THIS IS ENGLAND — Shane Meadows's 2-Toned look at skins and ska (w/ Jack O'Connell)

Rico gets a primer on the skinhead history—and ska-fueled soundtrack—behind THIS IS ENGLAND: The 2007 indie hit about misunderstood kids in a misunderstood subculture. Guests include stars Jack O'Connell (SINNERS) and Andrew Shim (A ROOM FOR ROMEO BRASS), producer Mark Herbert, and Neville Staple, frontman for '80s ska legends The Specials.

Our audio documentary podcast returns with a sequel to our popular 2023 season that dives deep into the grooves of classic movie “needle drops.”  Titled “Needle on the Record, Side Two,” in each episode host Rico Gagliano tells the story of a film that fused music and image to make magic—and sometimes, changed popular culture.

KES is now streaming on MUBI in the UK, Ireland, Italy and Turkey.

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode includes adult language, a mention of sexual assault and spoilers. When I was a young teen in the '80s, a lot of kids I looked up to were punks, and they and the punk music they got me into,

were super clear about one thing: 0:18

Skinheads sucked. It wasn't a tough call. Skins were also into punk, but they were a bunch of racist neo-Nazis. They came to punk shows looking ominous and identical. Shaved heads, button down shirts, jeans, suspenders, Doc Marten boots. They started fights. I didn't know where they'd come from or why they were like this, but righteous bands like the Dead Kennedys told us exactly what these Nazi punks should do.<i>Fuck off</i><i>Nazi punks, Nazi punks, Nazi punks</i><i>Fuck off</i> So years later, in 2007, when I hit play on a movie about skinheads, I'd stumbled across on this new thing called Netflix, I thought I knew what I was in for. A probably violent story about these monsters running amok. It was Shane Meadows',<i>This is England</i>. Set in 1983, and it actually starts quietly in the spartan bedroom of a lonely teen named Shaun. He's poor, keeps a picture of his dead dad by his bed. Later, at school, a jerk named Harvey picks on him for wearing lame thrift store jeans. But then that afternoon, he mopes past a gang of skinheads.<i>- Alright, mate.- Alright.</i><i>- Ey up, what's the matter?- Nothing.</i> Who invite him to hang.<i>Oh, come and sit down, mate. I feel bloody sorry for you.</i><i>Just come and sit down, five minutes.</i>"Ah" I thought,"here's where the kid gets sucked in by the evil racists." Except these skins don't seem so evil. Their leader, a guy named Woody, is funny. Just wants to cheer Shaun up.<i>So what's this? Who's picking on you, lad?</i><i>What's his name?</i><i>- Harvey.- Harvey?</i><i>What sort of a bloody girl's name is Harvey?</i><i>"Hello, I'm Harvey, and I've come to give you gyp.</i><i>"I've got one of these for you, Sonny Jim.</i><i>"I've got one of those for you. My name is Harvey."</i> It's kind of sweet. And then I noticed one of Woody's gang is Black.<i>- Where the frig have you been?- Bloody Ada!</i> The character's name is Milky, and he was played by actor Andrew Shim. When Shane said I was gonna be a skinhead in it, I was like, "What?" Like, you do realize that I am a Black dude, you know? And then that's when I realized and learned that the skinhead movement- was born out of a love for reggae.- Yeah. And I remember when he brought me a book and I was looking through this book, and I remember the first time I saw a Black skinhead. It was just the coolest black and white picture. But they were stood just on a street somewhere in the UK, and they just looked so cool. And I couldn't believe that I was-- That there was such a thing as a Black skinhead. I'd never, ever, ever heard of it. Neither had I. Or that once upon a time, white skins dug Black music. For me, it was just the first of a lot of mind blowing revelations from a movie that's really about how kids and cultures get torn apart. And that's also a subtle ode to music that tried to bring them together again. I'm Rico Gagliano, welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's, the global film company that