Razzmatazz

Set amongst the bedsits and bars of 90s London, Razzmatazz is a story of the brit pop scene, only viewed from the perspective of Plate, an undiscovered, unsigned indie band. Faced with a lack of success and spiralling personal issues, the band inevitably implodes, sending the lives of the members in wildly different directions. It is also the story of Edda, a 20-year-old Norwegian music fan, who, whilst trawling through files and files of downloaded music, finds an incredible, unknown song, a song that has somehow survived Plate’s demise twenty years earlier, a song that she immediately becomes obsessed with, hurrying her to London to discover the legacy of a band that might change her life forever.

Guided by one-time band girlfriend, Kesty, Edda starts to dig into the band’s past, to reveal and expose the turbulent and tragic lives that followed the breakup – guitarist Gordon Powell and his alcohol and drug addiction, who seems to have disappeared off the planet, and singer Francis Novak who falls into a spiral of ego, depression and self-doubt; but in amongst the bad marriages, the secret liaisons, the lies and the regret, she also discovers reinvention and rediscovery, wild stories of youthful shenanigans and even the odd bit of musical magic, before a final wild chase to track down the reclusive guitarist.

What happens to creative minds when the source of their art is lost? How do they deal with the creative void or, more poignantly, how do they struggle to deal with it? What happens in a life of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, when there is no more rock ‘n’ roll.

This is a bittersweet, blackly comic reliving of life in London in the 1990s; a glimpse behind the glamourous façade of Cool Britannia – highs and lows, survival and destruction; and it is the story of a young millennial woman’s search for balance and direction in her life.