Grimly shot, grittily 'honest' British films about expressions of working class anger are two a penny at the moment and by all accounts Awaydays, based on the cult novel by one-time NME writer and manager of baggy bandwagon jumpers The Farm Kevin Sampson, is no This Is England. Set in Birkenhead in 1979, it deals with the 'Casuals', a tribal gathering of the turn of the decade that were obsessed with high bespoke male fashion and gang football hooliganism, affiliated to Tranmere Rovers in this case. Cue examinations of youth tribes, the nature of male friendship and the desire for youth to stand out for themselves. And in the case of its soundtrack, the latest reshuffling of the post-punk cards.While Joy Division are heavily referred to in the source material, you do wonder on seeing the tracklisting of how much of this was actually the soundtrack to tooled up men in sharp cut Italian suits' on the weekends. As it's Merseyside, where pop culture has infected every facet of youth significance and at the time the cultural touchstones were Eric's and The End fanzine, it rings true; a book based on, let's say, Leyton Orient casuals would, if true to life, be more likely to revolve around the capital's New Romantic, soul and jazz-funk scenes, and TLOBF probably wouldn't be reviewing that album. Better Teardrop Explodes than Shakatak, I say.Oh yeah, the soundtrack album. Yet again proving Trent Reznor's Natural Born Killers OST has a lot to answer for, dialogue clips from the film are liberally interspersed with the tracks, and if anyone has ever gone to see a film on the basis of some forty second clips from the tie-in album they must be easily led. There's some bits of specially commissioned score too, ranging from a minute's approximation of clanging Martin Hannett production ('Carty's Revenge') to ponderous synth arpeggios ('Carty's Last Awayday', 'When We Go To Berlin').Sampson has written of how the adaptation was as inspired by its soundtrack as its subject matter, and on that score he and his team have done well on limited resources. Joy Division are here, but with the far less obvious nervous hollow nihilism of 'Insight' from Unknown Pleasures. In general, the better known artists are cleverly represented by lesser known songs with more connection to the film's themes rather than just going for the big hits with the big payoff, apart from an ending of Wire's 'I Am The Fly' and Gang Of Four's 'Damaged Goods' that seems tacked on for the post-punk revival kids. The Jam are represented by the self-explanatory 'When You're Young', The Cure by a Robert Smith home recorded lo-fi guitar and keyboard demo of unreconciled love song '10:15 Saturday Night', Echo And The Bunnymen by the doomed charge of 'Going Up' ('All That Jazz', from the same album Crocodiles, is earlier covered by The Rascals to no great effect), Elvis Costello by the anti-nationalist 'Night Rally', a clever contextual choice.What Awaydays does equally well is bring to the foreground those perhaps passed by the success of later incarnations or the rise of scene contemporaries. Before there was New Romantic synth poseurs Ultravox there was art-glam punks Ultravox!, fronted by later synth experimentalist John Foxx. 'Young Savage', which both opens the album and features on the film trailer, is an astounding piece of adrenalised proto-punk that would single-handedly rejuvenate any number of revivalists' careers if released fresh as their next single without sounding out of place or time. 'Slow Motion' and 'Just For A Moment', co-produced by Krautrock pioneer Conny Plank, sound more like the Midge Ure version had they been more in thrall to Bowie's Berlin albums, the latter a glacial ballad that sounds a little like a minimal take on Grandaddy's The Sophtware Slump. The rise of the machines is also reflected in the industrial thump of Cabaret Voltaire's 'Nag Nag Nag' and the glacial 'The World' by Dalek I. as well as early Human League and OMD. On the more traditional guitar side comes Magazine's avant-glam stomp, the Teardrop Explodes' psychedelic adventures and the rhythmic punk of the Mekons.So essentially Awaydays is a quick if not entirely predictable primer in the directions post-punk took circa 1979, and it does that very well. As an official film soundtrack? Well, you'd guess that the film isn't going to be a feelgood romp, but it reflects the stylistic bleakness rather too well. For a so-called "soundtrack that inspired a film", for all the good and worthiness in it it's not a soundtrack that'd automatically inspire you to seek out the film. 72%