“Create
your own universe, find your own identity. The rest is the product of your
environment…”
This film made me relive the same hope and disappointment I had with the build up to the production and release of UNKLE’s debut, Psyence
Fiction – DJ Shadow’s doing the music, Richard Ashcroft and Tom Yorke (!) are
collaborating; this has got to be
great but, in the end, too much and, at the time, we thought not enough… DJ Shadow had just released the
era-defining Endtroducing through
James Lavelle’s Mo’Wax record label and this was going to be a ”follow-up” on a
grander scale with guest stars, a big theme, toys and tie-ins.
But it wasn’t to be, even though the record has some grand
touches it fell under the weight of expectation and stands as the former head
of A&R at A&M has it, as an attempt at the era’s greatest concept right
at the end of that era… The music press hated it and I traded in my copy with
barely a listen.
 |
| James Lavelle |
And yet… by the end of this film, I so badly wanted James
Lavelle to win I was beaming with
delight as he turns things around with the most successful Meltdown Festival to
date, curating some impressive talent and, more than anything, discovering how
much how he was loved by a generation of music fans. Hell, he even gets back
with DJ Shadow on stage for a sell-out UNKLE set at the Royal Festival Hall and
there is peace, there is redemption and lessons learned.
This is where it begins, says James and you really do
believe that. Since the film was completed Lavelle has released the fifth UNKLE
album and the best-reviewed since Psyence Fiction… here’s a man who does not
give up.
James had made a million by the time he was 21 through his
record label, Mo’Wax – formed when he was 18 with Tim Goldsworthy - and the audacious
signing of a wide range of hip-hop and dance artists from DJ Krush, Money Mark,
Luke Vibert and Charlie Dark’s Attica Blues to the more esoteric electronica of
Andrea Parker, whose Kiss My Arp was
one of my favourites of the period. But it was DJ Shadow who was the
world-shaking talent and his crate-scraping, totally-sampled Endtroducing… changed perceptions of
what was possible for hip-hop.
 |
| DJ Shadow digging some crates |
Mo’Wax, it seemed, could do no wrong and yet Lavelle was so
driven, he couldn’t stop himself from driving ever onwards outside his comfort zone
and that for pretty much everyone else working with him. In the press events
for the launch of the collaboration Shadow (aka Josh Davis) looks haunted, he’d
had enough and was burnt out with James a man for whom personal barriers were
incidental to his pursuit of the right sounds and the sonic vision…
James’ mother recounts their having him tested by an
educational psychologist as a youngster; he scored off the charts for
creativity but a lot less for reasoning so, whilst Lavelle has undoubtedly
pissed off a lot or people – hardly a bridge left unburned… there’s almost
certainly a neurological reason for it. Whatever the cause, it appears he has
learned to live within the rules most people accept intuitively… he’s also
survived decades of DJ-ing, a job that goes hand-in-hand with sleep depravation
and chemical methods of staying awake.
Lavelle got his break through writing a column called Mo’Wax
for the forward-thinking jazz magazine, Straight No Chaser telling then editor James
Bradshaw that he “needed him”, a young man with his finger on the pulse writing
about the new “flavas of the month…”
It wasn’t long before his boundless passion saw him set up a
record label – Mo’Wax infused with his love not just of hip-hop and sample
culture but also street art with Robert Del Naja – 3D from Massive Attack (and
a possible suspect for Banksy) – among those designing for the label along with
New Yorker Futura 2000 aka Leonard
Hilton McGurr who largely designed the UNKLE project.
He was expert at pulling people into projects but less so in
“managing” them creatively or perhaps even as people. He was inspired by outfits
like the Wild Bunch – who, including Bristol maverick Tricky, would morph into
Massive Attack but wasn’t able to land them for his label nor Portishead the
other leaders of the trip-hop movement of the early 90s.
 |
| Crowd pleaser |
Mo’Wax attracted the attention of the bigger labels and
A&M invested in the project… Lavelle may not have been a millionaire at 21
but he was close. Bigger business would bring trouble down the line even as he
signed DJ Shadow and released Endtroducing. That record’s success helped him create
the UNKLE project which, after two years gestation was so viciously cut down as
a vanity project by the NME and others.
Listening to the record now it has stood the test of time
better than expected, Shadow’s music is almost as inventive as his album and
the collaborations work fairly well. But it underperformed and, as the film
shows, was the peak for a project that delivered diminishing returns especially
after Shadow left.
The question is always how much Lavelle was a genuine artist
or just an “A&R man”, assembling talent and trying to gain credit for “editorial
control” and vision. Lavelle is less revealing on this – clearly, it’s a
painful subject – than current and past collaborators (there are many) and you
gradually get the feeling that he has been dismissed too readily.
 |
| Hanging out with Noel and Ian in endless lost weekends in the mid-nineties |
Artistic credentials aside, business acumen soon became
Lavelle’s main weakness as A&M merged with Island and took all of Mo’Wax’s
artists leaving Lavelle without a record label and facing decades of DJ-ing and
fruitless attempts to create another breakthrough for UNKLE…
All of which finally brings us to his triumph at Meltdown
and something like a happy ending. The fight goes on irrespective of personal
and professional set-backs.
Director Matthew Jones has pulled together a tightly woven
and dynamic story from many thousands of hours of footage from the last 25
years and made a compelling narrative for anyone with even a passing
acquaintance with popular music and dance culture over that time. But it’s also
a story about passion and one man’s refusal to submit to common-sense and
personal approbation. James is now 44 and, as with all of us, you have to hope
that it all begins now.
The
Man from Mo’Wax is available in a standard edition and a stunning limited-edition DVD/Blu-ray set from the BFI shop online and on the ground UPDATE: this is now sold out but you can still grab it from Amazon and other retailers if you're very quick. It’ll strike a deep chord with anyone
who truly loves music and popular culture. Apart from anything else, James Lavelle has brought so much joy to people's lives and we should celebrate a career less than ordinary.
The set comes with a ton of extras including a 2018 hour-long interview
with James Lavelle and DJ Shadow and an extended “interview mash-up” with
Josh Homme, Futura, DJ Shadow, Ian Brown and more: it’s worth it for Josh
alone, a raconteur of the highest order!
“Mo” – More
“Wax” – A vinyl recording
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