On the Road

Michael Winterbottom’s sexy and idiosyncratic tour film follows 2018 Mercury Prize winners Wolf Alice, merging thrilling live footage with a fictional backstage romance.

Michael Winterbottom’s sexy and idiosyncratic tour film follows Wolf Alice on tour, interspersing thrilling live footage with a fictionalised backstage romance. In Summer of 2015, the deliciously dark, hook-and-riff-filled sound of Wolf Alice's first album, My Love is Cool, inspired NME to crown it, “the debut of the decade”. As a measure of their impact, BAFTA-winning filmmaker Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People, 9 Songs) joined the band on the road, capturing sixteen different gigs and daily life backstage.

Winterbottom’s resulting tour film - which records the tour from the point of view of a new member of their crew - is a refreshingly unusual one with unexpected twists; it reveals the relentless, sometimes unglamorous graft of playing loud, hot, physical music, night after night. But the film also mesmerises, offering a structure that reveals more, at every stop on the road, of the nuanced musicality of the full band, and the bewitching talent and charisma of front woman, Ellie Rowsell.