Inna de Yard

On paper, Inna de Yard sounds charm­ing: direc­tor Peter Web­ber reunites a group of pio­neer­ing reg­gae musi­cians (includ­ing Ken Boothe, Win­ston McAnuff and Judy Mowatt), who smoke spliffs and relive the glo­ry days by mak­ing a new album and going out on tour.

Some of them, par­tic­u­lar­ly the ener­getic Cedric Myton, have nev­er earned the kind of mon­ey their unique tal­ent mer­it­ed, mak­ing this doc­u­men­tary an impor­tant chance to intro­duce their music to a new gen­er­a­tion and get them earn­ing again.

It’s a shame, then, that Webber’s doc­u­men­tary, which focus­es on the back­sto­ry of each musi­cian before show­ing them play songs at a reunion show in Paris, is so pedes­tri­an, lack­ing the flair of sim­i­lar (supe­ri­or) music docs such as Search­ing for Sug­ar Man.

The sub­ject mat­ter is fas­ci­nat­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly the focus on how reg­gae pro­vid­ed social com­men­tary at a time where Jamaica was at war with itself, yet the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing this film is like being sub­ject­ed to a bar­rage of Wikipedia pages, as Web­ber tries to cram in as much sub­text as possible.

Just as one intrigu­ing detail emerges (such as Mowatt’s inten­tions to make music that empow­ered ignored work­ing class black women or McAnuff feel­ing like he was screwed out of his mas­ters), it’s quick­ly for­got­ten and replaced by another.

The live per­for­mances are pow­er­ful, but while Web­ber paints a well-round­ed pic­ture of how these artists made some­thing out of noth­ing, he fails to get to the heart of what makes their music so great son­i­cal­ly, or the dark­er, poten­tial­ly racist, rea­sons why they’re not all liv­ing as com­fort­ably as you might expect.

Beyond the purists, it’s hard to imag­ine many peo­ple will leave Inna de Yard in a rush to lis­ten to its sub­jects’ tunes, which, let’s face it, is the true indi­ca­tor of a great music documentary.