Beautiful Noise

Not a bad effort. However, it would have greatly benefited from featuring a lot more of the bands who were influenced by the original wave. It suffered slightly from only really talking about the main players in this "scene" - Not that it ever really was one, outside of the music press.

Would have been nice in the last half hour, rather than it kind of petering out, to feature the new wave. People who have been influenced by it. More than just a name on a screen and a couple of photos.

Having said this, it's lovely to see some interviews with Guthrie, Kevin Shields, etc and to get their take on the goings on back then.

Not really sure about the addition of Billy Corgan and Trent Reznor though. Never really considered their music either influenced by, or relevant to, these bands.

Maybe they needed them. Just in case the American Market didn't understand the point of the doc... Seemed pointless to me. The sort of people who will watch this doc are the sort of people who don't need Billy Corgan spoon feeding them what they already know. It just came across as mildly patronising to be honest.

In fact, you could argue that the American Bands of the time kind of ruined it all in the eyes of the music press. Smashing Pumpkins, kind of being one of the bands that caused the press backlash in the first place.

Kind of ironic. That.

Oh. And lovely to see that old git Alan McGee churning out his "Loveless is overrated" tirade yet again.

No mate. You are just bitter that they didn't want a drug addict ruining their buzz in the studio. And it cost you a few quid.

Still. Less than you ever spent on drugs. And nowhere near the amount you pretended it cost to perpetrate your sad, mad, self-mythologising. So there's that.

God if I have to hear that wizened old man saying that again, I'll kill myself.

He didn't support these bands. He let them flounder, and as Kevin Shields rightly said, "He was just a drug addict who didn't understand what we were trying to do"

Yup.

Still. I waited a long time for this to surface. I paid me money and was happy to see some of the more obscure bands mentioned (Flying Saucer Attack, Pale Saints) amongst the others.

So all in all, if you like these bands. This won't tell you anything you don't already know. It'll preach to the converted. But I give it a 7 because this doc shone a light on an otherwise overlooked scene that meant a lot to me when I was a kid.

And you can shout "F**k off McGee, you utter, utter twit" at the telly whenever he comes on.

Also. Bobby Gillespie.

Nah. Never took that wee chancer seriously, either.

Some good live footage I'd not seen before too. So hooray for that.

After months of anticipation, BN is finally available for download! As a long-time fan of the early dream pop, and having read all the great comments on Facebook, I had pretty high expectations for this film. Unfortunately, the film is bit of a let-down from my perspective. I had hoped for an in-depth look into the music and history. (I.e. cultural landscape, influences, studio techniques etc.), but instead, the film is comprised mostly of light interviews and a bit of old footage.

Considering this thing was 10 years in the making, the filmmaker seems to have done very little research, or made any attempt to build a connection with the artists. I appreciate the ambitions here to cover a big spectrum of the music, but spending 2-5 minutes on each band definitely left me wanting more. He would have been better off focusing on one or two artists, like last year's "Made of Stone", which I enjoyed very much. The other issue I have with this film is the shallow interviewing. It seems that everyone who appears in the film was asked the same questions: When did you first hear about the band, and why do you like them? I would have learnt more if the artists were asked about their favourite food and colour :)

This film is worth a viewing for anyone new to the genre, but any hard-core fan like myself will already be well familiar with the band chronology, and the music's dreamy, ethereal quality :/

I finally got around to watching my DVD of the "Beautiful Noise" documentary directed by Eric Green - and while much of it was what I expected, it was still great to hear the artists behind the music I've loved for so long discuss their influences, the scene they got lumped into and how their bands folded up shop, so to speak, as well as the current resurgence and interest in this type of music.

I question how useful or entertaining this doc will be for the uninitiated to this style of music. For the rest of us, it's a great walk down memory lane, and with interviews from rock luminaries like Billy Corgan and Trent Reznor, a validation of what we've known all along.

But my favorite part was the interviews of Kevin Shields and Alan McGee inter-cutting between each other as they talked about the recording process of MBV's "loveless" (they are basically ripping each other a new hole about the whole experience by recounting how, basically, they thought the other person was disrupting their lives, and in McGee's POV business). This just goes to show that history is determined by those who write it (or talk about it in this case).

