Irish-produced drama Mix Tape and the musical love letter

RTÉ News​

4 days ago

BBC drama Mix Tape, a tale of star-crossed lovers who bond over music, is coming to RTÉ soon but can it reinvigorate the lost art of the mix tape as musical love letter?
It was a teenage rite of passage and also what the kids now call a major flex. Making a mixtape was a labour of love, a musical way into the heart of the one you fancied and also a proud artefact of just how very good your taste in music really was.
Carefully pressing the right buttons on your twin tape deck, choosing the tracks of your hopes and dreams and lovingly inscribing the song titles and artists on the inlay card became something of a minor artform back in what some people probably correctly call simpler times.
Van Morrison called it the inarticulate speech of the heart and for millions of seventies, eighties and nineties kids, the mixtape was the musical equivalent of the love letter - the spark for countless nervous conversations and maybe even debates. God knows, I still have a box of them in my spare room. And no, they weren't all retuned, un-played and unloved.
These days, of course, you will see wizened old Boomers and Gen Xers posting tiresome memes on wizened old Facebook (it's where the adults hang out, OK?) of cassette tapes accompanied by a pencil. If you know, you know. This, apparently, is the modern age's equivalent of uncovering ancient runes and explaining arcane rituals to digital nativists.
In our era of instant gratification, even the noughties phenomenon of the CD burn has given way to soulless Spotify playlists and causal YouTube shares on mobile phones.
As ever, something has been lost but with a new generation turning to vinyl and even the cassette format making its own comeback, can the actual physical mixtape become a tribune of love once again?
Perhaps recent BBC drama Mix Tape (ta-dah!), which is due to air on RTÉ soon, will inspire a fresh flood of spooling polyester plastic film coated with magnetic material as musical missives. Perhaps not.
In any case, the fabled mixtape is the jumping off point for the four-part series. It is the overwrought story of two music mad Sheffield kids, with the very Irish names of Daniel O'Toole and Alison Connor, who meet as teens at a house party in 1989.
The young Daniel (who looks like a cross between Grian Chatten of Fontaines D.C. and a young Neil Morrissey) is a music obsessive and he wins bookish Alison's heart with his impressive knowledge of Cabaret Voltaire. Then again, we later learn that his favourite Bowie song is Modern Love.
Their first dance is to Joy Division's immortal Love Will Tear Us Apart, their first kiss is to The Jesus & Mary Chain, and when their bedroom fumbling goes much further, they DO IT to the strains of In-Between Days by The Cure. Oh, the drama! Oh, the great basslines!
There isn't enough of The Fall featured in Mix Tape for my liking but music is the spine of young Dan and Ali's romance and it plays out the beats and missed heart beats of puppy love (thankfully, no songs by Donny Osmond were used in the making of this programme).
Daniel slips his mixtapes into Alison's school bag and she hands him lovingly curated TDKs on the bus to school. We hear The Jesus & Mary Chain, The Velvet Underground and The Stone Roses. All very good, indeed.
But just as their teen crush turns to full-blown romance, Alison vanishes from Sheffield, leaving Daniel feeling like a Morrissey song.
It's an intriguing premise and the drama plays out in a dual timelines and dual time zones, making it a lot like Sliding Doors meets Sleepless in Seattle - a Proustian rush of 'what ifs' and 'if onlys' played out longingly in verboten mobile phone texts and mutual cyber stalking and the songs of their lost youth.
Normal People it is not. However, it is fraught stuff. We follow Daniel and Alison, who is now a successful novelist living in Syndey and married to a total eejit, and move between their teenage romance in 1989 Sheffield and the modern-day reality of their adult relationships living on opposite sides of the world.
Daniel and his wife aren't exactly singing from the same hymn sheet back in Sheffield. He now works as a music journalist but never seems to do any actual work (so, that makes sense) and he is toying with writing a book about some great lost music figurehead, like Daniel Johnson or Nick Drake.
Mix Tape is a very Irish affair. The four-part drama was originated and developed by Dublin-based production company Subotica, who have previously produced North Sea Connection and The Boy That Never Was, with help from Ireland's generous Section 481 Film and Television tax incentive and the support of Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland and Screen Australia among others.
It was also filmed entirely on location in Dublin and Sydney. And so, the former steel town of Sheffield is played by Dublin's Liberties (I was tickled to see that some of it was shot on the very street where I live), while location filming was also completed in Australia. However, things get seriously meta when the young Alison actually moves to actual Dublin and young Daniel nearly has a whitey on the actual Ha'penny Bridge when he sees her with another bloke. Strangely, no U2 was used in the making of this programme.
Based on the novel by Jane Sanderson and adapted for television by Irish writer Jo Spain, the show stars Teresa Palmer as the adult Alison and Jim Sturgess as the adult Daniel and Rory Walton-Smith as young Daniel and Florence Hunt as young Alison. And here's the thing, the actors who play the younger versions of our protagonists are so much better than the anguished grown-up versions, who spend most of the time moping about like extras in a Cure video.
Of course, the whole thing reminded me of that minor noughties indie hit about an estranged couple haggling over their shared record collection in the same way rich people haggle over their condo in Bel Air or their D4 pied-à-terre.
If you're looking for a good music-based romance, Stephen Frears' film of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is still your best. Mix Tape is a mite too tortured and joyless but it does have two major flexes - those Dublin locations and the actual music.
It also asks an eternal question posed by music obsessives in every time line and time zone - can the songs that sound-tracked our young lives and loves ever really sound the same again?