champions great cinema. On this show, we tell you the stories behind great cinema. Today we wrap up Season 11. We've been calling it Needle On The Record, Side Two, the sequel to our season a while back, all about needle drops. Those moments when filmmakers take a tune, drop it in their movie, and magic happens. This time around, we've been focusing on UK music of the '80s, and possibly my favorite ever use of that stuff in a movie is <i>This is England</i>. Shane Meadows looked back at an era when kids in English music tribes were getting invaded by a nationalist tribe. We all grew through the sounds of the music together, but some of our friends would go off to these meetings with their uncles and started signing up for the National Front. And its a movie that went on to become UK cinema's most unlikely franchise. So we have a director who's made a film meant to be a standalone piece, and then he goes on to create three television series that follow it up. I can't think of another British film that has actually done that. This is a story and a soundtrack that really moved people, is what I'm saying. So to learn all about both, I talked to <i>This is England</i>'s producer, Mark Herbert, actor Jack O'Connell, who went on to stardom in movies like <i>Sinners</i> and whose debut this was. I remember the wrap party because it was one of the first times I got really, really drunk. And Neville Staple, frontman of legendary ska band The Specials, whose songs sent a unifying message on screen and in real life. The music captured them first with that energy, energy. Then they'll listen and then they can hear what we're saying. We're not preaching to them. It's in the music. So strap on your Docs and prepare to mosh as we drop the needle on<i>This is England</i>. I'm going to start this story in the cinema scene of early '90s Britain, a moment British filmmakers would probably rather forget. It was very, very kind of depressed. There wasn't very much going on. That's Sarah Godfrey, she's a film and TV professor at East Anglia University, and she co-wrote and edited the book.

<i>Shane Meadows: 5:35

Critical Essays.</i> And then in sort of 1994, 1995, you have <i>Four Weddings and a Funeral,</i> followed shortly by <i>Trainspotting.</i><i>Choose life. Choose a job.</i><i>Choose a career. Choose a family.</i><i>Choose a fucking big television.</i> And we enter this period where there's a lot more excitement, which is quite typical of British cinema. You have these moments of sort of a big film, and there's like a big sort of rush of films, and then it goes again. For film fans like me watching from the States, it definitely felt like a rush. Suddenly in the mid '90s, there were all these UK movies like <i>Trainspotting,</i> super fast paced, super colorful, fueled by glam or Britpop soundtracks, and a lot of times about young working class men behaving badly, doing drugs or crimes or both. Because why not?<i>I chose not to choose life.</i><i>I chose something else. And the reasons?</i><i>There are no reasons.</i><i>Who needs reasons when you've got heroin.</i> You have <i>Trainspotting,</i> you have things like<i>Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels</i>. And it was coming out into a culture that was dominated by Blur, Oasis or sort of laddish culture going on, right? The UK lad mag <i>Loaded</i> debuted and epitomized the vibe. It was dedicated to, "life, liberty and the pursuit of sex,"drink, football and less serious matters." But in the middle of all this came a different kind of movie where men behaved differently. The debut feature from Shane Meadows, a comedy drama called<i>TwentyFourSeven.</i><i>I think it's time that we had a match against another club.</i> Shot in black and white and set in a working class town, it stars the late, great Bob Hoskins. Bob Hoskins' character Darcy is an alcoholic. Basically, the story is he's trying to set up a boxing club to give the young unemployed lads, two groups of boys that sort of don't get on, trying to bring them together by creating a boxing club.

