Becoming

I have arrived at the party but it's late, very late. Ships have sailed, trains have departed, reunions are over, wine has been spilled, hangovers recovered from, relationships ended, tapes played out and rewound. The world has turned many times. 2026 is almost over. Everyone who mattered in music is old or dead or something worse. That's how us riding on the bumpy over 70s bus see things. A digital minefield of jumbled, curated memory.

This film came out in January 2025. I just found it on Netflix. I knew it was out there in the land of the visual soup/nil by mouth diet but I couldn't be arsed watching it. Well I've watched it now.

It's a good film. Looks good. Sounds good. There's a benign kindness in there, drawn out by the upward travel of the story arc. I didn't expect that. Quite a few tricky edits to chew over due to a lack of live footage. Musicians will quickly notice the out of sync passages but that hardly matters. 

Cultural hurdles in the key of "The Blues" are celebrated or skipped as far as they can be. Plagiarism for profit is the sin rock and roll thrived on. Nobody can't pretend that it was any other way. We were all on an ignorance trip that some folks really did milk.

But LZ were more than just another fab four in the long line of "fabs". Architects of their own success and their own destruction. This film is all about their construction however. The downhill and more sordid part of the story is best left alone. That's a human truth. Common to us all. If you get the chance, better to write your own eulogy and then build a film around it.

I was a fan at the time. In those now misty edged years of discovery and rebellion. Saw them in Dundee and in Edinburgh for 10 Shillings or thereabouts. Good times. Bad times. The sweet racket of youth. Questionable behaviour in all walks of life. "The hollow sound of your own steps in flight", as Jackson Browne once said, or sang rather. Then living in a real and colder world took over. Winters of discontent. The music just faded away.

Meanwhile I've kept myself busy becoming me. I'd recommend doing that.