Jim Kerr – interview for Tommagazine.com

Jim Kerr doesn’t need to make music anymore, after 30 years of worldwide success fronting the enigmatic Simple Minds, he has afforded himself the luxury of being able to sit back and count his stacks. In pop terms the man has literally done it all. He’s sold 40 million albums, he’s divorced a supermodel and a rock goddess, he’s crossed the Atlantic and conquered the US charts; at fifty one years old surely it’s time for this flying Scotsman to wind down. But the man who in 1985 demanded ‘don’t you forget about me’, is staying true to his word and venturing away from his beloved band for his first solo endeavor Lostboy! AKA Jim Kerr.

“People are asking me if I’m going through a midlife crisis or something, which makes me laugh,” explains Kerr talking from London where he is promoting his Lostboy! album between recording sessions with Simple Minds.

“Simple Minds, like most classic rock bands come back every three or four years and tour extensively, but there is also a lot of down-time in between, and within that time nobody can criticise us if we want to go to the beach, especially at this stage in our lives. The thing is I don’t want to go to the beach; I want to go to the recording studio, or down into the basement and work on new songs and new sounds. There is nothing I enjoy more than that and that is what has become apparent to me again on Lost Boy!“

The band-driven record sets out to rekindle the youthfulness, which was somewhat blown away during Kerr’s whirlwind career with Simple Minds. The concepts and sounds the singer-songwriter rediscovers on record evoke a sense of post-punk nostalgia, which is counter-balanced with sonic explorations into more modern musicianship.

“For me personally, things didn’t click until 1978 and 1979 when bands like Magazine and Ultravox were coming out, I just loved all that type of music,” reminisces Kerr.

“There was something within the first few ideas of the Lost Boy! that really reminded me of that stuff. It brought on this whole nostalgia for that time and place of who I was, and where I was and what I was within my own life and the concept of Lost Boy! Really grew out of that.”

Kerr was only seventeen when he and his mates decided to name their band ‘Simple Minds’ after a particular poignant lyric in Bowie’s ‘Jean Genie’. They were just kids back then; fans really more than rock stars who decided to shrug social norms and get involved in something they really believed in, the art of making music.

“We certainly weren’t men when we formed Simple Minds, we really were just lost boys, we were drifters, we were hitchhiking through Europe,” says Kerr. “We were hitchhiking to Paris to see Patti Smith and hitchhiking to Sweden to see Lou Reed, and living day from day. We were kind of drop-outs really and at the same time I was starting to bear the dream that I could write my own songs that I could put something together that would find its way around the world.”

And find its way around the world it did…from collective drop-outs the group went on to become one of the hugest bands of the eighties, smashing stadiums across the globe with hits such as ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’, and ‘Alive and Kicking’. Twenty odd years down the track it comes as a surprise that Kerr insists that now, in 2010, long after the crest of his band’s popularity has peaked, his songwriting is at its most productive.

“I was writing for Simple Minds and ideas were coming, the songs were coming, I was getting into it and I was working on it harder than ever just for the sake of it, just because I was enjoying writing so much,” says Kerr. “Before I knew it there was a quantity of material and within that some of it could have been Simple Minds, but I thought there was something else growing out of it. “Lately I have become more prolific then in any other point of my life.”

This material went onto to become the unashamedly ambitious Lostboy! a delightful fusion of pop sounds and ideas that have inspired Kerr over his seasoned years as a musician. He admits that the majority of the time in the studio this melting pot of inspiration would send he and the other musicians on unexpected tangents.

“Well that was the charm of it, one minute we would be saying this is nostalgic, the next we would be saying this is futuristic,” says Kerr  ”Producing something timeless sounds great on paper, but as you can imagine making it’s very hard to achieve. I think this record is timeless, you can hear David Bowie on it you can hear Roxy Music you can hear some of the current bands on it, you can hear Simple Minds on it of course, it is quite modern but it’s definitely got a classic feel.”

Few musicians are blessed with the success of Jim Kerr and Simple Minds, but remaining on top and in control is a balancing act that he himself admits is something that has often eluded him.

“There have been times in the past where the energy has depleted and worryingly it hasn’t all gone swimmingly well, and there have been times when I’ve thought, ’maybe this is it,” says Kerr.

But stepping away from music, says Kerr is an urge that is only ever fleeting. After half a century on this planet and a defining career and family life, Jim Kerr still feels the same inspiring musical urge he felt when the world stood before him all those years ago, when he was just a lost boy.

