With us to mark the 24th anniversary of 24 Hour Party People, the director’s work includes everything from Cracker to A Cock and Bull Story, Wonderland to Welcome to Sarajevo. And, of course, The Trip
Of course, the 90s couldn’t be any more in vogue at the minute – but the 90s couldn’t have happened without the 80s. And that’s where 24 Hour Party People comes in, Michael Winterbottom’s riotous 2002 film that charts Manchester’s music scene from the Sex Pistols’ legendary 1976 Lesser Free Trade Hall gig through Factory Records, Joy Division, New Order and into the Madchester era of Happy Mondays and the Haçienda. It’s the story of Manchester music before Oasis swaggered in and took over the world, and it stars Paddy Considine, Shirley Henderson, Andy Serkis and John Simm – plus Steve Coogan as the late broadcaster and Factory Records boss Tony Wilson.
After studying English at Oxford, Winterbottom started out in television in the late 1980s, directing everything from documentaries about Ingmar Bergman to episodes of Boon and Cracker, before making his feature debut, 1995’s Butterfly Kiss – a dark road movie about a serial killer and her lover travelling across northern England. His subsequent films included 1996’s Jude, 1997 Bosnian war drama Welcome to Sarajevo, 1999 London ensemble piece Wonderland and 2000 western The Claim. Since then we’ve seen the sexually explicit 9 Songs in 2004, literary comedy A Cock and Bull Story (adapted from Tristram Shandy) with Coogan and Rob Brydon, political docudrama The Road to Guantánamo and 2010 noir thriller The Killer Inside Me.
