An old Cornish lady falls down a tin mine. (Are you quite sure you want me to go on?) She's pulled out in time and rushed to hospital. Her son, a lobster fisherman, sits on a cliff top bench, looking out to sea, waiting anxiously for news. He's accompanied by his daughter; and an alcoholic Irish pop star with whom he has been having an affair. His friend, a Welsh farmer turned singer, suddenly and without provocation starts to sing the 2007 pop anthem I Stood On Cape Cornwall. We cut back to the hospital, where the ghost of the old girl's late husband is sitting by her bedside, joining in the chorus. So is she. The next morning Cap'n Birds-Eye gets the news that his mum is going to pull through. It's just about the most plausible and believable thing which happens in the entire movie.
The true story of Fishermen's Friends is one of those astonishing, far-fetched sequences of events which only happens in real life. A quite good amateur band are noticed by a recording label; they make a quite good album which does quite well in the charts and they become quite well known, playing medium sized venues and some of the less prestigious slots at festivals. But that story has already been told, in the first Fisherman's Friends movie, in which an entirely fictional version of the band were picked up by an entirely fictional London promoter, who also buys the local pub and falls in love with a local girl. Unashamedly doing Local Hero with sea-shanties, it worked perfectly well. But now there's a sequel.
You can always spin a good yarn out of a rags-to-riches success story, but it is much harder to make the "riches" part interesting. Act Two of the real life Fishermen's Friends career presumably runs to "and they made albums and did gigs." If you had briefed me to make up a story, I might have shown the lads driving around Port Isaac in Rolls Royces and building posh penthouses where their cottages used to be, but reconnecting with their yokel authenticity by the end of the movie. (None of the film characters seem to have made any money at all out of their chart success.) There is, in fact, a dramatic story to be told about the band bouncing back after a terrible accident that left one member and their tour manager dead, but you don't turn actual tragedy into feel good musical comedy. So the film has to essentially rehash the themes of the first one: amateur band make it big; amateur band don't take things seriously; label drops amateur band; label reinstates amateur band; amateur band make it even bigger.
I assume that, off stage, the real Fishermen's Friends behave like the professional musicians they have been for the. best part of twenty years. But the movie has to pretend that they are exactly like their stage personas in ordinary life. Which is, in fairness, pretty much what Richard Lester did to the Beatles.
"Based on a true story". It is perfectly true that Fishermen's Friends appeared in some advertisements for Young's frozen fish around 2011. The adverts showed the band singing silly words to Dance to Your Daddy and What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor, while fooling around in boats, on the beach, and in the pub. They are the best kind of ad, actually: little music videos with some heavy product placement, perfectly capturing the bawdy silliness of Fishermen's Friends' stage act and associating it with the product. In the film, the record label force the boys to don orange make up and flippers and walk around town dressed as fish fingers. (Why would a company hire minor celebrities and then make them unrecognisable?)
It is perfectly true that Fishermen's Friends appeared on the Pyramid Stage in Glastonbury in that same year. (I was there.) It is true, from a certain point of view, that they opened for Beyonce. They appeared at half eleven on Sunday morning and she closed the festival at quarter to ten at night. (In between came Don McLean, Laura Marling, Paul Simon, the Bishop of Bath and Wells and some acts I haven't heard of.) A few years before that the English National Opera had done Act III of Valkyrie on Sunday morning: the Fishermen's Friends themselves referred to it as the Old Man's Novelty Slot. I imagine that Michael Eavis booked them because they were quite good and quite famous. There's normally a whole stream of folkies on the Avalon stage.
But in movie land, what happened was this. Jim (James Purefoy) is sad because his father (David Hayman) died in the last movie, and can't accept an incomer (Richard Harrington) as his replacement. He has taken to the bottle, ruined a prestigious gig, and, er, shacked up with a recovering alcoholic Irish pop (Imelda May) who has moved into the village. She puts cream on the scones before the jam, but he falls for her anyway. Purefoy pretty much carries the movie singlehandedly, treating every preposterous scene as if it's a piece of classical theatre. (Although, in fairness, Jade Anouka as the less nasty music executive, does manage to convince us she's an actual person from That London as opposed to a panto villain.) When Jim's family stage an Intervention, he says that he'll rejoin the band when they play the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. So his old mum (Maggie Steed) sets about securing them a gig. Things are getting quite desperate when you are basing plot points on old urban myths about Neil Armstrong. She butters up Michael Eavis by sending him two lobsters along with a copy of their album; and she convinces the record label that it's a good idea by, er, reciting, at some length, the theory that Joseph of Arimathea stayed in Glastonbury on his way to St Michael's Mount in Cornwall. (Which is also an urban myth, come to think of it.) I can only suppose that this was a set-up for a rousing chorus of Cousin Jack which never actually arrives.
The film is so full of absurd bullshit one hardly knows where to stop. A lady throws a glass of wine in Leadville's face after a he makes a lewd innuendo, so the whole band have to go on a feminism-awareness course. They have open auditions for Jim's dad's replacement and none of the hopeful's seem to know what kind of songs Fishermen's Friends sing. A whole club full of posh Londoners is instantly won over by a chorus of No, Nay, Never (and the nasty record producer says "
I enjoyed it very much indeed.
2 comments:
Although, if you think about it, it makes sense for the Cornish speakers to stick together, otherwise what would be the point, unless you were just going to talk to yourself.
Fishermen's Friends reimagined as a folk-horror, where Port Isaac is the last enclave of Gaelic speaking Celts. Jim is a druid trying to revive the Old Ways; the Port Isaac Look results in the town having interbred with the Mackerel. Film ends with Chris Evans being burned alive in a giant wicker pastie.
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