Documentarists Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace's previous project - 2010's No Distance Left to Run, about the reuniting of Blur - formed a superior example of the let's-get-the-band-back-together narrative, with the bonus of being wholly true. In their new film Shut Up and Play the Hits, again moving in credible musical circles, the drive is towards putting a band to bed - forever. In 2011, James Murphy announced his electropop outfit LCD Soundsystem would play one last gig, at Madison Square Garden, before unplugging their sequencers for good. As Murphy himself admits, this was partly out of a fear of the kind of elongated soap opera the music business tends to foster (*cough* Mickandkeef *cough*); more precisely, it was from a sense that touring had reduced the group to the lowly standing of a covers act, trying in vain to replicate the clinical precision of each bleep and wibble committed to vinyl; generally, it was a bid to get out of the game before the fun stopped.
The surprise lay in the fact that recognition had come late to Murphy, a sturdy thirtysomething with a salt-and-pepper beard and the pensive demeanour of an early dotcom entrepreneur. Here's that rare popstar with a weight of thought and experience behind him: one early pan across the Murphy bookshelves briefly alights on Graham Greene, Thomas Pynchon and David Gaddis, tomes you suspect Justin Bieber, or Peregrine from One Direction, most likely won't have consulted the next time they go out to get their haircut. What follows is, in essence, a concert with footnotes, any context for Murphy's music gleaned in passing from an interview the frontman was filmed giving to a journalist a few days before the gig.
As the journo notes, Murphy's decision to stop the music was "supremely controlled" - a clean break - and that description fits the film, for the most part. Southern and Lovelace favour clean, crisp images, sound design to give the cinema speakers a thorough workout; yet within this technical framework, they have a way of getting intimate with their subjects, and pinpointing those dramas facing musicians at pivotal moments in their careers. The concert is intercut with scenes from the decidedly un-rockstar routine Murphy finds himself having to adapt to in the days after the event: taking the dog for a walk, shaving off the stubble, throwing off a hangover that, in this case, counts as both literal and figurative.
Still, it's become apparent from these directors' opening one-two that their default mode - euphoric, as with fans at gigs - starts to look hazy if you don't share their excitement at hearing these tunes or being backstage with these musicians. Clearly something about ver Soundsystem's music connects with the shrugging, swaying, in some instances sobbing hipsters we see filling the Garden that night, but the music left this viewer cold. This is indie disco of a variety only just more substantial than the whimpering, apologetic nerdgasms of Hot Chip; at its rockiest, it veers perilously close to the hybridisation of the accursed Pendulum.
Any stagecraft here is minimal: we get a choir for one song, and a glitterball, but are mostly left to watch Murphy and chums bopping around behind synths. That element of careful control does rather shut out the messy emotion which made the Blur film so compelling: retirement was, after all, Murphy's decision to make. (A more critical film might have asked his bandmates what they made of the decision to put them all on the dole over night, at a moment when the average rent on a Soho studio loft isn't coming down noticeably.) A fond send-off, granted, for a group who achieved the near-impossible - to emerge from the music industry with their creative integrity unsullied by ad campaigns or greatest-hits packages - its appeal may simply be limited to fans who weren't there that night.
Shut Up and Play the Hits opens in selected cinemas from Friday.
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