and they did.

There was this fantastic gig, Shoreditch Town Hall,

really, really brilliant, brilliant, brilliant show.

And... and that was it.

Then London just got the cheque book out.

Quarter of a million quid, boom.

Crazy, crazy, crazy money.

They couldn't say no,

whether or not they knew they had to pay it back eventually

in that it was an advance.

Whether they cared about that, I don't know.

But yeah, that was it.

It was only ever gonna end in tears.

I was permanently scared.

So off they went, made a crap record with very poor guidance.

But they weren't really paying as much attention as they should have been.

Gigs were great. The record sadly wasn't.

The gigs continued to be great and the group were getting better, actually,

But yeah, the album was a damp squib.

It didn't live up to hype and a lot of people were out there to kick them.

We got them on the cover of the "NME" and the "Melody Maker"

before a single came out.

There was always this aura of fucking danger, edge and energy

surrounding Flowered Up.

Going on tour with them was quite an experience.

They were pretty raucous.

My role, more or less, was just to cause as much chaos as I can.

Yeah, they just liked to take risks, all of them the entire time

and just push the envelope as far as they could with all sorts of behaviour.

Well, what was it like? It was just mental energy.

We were untouchable, we thought.

Lawless, bandits,

and it just came naturally, just going around causing chaos

and I think it just carried on from the football days.

Flowered Up were a real contradiction to their name, weren't they?

Despite all that, they were actually just such great guys,

really lovely, really lovely blokes.

And they really looked after me on tour.

They were one of us. They went to the raves,

they went to the parties, they went and bought tickets with everyone else.

They wore the same clothes.

They drunk bottles of water the same way we drunk it.

So when they made a record, the record they made was out of reality.

Liam and me, I suppose, cos we'd been out clubbing for quite a while

up until that point, we literally were out for seven nights a week

for about two years solid,

and... and as every sort of scene or whatever, it gets diluted down,

it becomes more media-led

and then it's less and less underground and things like that.

It becomes... it loses its kind of special sort of thing

it had at the beginning.

The end of '87 up to about '92 when it started...

all of that sort of scene changed, was just fantastic.

Everyone was so friendly, was so nice.

A mixture of people back then.

You're going out with in clubs with lawyers

and it'd be lawyers and doctors and nurses and firemen,

just every walk of life.

It was just, "Hey, do you want some of my Ribena?"

Small clubs, dry ice, anonymity

and just other people allowing other people to express themselves

without laughing or sniggering.

'Weekender' lyrically... and maybe musically as well,

was a response to the dilution of the acid house scene

that we'd experienced leading up to that point.

Back then, when all this was going on,

there was a real rejection of formality, of corporations.

It was still the time of Margaret Thatcher,

so it was very oppressive and depressing and...

...politically and culturally, I think acid house was a little crack of light in the sky,

a little bit of colour that cut through the grey clouds of Thatcherism.

That horrible British class system,

which I think possibly has gone back to being what it was before that period.

But for a time there was partying, specially within the rave scene,

and people were mixing with each other from all walks of life.

All of a sudden, people who had normal, everyday jobs

stopped doing those in order to get into doing music related stuff.

And we were sort of steering away from all of that corporation type entertainment

because we were creating our own entertainment.

So it was a really good time, when all my friends and people I knew

who were like-minded were actually getting involved

in setting up record companies, running club nights,

doing club promotions, deejaying, getting in the studio.

I opened my shop on something that was called

the Enterprise Allowance Scheme,

where the government used to give you ?200 a month to start a business.

This was Maggie Thatcher, when Maggie Thatcher came in.

And suddenly there was ?200 a month.

We were just like, "We're entrepreneurs now!"

It was like this crazy, liberating, and kind of hedonistic

and kind of dark and light, a wild time.

For us, Black kids, especially the London clubs

they'd almost have a quota.

"We've already got six, that's enough. Sorry, no one else is coming in."

