I was in a band once.
I was.
Oh, you can laugh and crack jokes but the fact remains that I was in a band.
We wrote our own songs, we didn't do covers, we played gigs.
What did I do?
Singer.
Frontman.
Leader.
I mean, I say "singer" but that is stretching things a little...what I actually did was to honk like a seal doing an impersonation of Morrissey if Morrissey was tone-deaf (no jokes about Morrissey actually being tone-deaf please).
It was fun.
I had all the delusions that everyone else who has been in a band has...stardom, fame, women, front cover of the NME, spokesman for a generation.
It all ended quite badly and I haven't spoken to anyone in the band for over 15 years.
I'm a man who knows how to hold a grudge.
"Linda Linda Linda" is a Japanese film that captures perfectly what it is like to be young and in a band. It's not achingly cool, it's not knowing, it isn't "dark", there aren't "layers"...it's just a film about four girls who form a band and who play at the end of term show.
It's uplifting and it is, at times, hilarious.
The title comes from the name of a song played by Japanese punks "The Blue Hearts" which is the song the girls decide to cover as part of their set. It's a fabulous pop-punk song and when sung by adolescent girls it is given a glorious shot of emotion.
The girls in the band are not stereotypes...yes, one of the girls is a Korean who struggles with Japanese but she isn't geeky or awkward, there isn't a Spice Girls parade of sporty, ginger, baby, scary or dopey! What you get instead is four girls dealing with the reality of being teenagers and chasing a simple dream.
Quite possibly the best film about being a teenager I have ever seen.
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