Awaydays [Blu-ray]

Set against the Birkenhead docklands in 1979, Awaydays is the story of a group of disaffected young Merseysiders living in a working-class environment at the beginning of Margaret Thatcher's Prime Ministerial reign over Britain. The North of England in the late Seventies was, not a particularly nice place to be it was as an incredibly dark, violent place with the closure of indigenous industries, the rise of heroin and football violence. Liverpool Football team were supreme however and were riding the crest of a wave al over the UK and Europe, and there Legion of Fans followed, hence "Awaydays". The natural successors to the Mods who came before "The "Casuals" as they became known adopted the wearing of expensive European sports gear. Sports gear that they had stolen from all over Europe. The football hooligans here are represented in their regulation wedge haircuts, Peter Storm cagoules and Adidas Forest Hills attention to detail is very good and convincing. Awaydays also attempts to draw in cultural connections between music and football; both of which adhered to strict rituals, fashions and codes of behaviour. The football hooligans are represented in their regulation wedge haircuts, Peter Storm cagoules and Adidas Forest Hills attention to detail is very good and convincing. But the Music is Wrong, It's right for the City but wrong for the Hooligans. The film focuses on Post Punk Echo and the Bunnymen. Joy Divison. Gang of Four. This was the Music of the City, but the favoured Music of the hooligan was "Disco" and "Jazz Funk".

The core of the story concerns the relationship between art school student and emergent hooligan Carty a bright young man suffering from the recent loss of his mother and an adolescent disillusionment in urban life and Elvis, a charismatic if troubled member of The Pack. Both share a passion and love for all things post-punk.
Carty's wish to be accepted in society manifests itself with a yearning to be a part of a crew of football hooligans (The Pack). They're a bunch of guys of similar age to Carty, all kitted out in the same Adidas trainers and tracksuit tops and sporting wedge haircuts that make them appear more like bunch of petty pretty boys rather than hooligans. Eager to gain a place alongside The Pack on the terraces, Carty befriends Elvis (one of The Pack's front men) who lives alone in a house where all kinds of drink and drug debauchery takes place. Carty also adopts the same clothing in the hope of being noticed and asked to join the crew. But it's not as easy as that, The Pack are a hostile bunch and Carty has to prove his worth, before he can be classed as one of the boys. Tagging along with Elvis at an away game, Carty puts himself on the frontline and doesn't disappoint in showing his metal when The Pack take down a rival crew. Carty becomes the toast of the crew and is determined to take the bull by the horns and enjoy life, indulging in the rock and roll nature of his new lifestyle. But Carty's life of pleasure can't last for long and he soon begins to alienate both his family, and new friend Elvis, who grows jealous of Carty's popularity within The Pack and with the local girls. Relationships implode as Elvis starts to hate him self for his sexual deviations and the realisation he can never have his desire is seduced by the dark world of heroin. Carty's realises that life with the Pack isn't as sweet as it first seemed.

In Fact The whole of the Pack have this undercurrent of Homo attraction bromance thing going on. The intermittent scenes of violence are visceral and tough to watch in their own right, but at the same time they're not so horrific and explicit that they become unwatchable. Combining awayday punch-ups with bedsit brooding, the tortured relationship between the lads is generally lifeless. The film creates an atmosphere of sheer gloom and desperation as if a layer of dust and grime lies over the camera lens and the evocative sense of hoplessness of social mobility is overwhelming.

Better than you average hooligan Film

If the late seventies into the early eighties were part of your (misspent) youth, then Awaydays will transport you right back there with its rites of passage tale set in 1979.

Carty (Nicky Bell) is tired of watching Tranmere Rovers in the company of his Dad and the other Steady-Eddies at Prenton Park, and decides that getting amongst the ranks of "The Pack" - a notorious hooligan element that follow Rovers home and away, will bring the necessary excitement to his life that he craves. At the same point, Elvis (brilliantly played by Liam Boyle) - a key member of "The Pack" is looking for a way out of his existence, and yearns for a more stable life than the mixed up world of drugs, violence, and loneliness he currently dwells in. Each wants what the other has, but both also have common ground by way of the team they support, and their love of the music and club scene that was on offer just over the water in Liverpool.

Awaydays takes you along on the journey that these two very different people embark on, as they attempt to find what they're looking for, and invariably both find that you should be careful what you wish for.

The film is set to a superb soundtrack of classic songs from the period (Echo And The Bunnymen, Joy Division, The Cure, Wire, and OMD to name check a few, and the opening sequence which is set to "Young Savage" by Ultravox! along with the one of the fight scenes set to the Magazine track "The Light Pours Out Of Me" are two of the high points of the film.
The is also a cameo appearance from Wirral band - The Rascals, who play the part of an embryonic Echo And The Bunnymen playing a gig in Eric's club on Mathew Street.

If you're looking for a stereotypical brain-in-neutral football hooligan film then you may well be disappointed, but if a story set to the background of your youth gets you interested then you're in for a treat.