So the whole rare groove culture was very much a part

of the Black music scene in London.

It taught us how to get around the law,

how to ignore the law and to do our own parties.

We all came together and we all came together,

got sweaty together with ecstasy, in ecstasy, on ecstasy.

This was also taking place at a time of real change in Britain,

where you had the de-industrialisation, mass unemployment

and working class people particularly not really finding a place in the world

and then suddenly you've become part of this, not just national,

but international brotherhood and sisterhood.

You felt alive and you felt that anything was possible

and you felt just like...

Every Saturday night was the best night of your life.

I think there was a feeling that you could be freer,

wild at the weekend, that you could be anything you wanted to be.

Before acid house, there was a kind of gender apartheid almost

and I never really got to know my mates' girlfriends and wives and all that

until acid house and we went out.

I suddenly found out that some of my mates' wives and girlfriends

were far, far more interesting than my mates.

I could dress like a naughty St. Trinian's girl,

always one of my vibes, but I was always non-sexualized in my head.

I was just expressing who I was and nobody would lay a finger on me.

It was a moment of optimism and it did seem like a lot of music

made by new bands was becoming very popular.

You just have to watch these "Top of the Pops",

they're repeating "Top of the Pops" at the moment.

And the difference between a "Top of the Pops" from 1990

and a "Top of the Pops" from 1987 or 1988

is just another world and it was much more exciting for young people, I think,

to see people like themselves on stage performing

or making records and so on.

'And a new entry at number 34, Flowered Up and "Take It".

'This next band is a new name to us all, Flowered Up have their debut "Take It",

'a new entry at 34.'

You know, if you're good at something you can make it look easy.

So we must've been good at what we did.

And then the influence and all the kids that would go,

"Oh, look, well, they can do it, we can do it."

I must have got a call from someone.

And you know, "Are you interested in redoing one track from the first album?"

And I listened to it and it kind of fitted into the Madness sensibility inside me.

And I said yes.

To be honest, I was pretty scared of meeting them.

Yeah, I did spend a lot of the time worried that I'd end up in a police cell.

On the first session at West Side, which is a studio we had in West London,

I had a couple of Es in my pocket,

and so when Des walked in, I said, "Do you want half an E?"

But I just wanted them to know everything was fine.

All of a sudden Liam had come to me and said,

"We've got this thing now, but it's like a 40-minute jam."

And I think literally all he had was like the "Weekender" refrain,

"Go out, have a good time."

They came to West Side and we're doing "Crackerjack".

We did a reasonable version.

But when we came to the end of that session,

probably a two day session,

they were just jamming and they'd just jammed this song.

Somewhere on tape exists like, this 20-minute epic version

of "Weekender" of just us jamming

when they were just setting all the equipment up around us.

"Woah! Now we're talking.

"Let's... if we're allowed to, let's do that."

We got it down to 12 minutes 53 for the vinyl.

And that's as short as it could be and still make sense.

Seemingly out of nowhere, bang, came this tune.

It was like a present, the musicality was really good.

Then the lyric over the top, it was just... it was an adventure.

Like, "Fuck, yeah!"

It was kind of quite a strange time that post-rave scene,

in that straight up rock 'n' roll bands didn't have much reference to a lot of people.

And I thought this song came along and it was a really nice marriage of the two.

It's definitely not like punk or post-punk.

It's quite '90s, late '80s kind of rock, stadium kind of rock,

except with a working class urchin from Camden singing about his life.

With Liam doing his sort of rapping, poetic, talking, speech thing,

I mean, that was fresh!

We realised we had something unique

because obviously this wasn't gonna be a top 20 record.

It was gonna be a great critically acclaimed piece of music,

but wasn't gonna sell bucketloads,

and it wasn't gonna get us on "Top of the Pops".

We weren't concerned with that.

But London Records, their inevitable response was,

"How are we gonna edit it to three and a half minutes?"

