Let's hear it for Slag Bag!

Who needs real pop stars when the best music movies are about fake bands? By Bob Stanley
Stardust (1974)
Breaking all the mock-doc rules ... Keith Moon, Dave Edmunds and David Essex in Michael Apted's Stardust (1974). Photograph: Kobal/EMI Kobal

As a rule of thumb, it works 90% of the time: the bigger the pop star, the worse the documentary. These days there are so many people with something to lose - agents, T-shirt manufacturers, Mattel, Vodafone - that it's a wonder pop docs get made at all. Back when everyone thought rock'n'roll would entertain as many generations as the zoetrope, it was access all areas - and so we got Don't Look Back, Gimme Shelter and the turgid but painfully irresistible Let It Be. But hatches were battened down soon after this self-lacerating effort. Abba the Movie avoided answering any questions about the band, in spite of rumours of sexual proclivities to rival those of Fatty Arbuckle. As for U2's Rattle and Hum, it broke all the records when it came to brows furrowed and handfuls of popcorn hurled at the screen.

The fact is, the best rock documentaries are entirely fake, as anyone who has seen Spinal Tap will agree. They follow rock gods such as Jim Maclaine, Slag Bag and the Fabulous Stains. Their songs never make it on to vinyl, just celluloid. In this way, their myth is complete - you will never hear Slag Bag's Snake Madness on a Vodafone ad.


Essex had initially played Maclaine in That'll Be the Day, a grimy 1973 film directed by Claude Whatham. Filming began before Essex had begun to trouble the teen mags, but by the time the film came out, Rock On was a huge hit and the former David Cook of east London was an A-list actor and singer. Unsurprisingly, he was hurried into a sequel. That'll Be the Day had ended with Maclaine buying his first guitar; Stardust saw him work his way through Merseybeat into rock gospel territory as a megastar at the end of the 1960s.

The mixture of fiction and reality was tough on Essex, and on the crew. Filming a Stray Cats "show" at Manchester's Belle Vue, they had the idea of filling the venue with David Essex fans. It was pandemonium - not least because the kids were shouting "We want David" rather than "We want Jim". Still, the Stray Cats would have made a great British equivalent of the Monkees - they featured David Essex, Keith Moon, Paul Nicholas and future Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan.

Marc Bolan and Ray Davies were also keen on playing fictional pop stars. Unfortunately, when director John Mackenzie picked a real-life musician to play Mike Preston in his 1972 big screen debut, Made, he opted not for the T-Rex or Kinks frontmen, but for Roy Harper. Perhaps that's why the deluxe DVD format is indefinitely shelved.

Mackenzie was a Play for Today veteran who went on to make The Long Good Friday, and his cinema debut is bleak beyond belief. Carole White plays Valerie, a downtrodden single mum who meets hippy Mike - all flaxen hair and cheeky grin - on Brighton beach as he is being interviewed. When Preston, having rubbed noses with her, turns Valerie's plight into a hit record, everything goes dark. How Mackenzie must have wished he had plumped for the Bopping Elf or the saturnine Davies - Harper was such a handful that he stuck a magnet inside the tape box containing potential spin-off hit Valerie's Song, erasing half the track. Asked to re-record it, he sang "shitty city, shitty city" over the blank parts. Radio 1 received the single with not one but two raised eyebrows. The single, and the movie, undeservedly sank in a sea of indifference.

Another legendary lost film is Ladies and Gentlemen ... the Fabulous Stains. In a sense, it's the cinematic equivalent of the Sex Pistols' Lesser Free Trade Hall show - although it was screened only in a few arthouse cinemas, everyone who saw it formed a band. The Stains were a girl group featuring the young Diane Lane and Laura Dern, made then broken by tours with ageing rockers Metal Corpses and an up-and-coming British punk band made up of Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Paul Simonon and Ray Winstone. The film was written by Jonathan Demme and Nancy Dowd, who had won an Oscar a year earlier for Coming Home. The director was the Mamas and the Papas' producer Lou Adler. By rights, it should be hailed as a mock-rock masterpiece. So how come it isn't better known? Although it was filmed in 1981, the post-production took so long that it wasn't ready until 1984, by which time ripped fishnets and sexy shower scenes had been replaced by sensible Nik Kershaw and Aids panic. Adler remains bemused by how The Fabulous Stains disintegrated. Dowd blamed the druggy behaviour of the real rock stars on the set.

Clearly, it's best to leave unreliable rockers out of the music doc equation altogether. Go instead for real actors such as David Dixon, he of the sea-cold eyes used to some effect in Get Some In and the BBC's TV version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (he played Ford Prefect). And what about Denis Lawson? A thoroughly decent sort - rather posh, too. They both starred in Jumping Bean Bag, a Play for Today given just one screening on BBC1 in February 1976, and a fake rock doc that ticks every box.

Jumping Bean Bag tells the story of Slag Bag, a band formed at public school, who play souped-up glam rock - a smidgeon of Roxy, a dab of Yes, plenty of Spiders From Mars - while wearing Woolworth's Martian fancy dress. After a secret gig at school, Slag Bag are expelled. Singer Ozzie Freemantle (Dixon) remains cool in front of the head: "Read about us in the Melody Maker, sir," he purrs. "Slag Bag, the public school transvestite group. We're going to be amazing, sir." And they duly are. From an unsuccessful gig in a church hall ("You puddings!" shouts Freemantle at the unimpressed audience of seven) to a triumphant gig at Chiswick Empire where one fan literally screams herself to death, Jumping Bean Bag is unrelenting in its mixture of unintentional hilarity and genuinely great songs, written by one Stephen Deutsch, now a lecturer in Bournemouth. Suede may well have based their career around this film.

The things that make pop groups so special and endearing - Ringo planning to become a hairdresser after leaving the Beatles, Barry Gibb's habit of cooking sausages at 4am, Keith Moon going 10-pin bowling but forgetting to let go of the ball - are always far, far away from the old rock cliches that make up rock docs, both real and fake. When Snare leaves Slag Bag, the replacement drummer has a penchant for eating sandwiches on stage between songs. You feel in awe of this fictitious group as you rarely do with a band in a real documentary. With no myths to shatter, no half-baked philosophies, Jumping Bean Bag takes pop's manic thrill down to its essence.

· Bob Stanley introduces Made (on February 21) and Jumping Bean Bag (on February 28) at the Barbican, London EC2. Box office: 020-7638 8891.