Lance Bangs on the mak­ing of Son­ic Youth doc Day­dream Nation

Amer­i­can film­mak­er and music video direc­tor Lance Bangs is known for cap­tur­ing the ener­gy and vital­i­ty of live per­for­mances with great care and inti­ma­cy. Over the last 30 years he’s worked with REM, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Kanye West among oth­ers, cre­at­ing music videos, con­cert films and tour visu­als, as well as direct­ing com­e­dy spe­cials and shoot­ing the hit ​’90s TV show Jackass.

His lat­est ven­ture is Son­ic Youth con­cert film Day­dream Nation, named after the band’s sem­i­nal 1988 record of the same name. Doc­u­ment­ing the con­tained chaos and aloof charis­ma of the band live in Glas­gow in 2007, the film is cut from footage of two con­sec­u­tive shows which saw the band per­form the album in full as part of a 20^th anniver­sary tour. The film’s UK pre­mière is apt­ly set for this month’s Glas­gow Film Fes­ti­val, coin­cid­ing neat­ly with the album’s 30^th anniversary.

Bangs explains that the project came to him almost by acci­dent. ​“In August 2007 I was in Glas­gow shoot­ing footage for the band Slint at the ABC,” he recalls. ​“Son­ic Youth were about to fol­low that with the two ​‘Day­dream Nation’ shows, and asked me if I would stick around to film them too. Glas­gow had always been a great city for them: the audi­ences had been very sup­port­ive.” The city has always been a favourite of Bangs’, too. ​“I’ve always been fond of Glas­gow. I made a video for Belle and Sebas­t­ian there, and I’ve shot great footage there with bands like Pave­ment. It’s a great city for live music.”

Bangs is known for nur­tur­ing work­ing rela­tion­ships with bands over many years, some­times decades, con­tribut­ing to the per­son­al feel of his film­mak­ing. His rela­tion­ship with Son­ic Youth began in the mid ​’90s after he left his teenage home in New Jer­sey for Athens, Geor­gia and start­ed film­ing their shows. In 1995, Bangs got to know the band when they opened for his close friends REM on the ​‘Mon­ster’ tour – he shot footage every night on a com­bi­na­tion of Super 8, 16mm and video.

Short­ly after this tour, Son­ic Youth played an inte­gral role in Bangs’ step into pro­fes­sion­al film­mak­ing. ​“In 1995 they made a record called ​‘Wash­ing Machine’, with a beau­ti­ful 20-minute-long song called ​‘The Dia­mond Sea’,” he explains. ​“They com­mis­sioned Spike Jonze to make a music video for the song. Kim [Gor­don, bass and vocals] and Thurston [Moore, gui­tar and vocals] told him that I had been shoot­ing a lot of footage on the tour, so I sent it over.

He con­tin­ues, ​“Spike didn’t just use the con­cert footage: he wove bits of per­son­al, poet­ic trav­el­ogue footage into the video too. He was very gen­er­ous and split the direct­ing cred­it with me. That was one of the first things that came out under my name pro­fes­sion­al­ly, and it helped me start direct­ing music videos for oth­er people.”

Bangs sub­se­quent­ly found cama­raderie and sup­port in his friend­ship with Jonze, and the pair learned from each oth­er along­side their peer Michel Gondry. ​“None of us went to film school,” says Bangs, ​“we’re all semi-self taught, invent­ing our own approach­es and tech­niques. Hav­ing peers that you can talk to with­out being com­pet­i­tive as the main dynam­ic was real­ly impor­tant to us and helped us to make bet­ter films.”

Although Bangs has shot a num­ber of con­cert films before, Day­dream Nation was his first cap­tur­ing a full album show. This pre­sent­ed a chal­lenge to keep things visu­al­ly inter­est­ing when the setlist is pre­de­ter­mined. ​“There’s a dan­ger that once you reach side three of the record peo­ple will feel they’ve seen the same five shots over and over. Over the course of two nights I changed the cam­era cov­er­age and repo­si­tioned things so I could keep a dif­fer­ent flow or approach in the edit.” The footage is shot from the stage and the audi­ence, switch­ing focus from indi­vid­ual mem­bers to the band con­nect­ing as a unit.

The char­ac­ter­is­tics of Son­ic Youth’s music mean that Day­dream Nation is more var­ied than a straight­for­ward run-through of the record: almost every song fea­tures an extend­ed jam sec­tion, where the messier, bro­ken-down ele­ments of the band’s sound are empha­sised. ​“It’s always dif­fer­ent from the stu­dio record­ing,” says Bangs. ​“At the end of ​‘Teenage Riot’ for exam­ple, they go into a noise piece that’s hap­pen­ing com­po­si­tion­al­ly in the moment, with them all inter­act­ing with each other.”

Although Bangs describes Son­ic Youth – who are cur­rent­ly on hia­tus – as ​“not a typ­i­cal­ly nos­tal­gic band”, the 30^th anniver­sary of the album’s release was the cat­a­lyst for final­ly putting togeth­er the film. ​“Steve [Shel­ley, drum­mer] has done a lot of great work to keep peo­ple lis­ten­ing while the band are on hia­tus. He sug­gest­ed that we dig up the footage – they toured it on the 20^th anniver­sary and for the 30^th anniver­sary we could final­ly show the film that was made. We start­ed off doing some screen­ings in the States last Octo­ber, but Glas­gow will be the first time that we show the full film.”

The UK pre­mière of Day­dream Nation takes place at Glas­gow Film Fes­ti­val on Sat­ur­day 23 Feb­ru­ary, fol­lowed by a Q&A with Lance Bangs, Son­ic Youth drum­mer Steve Shel­ley, and The Pastel’s Stephen McRobbie.