Des was like, "They don't fucking get it."

I was like, "They don't get it?"

"Nah, it's too long to go on the radio."

I go, "Who gives a fuck?"

That voice, the energy, the power,

but the musicianship, the production, the arrangement,

it's fucking got street classical choirs.

It's got... it's just got everything!

When a group makes a bad debut record

it's pretty damn hard to come back from,

but to follow it with something so magnificent and such a statement as that.

I want a part of that.

So I was like, "All right, tell London to fuck off, right,

"and come back to Heavenly."

I can't remember the intricacies of what happened,

but we managed by way of Columbia stepping in.

We managed to get out of the London Records deal

and the record was able to be released on Columbia Records

but appearing on the Heavenly label.

Sticking to our guns with Des and Liam,

I think having that ability to tell people to just fuck off,

"We're doing what we wanna do",

compared to let's say, a group like Blur.

If they'd done something like that,

the record company would say, "Oh, no, you can't do it."

"OK, yeah." They would have caved in.

I said, "We're gonna make a film.

"This is gonna be a film, we've got to back up this track.

"We have got to make this a statement too,

"you need a label to make a statement here."

We had a deal at the time with Sony

and the guy we were dealing with was Rob Stringer

and Rob shared our enthusiasm.

Jeff Barrett and the rest of the guys on Heavenly, Martin...

they had the balls to sort of take the band back on and push it.

We'd already worked with a guy called WIZ

on a previous single called "Take It".

It was probably our best and most accomplished promo to date.

He was coming out of the culture,

he was involved in the culture, he was going to clubs.

He liked bands like Primal Scream or Flowered Up,

or the Mondays or the Roses.

He was friends with people like Weatherall, Jeff Barrett,

so I think it was very important that the director had to be somebody

who was of the scene and who was young and who was living it.

One night we'd been to the Diorama.

I'd left the venue and I was trying to get a cab home.

I was stood on the side of the road waiting for a taxi

to take me down the Euston Road to Shepherd's Bush.

Instead, I got a pimped up Mini with WIZ in the driver's seat.

Like that.

"Do you want a lift home?" I was going, "Actually, I do.

"And this is fortuitous, this is good. I've got something I want to play you."

So I sat WIZ down and I turned the lights off.

I gave him a drink, maybe a cup of tea, I don't know,

but sat him there, right between the speakers,

I flicked the lights off and I buggered off to the kitchen

and I played an acetate,

I put acetate of the track for him,

and soon as I could tell that it had finished, I opened the door,

flicked the light back on and I said, "And?"

He's going, "I've got it.

"I know exactly what you're looking for, I know exactly what to do here."

It could have been a load of people dancing around in the field.

I mean, that would have been fine.

But the fact that it went right into your psyche and into your imagination,

which was amazing.

It looks fantastic, it tells a story. It's a film, not a video.

It's... I think people approach it as curio, "What is this?"

And have their socks blown off.

It was about discarding your sort of regular, mundane lives

and going out and becoming the thing you aspired to be,

you wished you were or... basically living a fantasy really.

It's a kind of social realist rave film,

in the way that "Quadrophenia" was a social realist mod film.

The acid house culture was very much influenced

by mod culture in London.

You see it very much grew out of that...

"Whatever work we do during the day,

"we're kings for the weekend, we're queens for the weekend."

But it needs to be remembered

that "Quadrophenia" was actually shot in 1980

and that was a long time after the beginning of the whole mod scene,

which is what it was about.

So it took that long to get that film made.

So to get rave culture while it was still happening

was particularly fulfilling and a great achievement, I think.

There were a lot of people who were living this 9 to 5 life

and then they discovered acid house, ecstasy, clubbing,

music that they probably wouldn't have listened to before.

And it literally changed the way they lived their lives for quite a few years.

When I'd first seen "Weekender", I could see the references.

And then of course, there's that famous line from Jimmy,

"You can take your franking machines and stuff it right up your arse!"

