I confess that for the past three years, I hadn’t given much thought to One Direction since they came third on The X Factor in 2010, which was the last season of the show I watched all the way through. Like many other people over the age of 40 worldwide, I was vaguely aware that they’d done rather well for themselves, certainly better than that year’s de facto X Factor winner, whatever his name was. Apparently, they had quite a few hits, although for the life of me I wouldn’t have been able to name one song, let alone sing a single bar. Then, about six months ago, my five-year-old daughter Eve came home from school and demanded I download One Direction albums because all her friends liked them. Up until that point Let It Go from Frozen had been the soundtrack of our lives – in the bath, in the car, over Hello Kitty pasta shapes and toast - and then suddenly it was all, like, Elsa Who, Harry this and Niall that, and non-stop renditions of Live While We’re Young. They grow up so fast.
You can perhaps imagine the ear-piercing squeals of delight when I told her mummy had tickets for us to go see their latest movie, the abundantly punctuated One Direction: Where We Are – The Concert Film. If you can’t imagine, think of something like the sound of a hysterical bat being electrocuted while attempting polyphonic singing through a vocoder.
Twenty-four hours or so later we were in the Vue Cineplex in Norwich. Predictably, the bulk of the audience was made up nine-13-year-olds, with Eve probably the smallest there, although we were charmed to discover we were sitting next to another mother-and-daughter pair. The daughter was roughly my age, and the mother looked to be somewhere in her late 70s. When the film finally started up with an exclusive interview with the band pre-concert and the cheeky one from Doncaster started chattering away (Eve informed me this was Louis), I heard the older lady next to me whisper to her daughter that he was her favourite. I think he’s mine too now, because he looks a bit endearingly skeevy and fully aware that he’s third or even fourth banana but having a blast all the same, like a cross between Howard from Take That and Dee Dee Ramone.
Fans familiar with One Direction’s previous cinematic outing, One Direction: This Is Us, may feel somewhat short-changed by the dearth here of carefully vetted, pseudo-spontaneous behind-the-scenes footage. After the aforementioned interview, which covers such anodyne topics as how hard it is on the road and how nice it is that they have so many fans, the film gets down to business presenting a bog-standard concert doc, filmed at San Siro Stadium in Milan last June. The chaps get on stage, say “Ciao, Milan”, and then sing for an hour, although four of them do go off for a toilet break backstage while Liam holds the fort. There’s much amusement over this in the pre-concert interview, especially given the fact that Liam used to have a scarred, dysfunctional kidney (apparently, it’s all better now), but he nevertheless has a stronger bladder than his coevals. As the kids used to say, too much information.
I am not a music critic, and don’t feel qualified to pass judgement on that aspect of the show except to say the singing sounds enough like the studio albums to appease the fans, unless some electronic jiggery-pokery has been afoot to tune it all up, which I understand it quite common these days. I did feel rather sorry for the quintet’s backing band, who are kept well back indeed throughout, apart from the lead guitarist who’s allowed to venture forward a few feet on the stage from time to time for a brief solo before scuttling back to his assigned position.
There are no close-ups of the backing band, of course, but there are lots of the core five singers, and quite a few of the screaming, crying young women in the audience with whom we are clearly meant to identify. Interspersed throughout, lots of aerial shots and high-angle views emphasise the enormity of the crowd, experiencing a giddy moment of mass hysteria together. At one rather charming moment during the rendition of Story of My Life, everyone holds up photographs of themselves as kids, an allusion to the pop video’s core visual conceit. In a strange way, it rather underscores the fans’ sincere, personal relationship with the band, the way this music – however manufactured, anodyne and easily sneer-at-able it may be – empowers and affirms them. The audience in Norwich, clapping and stomping and singing along throughout, were fully participating in the experience, chivvied along by the way the 1D boys often break the fourth wall to address the camera directly. It’s all about creating the illusion that you are there at the concert too, that time has frozen.
Although of course it hasn’t frozen. The 1D boys are growing up and, apart from Zayn Malik with snappable skinny limbs, don’t look like fragile teen heartbreakers as much as they used to. Harry Styles, the one with the most distinctive voice and the most interesting hair (he has a scarf tied round its wildness for the show, suggesting an Afghan pakol), has grown more handsome but he also looks like he can barely conceal his boredom. He’s literally just going through the motions. Surely it’s only a matter of time before he goes off to make that first solo album. They’re still a big enough deal to make an event out of the four standalone screenings of the film nationwide this weekend, but there were a fair few vacant seats at the screening we attended. Perhaps they have peaked already, and the meat-and-potatoes plain presentation of this film is a sign that they know they need to cash in as quickly as possible while there’s still time.
On the way home from the cinema in the car, Evie was feeling tired and slightly nauseous. I put on the soundtrack to Frozen for her and she fell asleep.
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