<i>I've got two rules: 7:30

</i><i>No pot.</i><i>No lady friends and no drinks after midnight.</i><i>That's three, knob.</i> It was very much a counterpoint to a lot of the other films that were going on at the time.<i>TwentyFourSeven</i> was much more sincere. It did not have the kind of tongue in cheek, the insincerity. And I think, you know, there's a lot going on there about negotiating. What does it mean to be a working class English man? Right from the start of his career, Meadows dared to suggest it meant you might be tough and vulnerable or sad or broken. His lad boxers literally cry on each other's shoulders, and it's easy to see. Meadows knows the feeling.<i>There was a Hells Angel friend of my dad called Chris, who had</i><i>the biggest pirate collection you've ever seen, and he had</i><i>a secret department for Westerns...</i> That's him in 2023, delivering BAFTA's annual David Lean lecture. He's just five minutes in, talking about watching pirated movies on VHS as a kid, when he chokes up.<i>...and my dad's a huge fan of Westerns, and I think that was</i><i>the first time I fell in love with film, was watching Westerns...</i><i>Sorry. With... Sorry. With my dad.</i><i>And, because he worked away a lot and--</i><i>Fucking hell, Shane, come on, baby.</i> He really is just an absolute diamond of a man. Andrew Shim met Meadows at age 14 when he landed the title role in his second feature,<i>A Room for Romeo Brass.</i> In all honesty, and I don't say this lightly, there aren't many other people that I've met who kind of like reach Shane's level as a genuinely nice, amazing person. He really is. He wears his heart on the sleeve. Which is doubly amazing considering Meadows' childhood gave him every reason not to. He grew up in a very small town called Uttoxeter. And Uttoxeter, you know, there's not a lot going on. There's a lot of poverty. With poverty comes crime, you know, far, far, far from having, money. His mum was a shop assistant. His dad was a lorry driver. His dad was actually a suspect in a murder case for some time when Shane was young, although he was subsequently cleared. But that impacted a lot on Shane's kind of experience when he was growing up. There was all this media coverage, so Shane got sent off to live with an aunt and one day after wandering from her house, two local boys bullied him and one sexually abused him. In 2019, he told <i>The Guardian</i> newspaper he buried the memory for years but subconsciously looked for some kind of safety protection and at age 11, he found it when his sister started dating a skinhead.<i>And that was the first thing I'd ever really got--</i><i>Wanted to become a part of.</i> This is Shane in a bonus interview on the first US DVD release of <i>This is England</i>.<i>You know, I was, not a geek, but I was a bit of a nobody.</i><i>And then the transformation to sort of seeing these skinheads one day</i><i>in the shopping center, you know,</i><i>walking through the precinct and thinking, you know,</i><i>they looked like, almost like, marines or something to me</i><i>they were unbelievable.</i><i>So smart yet, you know, so aggressive.</i> He shaved his head, joined the crew, and then got a cultural education. Because these particular guys prided themselves on being old school skinheads with a look and musical tastes that dated back to the moment Caribbean workers first showed up in England on a boat called the Empire Windrush. So the original skinhead culture was part of the Windrush era, sort of around in the 1960s. It emerged out of spaces where West Indian communities and English working class men largely worked alongside each other in factories, shipyards and so on. And what's really, really interesting is that this is a very multicultural moment. White Brits heard their Black workmates, island music, natty Jamaican rude boy fashion collided with British mod style and soon it all fuzed.<i>I want all you skinheads to get up on your feet</i><i>Put your braces together and your boots on your feet</i> Here's my favorite example. This is a UK band called Symarip. That's "pyramid" spelled backwards, almost. And their 1969 song<i>Skinhead Moonstomp.</i><i>So let's start getting happy now</i><i>Ready?</i><i>Yeah yeah yeah yeah, yeah yeah, yeah yeah yeah</i> These were Black West Indian musicians playing reggae who put a photo of five white guys on their album cover wearing what was already the proudly working class skinhead uniform, a kind of crisp mod version of what they already wore on the factory floor. There was a sort of utilitarian look. You know, you've got jeans, you've got the Ben Sherman shirts, you've got the DM boots. They're workwear, right? And then the hair, the sort of shaving of the hair is also an interesting one because in one sense, it's a rejection of the sort of softness of the hippie aesthetic. Yeah, they had long hair. Yeah, exactly. So it was like a kind of"we are not them," but it's also, on a very practical level, having long hair, if you're working in a shipyard or a factory is a real pain. So you had white and Black workers with cropped hair and modified work gear, dancing to a mix of