Awaydays on DVD faithfully converts the story played out in the cult novel to the screen, and you could do a lot worse that getting hold of a copy of the soundtrack to go along with it.

Awaydays is directed by Pat Holden and adapted to screenplay from his own novel by Kevin Sampson. It stars Liam Boyle, Nicky Bell, Stephen Graham, Oliver Lee and Holly Grainger. Music is put together by David A. Hughes, who also produces, and cinematography is by Tony Mitchell.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions Carty.

The football hooligan movie! It's a genre of film in Britain that has proved to be a sound source for farming, be it the oldies like The Firm and I.D., or the spate of them that surfaced in the last decade such as The Football Factory, Green Street and Cass, films quenching the thirst for those who were either part of the scene, those who wish they were part of the scene, or merely for those interested in maybe learning about the subject to hand. There would have been many a football hooligan film fan who ventured into Awaydays and got torpedoed by what was on offer. For this is a different animal, a deep picture with heart and brains and as it turns out, it's the most misunderstood movie of the football hooligan splinter.

It's an everyday reminder of the absurdity of life.

Set in 1979 on The Wirral, Merseyside, film centres on the relationship between two lads, Carty (Bell) & Elvis (Boyle), who become great friends whilst running with The Pack, a small band of football hooligans who followed Tranmere Rovers. The Pack are different to other football mobs of the time, where the others were made up of boot boy skinheads and scarf wearing dockers, these lads wore casual sportswear, neat sweaters and sported wedge or fop haircuts. They also used Stanley Knives to maim their opponents in battle. What unfolds with the Carty & Elvis axis is that one of them, Carty, wants to be in with The Pack even though he's not sure why, while Elvis wants out but isn't sure how to achieve his goals. They both need each other, but for different reasons. It seems......

Welcome to the petite bourgeoisie.

Writer Sampson achieves a rare old thing in the genre, he manages to not glamorise the violence perpetrated by the football mob. He cloaks some of his characters in misery and others as sad misfits, and he perfectly understands that violence for these people is a drug, their unity is a need to belong, a means to escaping what they see as a void in their lives. With Carty and Elvis, they are from different backgrounds: Elvis lives alone in a gungey flat (nicknamed The Bat Cave), he's a tortured wastrel with a cynical outlook on life, Carty, recently rocked by the death of his Mother, still has a job with good wages, a father, a kid sister whom he adores and a clean family home. As Elvis tells Carty, almost bitingly, that he has it all and he doesn't belong with the people he so desperately wants to be with.

Hate the World it's so romantic.

It has been coined as the film that finds This is England meeting Control, and that is fair enough, though it's more of a burden since many observers accuse Awaydays of lacking freshness and not being worthy of mentioning with those two excellent movies. Yet Awaydays gets it mostly right, the period detail is spot on, and suitably grim as it turns out for a depressed Thatcher era backdrop. From old slam door trains and vinyl selling record shops, to the apparel sported by the old football gangs and the new casual look of The Pack, Sampson clearly knows his onions. One criticism I saw laughed that the youngsters of The Pack were fighting grown men, how it looked ridiculous, but that's exactly what it was, out with the old and in with the new. 1979 marked the crossover from the boot boy scarf wearing thug to the young "dressers" that would become infamous as football warfare reached a front page news zenith in the 1980s. The film may ultimately be about an unorthodox "bromance", with thematics of alienation, grief, family and addiction threaded deftly into the story, but it sure as hell knows the era as much as it does the characters.

Where will it end?

Which brings us to sound tracking and acting. The makers have fashioned a brilliant sound track that blends with each passage of play in the film; quite often marrying up to the character's emotional states. This is the post-punk era and that means Joy Divison, John Foxx's Ultravox, Magazine, Echo & The Bunnymen and The Cure form the backbone of the soundtrack. All great bands and all purveyors of sadness, poetry and a veer from the norm. The acting away from Boyle (outstanding emotional layers) and Bell (wonderfully enigmatic) is a bit hit and miss, but such is the strength of the work by those two, film doesn't suffer. Stephen Graham is a darn fine actor, but nobody should be thinking he is stretching himself here, it's a role he could do in his sleep, but it always remains a well etched characterisation of an ex-squaddie who clearly can't let go of violence in his life. Oliver Lee is suitably menacing as the sadistic Baby Milan, and Grainger does well with a small female role in a film that uses the ladies perfunctorily. Must mention Mitchell's photography, which has moments of brilliance (check out the near water shots) that belie the low budget of the production.

Dislocation.

Some character motives are sketchy and Scouse accents are wayward at times, but this is an excellent film if you know what sort of film awaits you. It's a far cry from the chest thumping machismo of those films mentioned earlier, in that respect it's a failure. But as a character study, an examination of confused souls searching for something to bind their life too, and an observation of a young male friendship under unusual circumstances, Holden & Sampson's film is a near masterpiece. 9/10