It's not just this kind of kitchen sink realism,

it's more crafted than that.

Here's a wonderfully impressionistic, magical representation of a long weekend.

It's not pretentious either.

It's that balance, it's that harmony,

and it's style and substance together, which is a rarity.

And it's hard to find the middle ground of those two.

It's Ken Loach and Ken Russell meeting to make a rave film.

There's a lot of frames I could just freeze and just look at.

It's very beautifully shot and realised.

Originally it was for Liam to take the lead role as Joe,

which would have been really, really cool if he'd have been into it.

But he wasn't, I don't know why.

I don't know if it kind of scared him or something.

I don't know if it was something to do with his frame of mind at the time, maybe,

but yeah, he didn't wanna do it, which I was pretty gutted about.

I think WIZ was a bit gutted about as well.

So then we had to find somebody to kind of fill that role.

And then it became a case of getting someone in

who could act basically, who could be directed.

I knew Des through mutual friends and all that in North London.

I think at the 11th hour, Sacha said, "Look, I know Lee Whitlock

"and I'm sure he'll do it.

WIZ had shared the outline of the story

and I knew that Lee would be able to do that in his sleep.

Yeah, I got a call from WIZ,

and at first I thought he was sort of winding me up on the phone,

cos he kept going, "My name's WIZ".

I'm like, "Leave it out, shut up, I don't even know you."

And then he said, "Look, I've got your number from Sacha,

"we're doing this video and we haven't really got any money."

Story of my life, "We haven't got much money."

"Would you do it?" I was like, "Yeah."

Simple as that, "Yeah, I'll do it. When do you start?"

He went, "Tomorrow."

He was perfect. His face was absolutely perfect.

Lee used to come to all the parties.

We knew Lee really well, so we spent many a time in a field

shaking our heads and eyes rolling to the sky

with big grins on our face and hugging each other.

It's not like I had to go and rehearse for weeks on end or anything to do it.

It was pretty much, "Yeah, let's go, let's do it."

Glad I did.

The shopgirl becoming the main hero,

I think it's one of the best things about it.

When she's taken out of context in the club when she becomes

this kind of goddess of acid house, it's such an evocative thing.

Somebody is just like ringing up their stuff and doing their job

and maybe not the in the best or high status employment that they would want,

but they're just getting through the day and suddenly it's like they just emerged

from this chrysalis and are gonna swoop like a butterfly all over the dancefloor.

Everybody can relate to, everybody's seen that,

everybody's been in that position.

The first scene that we filmed, as far as I can remember,

with me in it anyway, was the love scene.

It was going to be somebody that I knew was gonna be playing the male part,

which would have been probably a lot easier.

But then WIZ said, "Oh, no, we've got Lee Whitlock to play it."

He used to be in a TV series called "Shine on Harvey Moon",

which I used to watch as a kid. So that made it even worse.

Yeah.

They actually wanted us to be naked,

but I remember Anna going, "I don't wanna do this, I'm not gonna do that."

I was like, "Well, if you don't wanna do it, you don't wanna do it,

"just get flesh-coloured underwear or whatever."

The first time I met him I was wearing this flesh-coloured leotard

and I had to kind of smooch with him.

And so, yes, it was awful.

I completely identified with the whole 'working class

living for the weekends', because you're in a shitty job,

you live in council estate, you maybe live with your parents,

maybe you don't have a lot of money,

but at the weekends, you could look forward to the weekend.

You could dress up, go out and have a good time,

as he sings in the lyrics and then back to reality again,

Monday morning with the comedown,

you have to go back to work or school or college.

I do love the way he portrayed both heaven and hell,

without getting on this preach box.

He did it in a way that wasn't cliched.

One thing that "Weekender" really shows really, really accurately,

what it was like when you first walked into a door

with thousands of ravers, sweating ravers.

It was like going to a different world.