reggae, ska and soul right alongside other subcultures. I'm a '60s baby and I grew up in East London in Hackney, East London. That's Sugary Staple, best name ever. She plays music with her husband Neville, who you'll hear from later, and she runs the annual UK ska festival, Skamouth. I grew up around skinheads, mods... We had sound boys, we had a very big mix on a council estate and we all got on. We just all got on and the skinheads used to go into the sound systems. We all danced together. We all grew through the sounds of the music together because it was rebellious music. It was music from the street. And then I would say probably in the kind of early '70s, and I was only a young kid at the time, but some of our friends would go off to these meetings with their uncles and their dads, and then we literally saw some of them just change. It was like an overnight change. Well, first it was gradual, but then suddenly, bang. They were just different.<i>The ordinary British people now have no voice left</i><i>to speak up for them except the National Front.</i> They'd been taken to local meetings of the National Front. Britain's proudly racist far right nationalist party who had zero tolerance for immigrants, their culture or their kids.<i>The fact that they are born here doesn't make them British.</i><i>They must be repatriated, along with those who have actually</i><i>come into this country, whether they are born here or not,</i><i>makes not the slightest difference.</i> The Front had been recruiting working class whites since the '60s and in the early '70s sounds like they started really targeting skinheads. We said they'd turned into boneheads. We wouldn't even call them skinheads because, like I say, the original skinheads to us were our mates. So we called them the boneheads, and they were the ones who just went off and started signing up for the National Front and going on marches and all kinds of stuff. I looked up old footage of these National Front marches online. You don't want to know what that did to my YouTube feed for a while. Anyway, a lot of them turned into brawls between The Front and anti-fascists. Which is kind of what happened in skinhead culture into the '80s. A battle for its soul between old school traditionalists and boneheads. And in 2004, Shane Meadows decided to make a movie about what that felt like. If you were a boy like him who didn't have much except being a skin and had to pick a side.<i>Hey, Big Daddy.</i><i>Where you been? Where you been?</i><i>Getting a drink.</i> The pivotal scene in<i>This is England</i> happens about a half hour in. The hero Shaun, played by Tom Turgoose, has been totally accepted by Woody and his crew of friends, who by the way, aren't just skinheads. There's also a New Wave girl named Smell with super huge '80s hair. At a party, Shaun admits he fancies her.<i>You're a little sweetheart, aren't you?</i><i>It's making me emotional.</i> They go out back, kiss. You get the feeling it's the greatest night in this kid's life.<i>- Look at the sky.- This is perfect, this is.</i><i>The moonlight. It's beautiful like you.</i> But when they go back inside, the vibe has shifted because someone new has shown up, an old pal of Woody's named Combo. Big guy, full of simmering aggression and just out of prison.<i>Listen to me now.</i><i>This dude here spent three years in the pen for me.</i><i>He never said nothing.</i><i>If it weren't for him, I wouldn't be with you guys now.</i><i>So the utmost respect, and I mean it, I mean it.</i> Except Combo, played by Stephen Graham in one of his greatest roles is hardly respectful himself while he tells a story from his prison days.<i>I mean, for three weeks, right? This fucking... right?</i> He drops a racist slur right in front of the Black guy, Milky.<i>Sorry, mate. Sorry.</i><i>Didn't mean nothin' by it. You know what I mean.</i> But he can't seem to help himself. And as he keeps telling his still pretty racist tale...<i>"White boy, give me your pud-pud"</i>...half the kids crack up, including Shaun, while the faces of Woody, Milky and others, just fall...<i>You know what I mean?</i><i>Proper big cigar fingers and all that all over me, fucking...</i>...and mournful piano music by Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi, drowns out Combo's words. The boneheads have arrived. The rest of the story is basically Shaun deciding between father figures and a tribe. Woody's tolerant crew or Combo and the National Front. It was not your typical skinhead tale. I think there is a... There's a beauty to it, yeah? Mark Herbert produced<i>This Is England,</i> but his first work with Meadows was on the movie right before this, <i>Dead Man's Shoes,</i> a revenge thriller as violent as <i>This Is England</i> mostly isn't. Some people came expecting this kind of romper stomper, aggressive skinheads fighting, you know, and what Shane did was just not that. That is-- The world, is that but it's just this amazing story about people battling for this young boy's soul and what he learned through it. Still, to recreate that 1980s world was going to need a budget a little bigger than the£800,000 they'd