Vol.1

I predict a riot…

I guess it all started in my mum’s front room, watching a TV show with ALAN CUMMING about the evolution of CABARET – The Musical. By that time, I had been sitting in that Manchester front room for what seemed like months. Mum had just had quadruple bi-pass surgery. She was already over 80 and recovery had been a long hard road. In the previous months, I had been sitting at the window in SEAN McLUSKY’s M.E.N. GALLERY on Redchurch Street – watching the world walk by, en route to Shoreditch House. I remember thinking how, at that time, the crumbling environs of Bethnal Green seemed quite ‘post-Weimar’ with artists and musicians on the cultural fringes of Sharia Law, while massive political unrest was being fomented on the side streets. For all of five seconds I felt similar to Christopher Isherwood, somehow wishing I had been writing I AM A CAMERA or GOODBYE TO BERLIN.

Later that night, after Alan Cumming had finished his little song and dance and I put mum to bed, I got-out a ‘Knitting Journal’ (I had bought in the pound shop) and began writing a screenplay entitled LONDON CALLING. I wrote the script in longhand – meaning with a pen – as I don’t think I even had a functioning laptop anymore. Entitling the script LONDON CALLING would get me in trouble with the folks making a small JOE STRUMMER movie. So, after a conversation in Sean”s front room, any reference to THE CLASH was gone and somehow (in reference to a 1967 counterculture-era exploitation movie set on Sunset Strip) the script became RIOT ON REDCHURCH STREET…

RIOT would end-up being over a decade in the making. In that time I would bury my entire family, get through several years of COVID and never get that far beyond living out-of-a-bag or sleeping on a sofa. Between the first cut screened in public and The Director’s Cut – there would be a ten year hiatus… But, finally, RIOT is almost the film it needed to be… Still, as they might say in aviation circles ‘onward and upward’ with more to follow, shortly… Best Regards xx TM