It's so rare to see this sort of vibe presented on film and it look real.

The thing about a lot of people in England at that time

we were kind of world class drug takers.

That's the one thing we were fantastic at doing.

What WIZ showed in "Weekender" was the reality of what taking too much

and how much fun it is when you have a little bit

and when, boom, when you have too much.

When they're on the dance floor and they're sniffing amyl

and then the record just cuts out.

And that's actually happened to me.

The record's slowing down in the bathroom.

It was just picture-perfect and it's just so visceral as well.

There's so much feeling in it.

That was a brave thing to do, to put that out.

And I remember doing interviews at the time.

I remember getting absolutely roasted on BBC Radio One Newsbeat

for it depicting drug-taking and this sort of thing.

And the woman was absolutely trying to roast me for it.

I was just like, "Just go out any weekend, you will see this within the country.

"All we're doing is being honest about it. We're not glamorising it.

"We're just documenting what goes on out there and showing it.

"And that's what the video's about."

We were actually using real poppers, real amyl nitrate,

and we filmed it several times

and then we were all just like, "Really?"

WIZ was definitely capturing a real moment there, but it got too much.

We're all getting headaches and we had to tell him to stop.

We had to fill the bottle with water.

The toilet scene is great as well. I love that.

I had to grab my boyfriend

and throw him into the back of the toilet cubicle

as if I were gonna make love to him.

What you see inside club toilets is normally very naughty and nefarious.

It's something that you sort of... I don't know, in music video or music film,

I think a lot of people dismiss that, especially now.

I think it would be very kind of champagne and big and bling,

"We're not gonna show toilets."

So to show the toilets and then also have it in a kind of elevated way again

and just... the cinematography is very considered,

is just super powerful and something I love.

I like the record shop scene, because I remember.

Roy The Roach, who's the DJ at the beginning and had the shop Quaff,

and we'd all go down there and buy the new imports and stuff.

And it was just great to see that scene with everyone in there getting the records.

And that's... I guess that's a rare thing now

where it was a pilgrimage to the record shop to get the latest import.

Now I guess you order the MP3.

I don't know, you download... It's just not the same.

The slogan for my shop back then was "Covering Club Culture".

And it was about nurturing that whole culture of clubbing,

which was not just about dancing and listening to records.

It was about the way you thought, the way you dressed,

the way you associated with the people around you.

It was a way of life.

And that's what I love about "Weekender".

And I think that's why it's still poignant today,

because it goes beyond the music.

As much as it's about that wonderful record,

it was about the culture, it had a soundtrack.

It was about what changed our lives.

You had your little set of ceremonies.

You'd go to the record store, you go hang out with your mates,

smoke a joint, listen to records, get ready and then go out

and just have nights that were actually just incredibly inspiring.

And I think that comes across in "Weekender".

I remember the meeting with WIZ and he had this incredible chart,

it was like a sort of spreadsheet

and it was sort of the excitement levels and the bits of filming against the time.

It was a sort of big, lumpy, wavy thing that he did.

He had the whole thing mapped out and this was right at the beginning of filming.

WIZ is such a voyeur. He sees...

He's scanning every little detail of a situation

and that's what you get in the film

because there's all these details that most people have missed.

There's this scene at home where he's sort of questioning his life.

He's looking at his mum and he's looking at sister

and the kind of weird little knickknack things they have in the house.

And you can see he's almost rebelling against his humdrum lifestyle.

And then you see him in the bath

almost looking like a foetus or something, curled up.

There's actually something in that bath that WIZ told me,

there is a toy, a spongy toy of "Dennis the Menace".

And that was WIZ's little kind of Dennis the Menace ecstasy reference.

At the very end, you see him looking at the little penguins

going over to... I don't know where they're going,

they're going up a little slide thing and slide down.

And it's like the drudgery of going through life and sort of tipping over the edge.

Lee's character is so multifaceted.

He's a three-dimensional kind of man.