got for <i>Dead Man</i> and typical for Meadows, there was only the general blueprint of a script. Most of it would be improvised. He just sort of said to me, I want to do a film about this period of my life and about this gang that he grew up with. He showed me some references. In fact, I went to Cannes. Weirdly, I was thinking about this in relation to music. I went to Cannes and all I had was some skinhead images, a two page synopsis from Shane, and on my old fashioned clickwheel iPod, I had some of the songs that we're gonna talk about. So I literally was pitching it to people. I was like, listen to this. Look at these cool black and white stills of these skinheads. Read this. This is the film. And so the music was even from the very, very first financing thing was a huge part of this movie. Most of those songs ended up in the final film. And yeah, you could argue they get across the point of it as well as any script could. We dive into the classic Two Tone grooves of <i>This is England</i> with the help of Neville Staple. That's coming up in just a minute. Stay with us. Alright, everybody. MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are, in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we distribute them in cinemas, movies from any country, from legendary auteurs to to brilliant first timers. We've always got something new to discover. And hey, if you're a fan of<i>This Is England</i> or about to become one, you're going to want to discover a legendary film in the same kind of gritty, heartbreaking mode, a movie called <i>Kes.</i> The 1969 classic directed by the great British director Ken Loach. It is the story of a working class kid with a tough home life who finally finds some happiness when he adopts a type of falcon called a kestrel and lovingly trains it. In the next act, you're going to hear a little about Shane Meadows' process, which really gets the actors involved in creating the characters to get the sense of realism that's just uncanny. Loach does something similar, Meadows gets compared to him a lot, actually. More importantly,<i>Kes</i> is just a beautiful film and a great introduction to Loach's stuff. It is now streaming on MUBI in the UK, Ireland, Italy, several other countries. Subscribe to mubi.com to start watching. And even if you're not in those countries, you should go back and listen to my MUBI Podcast interview with Loach. We go over his whole career, his life and his politics. Guy's really a legend. You can listen to that in any country. We'll have a link to it and all the other links and info you need in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to the episode and wrap up this season of the show.<i>Testing. Testing. One, two, three.</i><i>Is it working, Kev?</i><i>Stick it up, mister!</i> So, <i>This is England</i> opens with a montage. Quick hits of documentary footage from 1980s UK. Space invader video games. Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher doing a photo op in an army tank. But instead of some '80s New Wave hit, Shane Meadows scores it all with this.<i>- I said yeah- I said yeah</i><i>- What they say- Listen what they say</i> Toots and the Maytals reggae classic,<i>54-46 Was My Number</i> from 1968. Producer Mark Herbert says that was partly for obvious reasons. He wanted to go,"No, these skinheads--" He remembered the ones that are really into their music. They were listening to Black music. You know, they were listening to reggae. They were listening to-- You know, that was-- That was important as a statement, I think. But also if you listen close, the song sets up the tone and concerns of the movie and the music to come, because upbeat as it seems.<i>54-46</i> is about a Black guy getting racially profiled for a crime he didn't commit. I mean, it's his prison number, isn't it? Isn't it his prison number? And it is just the lyrics are so perfect because obviously we deal with racism quite head on. And it's also a song that kind of embodies the movie, I feel like, because on one hand it's nostalgic, it feels like a party, but it's grappling with issues that are hardcore. Exactly. And that's what the film is. You know, if you think about the film, you're dropped into this gang that you want to be part of this gang.- They're fun. And then it changes.- Yeah. And the sinister side of what was going on in the country, and that's like the opening sequence, because if you watch that opening, it starts off funny. It's got body popping and like bad clothes and, you know, and sort of like video games and, and then you start to see a bit of the political landscape, the Thatcher, and then you start to see some of the violence and some of the protests and some of the racism. So throughout that sequence, what starts off as being really fun gets darker and darker and darker. And there's one band on the soundtrack that represents that vibe better than almost any I can think of. A band that sonically, politically, and even visually makes the light and the dark by design. This is your original rude boy Neville Staple from The Specials. Neville Staple grew up listening to music with a social conscience. As