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Beats: Behind the scenes of the riotous Glaswegian film’s 1,500-strong warehouse rave

For his bittersweet new film, Brian Welsh needed to authentically depict the Nineties rave scene – and the only way to do that was to invite thousands of extras to a real-life warehouse party, writes Liam Turbett

Friday 17 May 2019 17:59 BST
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Beats’ rave scene is set against the politics of the time – and the end of an era
Beats’ rave scene is set against the politics of the time – and the end of an era

It’s a Friday evening in Glasgow city centre. A small pub is packed to the rafters, and for some reason, everyone is wearing vintage sportswear. A few streets away, a thumping bass is reverberating across the grey landscape of a car park. If it wasn’t for the smattering of smartphones, it could be the early Nineties. We are all waiting for a rave to begin.

This is the set of Beats, a coming-of-age tale of dance music and friendship. After taking Scotland’s theatre scene by storm in its original play form, the film was picked up by Ken Loach’s Sixteen Films, with Steven Soderbergh signing up as an executive producer. In cinemas now, the film transports us to West Lothian in 1994, where two 15-year-olds are determined to have a night to remember. The law is just as determined to stop them.

The story culminates in a huge rave, which presented the producers with the dilemma any dance-music film faces: how do you do the party scenes justice? The answer, they decided, was to find an empty warehouse, get 1,500 people through the door, and recreate the 1990s for one night. Over the course of the next hour on set, all those Glaswegian ravers will pour through the doors.

Beats is set amid the “fag end” of the UK’s free party movement, and so the politics of the era loom large, from the aspirational soundbites of opposition leader Tony Blair to the Conservative government’s bid to quash illegal raves. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, passed in 1994, famously outlawed public gatherings “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. It’s in search of those repetitive beats that our two protagonists, 15-year-olds Johnno (Cristian Ortega) and Spanner (Lorn MacDonald) set out, although it doesn’t help that Johnno’s stepdad is a cop, and Spanner is in the care of his abusive, drug-dealing older brother.

The first performances of Beats, which was a play by Scottish theatremaker Kieran Hurley, were at the much-missed Glasgow arts venue The Arches, located in the vaults beneath the city’s Central Station. As well as cutting-edge theatre, The Arches put on legendary club nights. The whole operation was put in jeopardy in 2015, though, after a police-sponsored moral panic over drugs took away its license and saw the charity that ran it enter administration. The move sent shockwaves through Scotland’s dance music and theatre scenes, which collided together – then and now – with Beats. As Hurley said at the time, The Arches had been “a brilliantly simple idea, to put on massive parties and to fund experimental art that would otherwise really struggle to find a platform”.

The Arches emerged in the early 1990s, just as the rave scene was moving indoors. Such is the drive for authenticity, some of the same sound equipment from the venue found its way onto the set of Beats. It’s a unique set-up for a party, let alone a film set, and one which the filmmakers saw as vital for creating the atmosphere they wanted to capture on film.

“We’ve spent £25,000 on this tonight. It’s a lot for our budget,” says producer Camilla Bray, gesturing to the crane they’ve brought in for sweeping over the crowd, and the banks of monitors and technical equipment hidden behind the DJ booth.

There the director, Brian Welsh, and his team are huddled around. One screen shows the lead characters, and another roams among the crowd, focusing in on individual ravers lost in the moment.

Strict rules around period costume are in place (leave the glow sticks, hi-viz and your mobile at home), but beyond that, the main stipulation for those lucky enough to get free tickets is to have fun. The end result is something like T in the Park’s Slam Tent or the Warehouse Project – a vast cavern full of people falling into each other, dark silhouettes against the bright visuals – crossed with any small town night club from the early 1990s.

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A little while later, when Beats is complete, I catch up with Welsh. “The film absolutely depended on making that night work,” he says. “We only really had one shot at it, but there was no question that we should get a real party organised with proper DJs and a sound system in a secret location, with between 1,000 and 2,000 extras all in Nineties gear. We knew we couldn’t stop the party, so the crew would have to manoeuvre around it. It meant the energy and the trajectory of how the night went was authentic. We planned each of the individual scenes that we needed to do in line with where we felt the party would be at that specific part of the night. It worked really well.”

For the actors, it was a unique experience. “I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to do it,” laughs Gemma McElhinney, who forms, along with Rachel Jackson and Amy Manson, the squad of girls who act as a gateway into the party for the two main characters. “It was a nightmare for the guys filming, trying to keep track of us in the crowd. It was a challenge for us to find each other too!”

“It was a really clever idea,” adds Jackson. “The whole style of the film has a This Is England vibe, being funny but also quite sad. For the party, they made it as authentic as possible, they didn’t just pay a bunch of extras.”

Beats: Official UK trailer

Not everything went seamlessly though. A local brewer had been happy enough to stock up the bar, until realising that their cans would play a starring role alongside, well, ecstasy. So the film crew spent the afternoon before the party covering over the distinctive logo with duct tape on literally thousands of cans.

But the film is far from 100 minutes of relentless hedonism. “I never set out to just make a party film that doesn’t connect with the boys’ story and what that period meant, what the Criminal Justice Act meant and how it’s relevant to our lives today,” says Welsh. The film explores issues of class – Johnno’s Mondeo Man stepdad is about to whisk his family off to a life in new-build suburbia – and above all, young people trying to have fun and carve out a space for themselves, on their own terms, and being criminalised for doing so. “It was a youth subculture that had an ideology,” adds Welsh, “whether it was articulated or not, that was about togetherness, in the face of quite individualist, conservative values at the time.”

The film is riotously fun, with sharp dialogue and a banging soundtrack, its funniest moments matched by its most tender and bittersweet. It’s shot in black and white, but colour seeps through from its characters, the music, and the shared sense of euphoria.

The film captures the youth subculture of ‘togetherness in the face of individualist, conservative values’ 

When I was on the dancefloor that night, I was pulled over by someone I didn’t recognise. “I used to work in this building when it was a lighting showroom,” the stranger shouted into my ear as The Prodigy blared over the sound system. “The funny thing is, I got fired for going out partying too much.”

It was just after midnight and the rave was still in full flow. The production team were more relaxed, confident they had got exactly what they wanted from the night. The actors, it seemed, had long since been lost in the crowd.

Beats is in cinemas now

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