Martin Carr

  • Composer

Press clippings

Alternative histories can be dead-end vanity projects, but this reimagining of John Lennon in 1991, trudging through an unfulfilled life 30 years after leaving The Beatles, was stunningly conceived and realised, from Ian Hart's Lennon to Martin Carr's pastiche soundtrack.

Gabriel Tate, Time Out, 19th December 2013

Ian Hart plays John Lennon for at least the third time on film, in David Quantick's dramatisation of Ian R MacLeod's novella. This Lennon is still alive in 1991, but left the Beatles in 1962 and watched them achieve moderate success without him. Unemployed and embittered, all this Lennon has left is his hokey sense of humour: on the bus and on his disastrous first day in an office dogsbody job, he keeps up a stream of puns and Dad-jokes, whether or not anyone's listening.

If he were a global megastar, these utterances would be lapped up and analysed; as it is he's just a pillock, but a likeable one. It's a fantastic curio, with a spot-on pastiche soundtrack by Martin Carr of the Boo Radleys.

Jack Seale, Radio Times, 25th April 2013

What would have happened to John Lennon had he left the Beatles in 1962, on the cusp of greatness? We join Lennon (Ian Hart, uncanny in his third outing as the Beatle) in grey, 1991 Birmingham, scratching out a living in dead-end jobs, dispensing pithily sardonic observations and denying his mild resentment towards Paul McCartney.

In this universe, Macca's Lennon-less Beatles are dragging themselves around the low-rent nostalgia circuit after a middling career of melodic that saw them eclipsed by the likes of The Hollies.

Snodgrass (Lennon's tag for 'The Man') could have been a dismally self-regarding muso wank-off - and there are in-jokes aplenty for Fab Four obsessives. But it also works beautifully as simple human drama, anchored by a performance of thoughtful melancholy from Hart. The concept is neither overthought nor over-explained, the attention to detail in David Quantick's screenplay (based on Ian R MacLeod's novella) is stunning, and Ex-Boo Radley Martin Carr's soundtrack of affectionate pastiches completes this miniature masterpiece of disappointment and regret.

Gabriel Tate, Time Out, 25th April 2013

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