a Jamaican born kid living in the UK city of Coventry. We used to listen to a lot of ska music because at the time we didn't have newspaper, we had a transistor radio, I remember that, but we didn't have newspapers. If you needed to know anything, you would hear it through artists singing and singing about it. Eventually, in the 1970s, he started toasting, kind of the Jamaican precursor to rapping over reggae records his cousin spun at basement parties through some pretty serious loudspeakers. We used to call them Soundbox is a mega big heavy plywood. And to lift one of the speakers, I mean the big ones, you probably needed about 4 or 5 of you. That's how heavy it was. And when you turn that up and you hear the bass tell me, it was loud, you can imagine, oh, you know how loud. So it must have been surprising when one day, circa 1978, they had that basement sound system bangin', and Neville still managed to hear a local band rehearsing next door, playing ska music, but with punk rock speed, attitude and volume. So that's when I said,"Oh, that sounds different." So I pop my head around. Saw it was one Black guy on drums, bass player, white guy, singer white guy, and Jerry. That last guy would have been keyboardist Jerry Dammers, who put together the group. It was a band of Black and white guys playing a mash up of Black and white music. At the time, they called themselves the Special A.K.A, and it was Neville's first look at a musical movement Dammers was calling Two Tone. In a way, it was like the original skinhead movement of the '60s, a cultural fusion, but where that just sort of happened, Two Tone was a conscious response to the anti-immigrant racism that was all over '70s and '80s England. The lyrics of Specials songs like <i>Concrete Jungle</i> painted the picture.<i>I have to carry a knife</i><i>Because there's people threatening my life</i><i>I can't dress just the way I want</i><i>I'm being chased by the National Front</i> I have to carry a knife'cause people threaten my life. Can't dress the way I want. I'm being chased by the National Front.<i>Concrete Jungle,</i> all of them, they were literally the story of the streets at that time. That's Sugary Staple again, Neville's wife and bandmate. I mean, there were places where you just wouldn't go out. I had Black friends who wouldn't go to certain areas because they knew they'd probably get their heads kicked in just for being Black. But more importantly, also, the Black kids had to be careful of the police because they would literally round you up, kick the crap out of you, and then shove you back on the estate, all battered and bruised. In fact, police violence partly inspired the black and white checkerboard design of The Specials logo, and the logo for Dammers' record label, also called Two Tone. He decided, you know, to have the black and white check to relate to unity. Black and white unite through music. He used the black and white check because the police had- black and white check on their--- Oh yeah. On their hats. Like a checkerboard band on their hat brims. Yeah. So the police had all these powers and they were doing terrible things with it at the time. You take their checkered imagery and you turn it into something else, you know? Yeah, Two Tone bands like The Specials and The Selecter turned it into cool, inspiring righteousness. Dressed in pin sharp suits, usually black and white, of course, they sang socially conscious lyrics over upbeat, galvanizing jams. This was politics you could party to. The music captured them first with that energy, energy. Then they'll listen and then they can hear what we're saying. We're not preaching to them. It's in the music. But once Neville joined The Specials as their resident ridiculously high energy toaster, he learned fast. Not everyone at their gigs liked what they were saying. Anti-Racist punk rockers, mods and OG skins showed up to dance. Aggro boneheads showed up for trouble. I used to get hassled on stage. I used to get spat at. They would spit at you on stage. Yeah, you used to get them spitting at you... And like, in German,<i>"Sieg Heil, seig heil"</i> They'd like do Nazi salutes in the...?- Yeah yeah yeah.- In the audience? Yeah, that's what they used to do, Nazi salute. At one gig, Neville grabbed his band mate, Lynval Golding's guitar, leapt off the stage and started swinging it at these guys. And a lot of times the band's supporters got a similar idea. The original skinheads that were in the crowd, and the rude boys, would sort it out. I mean, often it was them. They didn't even wait for the bouncers. They would grab them and they would kick them out or, you know, give them a bit of a punch up and get rid of them. It was all inspiration for a Specials song that, to me anyway, is right at the heart of what<i>This Is England</i> is about.<i>Do the dog</i> It's a cover, kind of, of Rufus Thomas' funky 1963 dance track, <i>The Dog.</i><i>Do the dog</i> But typical of The Specials, it gets reworked with a hard ska beat and new lyrics. Instead of telling the various factions in their audience to do a dance, The Specials tell them to stop doing something.