16mm
Colour
Running time: 18mins
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‘I loved Weekender, its a great shot of the street’ -Lou Reed NYC 1994
‘His videos are among the most sexual and the most hedonistic. Weekender, an eighteen minute short film about the band Flowered Up and the wilder side of dance-club culture, caused a sensation when it was first aired in 1992 on Channel 4 in Britain, and it has been credited with launching the genre of British youth-culture movies such as Trainspotting.’ -Steve Reiss, Thirty Frames Per Second The Visionary Art of The Music Video.
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CRITIQUE: dangerousminds.net/comments/flowered_ups_weekender_quadrophenia_for_the_e_generation
i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/fashion-insiders-favourite-music-videos-navaz-batliwalla
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Winner: Select Magazine best video 1992
Winner: 37th Cork Film Festival 1992
Winner: Best Music Film, Hamburg Film Festival 1993
This film was chosen for ‘Power To The People: British Music Videos 1966 – 2016’ DVD boxset
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‘A 15 minute testament to the highs and horrors of going out in 1992. Directed by WIZ this in-yet-face realism filmed like fantastic dream was easily the video of the year.’
-Select Magazine
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‘If you want to see a true Mod movie go check ‘Mean Streets’ or Flowered Up’s Weekender’
-Paolo Hewitt, The Big Issue magazine
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DAILY STAR 14th May 1992
Rave Exclusive: Sick rave band Flowered Up has made an outrageous film showing drug abuse by kids.
The video nasty tries to pour scorn on the Daily Star’s campaign against killer Ecstasy. Our Page One carrying the headline ‘In The Grip of E’ is shown being read by a youngster as another appears to roll a marijuana joint.
A male voice is heard saying: ‘When we’re buzzing of our nuts together… it feels like we could do —ing anything.’
The video shocker, made to promote Flowered Up’s hit single ‘Weekender’, appears to show pot being smoked, Ecstasy being taken and amyl nitrate being sniffed. In one scene, a character talks about getting ‘well loaded’ -slang for being high- and talks about how good he feels when he takes drugs.
Then the cameras capture a teenager going on to a wild acid house rave and indulging in more drugs.
He pops Ecstasy pills, smokes marijuana in the toilets and then sniffs amyl nitrate at a club. The videos have been sent out to the media in the week that grief- stricken mum Betty Brown launched a campaign to wipe out Ecstasy. Betty’s life was torn apart after seeing her student son Lawrence die after taking just one tablet of the evil drug.
But band members have defended their film, which is all about using drugs to escape from a boring job.
MESSAGE They say, ‘whatever you do, be happy doing it.’ A spokesman for the record label says: ‘It could so easily be sensationalised. Obviously there are drugs in it, because that’s what’s happening in the club scene. But the message is not pro-drugs. ‘We want people to make up their own minds’
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DAILY STAR 30th July 1992: ‘Levi’s jeans shops throughout the country are to show FLOWERED UP’S banned Weekender film. It shows teenagers taking drugs’