“I do it through good and bad, I do it whether I’m in the charts, I do it whether I’m not in the charts I do it whether I sell 500,000 albums or whether I sell 5 copies, I just do it, it sounds so pretentious, but it’s true and I’m at my happiest in these times.”

Tomorrow Morning (Shock) - review for Tommagazine.com

Tomorrow Morning is about as arrestingly uplifting as Eels may ever get, which for a band renowned for their self-deprecating manner, is a welcome change. Following on from the despairingly pensive End Times, this closing chapter of a self-produced trilogy looks upwards from the murky pool of inspiration that is the mind of Mark Oliver Everett (known by most as E). With the wonderfully named Koool G Murder, and Knuckles on keys and drums, Eels’ seventh studio album is a colourful and disparaging exposition from a band clearly in control of their own sound.

Stripped-back and rooted in programmed drumbeats and selective instrumentation there is a simple youthfulness in the music that contrasts superbly with E’s battle-scarred lyrics. Awoken from the traumas of divorce, death and all of the rest of the shit human beings have to deal with there is a genuine optimism, which shines through on tracks such as ‘The Man’. “The little skinhead with the tattooed face / shows me a moment of style and grace,” chimes E as a gleeful xylophone skips over a wobbly synth-line in the background. There is plenty of the witty irony masking the idiom of the subject matter, but the conviction resounding in E’s voice puts unadulterated emotion behind all the songs. ‘I’m A Hummingbird’ is one of many impressive laidback numbers that set the tone of the record early on. Led by a stirring string arrangement and not much else E masters a beautifully moving melody reminiscent of an on-point Peter Gabriel. The driving boogie-woogie of ‘Looking Up’ shows another facet of E’s versatile voice. As an old blues piano bashes away in the distance E silkily croons and screams through the number as it crescendos through bursting drums and stabbing guitar chords. From the funky electronic bounce of ‘This Is When It Gets Good’ to the sweet reverberating guitar ballad,  ‘I Like The Way This Is Going’, there is plenty of musical variety to explore, the simplicity of each allowing the record as a whole to not be too overwhelming.

There is something reminiscent of Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ in Tomorrow Morning, sure the words are uplifting and happy enough, but there may just be something disturbing lying dormant in the backdrop. The music, individualistic and sparse allows E’s words to perforate the core emotion of each track into the listener’s head, and the catchiness of the tunes possesses a lasting effect. For a band with already such an impressive back catalogue Tomorrow Morning, is clear indication that Eels are showing no signs of aging into mediocrity.

Interpol (Shock) - review for Tommagazine.com

With a timeless sound, which joins the jagged noise of early post-punk with the Strokes-led indie rollout of the early naughties, Interpol are a band who know who they are and like it that way. After 2007’s disappointing major label outing Our Love to Admire, the New Yorkers have attempted to bounce back to form on this brooding, understated self-titled release. Drowning in reverb, their songs still wallow in enough self-loathing to make you want to pack your shit up and spend a year getting dangerously drunk in the hipper haunts of Brooklyn. However, these songs are definitely the musings of a band in the final throws of notoriety.

Right down to their core structure the tracks on Interpol resound with striking similarity to the band’s festival triumphs of the early naughties, they’re just not quite as good. There really is nothing fresh or vibrant at the heart of Interpol and nothing gets close to pumping with the virility of older tracks such as ‘NYC’ or ‘Slow Hands’. Former bassist Carlos Dengler’s driving rhythm does however, kick with the audacious vigour of a man who clearly new it was going to be his last outing with the band. His tight, angular bass-lines twist and turn unexpectedly and meld the mediocre, chugging guitar parts together. ‘Barricade’ flashes at past brilliance, vocalist Paul Banks viciously catchy chorus booming over an extremely tight and forthcoming single. There is no excuse however, for a song such as ‘All The Ways’, which fails wholeheartedly to emulate the stirring, ambient brilliance of Our Love to Admire’s emphatic closer ‘The Lighthouse’. The album seems to end on a high with the moody and atmospheric ‘The Undoing’, yet when it’s all over and itunes skips you onto a previous Interpol record you feel an overwhelming sense of relief.

It’s always disappointing when a great band fades into mediocrity and quite frankly on album number four, Interpol sound bored. Let’s face facts, they didn’t even bother to come up with a name for the bloody thing. Eight years ago these guys were the hippest hipsters on the planet, now they kind of sound like something Nova would add to their playlist to gain street cred.