<i>All you punks and all you teds</i><i>National Front and natty dread</i> All you punks and all you teds. National Front and natty dread. Mods, rockers, skinhead. Keep your fighting'til you're dead. Keep on fighting til you're dead. Basically like stop ruining everything with your violence. Yeah, keep your fighting to yourself. It's a call to reject violence and hate and unify against the man. But now check out how it's used in the movie.<i>Hey, Big Daddy.</i><i>Where you been? Where you been?</i> It's in that pivotal party scene I talked about earlier. When Shaun asks out Smell, his New Waver crush Woody and the gang actually have<i>Do the Dog</i> playing on the stereo the background when trouble knocks.<i>It were just a bit funny that you never actually--</i><i>What the fuck's that?</i><i>That sounds like the coppers, that does.</i> Panicked, they kill the music and start hiding the intoxicants thinking it's their traditional enemy, the cops. But of course, it turns out to be one of their own... Combo, just out of prison, who enjoys scaring the daylights out of them. And minutes later he's telling that racist tale and cracking Shaun up.<i>"White boy, give me your pud-pud."</i> A scene before this, Shaun was happily partying to a song about rejecting hatred and resisting infighting. Now suddenly, he's laughing along with hatred, and the gang's about to split into camps. To me, in this movie, Two Tone is the unspoken moral compass, and the second the needle gets ripped off that Two Tone record is the moment Shaun starts to lose his way. Music is pretty important in this film, is what I'm saying. So it's maybe no surprise it played a big role on the set as part of what, by all accounts, is a filmmaking process like no other. Just ask this guy. Jack O'Connell. I am an actor. I play Pukey in the film <i>This is England</i>. Like a lot of the cast of<i>This is England</i>, Jack O'Connell was plucked out of the Nottingham Television Workshop, a legendary training spot for young actors from non posh backgrounds. He'd never been in a movie, but he could still tell, this one wasn't typical. Fourteen, fifteen. First film ever. There was no script. I knew what a script was, and I knew that they were quite fundamental in the process of filmmaking. So it was novel to me, and it was all about improvising a lot. A lot of what we did was spontaneous. Mark Herbert says that meant steeping the actors in the world of the film, starting with the tunes. They were being played during the shoot. So there was almost like a playlist that Shane put together, stuck it on the old iPad with a clickwheel. So there was some certain songs that were just there from day one, like <i>Do The Dog,</i> Toots, Symarip. Yeah, I think <i>Skinhead Moonstomp</i> was a big one. I recall Stephen Graham singing it to himself in the trailer as he was getting his tattoos put on. Anything by Toots and the Maytals was massive.<i>People going here, people going there</i> What song is that now?<i>It's A Jam In The Streets.</i>- I forget by who.- It's by John Holt. And it ended up in the movie's trailer.<i>People going here, people going there</i><i>People going out, people coming in</i> Anyway, once Meadows got that stuff bouncing in the background, he and his crew plunged the cast into the other important details of the 1983 skinhead world. Starting with the most obvious. Yeah, I think we got our heads shaved pretty much the same day. Very ritualistic as you can imagine. I remember a couple of the girls would have, like, really long hair, very, very long hair, and they had to part with that. So, I imagine that's not easy. The world was-- Yeah. Everything from we shoot on location, there's no studio. So you feel, it feels right. The-- You know, you'd even see the way the actors, when they put on their clothes, they stood differently. They became those characters, you know, Docs, you know, like, even when Shaun put that really cool Ben Sherman and his jeans on for the first time, he just he held himself differently. Until finally the gang in real life wasn't behaving all that differently than the gang on screen. Apparently, right down to petty squabbles. Yeah, I remember Tommo getting a, mini moto for his birthday, and, I was really fucking jealous. This would be the Tom Turgoose who plays Shaun. Really, really fucking jealous. They bought him a mini moto and he was just cruising around the base camp and this tiny motorbike I was stood there thinking, where's my fucking mini moto? I'm looking at you. It's like you're reliving it as we speak, man.- Oh yeah.