The Man from Mo’Wax

Found­ed by James Lavelle, Mo’Wax Records was a pio­neer of the UK’s trip-hop scene in the ear­ly 1990s, sign­ing ground-break­ing under­ground artists such as DJ Shad­ow, Dr Octa­gon and Black­a­li­cious. The once inde­pen­dent label even­tu­al­ly became affil­i­at­ed with the majors, and The Man From Mo’Wax focus­es on how its founder shift­ed from hav­ing the world at his feet to com­plete iso­la­tion. The doc­u­men­tary works best when it depicts the trou­bled bro­mance between Lavelle and Joshua ​‘DJ Shad­ow’ Davis, who cre­at­ed elec­tron­ic group UNKLE’s debut album, ​‘Psyence Fic­tion’. Although Davis played the music, Lavelle took equal cred­it, with the for­mer com­plain­ing: ​“Most A&R men don’t get a writer’s credit!”

This should have been the heart of this doc­u­men­tary, with direc­tor Matthew Jones focus­ing on whether Lavelle’s skill laid in bring­ing peo­ple togeth­er or leech­ing off their tal­ents. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Jones spends too long explor­ing UNKLE’s ill-con­ceived lat­er albums (with­out Davis), which is occa­sion­al­ly exhaust­ing. Lavelle is a mag­net­ic char­ac­ter, but beyond usu­al rock­star cliché́s, we don’t get a three-dimen­sion­al por­trait for view­ers to empathise with. If only Jones explained who he was out­side the stu­dio more, and the impact of miss­ing a child­hood (Lavelle start­ed Mo’Wax when he was 18).

Ear­li­er this year, Swedish DJ Avicii com­mit­ted sui­cide, with the hedo­nis­tic pres­sures of tour­ing said to have played a major role. Through­out this doc­u­men­tary, Lavelle admits to liv­ing a sim­i­lar­ly ​“noc­tur­nal lifestyle” as a DJ and hav­ing had to ​“take drugs to stay awake”. The infer­ence is that this caused two divorces, depres­sion and an inabil­i­ty to man­age his nances. Again, Jones doesn’t go far enough in explor­ing these excess­es – a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty, espe­cial­ly giv­en the cur­rent con­ver­sa­tion around elec­tron­ic music and its strain on the men­tal health of its artists.