AWAYDAYS

Release date: May 25th 2009

Label: Universal Music Catalogue
Format: 1CD & Digital download
Cat # 5318892

AWAYDAYS: THE SOUNDTRACK THAT INSPIRED A FILM

When Carty meets Elvis at a Bunnymen gig, they fall headlong into a volatile friendship that each of them aches for but neither can control. Violent, sexy and funny, AWAYDAYS is a blade-sharp rites-of-passage that buzzes with the post-punk energy of its late-70s Liverpool setting.

Based on the classic novel by Kevin Sampson, and pulsating to a soundtrack of Joy Division, The Cure, Magazine, Echo & The Bunnymen and Ultravox, AWAYDAYS examines identity, fate, the nature of male longings and their need to belong.

Release in cinemas across the country on May 22nd 2009, AWAYDAYS is the first major feature film to be set during, and evocatively portray, the first dawning of the football casual fashion cult. QUADROPHENIA meets CONTROL? TRAINSPOTTING meets STAND BY ME? AWAYDAYS is all of these - A Catcher In The Rye with switchblades.

TRACKLISTING

AWAYDAYS – album liner notes

Before it was ever a novel, Awaydays was a movie. Or to be precise it was a scene from a film, set to music. I was in Eric’s, the legendary Liverpool underground club, and heard the corrosive opening riff to a song I didn’t know. At that time, spring 1979, three distinct but intertwined scenes had been bubbling under in Liverpool for the previous 18 months. There was the rise of the football team, current holders of the European Cup; the unique and androgynous way the young urchins dressed in Liverpool, characterised by the wedge haircut with a cyclops fringe covering one eye; and there was the renaissance of the Liverpool music scene, centred on Eric’s and driven by bands like Teardrop Explodes, Wah! Heat and Echo & The Bunnymen. The track I was listening to was I Will Follow*, and all I could see in my mind was a gang of floppy-fringe football lads wilding down a backstreet, all dressed to kill. I had a conviction that this Liverpool scene - the music, the football and above all, the iconic, proto-Casual street fashion - was something that, in years to come, would be seen to be important. And that image of the football lads coming down the road never left me…

On the bus home I got talking to Dave Hughes. Dave, one of the first punks in Birkenhead, was a legend before I ever met him. He played in some of the most influential new wave bands of the era - Radio Blank, Dalek-I and Orchestral Manoeuvres, but always retained his normality, chatting (or more likely rhapsodising) about bands he loved. From Dave I heard about art-punk bands like Ultravox! and Cabaret Voltaire long before they played at Eric’s.

That initial image of the marauding, unisex Scals took shape and form. I wrote Awaydays, mainly out of a compulsion to capture that post-punk golden age, and try to preserve an important part of pop culture that had largely gone unrecognised and under-documented. Dave Hughes, by now a successful player in Movieland after scoring the hit flicks Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch came to me with a proposition. We were going to make Awaydays as a movie for £300,000! I was all for it - with one massive caveat. The lads had to look how they looked in 1979. And the music had to be the authentic soundtrack of those times. That meant timeless cult classics from Joy Division, Echo & The Bunnymen, Magazine, Cabaret Voltaire and John Foxx’s seminal Ultravox!, of course - with approximately threepence ha’ penny to pay for it!

This was going to take some doing. We’d heard that Michael Mann had paid big, big money for the publishing rights to Joy Division’s New Dawn Fades which he used in Heat, and Control had just sent their catalogue into orbit in terms of soundtrack requests from film and advertising campaigns. We were going to have to be creative here. Gary Aspden at adidas, who had already given us terrific access to his archive of vintage training shoes, accidentally slipped us the address of Joy Division/New Order bassist Peter Hook. We cut a short promo of early scenes we’d shot and turned up in affluent Alderley Edge in Cheshire. We knocked on Hooky’s door. No-one answered. Next door but one, a retired military-type was washing his car. I wandered over:

“Excuse me mate - which one of these is Hooky’s house?”

