Film: Unmade Beds

December 2009



When Axl gets drunk he wakes up in strange bedrooms across London with no knowledge of how he got there.
So much so that he begins to count the ‘unmade beds’ he leaves behind.
The Spanish student is in the capital looking for his long lost father but instead spends much of the time getting drunk and watching bands with the bohemian couple Mike and Hannah.
With a mix of Belgian, Dutch, Spanish, French and Danish cast and crew, the second film by Argentinean director Alexis Dos Santos, based on his experiences as a film student, feels like a celebration of multicultural London.
“I wanted to represent the way that when you are a foreigner in London, you form these close communities with others like you,” says the director.
But it was largely shot in Nottingham last year.
That was due to the Nottingham based production company Wellington Films, who co-produced Unmade Beds.
“We persuaded Sol Gatti-Pascual at The Bureau in London, who initiated the film, that Nottingham was a good place to shoot the film,” says Al Clark from Wellington Films, behind the award-winning London To Brighton.
“We persuaded EM Media to part-finance the film if we shot it in Nottingham and used local crew,” he says of the screen agency, whose previous hits include This Is England and Control.
Its budget was £1.2m.
“If you are paying 50 people for six weeks on the shoot, plus sic months in post-production, then that kind of money soon goes.”
Familiar locations include Seven in Canning Circus, The Maze venue in Mansfield Road and the Forest Recreation Ground.
“There are a few key scenes shot in London but most of the exteriors and interiors are in the Lace Market, Sneinton, The Loggerheads pub, an Asian supermarket in Hyson Green and various places,” says Clark.
Adds the director: “The warehouse that we found for the squat I think would have been impossible to find in London. Any warehouse like that in London would have been converted a long time ago. Nottingham has the architecture and the right scale for what I was trying to make.”
Many scenes are filmed in the street at night, which must be interesting.
“There are always problems filming in the street, especially at night,” says Clark.
“The trick is to keep it fairly low key. You get one or two people shouting ‘is this the news?’ They usually think you’re filming for East Midlands Today. No, that’s why we’ve got 30 people, standing around.”
It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
“It’s a fair while but it’s not unusual. You have to have a decent festival life for a film. And it’s no good releasing it in the summer where it will be up against the blockbusters. It’s not that kind of film. It’s a film that students need to be around for.”

