Sweet soul music, the sort of pure good time music, you get here, when it is played with feeling and passion and true ever loving spirit, can be among the most joyous of all sounds. There have been far too many manufactured besuited and bewigged cretins paraded around in the name of soul, however, for the genre to have any real credibility any more in real life, but when you see a film like The Commitments and hear a sound like The Commitments and cop a feel for the atmosphere of The Commitments, you know that it is in fact the true music of God.
This story of the birth, growth and eventual demise of a good time soul band from Dublin is one of the most memorable of all music based films, and probably the most enjoyable - soul is the rhythm of sex, and The Commitments are the soul of enjoyment.
The film hearkens back to a simpler time, a more innocent time, embodied in the approach of the early Beatles films, Hard Day's Night and Help, although you certainly wouldn't know it from the sort of earthy Anglo Saxon language in which the story is steeped right from the off.
"All music is shite since Roy Orbison..."
You get the scum of the earth (well, Dublin, at least) pulled together to form the sort of showband that used to be so prevalent in the Sixties and you get some of the most wonderful soul music ever created by Whites, music with a real feel and, well, SOUL.
That it's also one of the most honest to goodnss funny films of all time is a rare and most welcome surprise, and really there's no bones to be made about it, just hear this lot belt out Mustang Sally and you are in the presence of real excellence, although it takes a while to get going. You just can't help yourself going round with a big, fat stupid idiot's grin on your face as the film draws you in - it's a sheer delight from start to finish.
The good thing about all of this, however, is that all the main players are so intensely flawed that you struggle to like any of them as people, just like real life I guess.
Robert Arkins plays Jimmy Rabbitte the manager cum leader who pulls the outfit together and it's when he gets approached by Joey The Lips Fagan (Johnny Murphy) that things really take off because Fagan claims, whether he ever did is not clear, to have played with all the greats of soul music, and injects the real feel, although it is the startling voice of Deco Cuffe (played supremely by Andrew Strong) which really marks them out as something special, though it's Deco's abysmal personality and pig ignorant approach to life which ultimately spells the end of the dream, although Joey The Lips clearly also has The Groin as he runs through all three female backing singers.
Alan Parker directs and the story is taken from the first part of Roddy Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy and the material is brought delightfully to life on the big or even small screen. This is indeed the World's Hardest Working Band...
Now as for the music, the sweet soul music, well you get some of the greatest songs of all time, played by one of the greatest soul bands ever - r'n'b as she should be played, loud and proud and very, very sweaty with THAT VOICE soaring through it -
1. Mustang Sally 2. Take Me To The River 3. Chain Of Fools 4. Dark End Of The Street 5. Destination Anywhere 6. I Can't Stand The Rain 7. Try A Little Tenderness 8. Treat Her Right 9. Do Right Woman, Do Right Man 10. Mr. Pitiful 11. I Never Loved A Man 12. In The Midnight Hour 13. Bye Baby Bye 14. Slip Away
Even the titles sound somehow different from the norm and you can listen to literally any of these tracks and imagine yourself in a claustrophobically packed and smoky Sixties club with wall to wall sweat and feeling, observing scraps breaking out and a band kicking ass in a very very powerful way - The Wicked Pickett would doubtless approve ...
Really you need to see the pictures with the tracks to make real sense of things but it's still one helluva album - if you like soul music you will adore this and even if you don't, you'll still treasure it...
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How does it compare to the artist's other releases
Outstanding
How does it rate alongside the competition
Outstanding
Cover / Inlay Design and Content
Satisfactory
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by the sometimes bombastic Alan Parker, this quirky 1991 tribute to the enduring and universal power of American R&B took some cynical criticism for its reliance o...
by the sometimes bombastic Alan Parker, this quirky 1991 tribute to the enduring and universal power of American R&B took some cynical criticism for its reliance o...
COMMITMENTS VOL 1^ THE
Producers: P. Bushnell, Kevin Killen, Alan Parker.[Reviews]Stereophile (2/93, p.109) -
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...its rendition of Soul is deep, solid, and driving...16-year-old lead singer Andrew Strong, who knows the music, has terrific phrasing, great pitch, and an impossi...
