10 rock music biopics that need to be made

3 September 2023, 16:00

After Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman and Stardust which other acts are in need to the big screen treatment? Radio X picks a selection of movies we’d like to see…

1. Fleetwood Mac

   

   There was actually a TV movie called Don't Stop in 2009, but as we all know, that's not the same as the big screen treatment. The Mac’s career is a living soap opera as it is, and would need no script doctoring to make it interesting. From their start as a hardcore blues act in England to the high flying Los Angeles years, this would be a corker. In 2013, Stevie Nicks said: “Nobody is making a movie about my life. When there is a movie about my life being made, everybody will know. And it will be serious.” But since we lost the fabulous Christine McVie in 2022, will people think again?

2. Red Hot Chili Peppers

   

   If you’ve read Anthony Kiedis’s autobiography Scar Tissue, then you’ll know that the Chili Peppers story is a rollcking good yarn. A story of redemption and some hair-raising escapades.

3. Aerosmith

   

   It’s incredible that the Toxic Twins Steven Tyler and Joe Perry haven’t been portrayed on screen as their biography Walk This Way is a gripping read. Some astonishing tales of addiction, intervention and tying scarves to your mike stand would make this a winner.

4. The Who

   

   There’s a Keith Moon biopic in the works, but London’s loudest band have a tale to tell too: the mod era, smashing up equipment, concept albums, splits, fights and bassist John Entwistle dying while on tour. Would they skirt around Pete Townshend’s brush with the law, though?

5. Led Zeppelin

   

   The hard-rocking quartet would show Motley Crue up as the rank amateurs they are when it comes to raucousness and debauchery. Thing is, could they even put half the things that are supposed to have happened in Stephen Davis’s landmark biography Hammer Of The Gods? Hmmm…

6. Mick Jagger

   

   One Direction lad Harry Styles was apparently in the frame to play the lead Rolling Stone, but he claimed it was all talk. We’d still like to see it, however, as the Brian Jones film Stoned (2006) wasn’t half bad and there’s the whole of the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s to get through with Sir Mick - and it’s all full of incident: movie making, marriages, kids, terrible solo albums, heart surgery, the lot.

7. The Fall

   

   The ongoing saga of the Manchester post-punkers would be an epic, by turns hilarious and tragic. But who would play irascible frontman Mark E. Smith? in 2012, the later singer announced: "Get the guy out of Fight Club!"

8. New Order

   

   They’ve done the Joy Division story with Anton Corbijn’s Control, but what about the next part? Lots of bad vibes, low slung bass, the car crash that was The Hacienda and Peter Hook splitting with the rest of the group. Plus, the making of Blue Monday, yeah?

9. The Cure

   

   Currently enjoying a critical appraisal 40 years after they were founded, Robert Smith’s creepies from Crawley may not sound like the most gripping subject of a movie, but take a look at founder member and former drummer Lol Tolhurst’s autobiography, Cured. It ends with Tolhurst an alcoholic and being told he couldn’t come on the Disintegration tour - the subsequent legal battle would be a dramatic highlight.

10. Rod Stewart

    

    Rod The Mod: from young blues singer to international stardom as Mr Britt Ekland (for a while), his tale has it all - and he’s up for it, too. Speaking to the Daily Mirror recently, Rod said: "I haven't seen the Elton John biopic, but I'd love one of me." Rhys Ifans was one named thrown around as the lead actor. It would need to be called "Blondes Have More Fun", of course.