Amandah Wilkinson (vocals / guitar) – interview for Tommagazine.com

What does it take to write the perfect pop song?

Selfishness? Fearlessness? Hard-work? Talent? May be just plain luck? Sit down with Operator Please front-woman, Amandah Wilkinson, and you’ll discover that it takes a little bit of all of these things and a lot more on top.

While we’re at home updating our Facebook statuses or glued to the season finale of Masterchef, she is meticulously mastering her craft. This relentless songwriter eats, breathes and sleeps music and her band’s success is primarily attuned to this. Chilling out after pretty much four straight years of touring and making hits, Wilkinson is twitching from anxiety, caused by the fear of getting a little too comfortable.

“A break?” she laughs, nervously. “Yeah I’ll have an hour after this interview and then I’ll get back on the guitar.”

Wilkinson didn’t take any chances on the band’s difficult follow-up to their pop smash Yes Yes Vindictive. The 22-year-old putting it upon herself to shun big-name offers and single-handedly produce the pulsating, glittery pop of Gloves. “I had about ten nervous breakdowns,” admits Wilkinson. “When it was all over I’m not going to lie, I cried when I got a copy of it in my hand. It was just such an intense kind of recording session and we never really got a chance to step back and appreciate what we were doing. We were living and breathing inside the record.”

So much more than a bunch of kids who wrote a snappy song about an obscure Olympic sport, Operator Please have recently undergone a tumultuous stylistic and musical change. This transformation is showcased on Gloves, an album, which Wilkinson herself admits being a more grown up affair.

“Everybody keeps using the M word ‘mature’,” she says. “I see it as a natural progression, we started this band as teenagers and we’ve grown into young adulthood, we were on tour together for three and a half years living in each others pockets and that kind of forced us to become better people. We got to go out and see the world and this helped us grow into the people we are now. I just see the record as a representation of who we are now, of the band we are now. “

The recording of Gloves went down sporadically between Wilkinson’s instrument-clogged lounge room and a quaint abandoned studio in the hills of Northern New South Wales. The reason for these budget-recording options was due to Wilkinson’s perfectionism, a trait, which is scrupulously poured into each second of the record.

“I guess making your second record and producing it yourself it is always going to take a lot longer because you want to have things exactly the way you want them,” she says. “I was such a perfectionist on the making of this record, I would spend hours honing in on single things and as you know time is money. I think that with the music industry these days you’ve got to make your record the best and most efficient way possible whilst maintaining a strict budget so that what you’re putting out is just creatively good.”

For Wilkinson each of her band’s songs is a finely tuned and integral aspect of their success. In the songwriting process parts and ideas are carefully taken apart and glued back together until the hit machine that is Operator Please is fully functional.

“I think the key thing about Operator Please is that it is always about the songs,” explains Wilkinson “I have never really thought that we had a particular sound, for me it was always about what sort of songs I could write and about bettering myself as a songwriter rather than worrying too much about the aesthetic of everything. I think in music there is so much emphasis on aesthetic and genre, when really the underlying thing is always the quality of the songwriting.”

The pop sensibility at the heart of her songs is really what Wilkinson prides herself upon. Despite the ‘indie’ pretext her band has been given, there is an engrained love for pop artists, which comes out in the luscious melodies of the new synth-swept tracks. “I’ve never thought of us as an indie band in the first place, we’ve always had that pop side to us because when I’m writing it is a natural instinct for me to go for a pop formula rather than what is underground.”

This pop formula is perhaps what gets under the skin the most about Operator Please’s contagious tunes. There is a however, a difficult knack to writing the type of songs that make you want to quit you’re day job and become a professional ping pong player. Wilkinson believes this art lies in song structure, a craft she has been slowly mastering over the last few years. “I think structure plays a big part, you have to be able to introduce things and reintroduce things properly,” explains Wilkinson. “In terms of going about things when we are writing it’s more about having a couple of key elements, which are highlighted and supported by the rest of your instrumentation, when we were writing Gloves it was really about having the vocal melody at the front.”

Another facet of writing that elusive ‘chart-topper’ comes down to an aspect of song-craft, which Wilkinson has only recently become accustomed to. Like Lennon before McCartney and Jagger before Richards this young writer believed her songs were good enough to make it on their own, shunning any input from her band mates. However, just as her notable forefathers discovered, finding that magical songwriting spark with a collaborator can mean the difference between a hit, and a classic. It was drummer Tim Commandeur who came to the fore as Wilkinson’s partner-in-crime, putting the final piece of the hit-producing puzzle, into place.