We see masculinity, we see vulnerability, we see doubt, we see a love interest.

And they're all things that everyone experiences.

I don't think Lee would mind me saying,

sometimes he was burning the candle at both ends, like we all were.

We'd go to parties the night before and then just go straight to work.

The shot that always really gets me is the shot of the guy on the crane,

when he's lying there.

Just the intensity in his face and that's it, you're hooked.

We were up 24 storeys

in an outside window cleaner's wobbly metal carriage

that went up and down on a pulley.

I was so scared that in the video you can actually see

where I'm lying down on my back, there's a bucket of water,

and it's next to my leg, and you can see the ripples in the bucket from my leg shaking.

And if you look carefully where I'm holding the sides of the cradle

the white of my knuckles from holding onto the side of this crane

because I'm so sure that it was gonna fall or drop.

And people were saying up the top, "Can you take your hands off the side?",

I'm like, "F off, no way, no, shut up, no. Let's just do this."

Because it's quite a scary shot, it's quite a scary place to be,

it actually captures the kind of the horror of being back at work.

The way the guy just doesn't really do anything,

he just sits and lies there, and thinks.

I mean, if I was in that position and I was on a comedown

and I was supposed to be washing windows and I was lying there

I'd be too scared to stand up.

There's so much psychology that you're like,

"OK, what's he going through? What's he feeling?"

Back then, I was still out partying a lot anyway.

I think a lot of us were while we were filming.

When we were shooting the supermarket scene in "Weekender",

we were in Queensway and we had a specific budget,

we've got a certain amount of time.

And we've taken over the whole of this supermarket

and the electrician makes this almighty F up

and brings two cables together and connects something

that should never, ever be done, it's like a cardinal rule.

And he manages to blow the whole electricity system.

The whole of Queensway was thrown into darkness

and all of the food started to defrost because they couldn't solve the problem.

It was an absolute, unmitigated disaster.

And now with the passage of time, unfortunately,

I can't remember how it was resolved

because I think we had to do a reshoot the next day.

The club scenes, it wasn't staged.

The adult party shots were from a proper free party

that we threw for that purpose.

I'm a professional makeup artist

and on this one occasion WIZ said to me,

"Listen, we want everybody to be involved and we want people to look genuinely

"like they're at a rave, so you can basically party."

I'm like, "So what, drop a pill?" And he's like, "Yeah."

The dancing with the children and that I thought was absolutely wicked.

To be there and watching Lee, he's quite a good dancer, actually.

I remember turning up on the day, "So what are we doing?"

They said, "Just stand there

"and we'll put all the kids around you and dance."

I was like, "It's sort of a bit weird."

So I took I think half an E and waited to come up

and then danced with the kids cos it was a bit weird dancing

with all these little kids around me going, "All right, yeah."

We were filming in Des's mum's house

and in their whole little estate down in North London.

One of the great things about Flowered Up

was that they came from a community.

Everybody knew everybody

and they were really treasured by those people on that estate.

I think everyone had a sort of cameo role of just a normal job.

My dad got to be in the video and that was fun for me,

because my dad was great.

You'd be privy to all these amazing stories

and these North London boys

and getting to spend quality time with people whilst working,

but on a slightly different level than you would do with normal artists

because they're more accessible and you've got your culture in common.

You could see with WIZ the talent,

like the way his sort of head was working, what he could see and all that.

Yeah, and he'd always show me like, "This is how it's gonna look."

First time we're doing a proper, proper video shoot,

and he made you feel comfortable.

He said, "Right, Baz, you're gonna be the bookie.

"I want you to sit behind a counter and just sort of half daydream."

But it was fun, just sitting down and meeting different sorts of people,

seeing the ins and outs of filmmaking.

WIZ would always refer to us, give us specific jobs,

ask us to do research, come back and have meetings,

and we'd co-create these incredible shots.

And of course, it was all coming through WIZ and his lens.

