Human Traffic

So that's why he's disagreeable to me.

You don't get the wish fulfilment of killing the Nazi.

So...

Like, not only would I hate to get stuck talking to him at a party, like, I would want to fucking smash him out of the heat with an ashtray, but I

And we were going through the second summer of love, I believe, in the late 1980s over here.

And we had this kind of... exaltation of these older figures at the time like Hunter S. Thompson and then you get the adaptation of Fear and the Loathing in Las Vegas and then we're kind of heartening back to this era of the 1960s and it kind of made its way into the culture of the 1990s which you would see in films like Human Traffic which would kind of put that on a pedestal that kind of rave culture that kind of hedonism

Yeah, the last great film of the 90s, Human Traffic, I would say.

I've heard that said very many times.

A topic that often comes up on this film is, do we choose the art that we like, or does the art choose us? Because I was thinking back to this, and last week's episode was the Peter Bogdanovich film, Mask, which, of course, stars share.

... are asking.

But yeah, um, Human Traffic.

And so I did that track for an album, and interestingly enough, when you kinda like, you, you load the parts up-

Right

icky pop and stuff yeah

pop exactly yeah um but but i i do i do write about it a bit about train spotting um but yes and i i i think it i think it has dated in ways that that morvin keller the film has not and and i think i think with morvin keller because there are There are a couple of other sort of rave, like Human Traffic's another one that was very rave-centric from that period.

I think the thing that saves more than Keller is that it's – uh tonally speaking quite almost like a surreal film it's very dream like it doesn't seem to be it seems to always be taking place in some space both sort of psychological and interior that is maybe slightly adjacent to reality you know it's a very hard film tonally to describe because it's It's quite dark, but it's also quite sort of morbidly funny, and it's quite...

It's also got a sort of flatness of effect, which I'm sure we can talk about.

We had a, a recommendation of the week that resonates with me, and we'll do it on my channel.

Uh, Human, Human Traffic.

Have you ever heard of that film?

Human Traffic? Mm-mm

Yes.

It's a, it's a British, uh, film about, essentially about raving and ecstasy.

That's the ecstasy movie, I'd say, is Human Traffic.

And it's about British-

Like those films in the 90s were like, there was loads of them.

Human Traffic, I know it's based in Cardiff, isn't like quintessentially Welsh, but like those films, like even then sort of rolling into stuff like, it's all off the back of like, you know, lock stock, scum.

It's those things, those films were made

for like, like 300 to 500,000 pounds at the time, which is absolutely tiny, tiny money.

...

Human Traffic, those films set in the '90s that have got a whole variety of different genres in it.

And then you've got Nirvana, and then you've got Blur, and you've got the Spice Girls.

Like, the '90s was absolutely monumental for music.

Singles showed young slackers who played in bands in Seattle.

Human Traffic showed the clubbing scene in 90s Britain.

One film, more than any other, tried to cover the 90s Australian alternative music scene.

And that was 2002's Garage Days.

A working class London kid with something natural, something raw, something special and something really watchable.

In 1999, Danny Dyer appeared in Human Traffic as Moff.

And for a certain generation, Moff is the first Danny Dyer role.

That

film captures something very specific.

The late 90s, clubbing, weekend madness, lads culture.

Human Traffic was not a gangster film.

It was Danny as a motor-mouthed, funny, chaotic, insecure young bloke in the middle of Britain's clubbing culture.