“I’m not going to lie I used to be a really selfish songwriter and I did not take onboard anybody else’s ideas and stuff,” admits Wilkinson. “But once Tim and I started writing together it was liberating, it was amazing. He is really skilled with melody, he is just a really talented person and ever since we started writing together it has just worked out to be a really good team, we really get each other” “I always look at it like Tim is the nice one and I am the mean one, when we’re writing we find that I always have the dirty melody where as he has always got the really beautiful melodies.”

As the Operator Please whirlwind world tour begins to flair up once more, Wilkinson is attempting to expand her arsenal of hits in a different way. Together with Commandeur she has taken the thrifty step of co-writing and working with new and established pop artists. This enlivening experience ensures we will continue to see Operator Please’s brand of pop stamped over the charts for a long time to come.

“I think there is a lot of songs that Tim and I write that we would never use for Operator Please, songs I would never sing myself,” she says.

“I’d rather not say who we are working with, but it is very exciting.”

Serotonin (Rough Trade) - review for Tommagazine.com

The Mystery Jets are everything that is good and pure about pop music. For example, who would ever think the word ‘serotonin’ could be used to form a devastatingly catchy sing-a-long chorus? Clearly Mystery Jets front man Blaine Harrison does…he is after all the same guy who thinks that it’s ok to let his dad play drums on his records and shun indie contentiousness to write lyrics mainly about girls and love.

The Mystery Jets are everything that is good and pure about pop music. For example, who would ever think the word ‘serotonin’ could be used to form a devastatingly catchy sing-a-long chorus? Clearly Mystery Jets front man Blaine Harrison does…he is after all the same guy who thinks that it’s ok to let his dad play drums on his records and shun indie contentiousness to write lyrics mainly about girls and love.

On Serotonin, Harrison has honed his songwriting into a finely tuned hit-making machine, with verses driving witty lyrical narratives into astoundingly anthematic hooks. The tunes still follow the guitar/synth indie standard the group shamelessly flaunted on Making Dens and Twenty One, yet they feel fresh and purposeful. Tinged with eighties glory, whilst giving head nods to indie contemporaries such as Friendly Fires as well as nineties dance, producer Chris Thomas (Beatles, Sex Pistols) has utilised his studio experience to give the record a clean and timeless feel. While no songs shine with the chart-topping brilliance of 2008’s ‘Two Doors Down’ each number offers a unique, enigmatic, personality, culminating in the long-player as a whole being the groups strongest yet. ‘’Too Late’ is of one the finest of these tracks, the spacey piano ballad building into a spine-tingling, tumultuous climax to rival Whitney Houston herself. Retro without being nostalgic ‘Waiting on a Miracle’ pits shimmering U2-esque guitar noise against bold, euphoric synth, while Harrison arrestingly croons some of his more poignant and uplifting lyrics.

Short, sweet and beautifully melodic, Serotonin is British pop escapism in a highly digestible form. Harrison makes cynicism and heartbreak as gleeful to the ears as Morrissey did with the Smiths.  As most of the naughties indie-guitar groups drown in a new wave of beats-based hipster laptop confusion, Mystery Jets are staying put, and it’s a pleasure to have them around.

Running on Air (Illusive Sounds) - review for Tommagazine.com

It’s a strange thing to judge this ‘Aussie’ hip-hop. There certainly has been some credible releases since its nineties inception from groups such as Bliss & Eso, as well as TZU and Hilltop Hoods. Still, you wonder how Australian hip-hop could garner any respect in the slums of Staten Island or the mean streets of Compton, where rap music literally means life or death.

It is a pleasant surprise to see true hip-hop heavyweights such as Wu Tang Clan’s RZA, as well as rap culture icon Xzibit, exchanging verses with Sydneysiders on Running on Air. What is even more impressive is how well MC Bliss and MC Esoterik stand up against their US counterparts, and how damn sweet Bliss, DJ Izm and the guest producer’s beats go down. Nineteen tracks of Aussie hip hop may seem like too much for some, but sonically this record might be as deep and exploratory as the genre has ever gotten. ‘Addiction’ is an instant favourite, staccato piano opening into an almost drum n bass exposition, which bounces back and forward between verses from the two versatile MC’s.

