Sound for the Future: an uncertain music-doc hybrid

‘Art is long, life is short,’ as some punk once said. Or maybe art is short and life is long? In Sound for the Future, director Matt Hulse revisits an old C90 cassette tape containing the complete musical output of the Hippies, the band he formed aged 11 with his 12-year-old brother Toby and eight-year-old sister Polly in 1979. The result is a hundred-minute film about a bare handful of songs recorded more than forty years ago. It shares a kitchen-table DIY budget with its subject and takes a kitchen-sink approach to the remembrance of things past, shuffling between staged public readings of adolescent diaries, the recruitment of youngsters to stage modern-day reconstructions of the Hippies’ may-fly career, glancing encounters with sources of inspiration such as Sleaford Mods or Gang of Four’s Andy Gill, and animated sequences riffing on the lyrics of the Hippies’ greatest hits.

The result – if you squint a little – could be filed near the likes of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave (2001) or even Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal (2022; reviewed in the TV section of this issue): fables of reconstruction, driven by compulsion, in which directors embark on increasingly quixotic attempts to capture or frame in art a source material – life – which just won’t stop happening. But Hulse never seems to settle on a way to approach his subject, or even settle on what precisely his subject is, leaving Sound for the Future to circle fretfully around large holes where a narrative, argument or line of thought ought to be. The family sadness – separation and divorce – detectable behind the Hippies’ brief activity and Hulse’s lasting pre-occupation with it decades later is sketched in confusing, discontinuous detail. The reluctance of key figures to be involved may account for the sense of these gaps in Sound for the Future: Hulse’s father only appears briefly to cue up a Stranglers seven-inch in his suburban semi, while Hulse’s older brother Toby never shows up, an echo of his lack of interest in persisting with the Hippies as a child except as a time-filler during holidays.

So, driven by Hulse’s faith in improvisation, Sound for the Future becomes an uncertain hybrid of documentary, re-enactment and recording of its own making. None of these strands persists long enough in the edit to allow the film a through-line: they defer to and digress into each other in a succession of scenes that all feel transitional. Hulse’s faith in free association leads to an interlude in which he literally free-associates on the letters E, A, D, G, B, E, the notes of standard guitar tuning. We see him have ‘eadgbe’ tattooed on his arm, and getting a Chinese word for music tattooed on a trip to Beijing, where he also has a miniature bespoke suit in the style of Malcolm McLaren made for his cherished stuff toy (and occasional mouthpiece) Snoops. McLaren is an obsession: Hulse dances on his grave in Highgate Cemetery, makes out with the death mask on its headstone, and has a pair of McLarenesque brothel creepers turned into tap shoes – learning to tap-dance being another of the film’s non sequiturs.

McLaren, who was always happy to be seen as a manipulator of his younger collaborators in punk, is also invoked by Hulse’s own recruitment and direction of teenage stand-ins for the Hippies. These modern-day recreations multiply strangely: some march around with a huge cardboard cut-out of the Hippies cassette, some perform mock radio interviews, some learn to play their instruments from scratch on camera. They all gather on wasteland for a bonfire of the film’s props, which might have worked more cathartically if it hadn’t featured in the film’s early scenes.

The Hippies’ music, meanwhile, has a genuine artlessness and a zero-budget aesthetic – Hulse, on ‘drums’, played chopsticks – that clicks with the DIY post-punk scene raging at the time. ‘Rabies’, given a prominence in the film which implicitly marks it as their hit single, dispenses lyrics drawn from public health messaging (“Rabies is a killer! A horrible way to go!”) over a Moog monotone. ‘Dallas City Ghost’ is a morbid blues about the Kennedy assassination. With their flashes of the Normal, the Shaggs, Dead Kennedys, Suicide and Daniel Johnston, you can just about imagine John Peel receiving the Hippies’ tape in the post sometime in 1979 and playing it late one night on Radio 1. Matt Hulse would never have got over it.

► Sound for the Future is in UK cinemas now.