- That wound goes deep. Until I get my own Mini moto from Shane. That's the only thing that will equalize it. Actually sounds like the film's UK premiere kind of made up for it. It was at the London Film Festival, October 2006. I think it was on Southbank somewhere. We're talking over 20 years ago. And yeah, man, enormous. Enormous. We're in a film. It was cut together. Noel Gallagher was there, which meant the world to me. As a 15 year-old, you're just kind of watching this. You just, you know it's cool, you know it's amazing. You know, it's brilliant. But you didn't you had no way of knowing the sort of buzz that it would end up catching. The film was released. It kind of released on... I've never known this, where a film... You know, normally you start off on 300 screens and you kind of whittle down and three weeks later you're on 50 screens. This went the other way. And it built up word of mouth. The music was getting-- So it was getting talked on radio, on music radio, on chat shows, and people started talking about Doc Martens. And there was <i>This is England</i> posters in Fred Perry shops and, you know, and it became iconic. Amazingly, that wasn't only true in England. Andrew Shim, Milky, caught up with his costar and then girlfriend Vicky McClure at the Rome Film Festival. And the whole auditorium just was standing ovation for the entire length of the credits and beyond. And I'll never forget the next day, me and Vicky were sat at a coffee shop and this woman came screeching up on a little Vespa. She was saying something in Italian. She got back on her Vespa, sped off, and we were like, "What?" And then she came back with a disposable camera to take a picture with us.<i>This is England</i> earned close to five times its budget at the box office and then in the UK, Sarah Godfrey says it started a crazy afterlife. The fact that it sold just under 300,000 DVDs is massive for a British film, but I think more significantly, we then go on to have these TV shows, which is... I can't think of another film that has, another British film, rather, that has actually done that. So we have a director who's made a film meant to be a standalone piece, and then he goes on to create three television series that follow it up. When did we find out? Dude, I can't remember, I cannot remember. I just, I just do remember thinking to myself, this is going to be wild. We were such good friends. Were such, such, such good friends with every single cast member. We're all mega good friends. And this is gonna be epic. Yeah, probably the main reason people like me return to <i>This is England</i>, and the TV spin-offs over and over again, is that. It's about trying to find your tribe, and you can feel that this tribe really loves each other. But for me, another is that it reminds me of an era that's a lot like ours right now. But when, as Sugary Staple tells me, music culture could actually make a bonehead less boneheaded. What I found is when The Specials came along and mixed up this ska and reggae and put it with the punk, the music together and the attitude and the style... A lot of them came back.- Oh, really?- They moved back. Yes. They stopped being, you know, these hardcore kind of racist sort of National Front guys and they came back. It took a little while, but it was just amazing how we saw that change. I mean, do you think that music can play a role in this? Oh, absolutely.- Or is it just too far gone?- No, absolutely. When we see a lot of things online and there's a lot online, social media stuff, a lot of racial stuff and a lot of tension, we see Two Tone fans jumping in, and at our gigs and our shows, we also see that and they're bringing their kids and some of them, their grandkids. And sometimes they've got banners up about, you know,"let's all be equal through the music."Let's all be united through the music." So I do, I think music will always have a massive part in sorting these sort of things out. Maybe that's idealistic, but I don't know. I don't really care. I'm going to believe in people who can see things in black and white. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week and this season. As always, it's been an honor telling the stories of these great movies and their great music. We're already laying the groundwork for Season 12. Follow us so you don't miss it. While you're at it, speaking of reggae music, scroll back to our episode from 2023 about <i>The Harder They Come</i>, the midnight movie classic with a soundtrack that might be the most important reggae album of all time. It said, here is a music you can take seriously. It's not just there to make white people dance. That episode features Paul Douglas, drummer for a band you heard a lot of people mention in this episode, Toots and the Maytals. Follow us and take a listen. You can also follow me on threads or Instagram at Rico Gagliano. That's Rico G-A-G-L-I-A-N-O. We can geek out on great political music over there. And now let's roll credits. This episode was hosted, written and edited by me, Rico Gagliano with the help of large amounts of coffee. Ciara McEniff is our producer, along with assistant producer, Kat Kowalczyk. Jackson Musker is our booking producer. Mastering by Steven Colon. Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick. Thanks this week to East Anglia University's Livewire 1350. Sonatune Studios in Nottingham, Persephonica Studios in Sheffield and Peter, Therese and Corrina Lesser. This episode was executive produced by me, along with Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. And finally, to watch the best in cinema, subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com Thanks for listening. Go watch some movies. They matter.