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A Hard Day's Night

One of the greatest pop bands in history produced one of the greatest pop movies with A Hard Day’s Night. The 1964 film has a simple plot that sees the band trying to get through two days while being pursued by fans. Music manager, producer and documentary director Jeremy Dillon tells Mark that The Beatles wanted to do something unexpected with their first foray into cinema.

“They’d had all these overtures to do something called a ‘jukebox film’,” he says of a type of film that treats musicians like novelty items. “The Beatles hated those movies.” They decided to collaborate with Richard Lester, a director who’d worked with comedians like The Goons, to do something genuinely funny. “It’s a comedy, but not a parody,” says Dillon. “It’s about the trap of becoming so famous that you lose your anonymity. It was reflecting The Beatles’ real experience and stratospheric rise to fame.”

Head

Mark says he enjoys 1968’s Head “as a cult movie, but it’s a total mess of a film”. The interesting thing about Head is, Mark says, “The Monkees setting fire to their own reputation”.

The Monkees were a band created for TV, but they became genuinely good. The film, in quite a surreal way, sees them battling with the idea that they are both real people and fictional characters simply performing to a script. “They were a band that made great records,” says Dillon. “What happened fairly early on is that they began to chafe against the boundaries of being a fake band.” Head is them pushing those boundaries.

The Phantom of the Paradise

“The idea of pop stardom as this Faustian bargain is threaded through so many stories about pop music through the years,” says Jeremy Dillon. That’s exactly what we see in Brian De Palma’s 1974 film Phantom of the Paradise.

An unscrupulous producer (Paul Williams) steals the work of a brilliant young composer (William Finley), who then haunts his music venue, The Paradise. It’s very odd and unsurprisingly a cult hit, with a lot to say about the fake side of the industry and the blurring of what is real and what’s not. Paul Williams tells Mark he thinks the film is “an interesting commentary on the line between what is news and what’s entertainment”.

Velvet Goldmine

Todd Haynes’ glam rock drama from 1998 focuses on a reporter (Christian Bale) writing about a David Bowie-like singer (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who faked his own death, and his encounter with an Iggy Pop-esque rocker, played by Ewan McGregor.

Jeremy Dillon says Velvet Goldmine occupies an interesting space in that it’s almost about David Bowie and Iggy Pop but not quite. “Everyone kind of knows, in the same way that more recently in Daisy Jones and the Six, everyone knows that’s sort of meant to be Fleetwood Mac.” A not-quite-biopic is allowed to be much more salacious than an actual biopic. And Velvet Goldmine certainly is.

Spiceworld

Jeremy Dillon says: “Spiceworld did pretty well at the box office but it was pilloried at the time.” When it came out in 1997, The Spice Girls were the biggest girl group in the world.

It’s similar in concept to A Hard Day’s Night, just following the group as they’re pursued by fans and scheming reporters. Mark says the Beatles comparison hurts it: “It’s trying too hard. It feels like it’s desperately trying to be a Richard Lester Beatles film, and I just found it corporate and plastic.”

Girls 5Eva

Ellen insists to Mark that he must watch the 2021 US sitcom Girls5eva. It’s an interesting addition to the list because it’s about the modern phenomenon of bands reforming.

“It’s about this Spice Girls, Girls Aloud-ish American pop group of the 90s/early 00s who are now [middle-aged] and trying to reboot their career. It’s got lots of pop culture jokes,” says Ellen. It’s a very funny look at what happens when unglamorous elements of real life – ageing, children, divorce – clash with the glossy, bubblegum world of pop.

Swarm

Since the invention of pop, there have always been fans, but a relatively recent phenomenon is the birth of ‘fandom’, people who base their whole personality around their love of a performer.

That’s explored in the 2023 TV show Swarm, about a young woman (Dominique Fishback) who is so obsessed by a Beyoncé-esque pop star that she starts to think they have a relationship to each other. It was created by Donald Glover and Janine Nabers. Nabers says she wanted to explore how people can feel they possess a celebrity: “I understand the logic of ‘If you’re a public figure, I’m supporting you and giving you an audience, therefore I feel like I have some ownership of you’.” Swarm is about that being taken too far.

The Idea of You

Ellen calls 2024’s The Idea of You “an unexpectedly mature take on youthful pop confection”.

The film started life as a piece of fan fiction, about a middle-aged woman starting a relationship with Harry Styles. It was such a hit that it was adapted – after being stripped of Harry Styles references – into a film starring Anne Hathaway and Nichola Galitzine.

It's essentially about the unappealing side of fame. Hathaway’s character could live life in the spotlight with Galitzine’s young star, but she sees there’s not a lot to recommend that life.

Find out more about Mark and Ellen's adventures in the glossy world of pop idols by listening to the episode in full.