FIRST, Kevin Sampson gave life to one of the city’s biggest passions to life when he brought Awaydays, his cult novel about football supporters, to the big screen. Now he’s about to do the same for Liverpool’s obsession with music, as his book Powder makes it onto the big screen.
As fans of the tome will know, Powder follows Liverpool singer/songwriter Keva McCluskey (played by Liam Boyle) and his band The Grams on a rollercoaster ride to fame, money, drugs and women.
On the way they battle local rival band Sensira, as well as a cynical music industry, determined to get their pound of flesh from the band.
If the gig scenes look real in it, then they should. A lot of the movie was shot in locations around Liverpool and at V Festival.
“One of our partners on the film is Simon Moran (managing director of concert promoters SJM Concerts),” Kevin reveals. “He raised the point that, while there have been a lot of films about the music industry, no-one has ever really managed to capture that gig atmosphere.
“He’s the promoter for the V festival and he said: ‘Why don’t you bring the bands down, they can go on the stage between the bands? So that was what we did. We shot them onstage between the acts and then we shot the crowd when the headline bands were on to get their response. So while it looks like they’re cheering The Grams on, it’s really Oasis they’re watching.”
Either way, it must have been an amazing feeling to stand in front of all those people?
“Immense,” says Liam. “It was the most exciting experience of my life. The adrenaline was incredible.”
As part of the filming, the festival security team allowed the crew to use their helicopter to get aerial shots and to show Sensira being flown in.
“When the helicopter landed, all these fans rushed to mob whoever was getting out of it,” laughs Kevin. “They thought it was going to be one of the headline acts, so when our actors got out, they were a bit confused.” Then they pointed at one of the guys, who had a bit of a ‘tache and started shouting ‘It’s Brandon Flowers, it’s Brandon Flowers!’.”
Kevin and the team managed to grab a number of famous faces to do cameos – the Ting Tings, Lily Allen, The Script, The Wombats, Alesha Dixon and Oasis all took part – but after the helicopter experience, they were determined to get Brandon Flowers, the lead singer with The Killers, in too.
“We approached this bloke called Gorgeous George to see if he’d introduce us,” says Kevin. “He’s a bit of a legendary figure on the rock scene. But when we asked him he said he couldn’t help but later he got back in touch, he’d tracked down the guy who drove Brandon to church, and we got him that way.”
