honest

At the tail-end of the sixties, an ambitious 17-year-old from Tyneside called David A Stewart arrived in London determined to get a recording contract. His arrival coincided with the city in those last few months before the burn-out of the sixties, when the flame burned especially bright and Swinging London was at its swingingest - a heady mix of revolution, hallucinogenics, sexual freedom and great music. Some 30 years later, Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, having since notched up record sales of over 40 million, plus a BRIT Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music and a reputation as one of the best producers in the business, goes back to 1969 to make his debut as a movie director. It is called Honest - an ironical title, since the three female leads are all small-time burglars and it’s not long before one of them has recruited the male lead as well. As much by chance as anything else, it also stars three members of a band that has been topping the UK charts in the first few months of 2000: All Saints. But Stewart cast them because they started out wanting to be actresses, and only went into the music business because their acting careers seemed to have stalled. “There’s no way this is going to be perceived as an All Saints movie,” says producer Michael Peyser. “Sorry to all our fans,” says Natalie Appleton, “but it’s nothing to do with All Saints.” They’d apparently heard about the film, cornered Stewart at a party and said, ‘We’re your sisters!’ If the film doesn’t have much to do with All Saints, it does, on the other hand, have everything to do with Dave Stewart. “Dave had been working towards directing a feature film for almost as long as I’ve known him, and that’s nearly 20 years,” says Eileen Gregory, who has run Stewart’s film production company since 1989, also produces Honest and is keen to make the point that this is not some rock-star’s vanity project. “He is an artist in the true sense,” she says, “very much a Renaissance man who, as well as being an extraordinary musician, is also a great storyteller, able to tell stories visually. For instance, the Eurythmics were the first band ever to do a video that wasn’t a band on stage, back-lit with all that glossy hair. It actually told a story through music. “Dave is also a very well respected and successful photographer, who has done lots of album covers and lots of commercials. I think he’s absolutely at the top of his game creatively, and that it’s the right time for him to direct a movie.” Gregory might also have added that Stewart has recently begun to carve out for himself a sizeable niche as a film composer, starting with Mike Radford’s 1984 and going on to include The Ref, Beautiful Girls, Showgirls and Robert Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune. But, when it came to writing the screenplay for Honest, Stewart had the good sense to call on veterans Dick Clement and Ian La Fresnais for help. Not only have the pair written some of the best British television series (including all-time classics The Likely Lads and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet), but they had recently done a couple of music-based stories: Alan Parker’s The Commitments, and Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy, about the improbable late-nineties revival of a seventies glam-rock band. Honest is almost as much about the London ‘scene’ in ’69 as it is about the love affair between the two main protagonists. “It was a highly impressionable time for me as a teenager,” says Stewart. “I remember smoking grass with Lords and Ladies on one side and East End drug lords on the other: we were all in it together.” Except they weren’t, as the screenplay of Honest makes clear. In 1969, another movie about the breaking down of London’s social barriers actually came out. It was called Performance and, albeit in a totally different way to Honest, it made the same point: while the Carnaby Street-King’s Road axis was experimenting with new forms of living, loving and consciousness, the East End remained conservative with a small ‘c’, hierarchical and stuck firmly in the fifties.

Nicole and her two sisters (fellow All Saints members Natalie Appleton and Melanie Blatt) rob an art gallery. Being London in the sixties, everyone assumes the robbery is a ‘happening’.

And yet both ends of town were fascinated with the other: the hippies with the glamour of the fast-disappearing world of organised crime; the old-style criminals with the money and the opportunities provided by a generation that made it almost a matter of honour to break the law. The story of Honest starts with Gerry, Mandy and Jo, played by Natalie and Nicole Appleton and Melanie Blatt, three members of All Saints, a band with three successive UK No 1s. They are sisters from an East End family who embark on a life of crime and break into a jewellery shop on Carnaby Street, the heart of Swinging London. In the process, they become involved with the staff of Zero, an alternative underground paper which has its offices next door. When the plans go wrong, Gerry is rescued by Daniel, a young American student who has given up on Oxford to become a journalist at Zero. A relationship develops between the two. At the same time, the East End bosses react badly to the girls’ solo efforts and, in among the music festivals, love-ins and the on-again, off-again love affair between Gerry and Daniel, a deadly battle is fought out, as the sisters and their family flee across France, with the vicious drug-dealing hit man, The Hawk, in hot pursuit. “It’s serious, meaningful and deep,” says Gregory, “but at the same time a very funny movie. It has action and bad guys that are real bad guys, and good guys who are real good guys, and everything in between.” “Dave drew the characters of the story from a particular time of his life and the meeting of a girl he knew years and years ago,” says Ian La Frenais. “He really fell for her, and then found out that she was a thief - but almost the most honest person he had ever met.”