Where does it say that creative genius goes hand in hand with commercial success? Being an indie music fan these days can be a bit like following a lower league football team: your band gives its all, plays with guts and soul, but never quite makes the play-offs. It is a bitter twist of fate that robs you of your hopes and dreams. Do you feel it all the worse if you have actually tasted that longed-for, so often dreamed about success, only for it turn to dust in your mouth?
This is the scenario Leeds rock band I Like Trains find themselves faced with at the outset of A Divorce Before Marriage, a beautifully realised and melancholy affair, an account of hope regained, of some small victory snatched outwith the jaws of defeat (to keep up the footballing analogy).
In 2006, the band had released a mini-album on Fierce Panda before signing to indie major Beggars Banquet. With encouraging reviews of their first album, they were touring the world, performing to enthusiastic capacity crowds. What could possibly go wrong?
It turned sour in 2008, when Beggars was wound up, subsumed by 4AD, a byword in artfully packaged doom and gloom. I Like Trains should have been a shoe-in, but instead they ended up without a label. ‘Not dropped,’ guitarist Guy Bannister is keen to underline from the beginning, ‘but without a deal.’
Not drowning, but waving then. Cue singer David Martin staring into the dark here-after, accompanied by the heavily amplified thwump of the soundtrack as it metaphorically rises up to meet him.
A Divorce Before Marriage is a labour of love by filmmakers – and long-time fans of I Like Trains – Matt Hopkins and Ben Lankester. Partly self-financed, and completed via crowd-funding, the making of the film can be seen as a paradigm for today’s austerity driven aesthetics. Picking up the story in 2012, the film documents the band’s struggle with the waking reality of the everyday – the one where each member gets to hold down a job, do the weekly food shop, be a good dad, walk the dog – and contrasts it with the compulsion to maintain momentum in a career threatened by ennui, both from without and from within. A case of shot by both sides perhaps.
To begin with, I Like Trains are all in it together, but fissures start to appear as the strain of recording and touring third album, The Shallows, takes its toll. There are motorway journeys, budget hotels, snatched phone calls, motorway journeys, service station haute cuisine, radio phone in shows, motorway journeys, missed first steps, ferries, autobahns, Europe endless: it’s all you can do to remind yourself that The Beatles started out like this once upon a time. Nobody falls out: I Like Trains are too tight a unit for that. Things just, you know, drift.
But they do so wonderfully. Shot extensively using the digital format RED, it’s a handsome devil is A Divorce Before Marriage: exquisitely framed shots of the Arcadian Yorkshire countryside cosy up against the steel and glass metropolitan glide of the Leeds skyline. There are echoes of Chris Petit and Patrick Keiller – a kind of Robinson Up North, if you like – it’s that good.
The film ends with a marriage and an acceptance of sorts. In another sense it begins with a birth – the first shot, after the prologue, shows frontman Martin bathing his newborn son, Oscar – and ends with a rebirth – of the impressively bearded singer himself, as he embarks on a new career.
We come full circle: the band and their audience wrapped together in the darkness and in the crossfire of the stage lighting. A new beginning
A Divorce Before Marriage – A Film by Matt Hopkins and Ben Lankester