Movies about music are never far from programmers’ hearts at Leeds International Film Festival, and 2016 is no exception with a comprehensive mix of concert films and documentaries on offer. Among these is Matt Hopkins and Ben Lankester’s A Divorce Before Marriage – fresh from its success at the Open City Documentary Festival – an affecting meditation on lives lived through music, whose subject is, geographically and creatively speaking, much closer to home.
In 2006, the Leeds band I Like Trains released a mini-album, via the cult label Fierce Panda, and were signed to Beggars Banquet, an indie major with punk rock credentials. Touring the first of a planned five albums around the world, and playing in front of capacity crowds, the future of the group looked secure and healthy.
It turned sour in 2008, when Beggars was wound up, subsumed by the minatory 4AD label. Despite possessing a doomy, allusive style, tailor made for a company boasting Future Islands and Scott Walker among its artists, I Like Trains ended up without a label.
A Divorce Before Marriage picks up the narrative in 2011, as the band prepare to record their third album, The Shallows, for release on their own label I Like Records. Beautifully sequenced and shot on digital video, the film captures each member as he grapples with the reality of being a jobbing musician – endless motorway journeys, perfunctory cuisine, snatched sleep, desperate loneliness, the shock and awe of performing live before an audience – as opposed to the rather more mundane reality of becoming a grown-up – starting a family, making ends meet through a series of McJobs. Each talks candidly about his personal disappointment and sense of failure – this is a band whose Twitter bio describes them as ‘Miserable since 2004’ after all – as well as his conviction that I Like Trains still has something to offer. Voicing the thoughts of them all, singer David Martin confesses: “I don’t know how to give it up really.”
It’s an age-old tale, given a fresh twist by the film’s directors Matt Hopkins and Ben Lankester, whose own experiences as freelance film-makers putting the documentary together, via Kickstarter, chimed with those of the band. “We’ve learnt an incalculable amount about childhood dreams, ambition, family and growing up,” they say. “We’ve focused our camera on the ordinary and in so doing captured a universal story for the ages.”
A Divorce Before Marriage will be screened at Hyde Park Picture House on Sunday 6th November at 8.00 p.m. For more information visit: leedsfilm.com
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