‘Versatility’, is what really stands at the heart of this record. Clearly the group’s role models such as Gangstarr, A Tribe Called Quest, and Wu-Tang played a part in the eclectic album’s inspiration, but there are a number of wonderful, oddball tunes thrown into the mix as well.  ‘Family Affair’ sports hand-claps, banjo rhythm and bluegrass guitar with a ridiculous hook that states “My grandma told me, never ever take no shit, that’s probably why my grandpa hides all my grandmas wine, but my grandma’s heart don’t quit”. Weird enough for you? The introspective garbage that clogs way too many an Aussie hip-hop CD offers few stumbles along the way, sickly lyrical sentiment ruining the aptly titled, ‘Reflections’ and ’Golden Years’.

So, let’s face facts, the Australian inflection in hip hop is never going to acquire any attention outside of our fair shores, besides who else would understand what ‘doing loops in a Rexy burning’ means anyway. It’s crass lines like this, however, which have given Aussie hip hop its personality and have landlocked it to a dedicated audience. This audience will embrace Running on Air as it may be the genre’s finest release with Bliss & Eso really hitting their stride five studio albums into their career.

Tomorrow The War Began - review for Tommagazine.com

Imagine you’re eighteen, you’ve just been on a camping trip with you’re mates and you come home to find your dog dead, and your family locked up in a POW camp. This is the dilemma faced by Ellie (Caitlin Stasey) and her fittingly diverse group of Australian friends, who return from the wilderness to discover their peaceful home overrun by ruthless invaders in Tomorrow When The War Began. Many of us are already aware of the fanciful adventure due to the popularity of the original John Marsden teen novel in the nineties. For those who aren’t, basically the kids take a very ‘Home Alone’ attitude to the situation, but instead of making booby traps with marbles and glue, they tend to blow the intruders up with makeshift bombs and destroy bridges with stolen oil tankers.

The man set to the task of bringing these well-turned pages to the big screen is Stuart Beattie who makes his directorial debut after a slew of successful screenplays.  Despite it’s M rating, TMTWB is definitely not a kid’s movie, and Beattie makes this very clear early on where a protesting prisoner gets his face blown off by a very agitated general. It is edge-of-seat moments like this that really make TMWTB an entertaining film with the director building heightened suspense in numerous frantic cat and mouse moments. The pacing throughout is slick and well suited to this older teen brand of film, with the action not interfering with the dialogue and vice-versa. Beattie is given a fairly decent budget to throw around and he uses it ambitiously, clearly utilising the skills he has garnered as a big-time writer in conjunction with his directing. The smooth production shimmers with the Hollywood glitz that adorned his scripted movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Australia and Collateral.

With the franchising possibilities of a seven book series Beattie wants this to go global, but the Australian teen niche and a lackluster cast may hold TWTWB back. Strip away the blockbuster sheen and concentrate on the characters and dialogue and you are left with a particularly exciting episode of Neighbors. You’ve got your typical jock, stoner, church girl, hot bimbo, and Italian bad boy all contesting their adolescent dominance on screen. The young actors tend to drown in the deep-end as their characters try to reflect the more emotionally complex aspects of being thrown into a warzone. Caitlin Stasey has the particularly difficult job of stepping straight from the Neighbours set into Australia’s attempt at a Harry Potter-style franchise in her portrayal of Ellie. Easy on the eyes and clearly dedicated to the role, she manages to fill these shoes better than the others, wielding an AK-47 with the reckless exuberance of a young woman who has clearly lost it all.

With themes of guilt, death, betrayal and retaliation this movies offers a lot more emotional depth than your average teen movie. At the end of the day however, it still is a teen movie and some naive acting and scriptwriting clearly define its pubescent flaws. What makes this movie a hit however, are the explosive chases and battles, which are contrasted perfectly against a cracking Australian soundtrack, Australian humour and some lovely character eye-candy. The ambitiousness of Stuart Beattie’s first outing as a director demonstrates that if he continues to make progress, this movie franchise could certainly become Australia’s most successful yet.

Opinion Column for MX Newspaper Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney

The weight of all that Dom Pérignon, sexual debauchery and swimming pools filled with cash seems to be finally catching up with the stars of the showy hip hop world. ‘Emo-Rap’ is the 2010 fad causing hip hoppers to contemplate trading in their SUV’s for Smart Cars and set up worthwhile charities (in their names of course). Canadian rapper / singer Drake, is the latest brave soul to stand up and say, ‘yeah I am a player… but I’ve got feelings too’ on his record, ‘Thank Me Later’. He follows in the footsteps of Kanye West who channelled the emotion of a messy breakup onto the depressingly bleak ‘808’s and Heartbreak’. For Mr West and co squeezing a bit of self-loathing in between trips to Mr Chow and orgies with super models is serving as the perfect inspiration for more success, and of course the misery that follows.