Within 90 seconds an armed response team had sealed off the cul-de-sac. The cowering occupant of the first house, seeing two strangers on her doorstep dressed in black, had assumed the worst. When she heard our accents, she pressed the red button. Chortling at the misunderstanding, the jaunty robocops pointed us to the right place (Road not Close, Aspden!) and the majestic Peter Hook felt duty-bound to accept our pitiful offer. Joy Division were in. Hallelujah!

There was another close call over Magazine. From the moment our Editor, Mark Elliot, cut one the film’s great scenes to the Magazine track The Light Pours Out Of Me, we were all sold on it. Awaydays director Pat Holden said he’d happily spend all the money we had on that one track rather than clear five other songs but miss out on Magazine. It’s the moment where The Pack all walk round the corner in slow motion and the waiting Woolybacks know they’re about to get it. Once we’d seen and heard it, none of us could imagine any other piece of music working as well, and Pat despatched our music consultant, Charlie Galloway, to clear the song by hook or by crook. But whichever route he took, Charlie found a dead end. Howard Devoto’s manager was away on tour. When he got back, he was bushwhacked by flu. And all the time the clock was ticking…

In the meantime, my own personal mission was to ‘reclaim’ Ultravox. Mention Ultravox to ten people today and nine of them will hum Vienna, musing tearfully about the halcyon days of the New Romantics. That Ultravox arrived in 1980. But between 1976 and 1978 John Foxx’s original Ultravox! blazed a brilliant trail between the duelling worlds of Post Punk and early Electronica with 3 subversive and ever more sinuous albums. They were fey, arty, wilfully pretentious - but they were fast, brutal, vicious and sexy, too. They were the wild, the beautiful and the damned, and with his sculpted cheekbones and pristine wedge haircut, John Foxx was the original young savage. We knew we were on a hiding to nothing trying to prise even one track from Ultravox!, who rightly treat their legacy as sacrosanct. Just as with Peter Hook though, the band liked the look of the film and perhaps, in Pat Holden and the rest of the Red Union team, recognised kindred spirits who were toiling to craft something of enduring quality with Awaydays.

By now we had made a fine cut of the film and were about a week away from having to “lock” the production. This is the point of no return. If you lock your film without all the necessary clearances in place, you’re in trouble. What to do about Magazine? Instinctively we knew that if Devoto and co were to see the film, and in particular the way we were proposing to use their track, they‘d surely give us the nod. But try as we might, we couldn’t get an answer either way out of the band. Awaydays would be naked without The Light… but the track was going to have to come out.

Yet, as often seemed the case with Awaydays, just as we were about to go under, the patron saint of Indie Penury came to our rescuein the form of Richards Thomas and Boone. A drinking session at Latitude led to the phone number of one Devoto, H, being slipped into my pocket. This was timely. Devoto was due to return to Thailand, where he’d been living for some years, but he was extending his stay now and due to be in London until Tuesday. This was Sunday, and given that I was in a Suffolk parallel universe with neither email or mobile phone connectivity, it was left to the trusty Dave Hughes to take a deep breath and persuade Mr. Devoto of the film’s worthiness and, more importantly, his track’s arterial and hypnotic role. According to Dave he said:

“Yeah. No problem. D’you need me to sign something?”

And that was that. After months of tense and fruitless searching we were there in less than ten words.

Needless to say there were near misses (Simple Minds “I Travel” was a Yes, and then suddenly a No) and downright knock-backs (that whole sequence where Robbie Bates does his robot dance was visualised to Kraftwerk’s We Are The Robots. We shot the scene. They said No.) But the CD you now lovingly caress is a fitting and lasting tribute both to the film itself, and the scene and the people who inspired it. It’s also a perfect time capsule of the sounds I heard in Eric’s all those years ago - the night Awaydays came to life.

Kevin Sampson, April 2009.

* The hip young band behind 1979’s I Will Follow were called U2. They went on to become quite big.