Unmade Beds is showing at Broadway until December 24

Lily Allen

December 2009


She is perhaps better known for her behaviour than her music. A household name because of her verbal attacks on other celebrities and photographs of her stumbling out of clubs, as opposed to her songs about boys, clothes and drugs.
Which is why Lily Allen is trying to keep her gob shut these days.
““I don’t blog so much,” says the 23-year-old who was one of the first high profile singers to communicate with fans through MySpace.
“I don’t give so much of myself away. It’s got to the point where I don’t even let myself be photographed with a drink, even if it’s water in my hand, because I don’t like giving people ammunition.
“It’s just too upsetting for me.”
We’ve got her wrong, you see. And it’s the fault of the tabloid press.
“I don’t like people writing about my personality when they don’t know me. If people stuck to facts I wouldn’t get so upset, but when people make judgement on my character from sources that don’t actually exist, that’s what upsets me.
“The general public are getting some idea of who I am and actually it’s not true at all.”
She adds: “My widowed grandfather sits in his house reading The Sun and The Mirror and comes across all these horrible stories about his grand-daughter. And he doesn’t know any better than to believe them. That’s what upsets me.”
Adds the former trainee florist: “Now everyone feels that they have access to you as a human being. You’re just walking down the street and people take out their camera phones and start filming you. It’s like I don’t even have a right to walk down the street any more.
“The only thing I can compare it to would be being in a zoo.”
It sounds like a proper whinge but Allen is quick to acknowledge the good fortune that her career brings.
“I’m not going to sit here and complain about my life because I feel really happy for the things that I do have. There aren’t many twenty-four year-olds, especially in today’s financial climate, that have got their own house and can pay off the mortgage and, you know, get sent nice clothes all the time. I do have that, but that doesn’t mean that I have to enjoy ten middle-aged men standing outside my house with cameras all day. And I don’t like them following me in their cars when I’m on my own.”
Since emerging three years ago in a vintage dress and funky trainers, with the No. 1 single Smile, and the debut album Alright Still, Allen soon shook off the label as ‘Keith’s daughter’ and raised eyebrows and temperatures by laying in to everyone from Bob Geldof to Amy Winehouse and Kylie Minogue.
Initially it was through her My Space blog but she announced on Twitter in September that she had shut it down.
“The abuse was getting too much,” she wrote.
And there have been no new tweets from her since.
In fact, just this week she claimed to have ditched social networking altogether.
“I've stopped everything, I haven't got a computer and I haven't got a BlackBerry. I don't do emails or anything now, she told the BBC.
Allen has been trying to stay away from controversy, focusing on the UK tour which comes to the Trent FM Arena next week. It’s the second leg of the tour to support her second album It’s Not Me, It’s You.
“The most difficult thing about it was, the first album,” she says.
“I didn’t really expect anyone to listen to it, whereas this time people are going to listen to it and want to have an opinion about it. That was the only thing I found difficult about it, not the actual writing of songs.”
Among the subjects tackled include the current obsession with fame and celebrity.
“It makes me sad just to think of young kids just reading Heat magazine and being on gossip websites and thinking that’s what they should be aspiring to. It makes me sad to think that’s what our society is becoming.”
Along with the fame culture, Allen tackles the reaction against drugs on the track Everybody’s At It.
“I get annoyed by the hypocrisy within our society and within the press and the government. It’s such a taboo subject. Maybe it is just me and the environment that I’ve grown up in, but literally everyone I know is on drugs or has been.
“(The song) is just saying, you know, everyone’s at it.”
She laughs: “I don’t know what it means.”
Pause.
“I do know what it means. It’s just saying, I haven’t got a right to tell people to ease off on their views of it or that taking drugs is a good thing or a bad thing.
“I haven’t got a right, I’m not well educated enough to be able to talk on the subject but I can observe what I see and that’s what I’ve done.”
Self-depracation is a key element of her character, despite her tabloid image and that comes through in the music.
“I don’t think that necessarily humour in music is important. It’s just something that I do in order to not take myself too seriously.”
Although there’s little self-deprecation on Not Fair, about her frustration of, erm, the human male’s sub-standard bedroom abilities.
“You know, I can get on with someone really well and if they’re no good in bed I think, ‘Oh, God, this is someone I’d really like to spend the rest of my life with but I cannot face having bad sex for the rest of my life.’
“I’m sure that many men, not that many a men, a very small amount of men, have said the same about me.
She adds with a laugh: “I think some people are really rubbish at it and it’s not fair.”
Well, that’s sex and drugs covered, so how about her opinion on rock ‘n’ roll? Or rather the music industry...
“I think people assume people like Duffy and Adele and me and Amy are puppets being run by some big, more powerful men. Whereas I don’t think people would think the same about Paolo Nutini and James Morrison. There’s definitely an undertone of sexism.”
It’s one of the reasons she is quitting the music industry altogether. Well, at least for a while anyway.
This week she vowed to have at least two years off after her final tour date in March to open a fashion rental shop and launch a record label.
It’s unlikely to be the last we hear from Lily Allen. She can’t help attracting attention. You see, it’s not us, it’s her.

Trent FM Arena, December 10, 7.30pm, £23, 08444 124624

Freddie Mercury Memorial

December 2009


A Notts band performed at the unveiling of a memorial to legendary rock singer Freddie Mercury.
Queen tribute band, Mercury, who are based in Newark, played to 2,000 people at the ceremony in Feltham, West London. Among those watching their 60 minute set of Queen hits was Freddie’s 87-year-old mother Jer Bulsara, who lives in Mapperley and guitarist Brian May.
“It was a brilliant day,” said Joseph Lee Jackson, who is Mercury’s Freddie.
“The reaction from the crowd was fantastic. The whole square was packed.
“And there were people there from all over the world. I spoke to people from Japan, Europe, Australia and Argentina who had flown in just for the event.”
The Bulsara family moved from Zanzibar, where Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara, to Feltham in 1964. It was there that Freddie, aged 16, enrolled in art college and started his music career, joining a band called The Hectics.
He lived in the northwest London suburb for ten years.
The granite pavement star, the UK’s first memorial to singer, was unveiled 18 years after the singer’s death from an AIDS-related illness aged 45.
“It’s stunning,” said Jackson.
“It was originally going to be the same size as the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but it snowballed and it’s massive. Really impressive.”
At the ceremony Mrs Bulsara, who was joined by Freddie’s sister Kash Cooke, described him as “a man with a big appetite for life and an even bigger talent for music”.
She added: “Feltham was his first home in England after we arrived from Zanzibar. It was a place where he began to explore his musical future.”
Jackson, who has been performing with Mercury for ten years, said: “By the time we met here she was tired out. It was a long day for her. We have met her before. She has been to us play at gigs in Nottingham.”
At one of the gigs she gave him a pendant as a thank you for keeping her son’s memory alive.
Mercury have performed to sell-out audiences across the world, playing to more than a million people from Holland to Hungary and from Majorca to Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium.
They have met Queen drummer Roger Taylor in the past but the memorial event was the first time they’d met Brian May.
Jackson, who spends up to £800 on items of clothing to mater the Freddie look on stage, said: “He thought it was great what we were doing. And he said that Freddie would have been proud of the memorial.”
He added: “It is odd that it’s taken 18 years to pay tribute to him. There is a statue of him in Montreux where Queen had a studio but nothing until now in Britain.”