Premiere.

With Sally Coe, Matthew Coe’s widow, and actor/musician/friend of Matthew’s, Jimmy Nail, at a screening of Shove It.

When the lights dimmed in Screen 9 at the Vue cinema in Leeds on 16th November 2022, my heart was thumping in my chest with such thunder I thought people near me would be able to hear it. Then the film started. My film. The culmination of 12 month’s work in planning, crowdfunding, shooting, travelling, editing, and promoting: Shove It, the Xero Slingsby story was having its world premiere in front of a sell-out audience as part of the Leeds International Film Festival.

It took about two minutes into the movie before I relaxed. My mind was doing a checklist: picture? looks great. Sound? is loud, perfect, the band’s music sounds amazing. Lips? are in sync. The tech is working. People? They seem to be enjoying it.

It’s OK. More than OK. Relax.

There’s a rickety old bridge from a state of anxious excitement to just excitement, and I crossed it without looking back. The hard work was done, I told myself: now… just enjoy it.

As a filmmaker you get a strange almost out-of-body experience watching a film you’ve made, in a cinema, with a big crowd of other people. You can’t help but notice the things you’d do differently in the edit. Only small things, and things no one else probably even sees or considers worthy of changing, but they leap out to the filmmaker. One, and maybe the biggest, is the title. I wish I’d have called it Shove It, the Xero Slingsby stories: because one of the things I love about the film, and found while making the film, is how people remember different sides of Matthew, and remember the same event slightly differently. There isn’t just one story. Different people have different takes (… and there’s that word – ‘take’, a bit of film language seeping in… Take: a separate, different, version of the same scene). But that’s what I love about film as a medium for story-telling. It has a built-in sense of allowing for multiple viewpoints and angles that let the viewer see more than one version, or take, ever can or will.

As well as Leeds, the film was selected for screening as part of the North East International Film Festival, which ran in cinemas across Newcastle upon Tyne, the weekend after the premiere. Different audiences. Different takes. And all positive.

Even those who were far too young to see the band in their heyday (or weren’t even born) and have discovered them through Spotify, YouTube and Last.FM have connected with the film in ways that thrill me. It is, I suppose, as I said at the Q&A after one of the screenings, as close as we can get to a Slingsby gig now. And so much more, besides.

It is amazing to get feedback from those who knew Matthew and loved him: there are tears, but mainly smiles. People speak about how the film has cemented Matthew’s legacy for the future; how it has captured a piece of his spirit; and how much he’d have loved it.

The last words we hear Matthew speak in the film are “Xero Slingsby is better than Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, er Jimi Hendrix, erm Duke Ellington and Count Basie all put together.....'cause he's still alive!”

Thirty-odd years after his death, he still is.