Music-themed films galore at cinema’s Summer Music Season

Limber up your air guitar fingers for another selection of sizzling summer music films and events at the Electric Palace cinema in Hastings Old Town, writes Annie Waite.

Summer Music Season 2024 screenings line-up:

The season began with a near sell out screening of Bob Marley: One Love plus late bar and pop up Jamaican kitchen in late June, and continues this weekend for a festival special – party hard at Lost in Vagueness + Glastonbury BBC livestream.

Not an obvious choice for music-season or for election night, but director Andrew Haigh has put a lot of love and thought into the soundtrack for his poignant and heartbreaking recent hit film, All of Us Strangers, starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal. You can catch it at the Electric Palace on Thursday 4 July (11am & 7.30pm) and look out for a very affecting placement of The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. With The Housemartins, Pet Shop Boys, and Blur all also featuring on the soundtrack.

Air guitars at the ready

The Electric Palace cinema has been running popular Family Friday afternoon screenings and kids events for about six months, and the latest of these is also part of its Summer Music Season. Jack Black’s much loved early Noughties comedy School of Rock is a great film to enjoy with others. Choose from an after-school early 4pm screening, or a 7.30pm showing, on Friday 5th July.

Sting “in his knickers”

“A great season of music movies – rock, reggae, soul, 80s pop and Sting in his knickers – what more could anyone want?” quips music journalist, broadcaster and author, David Quantick, about David Lynch’s Dune, also part of this year’s selection of screenings, which he has co-curated with us again this year.

Hastings-based Quantick will also be running a music film quiz on 9 August alongside Electric Palace director Annie Mannion, and will host a Q&A with Emma Anderson (also a Hastings resident), and Phil King from the band Lush, at the upcoming Saturday 7 September screening of Lush: A Far From Home Movie.

Rare screening of new Lush film

Beloved British shoegaze legends Lush are shown in the film at their impossibly cool peak, with the tour diary film offers an appropriately dreamy behind-the-scenes record of the band’s heydey.

Bassist and filmmaker, Phil King: “By the time I joined Lush at the end of 1991, they had already played around 190 shows in their four year career – and would go onto play another 320 or so before drummer Chris Acland’s tragic and untimely death in October 1996. I would often take my trusty Sankyo Super 8 camera on tour with me – and since film was costly would try and make sure to shoot footage sparingly. Hopefully this film captures the excitement (and boredom) of being on tour – and, sadly in retrospect, I hope that it serves as a fitting memorial to a much missed by us all Chris.”

This is a very special screening of the film, only showing exclusively in a small selection of handpicked venues including in Paris, Hebden Bridge, and London.

Something for everyone

Zendaya and Josh O’Connor star in the tennis-themed film Challengers, included in Summer Music Season in July for its tension-building, throbbing soundtrack from ’90s rock band Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor.

The rise of hip-hop in the US in the ’80s is effectively portrayed in Spike Lee’s groundbreaking Do the Right Thing showing on Saturday 27 July complete with a pizza pop-up as a nod to the pizza takeaway depicted in the film!

More events in the season for August and September will be announced soon on the Electric Palace website.

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