Dance Craze (DVD + Blu-ray)

Product Information

Watching the seven female musicians who made up The Bodysnatchers belt out Easy Life on stage, with no need for the hypersexualised posing that women artists seem obliged to deliver today, was a revelatory flash back.

The film now features remastered originalstereo and surroundmixes by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, as well as a new Dolby Atmos Mix.There’s live performances by The Specials, Madness, The Selecter, The Beat, The Bodysnatchers and Bad Manners (the latter being the only featured band never to have signed to 2 Tone) and the film flits between these six acts for a song or two at a time. Directed by Joe Massot ( The Song Remains the Same) and filmed by Bafta award-winning cinematographer Joe Dunton, it showcases the very best of the British Ska phenomenon, with exclusive live performances from The Specials, Madness, The Selecter, The Beat, Bad Manners and The Bodysnatchers.

Shot in 1980 by Joe Massot, who directed the psychedelic and absurdist Wonderwall in 1968, Dance Craze is a concert footage film rather than a documentary although, around the halfway mark, it’s broken up with some old Pathé news reports on dance crazes such as the Locomotion and the Madison, and a man from Harrogate attempting a world record for playing the piano longer than anybody before had managed (a marathon endeavour aided by ‘eggs, glucose, tea and brandy’ together with a hundred cigarettes a day.Originally he was going to make a film about the band but when his son informed him of the wonderful world of 2-Tone, Massot expanded his original plans to include the whole movement. But best of all, I not only got to see The Specials and the Beat play a charity double-header, but got backstage for autographs afterwards. Also 20 page booklet with essay by Johnny Mains, text of original 1981 press release and biographies of the bands,credits and acknowledgements.

The release will feature a brand new Dolby Atmos sound mix supervised by Jerry Dammers and Dermot James (Chrysalis Records). Rhoda Dakar of the Bodysnatchers is a live wire; Buster Bloodvessel of Bad Manners is a genuine English eccentric, doing that odd thing with his tongue; Madness’s cover version of the Swan theme from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake is very weird, and the Beat’s Twist and Crawl and Mirror in the Bathroom are still compelling. For a short period of time at the turn of the 1980s, it seemed like the biggest thing on the planet. Dance Craze is a 1981 concert film recorded at various venues throughout 1980 at the height of the 2Tone movement. I've just received a review checkdisc, and the restoration featurette says that the OCN no longer exists.The concert film Dance Craze is a high-energy record of a series of concerts performed from Portsmouth to London and from Coventry to Liverpool, as well as in the US. The film was a big success, touring venues in the UK and colleges in the USA, where enthusiastic audiences were found singing and dancing in the aisles. Sadly the film sticks to concert footage and there are no backstage interviews with the bands, this was a real opportunity missed as a documentary style film would have been a wonderful document of the 2-Tone movement. The movie is a madeleine for people of my generation: summoning up the sweat of venues such as London’s Lyceum Ballroom in the Strand, it shudders with the bands’ inexhaustible jogging-on-the-spot energy, the kind of live show where the singer lets rip directly into the ecstatic faces of the people at the front, virtually snogging them. The disc will feature outtakes, a booklet featuring new writing on the film, plus other extras to be confirmed.

It’s 1980 and the policies implemented by Margaret Thatcher, elected British Prime Minister a year earlier, are already making an impact. A consortium of bands reworked Jamaican ska, calypso and reggae beats and imbued them with punk energy and their own socially conscious lyrics. There are surviving 35mm prints but in much worse shape than Dunton's 70mm print (which the featurette refers to as "rare" rather than "only").Drench yourself in the high-energy, sweatbox world of British 2 Tone in the late-1970s and early 1980s with this legendary concert film.