It's all Gone Pete Tong
Starring: Paul Kaye, Beatriz Batarda,
Kate Magowan, Mike Wilmot
Director: Michael Dowse
The film: Part-mockumentary, part-melodrama, everything about this film is hard to pigeonhole. Although it claims to be based on fact, there's debate about whether the film's central character, DJ Frankie Wilde, ever existed. Although marketed as a comedy, and widely referred to as one, Pete Tong contains plenty of poignancy.
After an opening glimpse of a broken, unkempt man - Wilde, played by Paul Kaye (right) - real- life mega DJs appear in a series of recollections of the man they say was a favourite with clubbers on the Spanish island of Ibiza. These include Paul Van Dyk, Carl Cox and Pete Tong - he of the film's title, which translates from contemporary cockney rhyming slang as 'it's all gone wrong'. In this way, a picture is painted of a man who was as much a showman as a technical wizard, with an intuitive knowledge of how to wow each night's crowd with unusual effects.
Unfortunately, it's Wilde's inner ears that led to his demise. The film opens a year before the superstar DJ tributes that follow his disappearance from Ibiza, and Wilde is fast approaching complete deafness. Doctors say a birth defect has been exaggerated by the number of hours he's spent at volume-10 and the vast quantities of booze and drugs he wolfs down daily.