When you consider the cornucopia of subcultures that have been fictionalised in film, it is criminal that the golden age of UK garage hasn’t yet had the cinematic treatment. This was a hyper-vibrant, multicultural scene, born and bred in mid-90s London during a brief economic boom, where jewel-toned satin shirts and rhinestone cowgirl hats ruled the dancefloor and rounds of “champers” were racked up at the bar. Its soundtrack – a form of US house music sped up with a twitchy restlessness – was a ruffneck-yet-futuristic, soulful-yet-boisterous blend that encapsulated the push and pull of the new millennium, before grime twisted MC-led music into tougher shapes. Bold, brash songs such as Sticky’s Booo!, featuring Ms Dynamite, and So Solid Crew’s Oh No were surely destined for big-screen drama.
Reggie Yates recognised all this, which is why he has put UK garage (including both those songs) at the heart of his big-screen directorial debut, Pirates. The comedy caper, for which Yates also wrote the screenplay, follows three teenage friends as they try to get into the ultimate Y2K New Year’s Eve party hosted by the seminal club night Twice As Nice, with garage dons Heartless Crew, DJ Spoony and Pied Piper among the cameos.
“I’d never seen garage music in anything connected to film before,” says the broadcaster, actor and now director. “It breaks my heart that it’s just not been celebrated in the way that ska has been, or grime, or punk.”
Pirates corrects that, down to the decade-specific slang (“These are Twisted Levi’s, you chief!”) and designer shops (notably Proibito, which once stood in Soho). It is in this not-too-distant London that former schoolmates Cappo (Elliot Edusah), Two Tonne (Jordan Peters) and Kidda (Reda Elazouar) have ambitions of making it as a garage crew. They broadcast their DJ sets from their bedrooms and drive a banana-yellow Peugeot 205 – a “clubhouse on wheels!” laughs Yates – with garage’s biggest hits blasting from the stereo.
The film’s paciness evokes an unguarded bombast and earnest eagerness – a little bit like The Inbetweeners by way of Human Traffic – that feels all but forgotten now. “It’s pre-internet,” says Yates, “so there’s a certain energy that only comes from people power.” He wanted to emphasise “the importance of the record shop, of where you got your ticket from and how you got it. There was no paying via your smartphone.”
Gen-Xers may remember such scenarios with misty eyes, millennials may snort at Two Tonne’s sincere come-on, “I’m wearing Lynx Africa”, with a cringe of familiarity, while Gen-Zers will no doubt find it hilarious that teenagers used to entertain themselves by playing Snake on their Nokia 3210s. The young cast were particularly flabbergasted at the loud fashions back then, considering the uniform of choice today tends towards black trackies. In UK garage clubs, the men were the peacocks in two-piece Moschino suits, heavy Avirex motorcycle jackets and Gucci loafers.
“What you wore was really important,” says Yates, who was 17 at the turn of the millennium. “People used to wear the tags still on their clothes to show that they were new. I remember I used to take the tag off, wash my clothing, and then put the tag back on before I wore it out again. If you had some Versace shades, you would wear them in the club, even though you couldn’t see a flippin’ thing. It was about looking the part.”
Now 38, Yates is in a more muted pastel pink cardigan today, sipping mint tea. He is almost unnervingly zen, a mode he has perfected during his years on television and which helped him cope when the Pirates shoot went awry. Production was shut down 10 days early last March because of the pandemic, and he was uncertain whether he’d have to abandon ship completely. But some extra money was found and precautions put in place so they could finish the shoot. It helps that he’s hardly a Werner Herzog on set. “Directing teaches you to find your inner calm because there is so much to get annoyed about,” he reasons. “But if you are frustrated, you lose people.”
It may be a surprise to some that Yates is flexing his comedy muscle. Since his Radio 1 and Top of the Pops days, he’s become best known for his “extreme” documentaries, where he’s reckoned with race riots and rightwingers. Even his friend Michaela Coel told him recently of when they first met: “I didn’t realise you were a clown.” Yates says: “I’m quite protective of who I really am. I’m as professional as I can be, all the time.” He doesn’t drink, smoke or do drugs, he says – still the “swot” from school, always looking for the next challenge.
That restlessness means that in recent years he has increasingly moved into fictional film-making, first with some shorts and then last year a BBC TV film, Make Me Famous, which he wrote (but didn’t direct) about mental health and reality TV. Surprisingly, given Pirates is opposite in tone, Yates cites cult 90s French film La Haine, notable for its graphic scenes of youth violence and police brutality, as an influence. “That is one of the most influential films for me as a writer,” says Yates, “because at 14 years old I realised that stories about kids from council blocks could be on the big screen.”
He made a firm decision to avoid stereotypical representations of Black British boys in trouble. Instead, he made the movie he never saw growing up.
“This film, a coming-of-age comedy about three young men of colour, didn’t exist when I was a teenager,” he says. “We’ve had the trauma stories about the darker side of growing up in the inner city. But there are still lots of young men who are filled with joy, who just want to have fun, get the girl and listen to some banging music while they do it.”
Yates grew up on an estate in north London when UK garage was flipping from tape packs to the pop charts, then moved south aged 14. He got his musical start on pirate radio stations on both sides of the river, at the same time as attending acting auditions, and MCing under the name No-Bizzi until he was recruited by BBC Radio 1Xtra. Like Coel, he wanted to evoke the multicultural London he knew from his youth. “I had an incredible time growing up, and I circumvented the madness,” he says. “I was around a lot of that craziness, but it never defined me – and I know I’m not alone. All we have to do is watch Chewing Gum, and go: ‘Oh, council estates can look like that? You mean that people from different immigrant and white working-class backgrounds all get along like a family?’ That was the estate I grew up on.”
Strip away the setting and the soundtrack, however, and Pirates is about young male friendship on the brink of change (this being the 90s, the women are merely love interests, although they get some of the best lines, about the best garage DJs: “If the world’s gonna end, I might as well be dancing to EZ when it does”). Cappa, Two Tonne and Kidda aren’t only navigating girls, their brotherhood is tested as their lives head in different directions. “I wanted to show what it looks like to have that level of a friendship between three young men of colour, which isn’t based on anything other than love and joy – Black joy,” says Yates.
Pirates unashamedly has the feelgood factor. Yates wrote much of it in a cottage belonging to Love Actually director Richard Curtis, though he says he doesn’t aspire to make a comparable British romcom one day. “I don’t want to do the next anything,” he says. “I just want to be the first me, and I’d love everything that I do to reflect my perspective.” But there’ll be no more launching himself into war zones for the time being – “I’ve exhausted that muscle: I spent 10 years making documentaries”. He wants to tell stories in another way.
“I’ve had so many beautiful conversations with people saying: ‘I’ve been waiting for this film, because in that trailer I saw me and my mates,’” Yates says. “Not everybody was running from a gang. Some people were running to the party.”
• Pirates is out in cinemas on 26 November.