But he would allow, he was generous as a director.

WIZ is his own kind of filmmaker, a chameleon I guess,

always trying to do something really interesting.

He doesn't want to tell you how the party is done.

He wants to push the envelope, he wants to be provocative.

He's a bit of a freedom fighter as well.

I used to be so surprised, after I started working with WIZ,

how many people would know him that didn't know directors,

because of "Weekender".

This videocassette in the late '90s circulated in Russia, well, Moscow.

Who brought it there, I don't know,

but I think that opened the mind for many, many, many young people like me.

Within seconds you're just immersed in this world

and that's really intoxicating.

If you elevate the every day, it suddenly makes filmmaking democratic.

There is an element of magic.

It's a very special thing because then you see someone that's like you,

you're like, "Wow", it sort of transports you there even more.

And I think it changed the way we started portraying

perhaps drugs and youth culture, in movies, in the media, etc.

It opened the conversation.

I actually find "Weekender" hard to watch

if I'm to be brutally honest.

I find it very hard to watch and kind of painful in a very good way.

If I was to show this film to any of my nieces,

I would probably say this was a representation

of what we were doing with our lives.

But unfortunately partaking with drugs has its highs,

but it also has a massive downside.

And, really sadly, both Liam and Joe from Flowered Up

obviously took the brunt of the bad side of drugs.

And it really can have a life devastating effect.

Drugs lead us down all sorts of different paths.

I guess what Liam was trying to say in his lyrics

and WIZ was trying to say in the film was that

it's great to go out and do these things,

but actually where's it gonna go, it's not gonna last.

Is it really the answer?

I was surprised by Joe because he wasn't a junkie

when we did "Weekender".

Liam was getting there and I was made aware of how he was

and his whereabouts and things like that, and what a mess

or he's getting better or he's starting a group

or he's reformed Flowered Up or he's...

And if ever I saw him, it was kind of lovely.

But he'd been killed by heroin, he'd been killed early on.

It took a while for him to die and it's sad.

Liam was a beautiful soul.

Think he had a hard life.

And I wish he was alive because he was a beautiful guy.

He'd do anything for you.

And he was only geezer I know, well, he's the only mate I know

that would let him stick a bottle up my back door.

We were both working class kids

who probably really didn't have much of a future going for us really,

and I was very lucky otherwise I could have easily ended up

where Liam ended up, which is not on this planet.

What happened to the brothers from Flowered Up is very tragic.

And again in their music there's an untapped darkness,

hints of it in the film itself,

of the way it could go either way with drugs,

it could be heaven, it could be hell.

That adds another sadly tragic element to it,

another element of authenticity, of realism to the whole thing.

'How does it go?'

'Four and twenty blackbirds...'

'In case I'll sell this to "The Sun".'

WIZ probably didn't have any other thought in his mind

apart from just making something that was truly honest.

And that's why it has remained timeless.

That's why it has remained the seminal film

about the acid house movement.

You just have to look at certain things through time

and just sort of see how well they've stood the test of time,

not just in their own scene, but in society over all.

It still continues to have an influence on me.

I made a video for The Streets called "Blinded By The Lights",

and yeah, "Weekender" was a huge influence on that.

And I also did a few episodes of a series, a programme called "Skins",

and again used "Weekender" as a reference and showed that to a lot of the actors.

It just still looks real and now.

It was not just a genuine statement about the culture,

but was also a genuine statement from the culture,

which is very, very rare in any kind of art.

It works on every level, the lyrical narrative and everything,

but the way that WIZ has made it,

it just works as a film with an incredible song.

Most people are gonna go, "Well, drugs suck."

Unless you go around saying, "Drugs are absolutely fuckin' fantastic

"and they're great," then you can have it how you want it. "Suck drugs."

You can shove 'em up your arse, drugs, you can do anything you want with them.

Just make sure what you're doing makes you happy.

I think I might have that on my epitaph.