Oil City Confidential
Oil City Confidential – which has just won the Mojo Vision Award – is the final film in Julien Temple’s trilogy on the British music of the 1970s. It’s the story of four men in cheap suits who crashed out of Canvey Island in the early 1970s, sandpapered the face of rock’n’roll and left all that came before in burnt-out ruin. Together with Dr Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson, Julien will be presenting a special screening of the film at this year’s festival.
Oil City Confidential is a film noir, feature-length documentary about Dr Feelgood and is the prequel to his landmark films about punk figureheads The Sex Pistols in The Filth & The Fury and Joe Strummer in The Future Is Unwritten.
Rather than being a standard rockumentary, Julien uses the music as a prism through which he examines the social and cultural conditions of the times. Oil City Confidential is an exploration of the unique time, place and social landscape: all of which was responsible for shaping the identity of the band and which more than any other, defined the strange cultural vacuum which existed before the coming of punk rock.
The film reflects Temple’s characteristic cinematic language - the irreverent and anarchic style of montage full of archive and fictive footage, which he pioneered in The Great Rock & Roll Swindle. The Sex Pistols and Joe Strummer’s roles are well known, but Dr Feelgood, who is the subject of Oil City Confidential, played a vital role in creating the conditions for the cultural explosion in the 1970s and 1980s and is a story that is as yet untold.
“Julien Temple’s film about 1970s pub rockers Dr Feelgood is his best rockumentary yet.”
The Guardian
Links:
Watch the official trailer for Oil City Confidential:
