Telling tunes half the story

Dragon's documentary was a wonderful nostalgia trip.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be. But sometimes, if you've stayed home on a chilly Tuesday night, it's just what you feel like.

As it turned out, Dragon, the complete and utter and almost unbelievable history of a New Zealand band called Dragon, which screened on Prime this week, made for a quite wonderful nostalgia trip.

This hour and a half long documentary, which was plainly made with care and quite a lot of love, had everything: huge madness, big egos, bigger chart hits, bad drugs, awful tragedy, family squabbles, jealousy, more bad drugs, more tragedy, more chart hits and some of the most astonishing clothes and haircuts ever seen. It was, by turns, sad and uplifting, which is no mean feat.

Rock documentaries can of course be dreary, depressing affairs as anyone who has sat through U2's Rattle And Hum or Madonna's Truth Or Dare will tell you. They can be ploddingly predictable, Wikipedia-style bores too, a procession of bare facts and talking heads that will please only the band's tragics. Many play like This is Spinal Tap without the laughs.

But good rock docos are deep-fried gold. Remember Dig!? Brilliant. Oil City Confidential? Riveting. Don't Look Back? Terrific. The list of the good ones is longer than you think. Netflix has turned out to be an unexpectedly good place to find interesting ones. Two I've watched recently are the poignant and really rather sad journey through the life of jazz and blues pianist and singer Nina Simone, What Happened, Miss Simone?, and the surprisingly entertaining The Other One: The Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir, about the Grateful Dead guitarist.

Almost inevitably the stories of successful bands have the same, almost Greek tragic narrative arc: the early years of struggle, the breakthrough, the zenith, the drugs and the fights, the break-up, the crap solo albums, the reformation, the second split.... Rather inevitably this was Dragon's story. And but for the ghostly presence of the late Marc Hunter, the band's famously flamboyant singer, the story of one of New Zealand's most successful bands would have been rather less compelling.

The programme more or less started with a wonderful, prescient quote from Hunter. "Fame," he told an interviewer in a piece of old audio, "is failure postponed". He said this with humour, but he meant it. And certainly as his and the band's 1970s highs (literally and figuratively) drifted in the lows of the 1980s and 1990s, fame was most certainly followed by failure.

The programme's makers had gathered most of who was there to see it and live it: Marc's brother Todd, the brains of the outfit, Robert Taylor the guitarist, and Ray Goodwin, who had originally started the band with Todd in 1972 but was sacked in 1975. Crikey even Marc and Todd's old mum, a stride pianist called Voi, was there.

But it was the absences that really gave the story its power: the drummer Neil Storey, who died of a heroin overdose in 1975, Paul Hewson, the keyboard player and brilliant writer of their greatest hits, who died in 1984 of a heroin overdose, and Hunter, of course, who died from cancer in 1998.

It was tragedy writ large, all right. But a great story and, boy, some of the tunes were good.

- TimeOut