Flowered Up – Weekender

27th February 2023 · 1990s, 1992, Music

Sad news this week with the death of actor Lee Whitlock, whose finest moment in a successful career came in the starring role of the music video for Weekender by Flowered Up.

One of the greatest videos ever made, for one of the greatest songs, it’s an extraordinary 18-minute encapsulation of acid house club culture, set to a song denouncing those lightweight 9-5 workers who only go to clubs at weekends.

The funny thing is that as much as I love the song (and video), and always have, I don’t think I’ve ever heard another song by Flowered Up, famed as much during their short-lived existence for their drug-crazed lifestyle as their music.

Formed by five kids from a Camden council estate in late 1989, they were London’s answer to the Madchester mafia of Happy Mondays and Stone Roses, with a shared philosophy of being 24-hour – no, make that 48-hour – party people.

Just watching the video is almost as exhausting as the night out it portrays: a whirlwind of activity mirrored in the music, which is a rollercoaster journey through more genres than you could name.

I don’t know any other song where the main tune disappears entirely and turns into a kind of dub-sax breakdown (“Weekender – fuck off!”) then somehow segues into a synthy gospel interlude as euphoric images of a hedonistic club night morph into a children’s party.

Weekender came out in 1992 on Heavenly Recordings after the band’s previous label, London Records, turned it down and dropped them because of its 13-minute length – expanded even further on the video with dialogue sampled from the film Quadrophenia and followed by two even longer Andrew Weatherall 12-inch remixes, the bass-driven extravaganza Audrey Is A Little Bit Partial and the percussion-driven extravaganza Audrey Is A Little Bit More Partial.

Astonishingly, and gratifyingly, it actually sneaked into the Top 20. Less astonishingly, the band’s insistence of living the life they sang about to the max was doomed to end in tragedy – and it did.

Flowered Up released two singles on Heavenly – the druggy call to arms It’s On and the paranoid comedown shuffle of Phobia – before signing to London, for whom they recorded their only album, A Life With Brian, including a song (Take It) with lyrics by Joe Strummer.

The music papers loved them, especially their live gigs which had more in common with illegal raves than rock concerts, where the band were augmented by a bald double-glazier in a lycra bodysuit called Barry Mooncult.

One such gig, in a vast mansion where Barry had been working (and for which he still had the keys) went down in folklore as the Debauchery party and lasted an entire week, ending with the mansion as wrecked as the partygoers, who included Kylie.

Inevitably, their drug problems forced them to split, and in 1994 keyboard player Tim Dorney joined Republica. Frontman Liam Maher died from a heroin overdose in 2009, followed three years later by his brother Joe, from the same cause.

As for Lee Whitlock, he had started out as a child star in The Gentle Touch and Shine On Harvey Moon in the early 80s and moved on to Grange Hill, among countless TV productions and several films, including Sweeney Todd alongside Johnny Depp. He died earlier this week aged only 54.