Can life really be that bad for these rap stars? I’m sure there are people in Sudan who would chew off their own arm to be able to get dumped by their girlfriend and drive off a $300,000 Jag. Are these guys just exacerbating real world problems for their arts or are they genuinely depressed? What is going to happen when a rapper comes into real problem like contracting HIV from a transexual hooker while their bank accounts in the Cayman Islands are being discovered by the IRS? I really can’t envision them blurting out these misdemeanours over euro-disco synths, while they dance around their mansions in the soft porn that is a hip hop video.

“My friend shows me pictures of his kids, and all I could show him was pictures of my cribs,” Kanye West glumly confesses on ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’ This is the same Kanye West who has a reproduction Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel on his roof (no joke) and is currently dating the exotic, super model / goddess Amber Rose. Isn’t it obvious the guy lives a hard life? It’s a scary combination, the egotism of rappers and the emotional musical power of sorrow, and it is increasingly becoming the en vogue thing in hip hop. Drake is the same age as me and while he is sipping Champagne in a club filled with super models, I’m sharing a goon sack with my mum at the Beenleigh train station. Yet listening to his album I actually feel sorry for the guy, I feel like I should take pity on the poor bastard.

Somehow the real-life dramas of rappers are painfully addictive, it’s the same gluttony we all indulge in flicking through celebrity gossip mags. This time however, these celebrities are no longing hiding from the paparazzi, they are inviting them into their most private innards and we are lapping it up. Now when Kanye West makes a dick of himself at an awards ceremony, we can sit back and say, ‘oh the poor guy has just had is heart broken, leave him alone’. Before you know it Chris Brown will be justifying spousal abuse on a pragmatic album where he faces the true demons of marrying the hottest pop star on the planet. It’s all too much.

‘Emo-Rap’ is the ultimate form of voyeurism and yet again the hip hop industry has found a way to virtually print money. Thankfully, Drake and Kanye (the victims in all this) have plenty of empty swimming pools to fill, otherwise I don’t know how us poor people would be able to sleep at night.

Step Up 3d - review for Tommagazine.com

The wait is finally over dance fans; Step Up 3-D is upon us. The third chapter in a trilogy of break-dance battling, krump-filled dance epics is the first in the series to embrace 3D technology, fully immersing fans in the real sweat and grit of New York’s grimy dance underworld.

The story goes a little something like this: Luke (Rick Malambri) a sexy, endearing and very persuasive older man lures amazing younger dancers of both sexes to live with him in the flat he likes to call ‘The Vault’. Once he has convinced these naive acolytes to leave their friends, families etc behind, he initiates them into his crew (The Pirates) and religiously films them dancing, most of the time shirtless. When this creepy pied piper of dance, isn’t making ‘films’ about the kids he has locked up in his vault, he is encouraging the film’s other protagonist Moose (Adam Sevani) to ditch his engineering degree and his girlfriend to help the Pirates pay for his mortgage by winning ‘The World Jam’. Of course there is the evil, rival dance-sequence stealing crew to contend with and enough sexual tension to fill the conjoining plot parts of a bad eighties porno.

At the end of the day, we all knew what was going to happen well before we sat down and fans of the series are not exactly going to be filling up cinemas to enjoy the pedophilic nature of an extremely cliched plotline. Dance lovers are however, going to be tossing their hard-earned cash at cinema attendants purely to be blitzed by some sweaty and highly acrobatic dancing. Luckily, on this front the film doesn’t disappoint, the fast and furious sequences are highly convincing in the 3D environment, and the caliber of the choreography is second to none. There is body-popping, head-spinning, back-flipping, human-juggling and some serious krumping jumping out at audiences over a brilliant boom-box thumping soundtrack. The dancing is definitely a pleasure to watch, and not just because former Summer Bay brat Sharni Vinson has a body to die for. For some strange reason however, the differing crews the Pirates battle always bring something fresh and themed to the mix, and generally annihilate the haphazard styling of our roguish brigade. Despite this, the rivals are always judged the losers, which is extremely frustrating particularly for certain movie reviewers secretly fantasising over Luke’s impending eviction.

Dance fans and dancers, definitely check out this flick for some epic moves you can impress your own crew with and try your very best to have a laugh at some terrible acting and scriptwriting along the way. Movie lovers, who are not really into pelvic thrusting please steer well clear of this film, you would be much better off watching Inception for the second, third or fourth time.