Personally, the most important outcome of watching this documentary was that it made me pull out all of my shoegaze/dreampop CDs to rip them into FLAC format so I could revisit it all during a long trip I have coming up.

If you get a chance to see "Beautiful Noise", by all means do: the artists are interviewed in intimate settings where one gets the sense they were able to relax and really reflect upon the music they've made and their larger cultural impact. It was definitely worth the wait for this doc.

I was actually skeptical about this film when I saw the trailer and crowdfunding campaign. I had the usual worry of what they would cover in the film and what they would leave out. Some of the talking heads in the trailer were not really of this scene (a bunch of Americans!), so I was ready to yawn and roll eyes. But luckily they were people inspired by UK noise, that although more well-known than the shoegazers themselves, were there as supporting cast rather than the leads. Its quite surreal having massive pop-stars like Robert Smith talking about this much smaller music from a listener's point of view.

So its a vague scene for starters. I mean, where do we say "noise" started? Well, I think its OK to draw the line somewhere and just say it was Britain in 1980. Of course we know about the Velvet Underground and earlier - but this really is about "shoegaze" music (in the late 80s - early 90s), which openly revived the kinds of texture The Velvets and others explored in industrial music, but sometimes with new technology.

So the lead players are really The Cocteau Twins, Jesus And Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine. Three hugely influential pillars of popular rock music that didn't really sell a lot of music. What this film does best is just let the musicians, engineers and studio heads speak for themselves. And what you get is not every piece of the sprawling puzzle (snobs wake-up, its impossible to explain everything about a decade of fuzzy music in one film) but a great overview of how the musicians felt about what they were doing and who influenced them. This is supported by bigger known American artists who sight these groups as influential to them.

The film doesn't have the structure and production value of something like a slick authorised Rolling Stones documentary - but thank goodness it doesn't. This was obviously a labor of love and the filmmakers obviously cared about the subject or all the significant artists wouldn't have contributed to it. A Rolling Stones (or any other big group) documentary is an authorised product these days, which means they get to cut out anything embarrassing and basically create a piece of advertising/propaganda to keep the legacy (business) going. Watch a John Lennon documentary and Yoko as the head of the Lennon estate will make sure you never know about John's previous wife.

This is definitely worth seeking out and surprisingly good.

I had always heard of many of these bands all through my listening career of the 80's' and early 90's, but never really had a chance to have a proper listen to any of them, or, perhaps I did, but was unmoved. When I first heard Lush's De-luxe, I knew instantly that I liked this band and their sound. And that was my introduction to the "shoegazing" movement. I delightfully explored their whole back catalog.

So, over the years I tried numerous times to get into some of the other shoegazing bands covered in this documentary. And no matter how I tried, I always came up with the same conclusion; 'there is a reason none of these bands ever made it big, they all suck'.

Incorporating noise, feedback, distorted guitars etc. into rock n roll was nothing new in the 1980's, as this documentary would have you believe. The Beatles first famously used feedback from George Harrison's guitar amp at the beginning of I Feel Fine. Later The Velvet Underground fully incorporated noise into their sound and did it masterfully. In the 80's, the band that was experimenting with noise but also retaining a keen sense of musicality and songcraft was Sonic Youth, who, no surprise, have had much more success and longevity than either Cocteau Twins or My Bloody Valentine.

This documentary has a kind of amateurish, half-assed feel to it, kind of like the Beautiful Noise scene it's portraying. So my predisposition to the whole movement was pretty much reinforced while watching it. Unfortunately Lush gets only a brief bit of covarage for their contributions. At least they used one of their very beautiful compositions "For Love" over the beginning of the Girls and Guys segment.

In conclusion, unless you're a real die hard fan of this scene or any of the bands covered, there is very little reason to watch this show. Even if you are a fan, they cover so many acts in such a short amount of time, you can't possibly sink your teeth into any of them to get a good handle on their music or their message. Do yourself a favour and buy a Lush album instead.