KEY POINTS:
My weekend started with a movie about late lamented Joy Division singer Ian Curtis and ended with the final of Pop's Ultimate Star. The combined effects of the two could have been enough to turn any winter blues to black.
The movie Control, screening at the film festival,
was terrific in almost every way, the sort of rock movie to make you dig out old JD albums and wonder just why this short-lived band had left such a lasting personal effect.
Or how you ever heard of them in the first place back in the early 80s. From memory, I remember Love Will Tear Us Apart getting to No. 1 in New Zealand after Curtis' death and appearing on the local radio and Ready to Roll chart; and it being played week after week with no clip to accompany it.
I also remember being on holiday with my dad on the sunny Gold Coast and seeing a record shop window with the big black cover of the Unknown Pleasures album seemingly sucking all the light out of the mall it was in. I went in and bought it.
So began my fixation on the brief but legendary band that - as the big crowd of fellow members of the Radio With Pictures generation at the film attested - was well worth developing a morbid fascination about. Control is only going to encourage more of that, what with its black and white cinematography matching the deep dark gloom of the music.
The film also reminded that Curtis may be a dead rock hero but in life he was a guy whose personality flaws made him increasingly unlikeable. And that Joy Division - the Doors of their generation - sprang from a neighbourhood not dissimilar to what you see on Coronation Street. Which, in many ways, made them all the more remarkable.
The film is coming back for wider release at the beginning of summer. I'll leave any further ravings for a proper review then.
Which brings us to an even bigger on-screen musical tragedy - the final of our most desperate musical reality show ever, Pop's Ultimate Star. Or as we affectionately call it around the TimeOut office PUS.
Good on Joe Cotton for winning the thing and all that. She's a star that one.
But otherwise, words fail me. Actually words failed everybody - finalist Matt Saunoa was halfway through U2's Vertigo when he forgot the words. Which, to be fair, is easy to do as the lyrics aren't that memorable. All together now: "Hello hello ... mumble mumble ... Vertigo ... mumble mumble fee-eel, fee-eel ... ah, thank you good night".
But then at the end judge Jordan Luck got up to do his guest spot and he did some very strange things to the words of Why Does Love Do This To Me? Yes, he wrote it but, to be fair, it's easy to mess up because can anyone ever remember whether Jackie came, or if she went away, or whether she left him or he walked out or whether he's thinking about her or he's thinking about himself? All together now: "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know ... oh ... oh."
There were other aspects which made the PUS final such unintentional comedy. And not just the low ratings - it had a measly 341,300 compared to the NZ Idol final's 582,400.
There was the bit when the three finalists had to do a song with two of the eliminated contestants which meant a curious threesome between Cotton, fellow ex-TrueBlister Keri Harper and NZ Idol winner Ben Lummis. Their DIY choreography got little Ben in a bit of a crunch between the gals. For some reason the phrase "Marmite sandwich" sprang to mind.
And then there were those judges Luck, Peter Urlich, Harry Lyon and Kim Willoughby and - stop laughing down the back - "performance coach" Graham Brazier, all supposedly brought in to give the ill-conceived show some rock cred. You can laugh now.
Urlich has always oozed a certain shameless showbiziness. You got the feeling the others would rather have been somewhere else as the ropy production got ropier minute by minute.
Though it must be said Brazier, sort of the Kramer of the show, brought a certain off-beamness to proceedings: "As Tennessee Williams said you're like a cat on a hot tin roof," he told one finalist, which was apparently high praise indeed. Yeah, that Williams guy, loved his early albums eh?
