Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008) DVD

Commonly, the music biopic will take one of three paths; to string together well-known facts into a passable narrative, to extend the myth that surrounds the subject, or to rewrite history in its entirety, most recently in the peculiar canonisation of Christopher Wallace in Notorious. In the last few years, music documentaries have outlined the implosion of a band inDig!, the unlikely inner world of Metallica revealed by Some Kind of Monster, while bothThe Devil and Daniel Johnson and the more recent Telstar have concerned themselves with exploring madness and creativity, picking apart the very psyche of their charges.

This documentary study of Canadian rockers Anvil, falls somewhere in between these narratives, in that it is as much a study of the eccentricities of the male mid-life crisis as it is a document of the journey from potential superstardom to the shadows of obscurity taken by its two protagonists, Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow and sidekick Robb Reiner. Lips has long hoped for another hit to match their debut, ‘Hard ‘n’ Heavy’, and its follow up, ‘Metal on Metal’, which benefitted from the knob twiddling of Sabbath producer Chris Tsangarides. Both records proved big in Japan and amongst the Anvil faithful but, as their contemporaries came to dominate rock for the next decade, Lips and Reiner slowly faded away, with none of their following releases having received anything like the same attention. Gervasi’s camera doggedly follows the band through thick and thin, from a tour which unravels in the back water venues of Europe to the inevitable artistic differences which plague the recording of new album Thirteen with Tsangarides, funded by Lips’ long suffering sister.

The strength of these eminently watchable characters prevents the plentiful comedy slipping entirely into This is Spinal Tap contrivance, while the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the pair for rock and their fans results in a genuine feel-good hit which holds an extra-curricular flourish, the band recently played Download and open for AC/DC in July. Finally, they’re back on top.

Kingsley Marshall