I Am Weekender

Weekender was released in 1992, given an 18 certificate and banned by the BBC and ITV. It became a cult film and Danny Boyle said he wouldn’t have made Trainspotting without it. This documentary, which screened at the 2023 Glasgow Film Festival, is comprised of Zoom conversations with the filmmakers and the musicians which it featured, supported by archive footage and material from the film itself. If you have an investment in the original, you’re likely to find it entertaining. If not, it remains an interesting portrait of a community in a particular place and time, with its reliance on formula sometimes resulting in unintentional humour which complements its generally enthusiastic mood.

That mood is tinged with sadness, of course, because of the death of one of the film’s stars, Flowered Up frontman Liam Maher, from an accidental heroin overdose. He wasn’t the only person involved who went that way, and he’s fondly remembered here by friends and colleagues who are, in retrospect, more aware of how precarious their own lives were. Part of that was simply due to poverty, however – there is talk about the difficulty of day to day living in those days, at the tail end of Thatcherism, and how important that made it to escape at the weekends. To get together, as one contributor describes it, “in ecstasy, on ecstasy.”

With input from the likes of Irvine Welsh, Shaun Ryder and Lynne Ramsay, this documentary reflects on the popular culture of the time – on music and drug use but also on things like the freedom it provided for social mixing between genders, no strings attached – and also addresses Weekender itself. Artist Jeremy Deller describes it as “the first artwork produced about the rave scene.” There are comparisons to Quadrophenia, though it’s noted that it’s more contemporary with the scene it depicts. There is discussion of its efforts document drug use accurately rather than to glamorise it, but of course attracted negative media attention, an easy target at a time when struggling politicians were whipping up moral panic wherever they could.

Sometimes that accuracy pushed boundaries. It’s explained that real poppers were used on set until the stars got headaches from doing too much so asked for the bottle to be filled with water instead. They were too shy to be naked, so wore awful underwear meant to match their skin tone, and of course this only looks worse with the passing of time and improvements in technology, especially as nakedness is far less of a taboo now. We see clips of the film as anecdotes like this are shared, and there’s a lot of enthusiastic spotting of friends and family members of the core team, who filled in with bit part roles and work as extras.

Essentially an exercise in nostalgia, this still has some value as a piece of analysis and a contribution to the growing body of work on film censorship in the UK. It’s also a refreshingly honest statement about the need to acknowledge lived realities in art and the vital importance of countercultures when mainstream culture has become toxic.